Tog Hill lies at the end of the village. There was once a paper mill down by the river and Tog Hill was the miller’s house. During and shortly after the war it was lived in by Arthur Rivers whose descendents are still in the area. In about 1948/9 it was condemned as unfit for human habitation, quite rightly judging by contemporary photographs. In 1951/52 John and Margaret Grierson commissioned Frank Barnett, Master Mason of Quemerford, to completely restore and rebuild the house. It cost £5000 which was an absolute fortune and the most you were legally allowed to spend on any one building during the post-war austerity years.
John Grierson was born in 1898. He was an exceptionally bright student for his headmaster father in Cumbusbarron village school near Stirling in Scotland. At an impressionable age he watched his suffragette mother run a soup kitchen for the unemployed. Out of school he took great pride in the fact that the village lads took on the “big boys” of Stirling High at football and beat them. In later life it seemed that “taking on the big boys” became something of a habit.
In 1915, well qualified to enter Glasgow University, but too young to do so, he lied about his age and joined the Navy on minesweepers, achieving the rank of “able seaman”. Off watch he wrote letters for sailors who couldn’t read or write. After the war he entered Glasgow University. After university, financed by a Rockefeller scholarship, he went to Chicago to do post graduate research into public opinion and what we now call mass media. In New York he met the great Walter Lippman who turned Grierson’s attention to “the movies”. Grierson gave the subject his full focus and soon got work as a film reviewer. One of the films he wrote about was Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926). In his review he used the word “documentary” to describe this non-fiction film, and the word “documentary” as a description of a factual film entered the English language, becoming the title of the genre.
Returning to England he persuaded the Empire Marketing Board that the medium of factual film could be of use to them and was given the budget to make Drifters, the film about the Scottish herring fisheries. Drifters is now considered to be the first pure documentary and launched what became the mighty British Documentary Movement. The film’s impact sent echoes around the world that have resounded until this day and well into the future, and resulted many years later in Grierson becoming known as the “Father of Documentary” (we don’t think he knew about that, he would probably have been horrified). After Drifters he concentrated on producing documentaries such as the iconic Night Mail.
1937 he was sent to Canada to advise the government on the uses of film. He wrote a plan for the National Film Board of Canada. His plan was accepted and he was appointed to run it. He did so with distinction for the duration of World War II.
When Grierson and his wife and long time assistant. Margaret Taylor, returned to England after the war he was contacted by his brother, Dr Anthony Grierson, who happened to be a GP in Calne. Anthony said, “I’ve found you a house and you’re not going to like it because it’s falling to bits”, and indeed it was. During the many months that it took to rebuild Margaret kept a weather eye on it lodging with Mrs. Allan at the then South Farm, now sadly and shamefully demolished. It wasn’t easy. The road hardly existed and the architect got fired half way through over a matter of the siting of the staircase. They embraced Wiltshire life with enthusiasm. Margaret and Bill Barnett (Yew Tree Cottage) grew the most wonderful vegetables in an almost rabbit proof fenced area that they referred to as the OK Corral: Then the elm trees were at their most beautiful and the valley was known as the “Green Cathedral”.
Grierson went on to write the treatment for the Oscar winning documentary Seawards the Great Ships and to devise and present the television series This Wonderful World for Scottish Television, which went network and ran for eight years. He was then Professor of Communications at Canada’s McGill University. He died in Bath in 1974. His wife Margaret survived him by ten years. They both loved Tog Hill very dearly.
(With thanks to Laurence Henson Grierson – extract from background notes)