Geoff Geaves

The Wey Navigation Canal was one of the first canals to be completed in 1653.  It was designed to make the River Wey navigable to the River Thames and provide a merchant route from Guildford to London.

In Pyrford the canal is actually higher than the surrounding farmland and on completion of the canal local farmers complained that their land was flooding because the canal presented a dam to natural drainage.  Thus the fields behind the Old House and across  Pyrford Golf Club were useless for long periods of time in winter.

The solution was to drain the land under the canal and provided the old ditches are kept clean, free of weed and dredged regularly still work perfectly well today.  The good o’l boys knew a thing or two!!!!

A curious local resident Arthur Joseph Munby leased Wheelers Farm from 1878 until his death in 1910.  Munby was educated to be a barrister and was called to the bar in 1855.  His interest however was working-class women, particularly those who performed hard physical labour. A pastime was wandering the streets of London and other industrial cities where he approached working women to ask about their lives and the details of their work, while noting their clothes and dialects. The observations were recorded in his journals. These journals explore what Munby practiced with his parlourmaid wife, Hannah Cullwick, as well as his desire for the strength and care of a working woman.

He was an amateur artist, and his diaries contain sketches of working women. He collected hundreds of photographs, such as colliery women, kitchen maids, milkmaids, charwomen, and acrobats. His diaries and images provide historical information on the lives of working-class Victorian women. His papers are housed today at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Courtesy of Wikipedia