Photos from 1973 and 1974 including one of Ronnie Barker

The pictures are from 1973 and 1974.

They show comedian Ronnie Barker preparing for filming in Woodstock, a lively looking pram race in Cowley, and a very tranquil Oxford railway station.

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After enjoying huge success with TV shows Porridge, The Two Ronnies and Open All Hours, Mr Barker decided to open an antiques shop.

He had settled in the small west Oxfordshire village of Dean, the perfect home for a man determined to disappear off the professional radar. 

The shop was in Chipping Norton’s High Street, and it was called The Emporium.

In many ways it was really just an extension of Mr Barker's hobby of collecting antiques, memorabilia and Victoriana. It was said his postcard collection alone extended to 53,000 items.

The story of the comedian's search for peace in the tranquillity of the Oxfordshire countryside, before his death, aged 76, in Katharine House Hospice in Adderbury in 2005, is told in the biography Remembering Ronnie Barker.

Author Richard Webber spent months tracing Mr Barker’s old school friends at the City of Oxford High School and people who remembered his early acting career.

Born in Bedford in 1925, Ronald William George Barker moved to Oxford when still a young child. His family first moved into 386 Cowley Road, before settling into a newly built terraced brick property at 23 Church Cowley Road.

Mr Webber said earlier: “He sought perfection throughout his career and he was fastidious from an early age. Even as a child staging little plays with his mates in the back gardens in Oxford, everything had to be just so.”

All that talent could so easily have been missed, when after first trying his hand at architecture he joined the Westminster Bank’s Cowley Road branch as a junior clerk.

Everything changed in a chance meeting on a showery day in 1946, when he bumped into an old friend, Geoff Broadis, on a street in Oxford.

Mr Webber added: “Broadis floated an idea which might bring a little excitement into his friend’s life.”

Assuring him there would be plenty of girls around, Mr Broadis, a member of The Theatre Players, suggested that Mr Barker looked in on the group which rehearsed at the St Mary and St John Church Hall, in Cowley Road.

After spells of acting in Aylesbury and Cheshire, Ronnie returned to Oxford in 1951 to join the Oxford Playhouse company.

He made his name there over four years.

As it turned out, working in his antiques shop was not to prove entirely stress free.

Once the star unwittingly bought an antique cabinet from a man who turned out to be a convict.

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“The crook was apparently dressed in his blue prison uniform and home on leave when he duped Barker into buying the item, which resulted in Ronnie being questioned by police and released without charge.”

Then there was the time when the shop was visited by two under-cover Sun reporters, who offered Mr Barker a silver salver, which had been valued at about £1,000 by a leading auction house.

When he offered them £20, the Sun ran a story highlighting the difference between its value and Mr Barker’s low offer.

The little shop run with Mr Barker's wife Joy, closed in 1999.

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About the author 

Andy is the Trade and Tourism reporter for the Oxford Mail and you can sign up to his newsletters for free here. 

He joined the team more than 20 years ago and he covers community news across Oxfordshire.

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