In 1985 Howard Bluett, a Lay Reader at St Mary’s Church, filmed the Pilton Playgroup in Pilton Church Hall.  We have now successfully transferred the 30 minute video to a digital medium and, with the help of one of the mothers involved, Anne Chapman, we have managed to identify over 70 of the leaders, parents and children who are shown.

Playgroup Leader Dorothy Forward with two of the children

It was too big a task to go through and identify them on the film but they are all listed on The Pilton Story archive (search for ‘Pilton Playgroup’).  We hope this means that anyone searching the internet for themselves or members of their family may find The Pilton Story and open up links back to their time in Pilton.

The Leaders were Dorothy Forward (shown in this image from the film with two of her charges) and Brenda Bryan, and they were helped by Elizabeth Stevens, Ruth Dennis, Jean Ford, Sheena Ferguson and Nancy Bluett (Howard’s wife) and a lot of the children’s parents.  If anyone would like to add to what we know about this group and tell us what they are doing today, please contact The Pilton Story.

Despite its modest size, Pilton Priory possessed quite a large and ornate seal.  It was all the more unusual for bearing images on both sides, each half being formed in its own metal matrix with three little ‘ears’ that allowed the two halves to be correctly aligned.

The Two Sides of the Pilton Priory Seal

Over 200 years after the suppression of Pilton Priory, both matrices came into the hands of John Bowle (1725-1788), a Wiltshire vicar and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries with a passion for Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Whether the Reverend Bowle (Don Bowle to his friends) was an extra proprietorial type or merely afraid of losing his acquisition, he had not one but both reverse sides of the matrices engraved with his name! Fortunately, future owners of the artefacts did not follow suit.

In the late 1870s, Pilton Priory’s seal matrices were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  Dr. Kirstin Kennedy, Curator in the Metalwork Section, re-examined these lovely Pilton artefacts and has also taken the time and trouble to bring together the information available and to produce a document about them. You can access this by clicking on this link: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O322757/seal-matrix/.