‘Basingstoke’ is a funny word. It derives from one of the many peoples who migrated to Britain in the Iron Age – one such, the Basinga – settled by the river in what is now Old Basing.
From there a ‘stoke’ or new settlement grew 2 miles upstream giving us the name Basingstoke. Gilbert and Sullivan thought it so hilarious that they made the word a key in their comic opera, Ruddigore. It became the only word which could calm ‘Mad’ Margaret – you can find it on YouTube.
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Shakespeare popped in a mention in his play, Henry IV Part 2: “Where lay the King last night? At Basingstoke, my Lord” and so did Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), where Arthur asks: “How did we get here? We hitched a lift,” said Ford. “Excuse me?” said Arthur. “Are you trying to tell me that we just stuck out our thumbs and some green bug-eyed monster stuck his head out and said, Hi fellas, hop right in. I can take you as far as the Basingstoke roundabout?”.
Cosmo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, visited the town in 1669 while on a Grand Tour. He was rude indeed, calling it “wretched”. Some 30 years later in 1692, traveller Celia Fiennes called it “a large town to entertain travellers and commodious”.
But Cosmo did at least take the time to make an illustration of the town. Daniel Defoe, better known as the author of Robinson Crusoe than as a commentator on England, also added a little summary “we enter Basingstoke, in the middle of woods and pastures, rich and fertile”. This was ca. 1728.
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By 1759 when Methodist preacher, the Reverend John Wesley came to preach, he noted that the “people put [him] in mind of the wild beasts at Ephesus” and again “a people slow of heart and understanding”. John Arlott, born in Cemetery Lodge in 1914 wrote a little poem about the town, which begins: “Of Basingstoke in Hampshire, The claims to fame are small…”
Thomas Warton, poet laureate to George III was born in Chute House in 1728. He wrote a sonnet about the river Loddon calling it ‘his sweet native stream’. Today, the Loddon barely trickles through Glebe Gardens. In his Wessex novels, Thomas Hardy’s name for Basingstoke was ‘Stoke-Barehills’.
He regretted the building of two mortuary chapels in the cemetery: “The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway; the modern chapels, modern tombs and modern shrubs having a look of intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient walls” The offending chapels were built around 1850 and demolished a little over 100 years later.
One of the best current names is Amazingstoke.
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