(Grade II listed in 1956)
(Grade II listed in 1956)
This was at one time the village school ~ one was set up in response to the will of Thomas Strangways in 1726, when he asked his sister, Mrs Susanna Strangways Horner to erect a charity school for 20 boys in Abbotsbury; by 1745, a schoolmaster was being paid £12 12s a year. A new school was endowed in 1748-49, and erected by Francis Cartwright, who was known to the Strangways family through his work on Melbury Osmond church. The construction cost around £170. Despite all that, it isn't clear whether this is either the 1726 school or the 1748 one ~ it can hardly be the one that was replaced by the school that became the Strangways Hall", as that one apparently burnt down, and this building is still very much here.
It was apparently known to the locals as the "Penny School" because the children had to pay a penny a week to attend ~ the master, presumably established in the new building, was paid £20 a year to teach some thirty children to "read, write and cast accounts, and to understand the art of navigation so as to render them fit for the sea service".
Long after the village school moved to the building in Market Street that is now the Strangways Hall, 19 Rodden Row became "Mrs Gill's Tea Rooms" (run, despite the name, by Mrs Beale) in the 1920's through to at least 1939 according to the trade directories for those years: the Beales were the last family to run a tearoom from the house. In the 1950's and later, members of several Abbotsbury families still represented in the village lived and worked here, next door, and two doors away in the Estate Office at no. 15.
The west wall of the house still contains an original mullion window, probably dating from its reputed original construction in the 17th century (though its official listing puts it as 18th century), but now covered in and left in situ when the house was linked to the much more recent houses next door. The inglenook fireplace exposed in a 1989 restoration contains many dressed stones thought to be from the Abbey. The western gable wall shows what seems to be a double gable ~ the dressed stones on the corner of the house lie inside a second wall, which then forms the link with no.21. A curious arrangement, with no obvious explanation other than the possibility that the linking wall relates to earlier houses now replaced by the 19th century terrace leading to the corner of Rodden Row and Church Street