As one door closes and another opens, Roger Guttridge looks back on the Blackmore Vale Magazine’s early years

Sipping a pint in his local one evening, session singer Alan Chalcraft had no idea he was about to make a life-changing decision.

As they chatted in a Stalbridge pub, a fellow customer threw out a random offer.

‘Would you like to buy a magazine?’ he asked.

‘How much?’ said Alan.

‘£5,000,’ said the other man.

Alan promised to consult with his wife and return the next evening with a decision.

‘Offer him half,’ said Ingrid Chalcraft.

The £2,500 was accepted and the couple suddenly became owners of the Blackmore Vale Magazine.

The free distribution weekly was the humblest of outfits, launched six months earlier, printing just four pages a week and already on the point of collapse.

‘People said we were mad,’ Ingrid told me 15 years later. ‘We put out our first issue with no typing skills, no business experience, no knowledge of layout and having never written anything in our lives.’

Alan and Ingrid had previously made their living as session singers. Their voices can be heard on many hit songs and jingles from the ’60s and ’70s and they actually met while backing Engelbert Humperdink at London’s Talk of the Town.

They left London in 1976 for a quieter life in Dorset.

By 1978 they were almost broke – until that fateful pub meeting.

Despite having no publishing experience, they negotiated six weeks’ credit from the printer and set up an office under the stairs.

They used an electric typewriter to set the type and Letraset for headlines and display advertisements.

‘We had a telephone but it rang so infrequently that we did gardening between calls,’ said Alan.

But free newspapers were in the ascendant and interest steadily grew.

Then in 1979 came the break the Chalcrafts needed – a strike by the National Union of Journalists, which kept the Western Gazette off the streets for seven weeks.

Many advertisers transferred their business and the BVM jumped from 12 to 24 pages overnight.

By 1993, it boasted 112 pages and a reputation that attracted a £1m takeover bid from major newspaper group Trinity International.

When I dared, 27 years ago, to suggest to the Chalcrafts that they were about to become millionaires, they laughed off the suggestion, pointing out that they were only 70 per cent shareholders and that 40 per cent of what they received would go in tax.

That still left them with a few hundred grand, which seemed to me like a fair return on £2,500.

The rest, as they say, is history…

Roger Guttridge

It’s been home to a pump, a horse trough, market stalls and parked cars, but now the roadside spot at Sturminster Newton’s Market Cross has begun a new incarnation.

It’s latest life as a street café began in June in response to the government’s lockdown call to encourage the takeaway food and drink trade.

It now looks likely to stay that way providing the town council agrees to manage it.

In the old picture, dating from the early 1900s, a boy with a toy rifle stands to attention before the pump as a camera-shy dog looks the other way.

The location caught the eye of royal surgeon-cum-travel writer Sir Frederick Treves when he passed through Sturminster in 1906.

‘In the centre of the town,’ he wrote with his usual caustic humour, ‘is the semblance of a square to which all roads lead.

‘Here an officious gas standard carrying aloft the latest pattern of lamp, the stump of an ancient stone cross, and the town pump.

‘The latter is of wood, is small, black and vixenish. On it is a notice spitefully warning the passer-by that he will be prosecuted if he does it hurt and adding further that no children must use the exclusive structure.

‘There is a sourness in this, for all children delight to play with pumps.’

Treves failed to add that the steps of the cross have been warn down by generations of Sturminster bottoms, including mine.

Behind the stump, alone on its island, is Market House, then home to draper and costumier C S Draper and for much of the 20th century to fellow draper Alex J Hicks.

The White Hart to the left has changed little in a century and carries the date 1708, suggesting that it survived the fire that swept through the town centre in 1729.

A few years after Treves’ visit, the pump gave way to an ornamental drinking fountain and horse trough erected in memory of long-serving GP Dr John Comyns Leach, who died in 1907, and his surgeon son E Comyns Leach, who died in Sierra Leone aged 33 in 1902.

The trough later became a flower box until demolished when a motorist lost control in 2018.

Council staff salvaged the pieces and there are plans to re-erect it.

Roger Guttridge