Miniscule marks on a map pinpoint their location,
Just south of the London conurbation,
Little and Great Bookham have quite a story to tell.
From the time of the Domesday Book,
So many illustrious and infamous inhabitants who started out, passed through or passed away there.
I suppose it is not surprising that people who made a living from their writing were drawn
To a place called Bookham
Indeed a few notable writers have spent time there,
There was the poet, the playwright, the profligate and the politician
And that was just one person,
Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
A great deal about him can be and has been written
Jane Austen used to go to stay with her uncle and aunt.
The Reverend Samuel Cooke of course wrote sermons,
His wife, Cassandra Cooke, like her niece, was also an author.
‘Emma’s’ ‘Highbury’, it’s surmised, was in fact Great Bookham.
Clive Staples Lewis - inventor of The Pevensie children, Mr Tumnus,
The White Witch and Aslan
Spent his formative years under the tutelage of Mr Kirkpatrick
While war was waged across the English Channel
Not long after, relatively speaking, Newly-wed Prince Albert, later King George VI
And his bride, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later “The Queen Mum”
Spent their honeymoon at Polesden Lacey,
One of Bookham’s three stately mansions.
During the Second World War,
In another of Bookham’s great houses, Eastwick Park to be precise,
Canadian Armed Forces found accommodation,
As did the King and Queen of Yugoslavia in the Old Rectory.
In 1943, a little boy was born in Great Bookham,
Who grew up to be the bass player and songwriter for Pink Floyd
Roger Waters’ dad left soon after to fight in the war,
but sadly never returned,as he was killed abroad.
Though it might seem quite ephemeral, but Louis Essen, Scientist,
Discoverer and calculator of the precise speed of light,
And inventor of the highly accurate measurer of time,
The atomic clock, ended his time in Bookham.
And with that, I close the book on the yarn of Bookham, Little and Great.
By John Fairlamb © 2025
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