My first day as a volunteer at the Rural Life Centre was not at all what I expected. In fact, having confessed to no knowledge of tractors, dubious DIY skills and total lack of empathy with sheep, I was surprised they wanted me there at all. But they did. That’s the thing with volunteering – whatever you’ve learned or done in your working life is useful to someone, somewhere.

I arrived the Wednesday before Rustic Sunday, the biggest event in the Centre’s calendar and definitely not a good time to get anyone’s attention for long – too much had to be done to get ready for what they hoped would be a gate of 1500 or so visitors. With country crafts, traditional bands and demonstrations of everything from brick carving to blacksmithing, it is neither fete nor craft fair but a celebration of village life that has all but vanished in Britain.

Events such as steam rallies, WW2 re-enactments, even weddings, provide much-needed revenue for the Museum.

The director’s cluttered office is accessed through a stable block full of old-fashioned carriages, heavy horse harnesses and a horse-drawn horse ambulance from the early 1900s. The sheep can be heard baa-ing in the pen outside in between the phones’ incessant ringing, whirring of the fax machine and the coming and going of volunteers.

One call is from the organiser of a group of disabled people who will be coming on Sunday – will there be enough seating available, they want to know. The stove in the café seems to have stopped working – and so it goes on.

To familiarise myself with the museum’s layout and attractions, I wander around the lovely old buildings in the grounds, guidebook in hand. The sun has decided to shine and it’s easy to imagine a cricket match on the grass outside the cricket pavilion. This is a beautiful wooden building from nearby Godalming, once scheduled for demolition but luckily offered to the Museum.

The little chapel is exquisite, and as with the other buildings, it was dismantled and rebuilt on-site by volunteers. There seems to be a small army of these ageing engineers, builders, plumbers, electricians, retired farmers and ordinary Joes ready and willing to donate their time and skills.

An ornate romany caravan and a shepherd’s hut on wheels with a coal-burning stove and cot inside could be straight out of Enid Blyton, while the little steam train which comes alive on Sundays, is pure Thomas the Tank Engine.

How it all began

There are around 30 museums in the country dedicated to a vanished way of life in Britain’s villages and farming communities, however I found the history of this one particularly poignant. Thanks to its founders, Henry and Madge Jackson, that era can still be appreciated by visitors of all generations. But the couple struggled financially to keep it going and suffered great personal heartbreak along the way.

It all began when they spotted an abandoned horse-drawn plough, covered in weeds and partly hidden by trees in some Hampshire woods. Madge thought it would look nice in their garden…little did they know that it would lead to a life-long collecting fervour.

That was in the late 1960s and shortly afterwards the couple began looking for an old waggon to join the plough in the large garden of their cottage in Tilford, where they leased eight acres of land and assorted farm buildings, including a hop kiln.

Madge wrote in her recollections of those early days: “Sadly most [waggons] had been burnt when farming became mechanised. Many discarded implements of our grandfathers’ era were sent for scrap iron or put on a bonfire.”

Driven by a desire to save these relics, they attended auctions and farm sales in pursuit of bygone agricultural implements, including the contents of a wheelwright’s business from West Sussex. This contained a unique set of ledgers from 1767 to 1961 for which Henry paid £175 – a huge sum to find out of his salary as a tree nursery manager.

What had started as an appreciation of local rural artefacts had become an impressive collection, which was beginning to overflow their farm buildings. There were 70-80 pieces in the garden of Old Kiln Cottage alone. Encouraged by the interest shown by friends and the approval of the planning authorities, they opened the Old Kiln Museum of farming and country bygones in 1972, a venture that was to take over their lives, inspire a large group of supporters and eventually become what it is today – the Rural Life Centre.

Eventually Henry left his job and the couple decided to expand their kitchen garden into a market garden in order to fund their enterprise. “Our first year was 1976, the great drought year” Madge later wrote, “ It couldn’t have been worse…and fires in the forest all around us were a constant worry.”

Rebuilding vernacular buildings on the site was the inspiration of Madge and Henry who drove a hard bargain to obtain them, dismantled them with the help of volunteers and transported them back to Tilford.

They were determined that their venture should not get into debt. “We’d seen several similar collections to ours start off with a big splash on borrowed bank money, only to find that visitors were not turning up in coachloads and soon the collection would come up for sale.” They made the Museum into a trust in 1984.

Henry was taken ill with a rare and incurable disease when further tragedy struck – their 36-year-old son died suddenly from a rare form of laryngitis. Scarcely had they begun to recover from the upset of Henry’s illness and the grief of their son’s death when they had the news that their daughter had been killed in a car crash, aged 37.

Madge’s own words only hint at the anguish she and Henry were suffering: “This was devastating… Had it not been for the Museum and our commitment to many people, I think we would have given up.” They ploughed on with their project.

More buildings followed during the 1980s and ‘90s – a reception and gift shop, café, granary, village hall, small chapel, cricket pavilion and visitors’ toilets.

Prefab transformation

Today’s visitors begin their tour of the grounds and the buildings at the Prefab, typical of many thousands of rapidly erected homes for returning servicemen and their families after the Second World War. It has been authentically furnished and equipped as a typical home of the period and it’s not unusual to hear older visitors exclaim, “I had a cooker just like that one!” or “Mother’s old bathroom looked just like this.” In fact, for many country people the Prefab represented their first experience of modern conveniences.

Trustee Alexa Barrow laughs to recall the story behind the Prefab, which had been in use as a bonded tobacco warehouse in Tilford before the Jacksons salvaged it for the Museum: “Our prefab had been gutted, but I heard that Bristol local authority were demolishing a load of prefabs, so I asked the council if we could salvage some parts like windows to restore our exhibit.

“We put out a request over the internet for lino and some flying ducks for the prefab’s sitting room wall and offers came flooding in. We ended up with a flock of flying ducks!”

Grants and donations from many different sources provided two large barns to display the artefacts. Eighteen rooms were created showing realistic tableaux of a village laundry, baker, cobbler, butcher, vet’s surgery, tailor, baby nursery, hardware store and others, while tools and paraphernalia of gardening, forestry, the local hops industry and the groundsman’s craft are displayed in the appropriate buildings.

Some of the workshops are still used by volunteers today, especially during events such as Rustic Sunday in July when you can watch wood-turning, the blacksmith at his forge, brickcarving, basket-making and other once common country skills.

In 2000 the Jacksons were awarded MBEs for their tireless work and although Madge died in 2003 and Henry in 2004, their spirit lives on in Tilford. The Museum’s director, Chris Shepheard, along with the trustees and 60 or so volunteers, make sure the Rural Life Centre continues to provide exhibits and events the founders would have approved of.

As I was researching this article, I came across a wonderful quote from Henry Jackson in a 1972 local newspaper article, when the museum opened to the public: “The only people who start museums are millionaires, public bodies and bloody fools!” Maybe so, but where would the world be without the eccentrics whose passion is collecting and preserving our heritage?

Further information

The Rural Life Centre, Reeds Road, Tilford, Farnham GU10 2DL. Tel: 01252 795571. Visit www.rural-life.org.uk for details of opening hours and upcoming events.