The Arkell family brewery has been a feature of Stratton St Margaret for 166 years and with more than 100 pubs, its name is well known in Swindon. But it could have been a very different story.

John Arkell was born in Kempsford in 1802, the son of Thomas and Susannah.

Crippled by heavy taxation and an agricultural depression, John gave up on farming in Gloucestershire and, with his cousin Thomas, left England for pastures new.

The pioneering group, which included other members of the extended family, landed in New York during the winter of 1830-1.

Their eventual destination was the uninhabited plains of “Upper Canada.”

In a letter dated February 4, 1831 to his brother Thomas back home, John recaps on the previous ten months at Farnham Plains.

“We arrived at Guelph on the 26 of May in very fine and warm weather, mosquitoes and flies just beginning to move out of the black earth and swampy places.”

Within two days of their arrival, the newcomers had identified the area they planned to settle and during a spell of “exceedingly warm weather” they began the work of clearing the land.

“During the first night Thomas Arkell and James Carter remained on the plain, sheltered only by a few boards.

“Very heavy rain fell, but it did not injure them, the weather being so warm in the day time,” wrote John.

As summer turned into a wet autumn followed by the biting cold of winter, with December temperatures at ‘10 below zero,’ John commented that “the American winter altogether is more preferable to work in than the English one, the ground and air being more dry and steady.”

With the women back home anxious to know how the two single men were coping, John writes: “you can tell Polly that we live like two old, long-bearded and grave old bachelors. “We allow Mrs Carter to wash our clothes for us, and make our bread.

“We cook the food we eat nearly every day with the exception of meat, which we boil or fry, two, three or four times a week as occasion may demand.

“Thomas vows that if none of the English girls will return with him to America when he goes home, he will have an Irish, Dutch or Yankee wife before long.”

Thomas eventually married Scottish-born Isabella Hume. The couple raised a large family in Arkell, the settlement named after the two cousins who had helped establish it.

For John the path of true love led him home to Kempsford where he married Elizabeth Hewer in 1833. Elizabeth, a relative of John’s fellow traveller James Hewer, found the prospect of a pioneer’s wife less than attractive.

John returned to farming and the 1841 census records the couple living at Stratton St Margaret with their five young children.

The brewery was established two years later, and the rest, as they say, is history