TRUE HAPPINESS IN MALMESBURY ROAD

Image courtesy of Lucy Whitfield.

Although I have driven along Malmesbury Road in Chippenham hundreds of times, it is only when you walk slowly around peering at buildings and looking for datestones and such like that you come across oddities. So along with the anodyne names that Victorian builders everywhere gave each house in a terrace – Hillcrest, Meadow View, Windermere, for instance – the word PANOLBION over a door close to John Coles Park comes as a bit of a shock.

The word is Greek, and it occurs only twice in very early (pre-classical) Greek literature, both instances pretty obscure. It means ‘completely happy’. One of the Homeric Hymns, a short poem once attributed to Homer, describes how the god Dionysus made a ship’s crew jump into the sea and turned them into dolphins, but he spared the helmsman, which made him completely happy, ‘panolbion’. The other instance is in the musings of a poet called Theognis, who reckoned that nobody was completely happy in everything. Although Greek, the word had been turned into English before it arrived in Chippenham. A theologian signing himself A S, and thought to be either Aaron Streater or Archibald Symmer, wrote a religious pamphlet in 1634 entitled Panolbion, or the Blessedness of the Saints.

Complete happiness, of course, is what you hope for when you move into your new home. But none of this really explains why this rarest of words found its way to Malmesbury Road. Was it a Greek scholar or a collector of 17th-century tracts whose fancy it had taken and who brought it there?

The house was built around 1910 for Arthur Hinder, since he was living in Park Lane in 1910 (and earlier) but in Panolbion in 1911. The likely builder was Frank Fields, who had constructed three nearby streets (Tugela Road and Terrace, Ashfield Road, Hawthorn Road) in recent years, and had built his own modestly-opulent Edwardian residence – Ivy Park House on Rowden Hill – in 1907. The design features of Panolbion seem to have been picked by Hinder rather than Fields, however.

Hinder did not live there for very long, because by 1918 he had rented it out to a widowed dressmaker, Beatrice Mounsley (or Mousley), and she was still there 15 years later, when in 1933 Hinder took her to court. She had not paid any rent for a year and, understandably, he was not panolbion about it. The Hinder family moved back in, but after his mother-in-law’s death in 1936 the house was sold.

The next residents were Gerald Newman and family, who ran a butchers shop at the top of New Road by the Post Office. They had four children, and their eldest son – a choral scholar – died in a RAF accident in Malta in the Second World War. They in turn sold Panolbion to the Hurley family in 1952. William Charles Hurley, a gold medal winning baker, had moved down from Castle Combe, and set up two successful premises – the Carlton Bakery on New Road, next to the Black Horse, and the Carlton Café on Langley Road, where Langley Fish and Chips now sits.

After the Hurleys left in 1966, Panolbion went through three more families before arriving at its current residents. Its original owner, Arthur Hinder, continued to live around Chippenham until his death in Hardenhuish in 1951.

So, was he the Greek scholar or tract collector? Well possibly he was. Chris Dallimore, Chippenham historian, tells me that Hinder started the Christian Science movement in the town, so he may have come across the word and absorbed the concept from the teachings of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. But I can’t find anything like it in the religion’s principal text, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. And historian Lucy Whitfield, who has contributed the house history research to this account, could not uncover how it got its name.

My suggestion is this. Arthur Hinder made, sold and repaired bicycles and motor cycles, and established quite a lucrative business using the brand name ‘Reliance’, with his works at Landsend in Chippenham. My hunch is this: at some stage a late Victorian or Edwardian cycling enthusiast, probably a public school man with a classical education, launched a bicycle brand with this fancy erudite name. It is, you must admit, redolent of fin-de-siècle advertising, somewhat like Rowett’s Aneucapnic patent oil lamp (the impressive name is Greek for ‘without smoke’). And then Hinder came across a Panolbion cycle, or even was the local agent for it, so that when he built his dream home in Malmesbury Road and needed a suitable name, he had the perfect answer – a word that combined his business and his leisure.

Of course I may be completely wrong.

John Chandler, with Lucy Whitfield