Joseph Ashby

“His life was remarkable, encapsulating in many aspects the ideal of the self-improving working man, and embracing most of the institutions—the nonconformist chapel, trades unionism, and working-class Liberalism—that so clearly represented social and political betterment in the later years of the nineteenth century.” (Quotation from Alun Howkins, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

(Her notes deposited at the Warwickshire CRO suggest the family was the Comptons, Marquesses of Northampton, whom indeed Joseph had contacts with throughout his life.)

Joseph left school when nearly eleven and worked on a farm in Tysoe before being employed in quarrying in nearby Hornton.

Also at this time, he came into contact with the third great influence of his life, the friendly society movement which gave him a belief in self-help.

By his late teens, he had found work with the Ordnance Survey, carrying instruments and taking simple measurements with a firm of surveyors in the Tysoe area; it was while working with the survey that he met Bolton King, the educationalist and sociologist, who was at that time a young Oxford graduate.

Through his association with King and his contacts with local Liberalism Joseph began writing on the problems of rural life.

Early in 1914 Joseph's scattered 100 acres (400,000 m2) in Tysoe were exchanged for a 200-acre (0.81 km2) holding, Coldstone Farm, at Ascott under Wychwood in Oxfordshire, where he died on 4 March 1919.