IT goes largely unnoticed that Theresa May has strong Oxfordshire roots.

Yet the prime minister's father, the reverend Hubert Brasier, was a vicar in Enstone and later Wheatley, and features prominently in our archives.

He is pictured here (centre), in 1970, at a weight guessing contest which saw a Mrs Pat Hillsdon come nearest to estimating the combined weight of the parochial church council of Wheatley.

The event was part of an annual church fair that raised around £200, which covered the cost of electrifying the church clock. It is not known if the future prime minister, who would have been 14, attended.

Mr Brasier regularly wrote letters to the Oxford Times and raised the issue of road safety on multiple occasions, before sadly dying in a car crash in October 1981.

Aged 64, he was driving his Morris Marina to conduct an evening service, when he was hit by an oncoming car at the notorious Forest Hill turn on the A40. He later died in hospital.