How Bournemouth grew from a small village into a large county town

The first vicar of St.Stephen's, speaking to a Parochial Gathering in 1904, tells us of the early days of Bournemouth. He lived here as a boy, his father being Alexander Morden Bennett, the first Vicar of St.Peter's, and founder of Church Life in the Town.

He says:

"When I first came to Bournemouth with my father in 1845, there were but 300 people in the village. There was a church, the predecessor of St.Peter's. It had four castellated-looking excrescences and a tiny spire. The western gallery was occupied on Sundays by the village orchestra, with sackbut, psaltery and all kinds of music. There was no elementary school at all, but there was a Sunday School, held in a building in what is now known as the square."

He tells of how on one Sunday, driving over from Mudeford with his father, they overtook the teacher with the key of the school in one hand and the solitary scholar in the other.

It is hard to realise that in 1814 there were only three houses in the place, and that in 1824 the only direct means of communication with Southampton in the East and Weymouth in the West consisted of two four-horse coaches, the arrival and departure of which were quite a society event and attracted many people to watch them. Even some sixteen years later, as Bishop Browne tells us in his reminiscences, there were no two houses opposite each other in the village. The nearest railway station in those days was Southampton.