12/05/2026
83 years ago today Irene Hobden married Thomas Saxby, the newly weds spent their honeymoon here at the Fleece.
Their son visited us recently on his own 50th wedding anniversary and brought us the below review.
**** Our week’s honeymoon was at Cirencester. We wanted to get away from the bombing, and Dunster, our first choice, was full. An RAF film crew were at the hotel, and it was bustling with activity. On the first morning, when the elderly maid brought early morning tea, I sat up in bed, feeling very embarrassed, it being the first time I had ever been in bed with a man. I said how lovely the Abbey bells sounded, for something to say. She looked at me severely and said “it would do some people good to hear them from inside the church”, and left. I thought that a bit hard, as I went to church every Sunday. But I realised later that with an RAF film crew there, there had been several illicit weekends for her to cope with.
When we went down to breakfast. I asked Tom if he took sugar in his coffee. A moustached gentleman’s the next table came over to me as he left, and grinned, and said “I was right wasn’t I”. I don’t know whether he also thought I was having a weekend away with my boyfriend or whether he might have noticed any confetti anyway. I shall never know. We enjoyed our week.
We did however encounter some of the vagaries of the war situation. We sat on a bus going to Bibury, hoping to see the cottages and walk back. We had a few funny looks, and when the conductor got on ha said it was the market bus, and if we didn’t come Bibury that morning, we couldn’t go back. There were empty seats, so we couldn’t see the logic, but we got off. I have never seen those cottages at Bibury.
We than decided to go into Fairford to see the famous stained glass. When we got there, we found it had all been removed for safety. We couldn’t take the footpath back, as there was an American base there, and when we rested in a field, the farmer shouted at us that it was mowing grass!
Tom went back to his ship, and I went back home, and back to my job at Brighton Postoffice. It seems almost unbelievable now that, upon marriage, in this days, a Civil Servant had to resign. I was about to become a supervisor, by virtue of my seniority, but because of my marriage, I had to return as a ‘temporary’, which I did until Tom was demobbed in December 1945****
We do hope that Irene & Tom had a wonderful life together and that they did make it back to see the cottages in Bibury.
