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Fanny Vachre was Jim's Greatgrandmother. Jim tells of sitting at his Greatgrandma's knees and listening to her stories of the family. As he tells it, he was five at the time and didn't want to, but he "would've got thumped" if he'd moved !

Jim believes the family name was spelled VACHRE, pronounced VAY-TCHER.
Neither the Dorset Online Parish Clerks (OPC)  site or the LDS site have any VACHREs, but both have plenty of VACHERs and VATCHERs.
AND,
according to the GRO indexes, the full name of Fanny Vachre's daughter, Fanny, was Fanny Elizabeth VATCHER Benson !!

31.12.2004:
Just been in contact with a Vacher-Researcher, DebPat, from RootsChat.

I have heard that The Vacher's may be descended from 3 Vacher brothers who fled Switzerland when the non-Catholics were being massacred (are you familiar with the people known as Huguenots that fled to England centuries ago?). One brother settled in the West Country, one near to Southampton, and one settled in London so the story goes. But I feel that the central link in all of this is Dorset

Since writing the above, it turns out that Fanny's maiden name may not have been VACHRE but HARDY.
Jim remembers a HARDY, but is not sure whether it was Hardy VACHRE, a brother of Fanny VACHRE, or whether the family name was in fact HARDY.
The VACHREs/HARDYs were horse and cattle dealers, dealing between Dorset and Ireland (?)
And one of them may have been a Postillion on the Blandford to London coach...


Next question: what is the VATCHER connection ??
My guess: Jane Hardy's maiden name.

The hunt continues . . .