FOREWORD

The Church was the focal point of the village and to a lesser extent that is still true today. It Is because of the Church that this essay came to be written. In 1967 the Church, nationally, held a series of meetings throughout the year for the layman to discuss its relationship with, for example, education and with social welfare. The year ended with a look at the local church and local history. The late Revd. Wilby opened the Parish Chest and said ‘I want you to stage an exhibition about Old Powerstock. You can start in here’.
The contents did not go back too far, some had been transferred to the County Archives and the very earliest records bad either rotted away or been destroyed in the fire at Blandford - so the story goes - en route for Salisbury. I decided there and then to write a History of Powerstock but was sidetracked by a cutting from the now defunct Dorset County Chronicle which told the story of what came to be referred to in hushed tones for many years as the Powerstock Double Murder Story. It was an account originally printed in the Shilling Magazine - there were three Shilling Magazines around that period, 1839, but none of them fitted datewise and as time went on this was found to be true of a lot of the research subsequently carried out.
History taught at school was a dry-as-dust subject, dates of Kings and Queens, of battles in far off lands and of people never heard of again. Television has shown that history is none of these. History is about people, the people who make the events and the people who are affected by them. Dates are not all that important except in relation to each other although this essay is as accurate as the existing records allow.
Domesday Book was long ago but there were Overseers of the Poor right up to 1894 and some of the people who knew them are still alive today, but they are rapidly getting fewer which is why it has been important to put their memories on paper. A lot of stories - can they be called records? -have never been written and, therefore, there is no printed source to quote, but they tell of life just as much as the written word.
It was fortunate that someone had written a History of Powerstock before but it is tedious reading. The anonymous writer could not have dreamed that someone, someday would be copying some of his work with a typewriter and by electric light too!
Powerstock, in this essay, comprises Nettlecombe, West Milton, North Poorton, Wytherstone, Mappercombe and Whetley.