The move to Sapperton

By 1900 the craft community was expanding. Gimson married Emily Thompson and Edward, the second of Sidney and Lucy Barnsley’s children, was born that year. Gimson and Ernest Barnsley set up the second workshop with trained cabinet makers in Cirencester because of lack of space at Pinbury. The restoration work carried out by Ernest Barnsley largely paid for by the three men was much appreciated by their landlord, Earl Bathurst. He was newly married and Pinbury seemed to offer an ideal country home for his young family.

Ernest Barnsley negotiated an arrangement with the Bathurst estate whereby the three men gave up the lease to Pinbury in return for land in the village of Sapperton and the use of Daneway House nearby as workshops and showrooms. Each man built his own house at Sapperton with money from the Bathurst estate. They were part of the estate and Gimson and the Barnsleys paid rent for the accommodation. The workshop at Daneway was set up in 1902 but Gimson’s cottage at Sapperton wasn’t completed until 1903. They moved out of Pinbury into lodgings in the nearby village of Frampton Mansell in June 1903 and managed to move their belongings into the new cottage on 2 July:

‘…on the hottest and loveliest day of the Summer - and we had a cool saunter through woods & hay fields to our lodgings in the evening seeing the sun set over Oakridge on the way.’

The cottage named The Leasowes was built of local limestone with a thick thatched roof. Because thatch was not common in the south Cotswolds, Gimson employed a craftsman from Oxfordshire, John Durham, to carry out the work. The thatch was destroyed by a fire bomb in 1941 during the Second World War and replaced by stone tiles.