Retro: Four mystery cottages

David Cliffe • Published 6 Aug 2009 10:00 0 Comments

THIS week's mystery picture comes from a glass lantern slide taken by Llewellyn Treacher about 1910.

Mr Treacher owned extensive orchards on Ruscombe Road in Twyford, and he had a house built among the trees, which he called Uporchard.

There he lived, with his sisters and his pet goat, Angela. He was for many years a parish councillor, and a keen and distinguished archaeologist, geologist and antiquary - as well as being a photographer.

After his death in the 1940s, Wokingham Rural District Council bought his land and built houses on it, with streets appropriately named Orchard Estate and Treacher Court.

Many of the Treacher photographs are now preserved at the Museum of English Rural Life, part of the University of Reading in Redlands Road, but some of them found their way into the collection at Reading Central Library. A few years ago we had all the images on glass at the library scanned, and you can see most of them on the library website - www.readinglibraries.org.uk

If you search the catalogue under the name "Treacher", all the material we have from him will be listed, and most of the pictures will appear.

This one, however, will not appear because I am still hoping to discover where these cottages were.

The probability is that they were somewhere in the Twyford and Ruscombe area, and they may well still be standing.

They can only have been small. There are just four pots on the chimney stack, so each cottage probably had two rooms downstairs, each with a fireplace, and two bedrooms upstairs with no heating.

Can you identify them?

I have spent some hours wearing rubber gloves looking at the glass plates at the Museum of English Rural Life, in the hope of finding another image of these cottages, but without success.

Please get in touch if you can help, call Adam Hewitt on 0118 955 3303.

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