town and lies at its southern edge. The town was previously in the Devizes constituency, with former Conservative Party Chairman and Northern Ireland Minister Michael Ancram serving as the local Member of Parliament until May 2010. Civic and local governance is through Calne Town Council and Wiltshire Council, which is a unitary authority. The town council spends approximately half of its income on parks, open spaces and the Beversbrook sports facility, and in 2013 levied an annual precept of £1.1M from households and businesses, with reserves of almost £1M. Notable inhabitants The first inhabitant of note was Edmund Rich (1175–1240), who became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was canonised and many educational establishments are named after him, notably St Edmund Hall, Oxford and St Edmund's College, Cambridge. John Pym (1584–1643) lived in Calne. He was a leader of the Long Parliament and a prominent critic of Kings James I and then Charles I. He was one of the Five Members whose attempted arrest in 1642 sparked the Civil War. Isaac Nichols, a transported convict who became the first postmaster of Sydney, New South Wales was born here in 1770. The country estate of Bowood House, which dates from 1725, lies approximately southwest of the town. It is the family seat of the Marquess of Lansdowne; the current Marquess is Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice. It was at Bowood that Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774; there is a plaque in the town centre commemorating this. Jan Ingenhousz repeated Joseph Priestley's experiments and found it was sunlight which acted upon the plants to create oxygen (photosynthesis). There is a pavement display outside the Millennium Library in Calne in his honour. Samuel Taylor Coleridge stayed from 1814 to 1816 as part of the Morgan household whilst writing his Biographia Literaria. A plaque on the house commemorates this visit. Walter Goodall George (1858–1943) was an athlete who set numerous world records as an amateur and then as a professional. In one of his races, he set a mile record which was not surpassed for almost 30 years. George held more than 13 world records for running at the time and still holds a world record simply for holding the mile record longer than anyone else. There are two plaques in Calne to commemorate his life, one in front of the town hall and one at ground level just inside the recreation grounds. Frederic Hicks Beaven (11 April