Rock star discovers lost village

“It’s the fulfilment of a dream. I’m thrilled — really thrilled,” he said.

It strikes me that having filled stadiums around the world in the company of Freddie Mercury, one of rock history’s most flamboyant frontmen, it must have taken quite something to stir such a response.

Drugs, religion and rainforests are the kind of things we tend to associate with pleasure-sated rockers, seeking fulfilment in middle age. We can be pretty sure no other superstar has ever embarked on a journey of discovery quite like Brian May’s — a quest for a lost village, culminating in the discovery of his Holy Grail in Hinton Waldrist.

Villagers who first set eyes on the guitarist can scarcely have guessed the time this multi-millionaire had put into finding their tiny community, nor the satisfaction he took from seeing its old church and fish pond.

“You could say it all began with a Weetabix packet,” laughs May, in his self-depracting style. For that humble cereal packet contained a give-away 3-D picture card, which literally opened up a whole new world for the schoolboy Brian. “It was the excitement of discovering a new dimension,” he says.

The simple 3-D cards of animals were to stir a passion that was to lead him to an unlikely hero for a rock star — T.R. Williams, a Victorian society photographer, whom May rates as a forgotten genius.

Williams’s pictures have come to obsess him, with the mystery surrounding so much of his hero’s life and work only fuelling his interest. And nothing intrigued May more than the series of three-dimensional photographs taken in the 1850s that came to be known as ‘Scenes in Our Village’.

In cities all over the world, while on tour with Queen, May has scoured antique shops in search of old photographs.

“I would be getting up in the morning in places like Chicago to go out looking for antique shops, to go through drawers of old photographs.

“I just became totally hooked. For years I have been collecting anything in ‘stereo’ but more and more my field of vision was narrowing down to 1850s and 1860s material from Britain and France.”

And then finally to just T.R. Williams himself, a man recognised as a star in his day, commissioned to photograph Queen Victoria’s family, who was to literally die for his art.

At the height of the 3-D craze that gripped Victorian England, Williams’s pictures sparked huge excitement.

“People clamoured for his still-life studies in a way reminiscent of today’s pop music fans, eagerly awaiting the next release from their favourite artist,” said May.

And it was the series of ‘stereo cards’ showing a small village that really caught the imagination of Victorian England.

“Thousands of TRW’s beautiful Scenes in Our Village stereo cards were printed up, sold and enjoyed,” explained May. “But in time the stereo craze, like all crazes, faded, overtaken by new trends. The boxes of cards were consigned to the bottoms of trunks and dusty attics.”

When May realised the complete series had never been seen in living memory, he set himself the task of trying to assemble a full set. He also made up his mind to spare no effort to find the village that the great photographer had so lovingly photographed, embarking on his mission with Elena Vidal, the photo historian.

Williams, it seems, somehow managed to keep the identity of the village a secret during his own lifetime. It has taken May almost 30 years to find it. “When we began, nobody knew where ‘our village’ was,” explained May.

The breakthrough came when they published a Williams picture of the village church on the internet.

“With the help of some kind correspondents we were able to discover what had been hidden for 150 years — the location of the beautiful village of Williams’s vision; not, as often previously suggested, Three Mile Cross, which Mary Russell Mitford described in her book Our Village, but Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire.”

May and Vidal have published a book, A Village Lost and Found, describing their quest and bringing together the complete series of the stereo cards, comprising 59 views, along with photographs of the village as it is today.

The rare stereoscopic images allow Victorian characters such as the dame with her spinning wheel, John Sims at his pig sty and reapers in the fields to leap out in glorious 3-D, when looked at with a special viewer, designed by May himself, that is distributed with the book.

Many of the images were accompanied by a poem on the back to offer a valuable document of a bygone age. Locating all the cards, he says, was reminiscent of the excitement of collecting a complete set of cigarette cards as a child.

“Every time I came across a new one, there was a thrill. I found them all over the world.

“Holding this book in my hand, I feel that these precious pictures, scattered in the winds over the last 150 years, are safe at last.”

He descibes his first trip to Hinton Waldrist as “a Holy Grail moment”.

“I found myself standing looking in wonder at the very church which had haunted me for so many years.

“For me the thrill is doing something no one else has done before. I’ve always loved charting new territory, finding something to really dedicate yourself to. It’s like exploring. For me it’s like discovering America.

“Or maybe it’s similar to what archaeologists feel when they find a lost tomb, although this is something that happened only 150 years ago.”

When he was approached by villagers taken aback to find a rock star in their midst, he delighted in explaining the historical importance of Hinton Waldrist.

“People knew nothing about Williams or Scenes in Our Village,” he said. “When they found out, it created quite a buzz.”

May has clearly been touched by the hospitality and advice imparted to him about village life and local history. As a thank-you, on Tuesday, he hosted a party for villagers. May is likely to remain a familiar figure in the village, having already started a full-scale biography of his hero.

Many details of Williams’s life are sketchy but May has established that the photographer spent part of his early life in Hinton Waldrist.

“It seems he was not only trying to recapture his childhood experiences but to preserve a way of life, which he felt was already disappearing. It was right in the middle of the industrial revolution.

“There’s no doubt this was a labour of love. He had this vision of painting a lasting picture of the idyll he regarded as precious.” He died at the age of 47, with May now convinced that chemicals used for his work were responsible.

May, who lives with his wife, the actress Anita Dobson, in Surrey, has long been recognised as not being a typical rock star, and there is something of the obsessed academic about him.

Two years ago, after a 30-year break, he returned to Imperial College, London, to sign up to complete his doctoral thesis in astrophysics, submitting a new version of his thesis on interplanetary dust. His first book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, was co-authored with friend Patrick Moore. While he is still involved with music — when we spoke, he was overseeing plans for a new Milan production of the musical We Will Rock You, and there is a new Queen compilation album to promote, he says he will continue to pursue his hero beyond his lost village. For the multi-dimensional Brian May, T.R. Williams and a rural corner of Oxfordshire forever frozen in time, will always retain a kind of magic.

• Brian May and Elena Vidal will be speaking on A Village Lost and Found at Blackwell’s, Oxford, on Wednesday, October 28, at 7pm. For tickets (£2), phone 01865 333623.