The Turner family provides one of Great Brickhill’s clearest examples of continuity across generations. Their history links farming, Rectory Farm, village institutions and the changing character of agriculture from the eighteenth century to the present day.
A family rooted in the parish
Surviving local accounts place the Turner family in Great Brickhill from the early eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century members of the family were firmly established in village farming and community life. Their story is particularly associated with Rectory Farm, but it also reaches into other holdings, the Baptist tradition and parish affairs.
William Turner and Rectory Farm
In the 1860s Rectory Farm was one of the largest farms in the parish, extending to roughly 218 acres. Unlike the principal Duncombe tenancies, it belonged to the Rector. William Turner farmed it on the Rector’s behalf and was a prominent village figure, serving on the vestry and employing a substantial agricultural workforce.
The farm therefore occupied an unusual position in Great Brickhill’s nineteenth-century landscape: it was part of the church estate rather than the Duncombe estate, yet it was operated by a local family whose association with the parish already stretched back for generations.
A new farmhouse and a lasting home
The Rectory Farm familiar today dates from the late nineteenth century. A new farmhouse was built in 1888 during the incumbency of the Reverend Nepean. The older farm buildings stood nearer the church, in the area later associated with The Priory.
The Turner family’s own published history states that Rectory Farm was bought from the church in 1890 and has remained the family home since. The same account describes the present generation as the thirteenth generation of Turners to farm in Great Brickhill.
More than one Turner farm
The family’s nineteenth-century presence was not confined to Rectory Farm. John Turner, William’s brother, farmed a smaller holding of about fifty acres, much of it belonging to Bernard Fountaine of Stoke Hammond. Their father, another William Turner, was remembered for a long association with the Baptist church.
These overlapping occupations are a reminder that a farming family’s history cannot always be reduced to one farmhouse. Land might be owned by one person, rented by another and worked by several members of an extended family.
Changing agriculture
Rectory Farm itself has changed repeatedly with the agricultural economy. The family’s modern account describes a progression from traditional mixed farming through arable and dairy production, poultry and later organic farming. The farm therefore provides an unusually long local thread through very different periods of British agriculture.
That continuity does not mean that the farm remained unchanged. Buildings, enterprises and methods altered, while parts of the wider Rectory Farm and Lower Rectory Farm landscape took on new uses. The family history is valuable precisely because it shows adaptation rather than simple survival.
The family and village life
Across the surviving record the Turners appear not only as farmers but as participants in village institutions. Nineteenth-century vestry records place William Turner among those involved in parish business, while later village and church activities continued to make use of Rectory Farm and Lower Rectory Farm.
This combination of farming and community involvement makes the Turner story important to Great Brickhill. It is a family history, but also a history of how one farm and one local family adapted as the village changed around them.
Follow the farming story
For the wider pattern of Great Brickhill’s farms and tenant families, see Farming and the Great Brickhill Estates. Michael Warth’s original nineteenth-century account is preserved separately in his book: Great Brickhill in the Mid 1800s.
Rectory Farm today: Trifolium Partnership — Rectory Farm, Great Brickhill
Other Family references are available within the membership (restricted) Pages