Geraint'S STAY AT LOWER FARM DAGNALL HERTFORDSHIRE Part 1
Joan How's visit Part 1
The following is an account of my visit to Lower Farm, Dagnall in Buckinghamshire made in July 2010. I have woven in some quotes from letters written by Geraint Goodwin whilst staying and writing at the farm, and also from Sam Adams critical monograph ‘’Geraint Goodwin''from the Writers of Wales series. These quotes are in order to augment my visit. ************************************ There was a wonderful aroma of cooking when I visited Lower Farm, Dagnall in July 2010. Doris Munn, the owner, was baking for the local fete, and, as my two previous visits, made me very welcome. Lower Farm is situated at the base of Whipsnade Zoo on the Dunstable Downs, and it was here in the mid 1930s that Geraint Goodwin, his wife Rhoda and young daughter, Myfanwy, rented the farm cottage. Geraint, born in 1903 in Penygladdfa Newtown (in the then old county of Montgomeryshire) had probably started working for 'The Montgomeryshire Express in 1920 and in 1923 made the move to London to work as a reporter at Allied Newspapers. In 1931, after returning from a T.B. sanatorium in Frimley, Surrey where he had been treated for ongoing tuberculosis, he was employed as a journalist at The Daily Sketch. He continued to work at The Daily Sketch until 1935 when he retired to continue his writing career. His wife Rhoda remained on the editorial staff of Allied Newspapers. So the family arrived to live at Lower Farm. Doris explained that she had not known Geraint but her husband, Steve, who was some years older than she was, had known him and had spoken often to her about him. Steve who was born in 1909 would have been 27 years of age when the writer, then aged 33 years, would have been living at Lower Farm. Steve had affectionately described the writer as ‘quite a character,’' enthralling the villagers with his tales and ‘holding them in awe.’ I had with me copies of some of the letters written by Geraint from Lower Farm, and Doris was delighted when I read some extracts to her. The cottage layout would have been different then to the present day arrangement with a bungalow now an addition to the garden, housing Doris's son and his family, while her daughter and her family live in part of the cottage. The entrance into what is now the kitchen would originally have been into the front room complete inglenook fireplace. Geraint refers to the inglenook in a letter dated Nov. 17th 1935 to a Miss Atkinson which refers to a misplaced proof. ‘’I have searched high and low for it and it now seems beyond all question that it has slipped down behind the bricked up inglenook and that it can only be recovered by dismantling a good deal of the house.'' Thankfully the proof was recovered so preventing this course of action and prompting a further letter to Miss Atkinson dated Nov 19th 1935. ‘’The proof which I had thought fallen behind the inglenook was mysteriously turned up.'' The original kitchen was complete with a copper and a small room off today's sitting room may possibly have been used by Geraint as a study. The bedrooms of the cottage were down a passageway at the back. The garden at Lower Farm runs along the edge of Dunstable Downs with Whipsnade Zoo looking down from the top, and to the right of the cottage there used to be a well now bricked up but which played a significant role in the Goodwin's stay and departure from Lower Farm.
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