THE bustling town life of Cirencester in the 1930s was vividly brought back to life recently when authoress Olga Pyne Clarke made a nostalgic visit to the town after 50 years.

Born of Anglo-Irish gentry, whose lives revolved around horse training and race meetings, Olga frequently left her native Ireland to visit the equestrian Cotswolds.

But it was Cirencester, the' jewel in the crown', which really caught her imagination.

There was no supermarket shopping then and Cricklade Street in those days with its old high gabled Cotswold houses was a delight to shop in. Every customer was a person in their own right.

The Gloucester Dairy sandwiched between the bank and Dr Grove-White’s surgery sold real farm eggs and butter and Double Gloucester farm-made cheese.

John Masefield patronised it when he lived at Pinsbury Park. You would see this tall grey bearded figure selecting his eggs from the angled trays on the counter, his hands, though gentle and fine, still bearing the scars of his sea-faring days before the mast.

But whether you were a famous author or a simple local shopper, in the 1930s it was always service with a smile.

Take Ormonds the Drapers for example, once to be found in the Market Place but now replaced by a building society. This shop was owned by the tall, bearded courtly Mr Ormond. He always wore a rather high crowned bowler hat, a black coat with an astrakhan collar, and drove a 16hh horse in a high ralli trap.

The turn out was immaculately elegant yet if he served you in the shop and you only wanted a penny packet of pins you got the same courteous treatment as if you were a duchess.

Happily in Cirencester this sort of service is still easy to find today.

Animal life also seems to be peculiar to Cirencester if one family of felines was anything to go by. These cats were snow white with orange eyes and tails as black as if they had been dipped in a tar barrel.

Two of the family lived near the Memorial Hospital thriving on ambushing local unsuspecting dogs who invariably suddenly found they had urgent business in the X-ray department side of the road.

But one aspect of Cirencester which seems never to have changed lies in the escapades of the Royal Agricultural College students.

In the 1930s, according to Olga Pyne Clark, they were frequent visitors to Castle Street where ‘Mother’ Huxter ran a shop very much in contrast to the TV and Hi-Fi Centre on the premises today.

Her store was full of strings of liquorice, boxes of assorted sweets, meat pies, razor blades, gents' handkerchiefs, boot laces, drawing pins pencils and penknives, to name but a few of the commodities which all jostled for position in her window with an enormous tabby cat.

‘Mother’ to all she really was, especially to the RA College boys. She lectured them soundly when they needed it, lent them their fares to go home when they were flat broke, comforted them when their love lives went askew and made many a dalliance into a real romance.

Those were the days when the brilliant veterinary surgeon Major Professor A C Duncan lectured at the college.

Profoundly deaf through gunfire in the First World War he was often played up by his students.

But his text books are still in current use and he was a leading pioneer in the field of Caesarian section in brood mares and cows.

Further memories of Cirencester are to be found in the first part of Olga’s autobiography She Came of Decent People published by Pelham Books Ltd.

Author’s fond memories of a gentler bygone age Olga Pyne Clarke’s autobiography recalls the charming shops, service with a smile, and the many characters who populated Cirencester in the 1930s.

Standard, January 23, 1987