The swanherds, Squillor to Dick Dalley

Somebody has always kept the swans. The first we know by name is William Squillor, 'Keeper of Swans', in the abbey court rolls of 1393. After the Dissolution the Strangways kept the job going. In 1591 Elizabeth I claimed 410 swans and 90 cygnets at Abbotsbury because the swanherd had failed to mark them; ownership in those days was shown by nicks cut in the webbing of the feet, later by rings. The job passed down through village families for centuries. The best known of the modern swanherds is Anthony Dalley, always called Dick after the radio hero Dick Barton. He came from Chickerell and the fruit trade, started as swankeeper in 1961, lived at Clouds Hill cottage on the edge of the Fleet, and rose to swanherd. He caught birds with a hazel crook tipped with a ram's horn and was once knocked cold by a cob defending its nest. In his early years he still had to fatten swans for Lord Ilchester's table, a part of the job he did not enjoy and which stopped when swans became protected in 1974. He retired in 2001 and was still turning up to work ten years later. The village has its own swanherd stories too. The Roper family's memories of the old Swan and the Hurds are being written up for this page.

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