Trustees
David Moss, chairman
David grew up in Cheshire, read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and has maintained an interest in history ever since. After university, he joined the civil service, working in the Department of the Environment, HM Treasury and, principally, the Department of Transport.
Much of his work was international, leading for the UK in air services negotiations with many countries including EU members and the USA. In the early 1990s, he was chairman of the European Civil Aviation Conference (a UN body based in Paris). He then joined Railtrack Group as director, commercial and then director general, European affairs.
Retiring to Bradford on Avon in 2000, he became chairman of the town’s preservation trust in 2004. After 14 years he felt in need of a change and in 2018 took on the chairmanship of the Wiltshire VCH Trust, whose chairman was retiring.
David is also chairman of Iford Arts and the Bradford on Avon Station footbridge canopy project. His interests are opera, historic buildings (particularly churches), historical biography and wine.
His interest in local history was fuelled 20 years ago by moving into a house which dates back to the 15th century. He was soon busy researching its history, including delving into the pages of the VCH.
Rosemary Addington
Rosemary attributes her keen interest in Wiltshire history and the VCH to her father, Richard Lamb, an historian who wrote eight books about the Second World War.
She was born in Cumbria but grew up at Broadchalke which she describes as being steeped in Wiltshire history, with a Roman road that ran through the family’s farm. Nowadays it’s at the centre of the Chalke Valley History Festival.
Rosemary trained as a nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital in London and worked for many years as a practice nurse in Calne. But she gave that up in 2014 to help her husband Peter, a retired farmer, with his year as High Sheriff of Wiltshire. They live at Highway near Calne and have four sons and eight grandchildren.
She is a keen supporter of Calne Music and Arts Festival, and a former chair of the festival committee; a former governor of Springfields Academy in Calne; a volunteer primary school mentor and involved with a local partnership of churches.
Rosemary was invited to join the trust in 2014. She says the VCH is “an absolutely vital resource ensuring that the history of Wiltshire is recorded for the benefit of future generations”.
Gil Alder
Gil hails from Newport in South Wales. Whilst working in the reference library, she was introduced to the local history of the Chartists, the transporter bridge and the Romans in nearby Caerleon.
Helping historians and authors with their research led her to the Victoria County History big red books, embedding a lifelong interest in local history and, particularly, the often larger than life characters who populate it.
On moving to Chippenham in 1983, Gil soon became engrossed in the geography and history of Wiltshire, its people and landscape. Jobs in the Civil Service and NHS required detailed local knowledge too.
Before retiring, Gil spent 15 years as a special needs assistant in a school, but still found time for exploring Wiltshire, its history and people.
Having a husband who is a published local historian (and two 20-somethings who may be interested one day) means that trips to the museum, a large collection of local books and an account with a second-hand book seller are a way of life.
Gil joined the Wiltshire Victoria County History Trust as a volunteer in 2016, becoming a trustee a year later, with the aim of raising both the profile and the funds of the charity.
Melissa Barnett
As head of heritage and museum services for Chippenham Town Council, Mel oversees the development of Chippenham Museum in Market Place and the care of the iconic medieval Yelde Hall.
The museum, which is accredited by Arts Council England, tells the story of Chippenham and surrounding villages and welcomes more than 20,000 visitors a year. It cares for more than 38,000 catalogued artefacts and provides a free education service to every school in the town. The museum received a Chippenham Civic Society award for its recent revamp.
Mel trained in archaeology at Cardiff University, but has since made a career in the museum sector, gaining a post graduate qualification from Leicester University in museum studies and an associateship from the Museums Association.
She has worked in archaeological conservation and was curator at Banbury Museum and Powysland Museum in Welshpool and heritage and museum development officer at South Gloucestershire Council.
Mel enjoys making the museum’s collection and Chippenham’s heritage available to the widest audience. She organises walks, talks and special events connected to the town’s history and is an editor of the museum’s Chippenham studies series. The Victoria County History is vital to the work of Mel and the museum.
Chris Caswill
Chris was born in India – his parents were there in World War Two – and spent his childhood in Brighton. At Cranbrook School in Kent he was introduced to history by an outstanding teacher and ended up with an S level and A level distinction, which took him to Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an upper second in history.
He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and on the Academy Council; and is a visiting research fellow at Manchester University. For 15 years until 2004 he was director of research at the Economic and Social Research Council in Swindon.
Chris represented Chippenham’s Monkton ward on Wiltshire Council for ten years, retiring in 2017.
He has kept a keen interest in history and has traced his Caswill ancestors to the Quantocks in 17th century Somerset. Chris is a member of the Society of Genealogists, and the Somerset and West London family history societies, in whose journals he has had articles published.
Chris and wife Lynne have lived in Cherhill, near Avebury, since 1991. They also have an old barn in France, which they have done up over many years. He divides his time between gardening, academic consultancy and policy contributions, walking their dog, the French house and his genealogy.
Tean Dallaway, treasurer
Tean* has lived in Wiltshire for most of her life. Her childhood was spent in a village on the Hampshire border and she attended South Wilts Grammar School in Salisbury.
Her love of history came from her mother who was a history graduate. From an early age Tean was brought up on a diet of tales from the past which caught her imagination.
Even the choice of physics as a degree subject at the University of Bristol was partly due to an interest in people like Newton and Faraday who gave their names to scientific advances.
After graduating, Tean went on to study accountancy and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. She gained her professional qualification while working for Price Waterhouse in Bristol.
Tean is now the finance director of a large employer in west Wiltshire and lives with her husband and children in a small village in the county.
She volunteered to be the Wiltshire VCH treasurer at the start of 2020.
*Tean’s name derives from one of the largest uninhabited Isles of Scilly. The correct pronunciation, Tee-an, often causes problems, especially as the pre-digital spelling includes a grave accent over the a.
John d’Arcy
Since studying classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and taking the diploma in archive administration at Liverpool University in 1971, John’s career has been as an archivist surrounded by historical documents: the fundamental ingredient of Victoria County History (VCH) work.
He joined Wiltshire Record Office in 1973 and was responsible for archives from the local government reorganisation at that time. For the next 30 years it was his job, and good fortune, to persuade archive owners to deposit their documents with the record office in Trowbridge and, more recently, at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham. The archives were appraised, catalogued and made available to the public. Latterly John was principal archivist, overseeing the strong rooms and conservation.
Since retiring he has worked on two major private collections kept by their owners, one at Fonthill in south Wiltshire, the other at Mells in Somerset. John was secretary of Wiltshire County Council's VCH committee from 1998 to 2005, before it became independent, and of Wiltshire Record Society, which publishes important or interesting archives, for ten years. He is a trustee of the Sandell Trust which supports Wiltshire Archaeological Society.
John lives in Edington.
Michael Hodges, vice chairman
Michael was born in 1952 and educated at Pinewood School in Wiltshire, Eton (King’s scholar) and Balliol College, Oxford (MA modern history).
He worked at Morgan Grenfell from 1973 to 1997 and then at HSBC until 2012, focusing on export finance in the Middle East. He was chairman of the Middle East Association from 2010 to 2012.
Michael married the Hon Veronica Addington of Highway Manor, Calne in 1989 and has a stepdaughter, Philippa, in France. Michael and Veronica live in Fonthill Gifford near Tisbury.
He set up the Friends of Wiltshire Churches in 2008 and is a trustee of the Wiltshire Historic Churches Trust and Wiltshire CPRE (the countryside charity), a governor of the Wiltshire Historic Buildings Trust, chancellor of the British Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a deputy lieutenant of Wiltshire and fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Michael is extremely interested in local history and finds the volumes of the Victoria County History a very useful resource. He is the author of Parish Churches of Greater London (2015), The Knights Hospitaller in Great Britain in 1540 (2018) and Urns and Sepulchres of Mortality (The Church Monuments of Wiltshire) (2018).
James Holden
James’s interest in British history stretches back over many years, but his degree was in engineering and he spent his career in transport planning and management, first with British Rail and then with county councils in Oxfordshire, Devon and Leicestershire.
He lived with his wife and three children for many years in the historic small town of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire and there his interest in local history - developed initially through genealogical research - widened, with a particular interest in architectural history culminating in a series of articles in a local magazine.
He and his wife moved to Bradford on Avon in 2014 and soon afterwards he joined the Wiltshire Victoria County History (VCH) trust, initially as treasurer and later as chair of the project group responsible for commissioning and managing research. He has also written a book on the county’s gate lodges, published in 2018 by the Wiltshire Buildings Record, and is concluding research for a book on nonconformist chapels.
Travelling the byways researching gate lodges and chapels has been an ideal way to get to know this fascinating county, a county whose detailed history we are working to record for the long term in the volumes of the VCH.
Bill Perry
Bill was born in south London and went to St Dunstan’s College in Catford. After school he did a short-term engagement in the Army, serving in the Malayan emergency.
He then entered the Civil Service and spent the rest of his career with the Ministry of Defence working in London, NATO headquarters in Brussels and other countries on major defence projects. Bill moved to Wiltshire in 1994, three years before retirement, to become the Command Secretary for the Army’s Adjutant-General at Upavon.
After retiring, Bill studied for a master’s degree in local history and a diploma in archaeology from Oxford University.
He was for many years a trustee of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (WANHS) which owns and runs Wiltshire Museum in Devizes. Bill served as treasurer and later as chairman. He is now the society’s representative on the Wiltshire Victoria County History board. For several years he was a member of the Victoria County History national advisory board.
Bill lives in Salisbury with his wife, Anne; their two daughters are both married. He continues to volunteer in the WANHS library in Devizes and maintains his interest in local and family history.
Mike Stone
Mike is an author, lecturer, curator and archaeologist who has spent 40 years working in archaeology, heritage, museums and as a visiting lecturer at Bristol, Bournemouth and Bath universities for adult education programmes.
After graduating from the University of London, Institute of Archaeology, where he specialised in the archaeology of the Roman Empire, Mike carried out excavations in Italy, southern France, London and the West Country.
He has worked in museums in London, Burton-on-Trent and Wiltshire. From 2000 to 2010 he was curator/manager of the Chippenham Museum & Heritage Centre and was a successful lead in obtaining a Heritage Lottery grant for Chippenham Town Council.
Mike has written and published six books on the history of Chippenham and, along with other editors, has published a history of Chippenham and an industrial history of Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company.
He chairs the industrial archaeological committee for Wiltshire and is actively involved with Chippenham Civic Society, producing their programmes and giving lectures.
Hugh Wright
Hugh became interested in Wiltshire history as a guide at Great Chalfield Manor, near Melksham, and has written a history of the house.
More recently his story of the Webb family, who owned Odstock Manor, near Salisbury, for 400 years, was published by the Downside Abbey Trust.
Hugh moved to Wiltshire when he retired as chief master of King Edward's School, Birmingham. Before that he was head of two other schools after being housemaster and head of classics at Cheltenham College.
He continues to research West Country history and translates documents for the Downside Monastic Library.
Hugh was a pupil at Kingswood School, Bath. He left in 1957 and was a bible clerk of The Queen's College Oxford until 1961, where he read classical mods and greats and was introduced to studying history from original sources. Since retiring he has become chairman of governors at his old school.
He is married to Jill, who worked as a research chemist before teaching maths and chemistry. They have three sons and four grandchildren. Hugh and Jill have lived in Bradford on Avon for the last seven years after retiring in 1998 to nearby Limpley Stoke.
Ian Thorn
Ian lives at Quemerford in Calne. He has a degree in music and wrote his musicology dissertation on the prolific 18th and early 19th century composer Charles Dibdin, who composed many sea songs, including Tom Bowling, still regularly featured in the Last Night of the Proms. Ian’s research introduced him to the VCH Hampshire volume as Dibdin was from Winchester.
Ian, who enjoys playing the harpsichord, is a trustee of the Wiltshire Music Centre at Bradford on Avon and a patron of the Holburne Museum in Bath.
He represents Calne Central on Wiltshire Council, where he is leader of the opposition Liberal Democrat group. Ian is also a Calne town councillor.