Family Card - Person Sheet
Family Card - Person Sheet
NameWilliam Dowell BURCHER
Birth25 Jul 1904, Staffordshire
Death19 Jul 1982, Worcester Park, Surrey
OccupationAuctioneer
Spouses
Birth5 Apr 1906, Holway House, Taunton, Somerset
Death20 Apr 1941, Worcester, Worcestershire
FatherFrederick Augustus HOMER (1867-1936)
MotherGertrude HUGHES (1867-1947)
Marriage1932
Notes for William Dowell BURCHER
Name mentioned in will of his father-in-law.
In the July to September 1904 birth index William Dowell Burcher, Lichfield, Staffordshire, volume 6b, page 505.
Worcestershire Electoral Registers 1957-1962
Heddon House, Claines, Fernhill Heath Pollong District
David D. H. Burcher
William D. Burcher
Worcestershire Electoral Registers 1962 to 1968
Heddon House, parish of Claines
Frederick A. Burcher
William D. Burcher
In the July to September 1982 death index William Dawell Burcher, born July 25 1904, Worcester, Worcestershire, volume 29, page 0698
National Probate Calendar
William Dowell Burcher of 4 Pierpoint Street Worcester died 19 July 1982 Probate London 32 July 1989 45 257 pounds
In the July to September 1904 birth index William Dowell Burcher, Lichfield, Staffordshire, volume 6b, page 505.
Worcestershire Electoral Registers 1957-1962
Heddon House, Claines, Fernhill Heath Pollong District
David D. H. Burcher
William D. Burcher
Worcestershire Electoral Registers 1962 to 1968
Heddon House, parish of Claines
Frederick A. Burcher
William D. Burcher
In the July to September 1982 death index William Dawell Burcher, born July 25 1904, Worcester, Worcestershire, volume 29, page 0698
National Probate Calendar
William Dowell Burcher of 4 Pierpoint Street Worcester died 19 July 1982 Probate London 32 July 1989 45 257 pounds
Notes for Phyllis Diana Gertrude Hughes (Spouse 1)
Known as Diana.
Listed in the April to June 1906 birth index Phyllis Diana G H Homer, Taunton district Somerset Devon volume 5c page 268.
In the 1911 census 71 Beeches Road, West Bromwich, Staffordshire, North East subdistrict.
Frederick Augustus Homer, head, married, age 44, Unitarian Minister, born Sedgley, Staffordshire.
Wife Gertrude Homer, age 44, born Sedgley.
Son Philip Keelinge Homer, age 12, born West Bromwich.
Daughter Diana Homer, age 4, born Taunton, Somerset.
1 servant.
In the April to June 1932 marriage index Diana Homer and William D. Burcher, Worcester district, Worcestershire.
Worcestershire Electoral Registers 1934 to 1939
185 Malvern Road, St. John’s Ward
William Dowell Burcher
Phyllis Diana Gertrude Hughes Burcher
National Probate Calendar
185 Malvern Road, Worcester, Worcestershire
1. William Burcher, born July 25 1904, married, auctioneer, estate agent, Assistant Section Commander Worcester Ambulance Service
2. Diana Burcher, born April 5 1906, married, unpaid domestic duties
3. Record Officially closed
4. Gertrude Homer, born March 15 1867, widow, private means
[Diana is Gertrude’s daughter]
In the April to June 1941 death index Phyllis D G H Burcher, age 35, Worcester, Worcestershire, volume 6c, page 250
National Probate Calendar
Phyllis Diana Gertrude Hughes Burcher or Homer of Springbank Kempsey Worcestershire (wife of William Dowell Burcher) died 20 April 1941 at Royal Infirmary Worcestershire Administration Oxford 9 August 1955 to the said William Dowell Burcher auctioneer and Philip Keelinge Badland Homer retired estate agent. Effects 3802 pounds.
Sam Burcher graciously provided her article for this website.
The daughter of an ancient Sedgley family is a prizewinning speaker at Oxford University
By Sam Burcher
This year marks the one hundred year anniversary of The Oxford Recitations, a prestigious verse speaking contest held each year from 1923 to 1930. My grandmother Diana Homer, born in 1906, was one young speaker aiming to impress the Hereford born judge John Masefield. He was an orphan sent away to sea at sixteen and nearly shipwrecked, who became the Poet Laureate. But before that, his plan was to launch a raft of England’s most beautiful speakers to give life to poetry off the printed page. And, the best judges of this talent would be living poets, including himself.
On the first day of the contest, 26th July 1923, John Masefield started to wonder had he made a mistake after the first dozen or so speakers failed to delight him, when a young woman began to recite in a way that made him hold his breath. He later recalled, “I had heard nothing like it. What I had not imagined was the power of such speech upon an audience, which sat as if in a trance.” The judges, still healing from the brutality of the war, were profoundly moved by the verse, some of it their own, spoken by Diana Homer and other beautiful voices.
Diana’s father was the Rev Frederick Augustus Homer, and the family lived at The Villa, Dudley Street, Sedgley, which still stands today n the West Midlands. After completing his religious education at Oxford, Homer had preached for five years around Australia, finally settling in as the Unitarian Minister at the Lodge Road Chapel in West Bromwich from 1907-1933. His father F.A. Homer Snr, was also well known in Sedgley for his philanthropic deeds at the Ragged School, but he was less popular as a Magistrate and a supporter of the Temperance movement, for which he led The Sedgley Band of Hope.
F.A Homer Snr took the pledge after losing two of his brothers in freak accidents. One rode his horse through a plate glass window in Birmingham and the other was fatally shot on the hunting field. Homer Sr got on the wrong side of the law himself when he was arrested for a breach of the peace for protesting against the long established Truck Act, which allowed employers to pay workers in forms other than money, something he did not agree with. The act was finally repealed by The Wages Law (1986).
Diana’s uncle, John Twigg Homer, was born in Sedgley in 1865. As a teenager he rode with Colonel Methuen’s Horse in a bloodless expedition to Bechuanaland, now Botswana. During his adventures, he farmed in Manitoba and mined for gold in Colorado before returning to Sedgley in 1889. He distinguished himself in 1923 as the High Sheriff of Staffordshire, receiving a CBE from King George V for his unfailing public work. He is also credited with developing the education system in Staffordshire between 1903 and 1913, alongside Sir Graham Balfour, the son of the Surgeon General, and a cousin of the Treasure Island novelist Robert Louis Stevenson.
The lineage of the “Homers of Ettingshall” dates from 1338 when they were granted lands in Dorset by Lord Maltravers. Later that century, a duel was fought which forced the family’s flight to Sedgley. One member of the Sedgley branch, Captain John Homer, is a noted Pilgrim Father, who disembarked in Boston circa 1690. Consequently, the family’s Coat of Arms is listed in Burke’s Peerage as Landed Gentry, and the Homers of Sedgley are considered to be a Founding Family of America.
The Homers would inadvertently inspire another famous Black Country son, the author JRR Tolkien. In the 1850’s Squire Homer reorganised the strips of land around the small parish of Dormston, near Inkberrow, which he integrated into the farm called Bag End. By 1923, the farm was owned by Jane Neave, Tolkien’s aunt, to whom he went to convalesce after an illness. The young boy was enthralled by the Worcestershire countryside around him and later took the name Bag End, which means “bottom of the bag” or cul de sac, for the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.
Another of the Oxford Recitations’s poet-judges Laurence Binyon had moved to Worcestershire as a child. His poem For the Fallen (1914) was inspired by the heavy losses suffered by the Royal Worcesters during World War I. Today, his words are at the centre of the Anzac and Remembrance Sunday Service, or poppy day, held every November since 1919. One of Worcester’s most famous sons, Edward Elgar, born in Broadheath in 1957, set For the Fallen and several other poignant poems by Binyon to music as part of his Spirit of England Suite (1916-17).
In July 1924, the nineteen year old Diana Homer stepped onto the stage at Oxford University’s imposing Examination Schools. Also reciting that year was Alistair Sim, who, together with Homer dominated the men’s and women’s classes until 1929. Following his involvement in the competition Sim, then a Fulton Lecturer in Elocution at Edinburgh University, became one of Britain’s finest and funniest character actors. He starred in over fifty films and is perhaps best known as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951), and for the dual roles of Clarence and his twin sister Miss Fritton, the hapless headmistress of the unruly girls in The Belles of St Trinians (1954). In The Green Man (1956) Sim mimics John Masefield’s habit of popping a carnation into his buttonhole.
By the end of the three day contest in 1925, Diana Homer had won The Mary de Navarro Prize for The Best And Most Beautiful Piece Of Speech for which she received £5.5 shillings, around £200 in today’s money. Mary De Navarro was the celebrated American born stage actress Mary Anderson, who had retired after her marriage in 1890 and moved to the pretty town of Broadway in Worcestershire. The following year Diana Homer won a coveted medal in the women’s Oxford Prize Finals.
One young actor praised by all the judges in 1925 was John Laurie, at the time fresh out of drama school. He later said in an interview, “I’m considered to be the finest speaker of verse in this country, and yet I became famous for doing this rubbish.” Laurie was, of course, referring to Dad’s Army, in which he plays the disgruntled Private Frazer, whose distinctive rolling of the letter r made his catchphrase “We’re doomed, doomed,” all the more memorable.
Alfred Hitchcock later cast John Laurie in a supporting role to Robert Donat as the spy Major General Richard Hannay in the 1935 film version of The 39 Steps. The film was adapted from a novel written in 1915 by the politician, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir and Governor General of Canada John Buchan, who is listed as a judge at the Recitations in 1927. Robert Donat first entered the contest in 1923, as a teenager overcoming a stutter. He was then an elocution student of the Unitarian Minister James Bernard, who helped Donat make his professional debut as Lucius in Julius Caesar at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham in 1921, aged just 16. Donat returned to the Recitations in 1929.
At its peak, The Oxford Recitations attracted over 500 men, women and youths reciting in nine different classes. In 1926, the newly established BBC send its talent scouts to John Masefield’s door for a list of his beautiful speakers. Amongst the first recordings of poetry ever made was Samson Agonistes by John Milton, the poem for which Diana Homer had won her special prize. His Master’s Voice (HMV), the company with the logo of a Jack Russell listening intently to a gramophone horn, made the recordings in 1928 with the winner of the 1925 men’s competition.
John Masefield retired from his contest in 1930 on the appointment by King George V to the post of Poet Laureate. By that time, he was satisfied he had raised the standard of performance poetry in the public arena. Laurence Binyon ran the competition under another name until the outbreak of the World War II. In the intervening years, Diana Homer married and moved to Droitwich in Worcestershire with her husband William Burcher, a well known auctioneer, friend of the chocolate makers the Cadbury family, and a golf buddy of the war hero Douglas Bader. Tragically, Diana died a young woman, aged 36 in 1941.
Postscript:; Sam Burcher followed the creative spirit of Diana Homer and was involved with the New Romantic fashion and music scene in Birmingham and London. She appeared briefly as her 16 year old self in the 2021 Sky Arts Documentary Blitzed:The 80’s Blitz Kids Story. She published her first collection of poetry, Garland in 2013 and is writing a book about her grandmother’s involvement in the English poetry scene.. She continues to contribute to the research on the Homer family.
Listed in the April to June 1906 birth index Phyllis Diana G H Homer, Taunton district Somerset Devon volume 5c page 268.
In the 1911 census 71 Beeches Road, West Bromwich, Staffordshire, North East subdistrict.
Frederick Augustus Homer, head, married, age 44, Unitarian Minister, born Sedgley, Staffordshire.
Wife Gertrude Homer, age 44, born Sedgley.
Son Philip Keelinge Homer, age 12, born West Bromwich.
Daughter Diana Homer, age 4, born Taunton, Somerset.
1 servant.
In the April to June 1932 marriage index Diana Homer and William D. Burcher, Worcester district, Worcestershire.
Worcestershire Electoral Registers 1934 to 1939
185 Malvern Road, St. John’s Ward
William Dowell Burcher
Phyllis Diana Gertrude Hughes Burcher
National Probate Calendar
185 Malvern Road, Worcester, Worcestershire
1. William Burcher, born July 25 1904, married, auctioneer, estate agent, Assistant Section Commander Worcester Ambulance Service
2. Diana Burcher, born April 5 1906, married, unpaid domestic duties
3. Record Officially closed
4. Gertrude Homer, born March 15 1867, widow, private means
[Diana is Gertrude’s daughter]
In the April to June 1941 death index Phyllis D G H Burcher, age 35, Worcester, Worcestershire, volume 6c, page 250
National Probate Calendar
Phyllis Diana Gertrude Hughes Burcher or Homer of Springbank Kempsey Worcestershire (wife of William Dowell Burcher) died 20 April 1941 at Royal Infirmary Worcestershire Administration Oxford 9 August 1955 to the said William Dowell Burcher auctioneer and Philip Keelinge Badland Homer retired estate agent. Effects 3802 pounds.
Sam Burcher graciously provided her article for this website.
The daughter of an ancient Sedgley family is a prizewinning speaker at Oxford University
By Sam Burcher
This year marks the one hundred year anniversary of The Oxford Recitations, a prestigious verse speaking contest held each year from 1923 to 1930. My grandmother Diana Homer, born in 1906, was one young speaker aiming to impress the Hereford born judge John Masefield. He was an orphan sent away to sea at sixteen and nearly shipwrecked, who became the Poet Laureate. But before that, his plan was to launch a raft of England’s most beautiful speakers to give life to poetry off the printed page. And, the best judges of this talent would be living poets, including himself.
On the first day of the contest, 26th July 1923, John Masefield started to wonder had he made a mistake after the first dozen or so speakers failed to delight him, when a young woman began to recite in a way that made him hold his breath. He later recalled, “I had heard nothing like it. What I had not imagined was the power of such speech upon an audience, which sat as if in a trance.” The judges, still healing from the brutality of the war, were profoundly moved by the verse, some of it their own, spoken by Diana Homer and other beautiful voices.
Diana’s father was the Rev Frederick Augustus Homer, and the family lived at The Villa, Dudley Street, Sedgley, which still stands today n the West Midlands. After completing his religious education at Oxford, Homer had preached for five years around Australia, finally settling in as the Unitarian Minister at the Lodge Road Chapel in West Bromwich from 1907-1933. His father F.A. Homer Snr, was also well known in Sedgley for his philanthropic deeds at the Ragged School, but he was less popular as a Magistrate and a supporter of the Temperance movement, for which he led The Sedgley Band of Hope.
F.A Homer Snr took the pledge after losing two of his brothers in freak accidents. One rode his horse through a plate glass window in Birmingham and the other was fatally shot on the hunting field. Homer Sr got on the wrong side of the law himself when he was arrested for a breach of the peace for protesting against the long established Truck Act, which allowed employers to pay workers in forms other than money, something he did not agree with. The act was finally repealed by The Wages Law (1986).
Diana’s uncle, John Twigg Homer, was born in Sedgley in 1865. As a teenager he rode with Colonel Methuen’s Horse in a bloodless expedition to Bechuanaland, now Botswana. During his adventures, he farmed in Manitoba and mined for gold in Colorado before returning to Sedgley in 1889. He distinguished himself in 1923 as the High Sheriff of Staffordshire, receiving a CBE from King George V for his unfailing public work. He is also credited with developing the education system in Staffordshire between 1903 and 1913, alongside Sir Graham Balfour, the son of the Surgeon General, and a cousin of the Treasure Island novelist Robert Louis Stevenson.
The lineage of the “Homers of Ettingshall” dates from 1338 when they were granted lands in Dorset by Lord Maltravers. Later that century, a duel was fought which forced the family’s flight to Sedgley. One member of the Sedgley branch, Captain John Homer, is a noted Pilgrim Father, who disembarked in Boston circa 1690. Consequently, the family’s Coat of Arms is listed in Burke’s Peerage as Landed Gentry, and the Homers of Sedgley are considered to be a Founding Family of America.
The Homers would inadvertently inspire another famous Black Country son, the author JRR Tolkien. In the 1850’s Squire Homer reorganised the strips of land around the small parish of Dormston, near Inkberrow, which he integrated into the farm called Bag End. By 1923, the farm was owned by Jane Neave, Tolkien’s aunt, to whom he went to convalesce after an illness. The young boy was enthralled by the Worcestershire countryside around him and later took the name Bag End, which means “bottom of the bag” or cul de sac, for the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.
Another of the Oxford Recitations’s poet-judges Laurence Binyon had moved to Worcestershire as a child. His poem For the Fallen (1914) was inspired by the heavy losses suffered by the Royal Worcesters during World War I. Today, his words are at the centre of the Anzac and Remembrance Sunday Service, or poppy day, held every November since 1919. One of Worcester’s most famous sons, Edward Elgar, born in Broadheath in 1957, set For the Fallen and several other poignant poems by Binyon to music as part of his Spirit of England Suite (1916-17).
In July 1924, the nineteen year old Diana Homer stepped onto the stage at Oxford University’s imposing Examination Schools. Also reciting that year was Alistair Sim, who, together with Homer dominated the men’s and women’s classes until 1929. Following his involvement in the competition Sim, then a Fulton Lecturer in Elocution at Edinburgh University, became one of Britain’s finest and funniest character actors. He starred in over fifty films and is perhaps best known as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951), and for the dual roles of Clarence and his twin sister Miss Fritton, the hapless headmistress of the unruly girls in The Belles of St Trinians (1954). In The Green Man (1956) Sim mimics John Masefield’s habit of popping a carnation into his buttonhole.
By the end of the three day contest in 1925, Diana Homer had won The Mary de Navarro Prize for The Best And Most Beautiful Piece Of Speech for which she received £5.5 shillings, around £200 in today’s money. Mary De Navarro was the celebrated American born stage actress Mary Anderson, who had retired after her marriage in 1890 and moved to the pretty town of Broadway in Worcestershire. The following year Diana Homer won a coveted medal in the women’s Oxford Prize Finals.
One young actor praised by all the judges in 1925 was John Laurie, at the time fresh out of drama school. He later said in an interview, “I’m considered to be the finest speaker of verse in this country, and yet I became famous for doing this rubbish.” Laurie was, of course, referring to Dad’s Army, in which he plays the disgruntled Private Frazer, whose distinctive rolling of the letter r made his catchphrase “We’re doomed, doomed,” all the more memorable.
Alfred Hitchcock later cast John Laurie in a supporting role to Robert Donat as the spy Major General Richard Hannay in the 1935 film version of The 39 Steps. The film was adapted from a novel written in 1915 by the politician, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir and Governor General of Canada John Buchan, who is listed as a judge at the Recitations in 1927. Robert Donat first entered the contest in 1923, as a teenager overcoming a stutter. He was then an elocution student of the Unitarian Minister James Bernard, who helped Donat make his professional debut as Lucius in Julius Caesar at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham in 1921, aged just 16. Donat returned to the Recitations in 1929.
At its peak, The Oxford Recitations attracted over 500 men, women and youths reciting in nine different classes. In 1926, the newly established BBC send its talent scouts to John Masefield’s door for a list of his beautiful speakers. Amongst the first recordings of poetry ever made was Samson Agonistes by John Milton, the poem for which Diana Homer had won her special prize. His Master’s Voice (HMV), the company with the logo of a Jack Russell listening intently to a gramophone horn, made the recordings in 1928 with the winner of the 1925 men’s competition.
John Masefield retired from his contest in 1930 on the appointment by King George V to the post of Poet Laureate. By that time, he was satisfied he had raised the standard of performance poetry in the public arena. Laurence Binyon ran the competition under another name until the outbreak of the World War II. In the intervening years, Diana Homer married and moved to Droitwich in Worcestershire with her husband William Burcher, a well known auctioneer, friend of the chocolate makers the Cadbury family, and a golf buddy of the war hero Douglas Bader. Tragically, Diana died a young woman, aged 36 in 1941.
Postscript:; Sam Burcher followed the creative spirit of Diana Homer and was involved with the New Romantic fashion and music scene in Birmingham and London. She appeared briefly as her 16 year old self in the 2021 Sky Arts Documentary Blitzed:The 80’s Blitz Kids Story. She published her first collection of poetry, Garland in 2013 and is writing a book about her grandmother’s involvement in the English poetry scene.. She continues to contribute to the research on the Homer family.