ONCE a week without fail he peddled his wares through the streets of Swindon, stopping at the same spots, at the same time, thus enabling regulars to carefully dip their jars into either of his two large vessels and scoop out the nectar that was crucial to their ongoing health, wellbeing and vitality.

For those who weren’t so familiar or convinced at the apparent restorative and disorder-relieving powers of this singular local product, our man would lustily “hold forth on the wonderful nature of this natural mineral water and its value as a cure for certain diseases”.

At a penny a half-pint, he “did good business” travelling a “pretty wide district” in Swindon and North Wiltshire by horse and cart before dismounting to convey his salty pick-me-up on a contraption that allowed him to walk about with a couple of bucket-like pitchers over his shoulder – one at the front, one at the back.

He was William Kennett “The Purton Spa Water Vendor” and at one stage, unlikely as it now seems, the medicinal marvel that he hawked for some years during the early 20th Century may well have transformed a small village a few miles west of Swindon into “a second Harrogate”.

It is unlikely that many people outside of Purton Stoke, with its nature reserve, Grade II listed 16th Century farmhouse, traditional red telephone box and Arkells pub (The Bell) are aware of the once nearly famous salt hole that promised – or threatened – to turn the sleepy settlement into a spa town to rival Cheltenham.

As James Caslaw dryly noted on the Purton Stoke website seven years ago: “The upmarket hotels, the Crescents and Grand Parades did not materialise”. However, the story of Wiltshire’s only traditional healing well worthy of becoming a spa is a remarkable one.

It is full of ups, downs and what-ifs, along with the sort of time-honoured yarn that we all love because it makes our blood boil… you know, the one where the local populace – the people, the salt-of-the-earth if you’ll excuse the pun – are pushed around by the mean spirited local landowner.

And guess what, more than 60 years after the last bottle of Purton Stoke spa water was dispatched, bringing to an end almost a century of commercial activity triggered by a bubbling spring, the old pump room is still there today locked, cobwebbed and hiding behind some trees, bushes and an ornate but now rusty old gate along a little used rural road.

It is said that the good folk of bucolic Purton Stoke, a mile-and-a-half from its big brother Purton, had been dipping into an ancient spring a few hundred yards to the west of the village as far back as the 17th Century… maybe earlier.

At some stage it became apparent that this “clear and bright water” that possessed “scarcely any odour whatsoever” was no ordinary H2O. It contained, said locals, “magical properties” that cured a variety of ailments.

These included ulcers of the leg, liver and kidney disorders, scalp and stomach complaints, gout, rheumatism, consumption and arthritis. Villagers swore by the stuff that dribbled, gushed or sprouted, depending on conditions, from a depression in the ground.

Born in 1783, sprightly villager Isaac Beasley, 94, recalled that he, his father and numerous locals before them had been quaffing the efficacious draught for at least 200 years.

However, during the 1850s local bigwig and JP Dr Samuel Champernowne (that’s right) Sadler became so peeved at the constant invasion to collect water – his water – that he erected railings and a locked gate to keep the rabble at bay.

He even tried to bury the spring beneath cartloads of earth but it kept sprouting forth.

An outcry ensued but Sadler was unmoved. That is until he, the good doctor, became seriously ill and couldn’t find a remedy. So he did what generations Purton Stoke folk had done before… he started gulping from the spring.

Hey presto, he became well again. At least that’s how the story goes and hopefully it’s true.

What is true is that Sadler, realising the commercial potential of the spring, turned it into a business and in 1859 built a splendid octagonal pump house – complete with a two-seat loo – over the spring which he upgraded into a well.

This, he grandly announced was to “satisfy the immediate requirements of the public who are in increasing numbers flocking to the spa”.

On February 13, 1860, an advertisement in this newspaper proclaimed: “The public are informed that a Person attends the Spa every Wednesday from ten to three when parties can be supplied with the waters on Application.”

An inscription of the waters’ curative credentials can still be found above the door fancily stating that the “ancient salts hole” had been analysed by Dr Augustus Voeckler and found to contain “sulphated and bromo-iodated saline.”

With the blessing of the esteemed Voeckler from the Cirencester Agricultural College, Sadler’s well thrived for a few years. Crates of it were packed off all over Britain while rooms became available in the village for those who wished to stop-over for a drink and a drench.

It peaked in 1874 when stone jars of Purton Spa Water sold for a penny a pint and takings rose to £117.

But despite the backing of eminent doctors, including Queen Victoria’s honorary surgeon, J R Kerr Innes, who invested in the venture, business slowly trickled away and by 1880 visitors ran dry.

Unlike Cheltenham, Bath or Harrogate, there wasn’t much to do by way of social intercourse in Purton Stoke when one wasn’t taking the waters.

Others later tried to revive the spa’s fortunes including the aforementioned William Kennett who snapped it up 99 years ago and carted the stuff around Swindon.

Writing in 1932, Swindon historian Frederick Large remembered: “He has long since disappeared but the water still remains at Purton, to be developed, it is hoped, at some future time by an enterprising person who will reap the pecuniary reward he deserves.

“There are those who maintain that Purton will yet become a second Harrogate where the water cure will be as much

practised as in that fashionable resort.”

  • “DON’T walk over there, the salts have eaten into the floorboards…”
    Miss Alice Haskins is instructing a representative from the Swindon Evening Advertiser how not to break his leg inside the rundown Purton Spa Pump House.
    It is 1978 and Alice, who lives in a cottage next to the pump rooms with her sister Florence, is showing our man around “the lost spa”.
    The well is deep and never runs dry, says pensioner Alice who dipped a jug into the water and poured our man a glass. “Faintly salty and not unpleasant” was the verdict.
    “My sister drinks it occasionally but I don’t like it,” she says. The well house, we noted back then, was slowly “sliding into oblivion”.
    In 2009 the new owners opened it for a gala fun-day to mark the 150th anniversary of the pump room back when Samuel Sadler had ambitions of transforming Purton Stoke into a spa town.
    Virtually hidden away, the pump room/well house today evokes a strange almost pixie-like charm as if it has crept from the pages of a Victorian fairy-tale.

    Just so unusual

    In a 2000 thesis on ‘wells and their folklore,’ Katy Jordan described the transition at Purton Stoke from healing well to medicinal spa as “surprisingly unusual”.
    Its healing properties, she wrote, were “scrupulously documented” during its heyday as a spa.
    She also quoted John Munro, Pathologist of Bath’s Royal Mineral Water Hospital whose 1929 analysis found that the waters contained small quantities of radiation which he stressed was “an important factor from a medical point of view”.
    “Nowadays,” added Jordan, “we know all too much about it, and we look askance at radioactivity. But at this period it was a fashionable healing attribute.”

  • A DECADE after serving as a teenager with the Royal Artillery at the Somme and Ypres, the former Sgt Fred Neville in 1927 acquired the cottage and land at Purton Stoke known as “The Spa.”

    First by pony and trap and later by motor car, he hawked his glass bottled spa water throughout the area including Swindon, selling them for six pence, which rose exponentially to a shilling, outside the Corn Exchange on market days.

    Neville’s Purton Spa Water was also distributed to “satisfied customers” around the country and a number of appreciative letters exist that testify to the efficacious qualities of the product.

    Historian Alec Robbins wrote: “Each bottle sent from Purton station was packed in a protective sheath of straw and despatched in a crate.”

    Swindon deliveries ceased in the 1940s due to a combination of war-time petrol rationing, a 20 per cent per bottle tax charge and later on the arrival of the NHS when free medicines for all ailments became available.

    The last consignment left Purton station in June, 1952. Locals, however, continued to collect their spa water from the increasingly neglected pump house for years afterwards…