Fritham

Fritham is a small village in Hampshire, England. It lies in the north of the New Forest, near the Wiltshire border. It is in the civil parish of Bramshaw.[1]

Fritham

Fritham
Fritham
Location within Hampshire
OS grid referenceSU239141
District
Shire county
Region
CountryEngland
Sovereign stateUnited Kingdom
Post townLYNDHURST
Postcode districtSO43
Dialling code023
PoliceHampshire
FireHampshire
AmbulanceSouth Central
UK Parliament

History

The name Fritham may be derived from Old English meaning a cultivated plot (hamm) in scrub on the edge of a forest (fyrhth).[2]

The oldest feature in Fritham is a Bronze Age Bowl barrow, known as The Butt, which lies just east of the village, although it has been partially damaged on top by a brick structure.[3]

Fritham is not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.[4] It was once thought that the Domesday settlement of Truham (or Trucham) may have been Fritham,[5] but this is now thought unlikely as Truham was within Boldre Hundred.[4] The first mention of Fritham appears early in the 13th century,[2] when Geoffrey de Baddesley held land in Baddesley and Fritham. Fritham remained attached to the manor of South Baddesley in the parish of Boldre at least until 1429.[5]

The Royal Oak - a thatched cottage with red-brick additions - is one of the oldest pubs in the New Forest, dating back to the 17th century.[6] Fritham Lodge, dating from 1671, may have been one of Charles II hunting lodges.[7] A school and chapel opened in Fritham in 1861.[5]

Eyeworth Pond.

From the 1860s until the 1920s Fritham was home to the Schultze gunpowder factory.[8] The factory specialised in smokeless powder for sporting guns.[8] Established in 1865, it was at one time the largest nitro-compound gunpowder factory in the world, with sixty separate buildings and a staff of one hundred.[9] It supplied three-quarters of the world's annual consumption of gunpowder for sporting purposes and often sent 100-ton consignments to the Americas loading road vans and special railway trucks for the docks at Southampton.[9] Little now remains of the factory except for the superintendent's and gatekeeper's houses.[10] Eyeworth Pond, near Fritham, was specially created by the factory as a reservoir to hold water needed during the manufacturing process.[10]

Four young men from Fritham went down with the Titanic in 1912: Lewis Hickman (aged 32), Leonard Mark Hickman (aged 24), Stanley George Hickman (aged 21), and Ambrose Hood (aged 21).[11] A gravestone in memory of the Hickman brothers can be found in Riverside Cemetery in the town of Neepawa in Manitoba, Canada.[12]

The Ham class minesweeper HMS Fritham, launched in 1953, was named after the village.

Notes
  1. Bramshaw Parish Council Archived 2011-10-03 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Old Hampshire Gazetteer - Fritham
  3. Hampshire Treasures - Bramshaw, page 21 Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Througham (Truham) Archived 2015-09-30 at the Wayback Machine, Pastscape
  5. Victoria County History, (1912), A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 5, Pages 623-626
  6. Hampshire pub guide: The Royal Oak, Fritham, The Telegraph, 03 Mar 2011
  7. Fritham Lodge, Bramshaw British Listed Buildings
  8. Norman Henderson, (2007), A Walk Around the New Forest: In Thirty-Five Circular Walks, pages 87-8. Frances Lincoln
  9. Kenneth Hudson, (1968), The industrial archaeology of southern England: Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Gloucestershire east of the Severn, page 35
  10. Eyeworth Pond, Fritham, and the Schultze Gunpowder Factory
  11. The Royal Oak, Fritham Archived 26 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine, Lymington.org
  12. Find A Grave website
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