In June 2026, This is Haslemere met with John Owen (Jo) Smith who is a local historian, wordsmith, speaker, poet, playwright & publisher based in Headley Down. We heard not just about how Jo became a writer after a career in IT but also about his forthcoming productions of his play Flora’s Heatherley, marking the 150 year anniversary of the birth of Flora Thompson (of Lark Rise To Candleford fame). 

About John Owen Smith

Jo grew up in Buckinghamshire and read Chemical Engineering at Imperial College. After university, Jo joined British paper manufacturer Wiggins Teape as a paper technologist. Whilst at this firm, he saw an internal job ad for a computer programmer and remained in IT for the rest of his career.

When Jo retired, he got into local history. He was a relative newcomer to the village of Headley, arriving in 1977, and he started writing. His first work involved panto scripts for Headley Theatre Club and he has written twelve so far! One evening, he was in The Holly Bush Pub in Headley and was introduced to someone who worked for East Hampshire District Council who proposed Jo could write a local history play. A few months later, she suggested the 1830 Selborne Riots as the subject. By coincidence, Jo was already aware of the riots as his daughter had written a school project about the them and a day after the Selborne Riots, the same rioting mob arrived in Headley. The Swing Riots were a widespread set of uprisings in 1830 by agricultural workers across Southern and Eastern England protesting against agricultural mechanisation and harsh working conditions. Selborne and Headley uniquely attacked workhouses with several rioters being transported to Australia. Jo wrote the play “This Bloody Crew” but there wasn’t enough space to get all the facts in so, he also wrote and self-published the book under the title “One Monday In November”. Jo joked, “A Man walked into a pub…and came out a local historian…”

Jo began to be known for local history. For the 50th anniversary of D-Day, he was asked if it would be good to write about Canadian Tank Forces in Headley. Canadian troops in the village were mainly from Armoured regiments, using the local heathlands to practice manoeuvres, and many were destined to land on Juno Beach in June 1944. Jo recorded personal stories of villagers and veterans and did extensive and painstaking research which led to a second book "All Tanked Up". In Jo’s talks about this subject, he also plays back his interviews and he feels he has found “a way of keeping alive memories which might otherwise soon disappear.”

Introducing Flora Thompson, beyond Candleford Green

Jo mentioned that in the old days Grayshott used to be part of Headley. One day, someone mentioned to him that a postmistress in Grayshott had become “a bit famous”  later in her life.  Jo told us, “Since then that postmistress, Flora Thompson, has taken over my life.” 

Originally from Oxfordshire, Flora Thompson came to live and work in Grayshott as a post office assistant in 1898. When she was in her 60s, she wrote about her childhood in a book called Lark Rise. There were two other books about her childhood and youth called Over to Candleford and Candleford Green, before she wrote Heatherley about her time in Grayshott. 

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin houses the primary archival collection of Flora Thompson's papers. This archive includes the typescript and original manuscript for her semi-fictionalised autobiography Heatherley, which serves as the "lost sequel" to Lark Rise to Candleford.  Heatherley was subsequently published in full for the first time by John Owen Smith in 1998 as a celebration of the 100-year anniversary of her arrival in Grayshott. In the short work, Flora depicted herself in the third person, as a young lady called 'Laura'.

Flora Thompson is best known for writing the trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford about her childhood in rural north Oxfordshire in the late 1800s. In this she also refers to herself as ‘Laura’, and the trilogy ends with her saying that “driven on by well-meant advice from without, and from within by the restless longing of youth to see and experience the whole of life, she disappeared from the country scene”.

Her sequel Heatherley has a first chapter entitled “Laura goes farther” and it starts with the words: “One hot September afternoon near the end of the last century a girl of about twenty walked <from Haslemere station> without knowing it over the border into Hampshire from one of its neighbouring counties <Surrey>.” And she was to stay in Hampshire for the next 30 years.

The time gap between the end of Lark Rise to Candleford and Heatherley is about a year. She arrived in Grayshott in September 1898 to be “in charge of the post office”.  While there, she served renowned customers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw, writing in Heatherley that: “These and many other well-known people came to the post-office and Laura had her restricted post-office-counter view of them all. Some of them were brilliant conversationalists and, when two or more friends or neighbours met there, it amused her to listen to their talk.”

However, she revealed that after meeting these renowned writers: “She had felt ashamed of her own poor attempts and given up trying to write. Even her journal, begun on the day she first left home, had been discontinued. She had destroyed that with her other scraps of writing, saying to herself as they smouldered to tinder that that was the end of a foolish idea”.

In retrospect she describes her time in Grayshott as being when she went “from foolish youth to wicked adolescence”, but she obviously appreciated her time there as she named one of her later houses “Grayshott”.

Flora Thompson leaves Grayshott

Flora left Grayshott soon after September 1900 when a new telegraph office opened in neighbouring Hindhead, taking 80% of Grayshott’s telegram business, and by the time of the March 1901 census she was working as a sub-postmistress in Yateley. The same census shows her husband-to-be, John Thompson, working as a post office clerk in Aldershot – just 8 miles away – and Jo believes that this is when they first met. They married in January 1903 and she moved to be with him in Winton, a suburb of Bournemouth (then in Hampshire), where he was the local postmaster. Here, they started a family, a daughter Winifred born Oct 1903 and a son Henry Basil born Oct 1909. Flora began to write again, helped by living near the new Winton Library which opened in 1907 where she “slipped in like a duck slipping into water and read almost everything”.

Then in 1916, John Thompson applied for promotion, and was accepted as postmaster at Liphook – just 4 miles from Grayshott. So, Flora moved back to familiar territory. Here they had a third child, Peter, born in Oct 1918 at the height of the ’flu pandemic – all the family except Flora and the baby were laid low, but they survived – and the next 12 years in Liphook were to be some of Flora’s most productive as an author.

Flora Thompson in Print

In 1921 she had a small book of her poetry published under the title Bog Myrtle & Peat which was reviewed in the national press under the heading “Village Postmistress Poetess – her first volume”. As a result, an article about her (‘Poet and Nature Lover’) was published in the Civil Service magazine “The Civilian”– and it was for this, at the age of 44, that she posed in a local studio for the photograph which is now generally used to depict her. (This is the image that accompanies this article.)

She loved to take long walks – “nineteen or twenty miles was nothing to her,” as one villager put it – and recorded what she saw in a series of articles she wrote monthly for the Catholic Fireside magazine under the title “The Peverel Papers”.

Flora Thompson had pieces accepted for such journals as “The Lady” and won prizes in various literary competitions, and, while at Liphook, she also wrote a novel “The Gates of Eden” which was released in instalments in her own “Peverel Monthly” magazine but never published as a whole work.

Then in 1927 John Thompson applied for promotion again, and the family moved the next year away from Hampshire to Dartmouth in Devon.

During the next ten years, taking notice to some extent of the feedback from her “Peverel Papers”, she revised some of the notes she had written about her early childhood and developed them into the book Lark Rise which was to bring her fame late in life. The success of this book led to the publication of two more, and their eventual appearance as the trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford. She wrote Heatherley, a sequel following on from Candleford Green and telling of her time in Grayshott. As mentioned, she chose not to publish it but thankfully Jo did. Instead, she wrote Still Glides the Stream — her final publication.

Commemorating Flora Thompson

Locally, Jo is commemorating the 150th anniversary of Flora Thompson this year in several ways.

• The Bramshott & Liphook Heritage Society are mounting an exhibition outside the Liphook Heritage Centre in the Millennium Hall showing events in her life.

• Jo has created a small information board in Liphook Library about Flora Thompson’s life.

• Jo will be giving a talk at the Old Gaol Museum in Buckingham (Flora’s “Candleford”) on 12th September. That museum has a room dedicated to Flora, (the only one in the world) – see www.buckinghamoldgaol.org.uk.

• Headley Theare Club are performing John Owen Smith’s play “Flora’s Heatherley” at local venues in July which dramatises her time in Grayshott. The play, directed by Jo, is in two acts: Act 1 is just after Flora arrives in Grayshott and Act 2 is just before she left. This could not be more local with someone who used to live in the house where Flora lived performing part of The Landlady in the play. If you would like to be involved in this production please contact wordsmith@johnowensmith.co.uk. The play will run from 17th to 25th July and tickets are available directly from the theatre here.