I WAS interested to read in your Back Through The Pages column the letter written 100 years ago by Fairlie Harmar to record her disgust at the way a farmer was treated by the Romsey bench when he employed his 12-year-old stepson to help him in with the hay instead of sending him to school (Andover Advertiser 14 August 2015).

In the midst of war, it had become impossible to employ labour as so many were serving at the front. She observes that there was no shortage of school attendance officers – ‘apparently they have not flocked to the colours or the munitions shops.’ Fairlie Harmar was a local personality born in 1876, a daughter of Colonel D’Oyley Harmar of Ramridge House.

Evidently a feminist, there is a photo of her selling copies of The Suffragette in Andover High Street.

She was also a very competent artist and was frequently encountered with easel and paints beside the road, immersed in artwork.

Indeed her pictures have found their way into the Imperial War Museum, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and University College London Art Museum.

At age 55 she married the 7th Viscount Harberton who had served in the South African War and whose seat was in Northampton. He died in 1944 and she in 1945.

With no children to inherit, it is probable her pictures were dispersed and this explains why so many of them have found a home many miles from where she lived.

As some of these views are local, it is sad that she has been appreciated elsewhere but there is now little left around the town of her upbringing.

It has been thought that the picture of the 1908 mayor, William Turner, hanging in the council chamber of Andover Guildhall may be one of hers but that has yet to be authenticated.

David Borrett, Lansdowne Avenue, Andover