The Lewisham Anchor Brewery

There is an impressive, slightly faded Victorian building within Tesco’s car park in Lewisham; it looks rather out of place amidst the 21^st century internal combustion engines and 1980s retail architecture.  It is Eagle House which was the former office of H & V Nicholl’s Anchor Brewery and was built around 1870.

The Lewisham brewery seems to date from the late 18^th century, initially on Lewisham High Street (1); its owner, Abraham Constable was mentioned as an ‘eminent Lewisham Brewer’ who lived at Bridge House Farm in Ladywell by 1804 (2).  While there appears to be no online reference of it this, Constable seems to have been in partnership with someone called Fordham.

The usually reliable Edith’s Streets has brewing on the Tesco site from 1818, presumably with Constable and Fordham. Abraham Constable was Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Kent and lived at the rather grand Mount Pleasant in Hither Green which was built for him in 1810.  Abraham Constable had an interest in the White Hart at Lee Bridge (bottom of Belmont Hill) as late as 1830. But ownership of the Lewisham Brewery had been sold to Fordham and Marsden by 1820 (3), possibly earlier as they were in partnership from as early as 1810, in relationship to a land deal next to The George.  Constable died in late 1832.

The brewery was again sold in 1827 as there was a letter from a B Wood, who was ‘partner in recently sold Lewisham Brewery’ to John Courage offering Courage the Roebuck pub in September 1827. It isn’t clear whether Wood was the current or recently past partner.  The John Courage referred to in 1827 would probably have been the son of the original brewer from Aberdeen.  John Courage (senior) had bought an existing brewery in Horsleydown, Bermondsey in  in 1787 but died in 1797 aged just 36.  His son John was born in 1788 and became a partner in 1811.

It doesn’t appear that the letter relates to anything more than The Roebuck though, although at some point the name changed from Lewisham Brewery to Anchor – a name shared with the Courage Brewery at Horsleydown, Bermondsey as well as that ofthe eponymous brewery on the South Bank – once partially owned by a tenant of Lee Manor House, Frederick Perkins.  The location is shown on the Ordnance Survey map below surveyed in 1867.

The history becomes clearer in the 1830s, as the brewery was  bought by Harry & Vincent Nicholl, during the 1830s – the first reference is a mention in bankruptcy proceedings in 1838 where the Nicholl brothers were listed as creditors (3). Both brothers were listed as early as the 1851 census as brewers, Harry as a “Brewer employing 11 Men.”

There is nothing on-line suggesting connections with other breweries so maybe the earlier date is correct – certainly, as will be seen below, there were connections with Lewisham from around that era.  They could of course been brewery managers who then became owners (as we saw with the Barclay Perkins brewery).

The Nicholl brothers were from the Chipping Barnet area, perhaps a century before suburbia encroached upon it.  Harry was born in 1810, possibly a twin – there was a sister of the same age in the 1841 census.  He was still living at home in 1841 – with Vincent and two sisters.  It was a family of wealth – there were eight servants living at the family home – Greenhill Grove.

The family wealth that allowed the brothers to buy to brewery came, in part, at least, from slavery – their father, Richard who died in 1839, owned two estates in St Vincent with 163 and 216 slaves in 1837..

They had two brothers who had already left home by the time the census enumerators called for the first time at Greenhill Grove in 1841 – J R Nicholl, who was to become Rural Dean of Streatham – a role he stayed in until he was 95!  Another brother, Charrington Nicholl, had moved to Essex and took over the East Hill Brewery in Colchester (4) which lasted until about 1925, when it was acquired by Ind Coope.  There is a link to the East End brewers Charringtons – the name for which comes from a John Charrington.  He was the father of the Vincent and Harry Nicholl’s mother, Anne.

By 1851 Harry had moved to Beckenham and was living on his own (with three servants), a decade later he was still there but he married Emily in 1867 in a church on the Strand, she was from the then market town of Watford.   By 1871 census showed them still in Beckenham and they had an 8 year old daughter plus two children from Emily’s previous marriage along with a trio of servants.  A decade later, he was living at Morants Court in Chevening in Kent, this is a large country house – he seems to have rented rather than purchased it, but times were not hard – they had five servants living-in on census day.  They may well have moved back towards London – he died in 1889 in Bromley – certainly his widow was living in Beckenham in 1891.

Vincent was born in 1814, like his brother he seems to have remained in and around Barnet until at least 1841.  He married Lousia in Lewisham in 1843.  With both the next two censuses he was away from home, in 1851 visiting a wine merchant in Lewisham, and in 1861 he was in a large boarding house in Brighton.  It was probably a relatively upmarket hotel,  the other clientele included a Navy Commander, a Norfolk vicar and a Barrister.

It appears that they had no surviving children Vincent and Louisa were listed in the 1871 as living in Reigate Foreign (originally outside the castle walls) with five servants – a compliment that had increased to seven a decade later.   He died after the sale to Whitbread in 1902, still living in Reigate.

The brewery was sold to Whitbread in 1890, perhaps precipitated by Harry’s death the year before, for what seems like the incredibly large amount of £185,000. In employment terms it had grown considerably from the ’11 men’ in 1851 – the 1881 census put the workforce at 30.  Whitbread’s motive for the purchase seems to have been to turn the plant into a bottling depot for their operations south of the Thames.

Although they were also to take on Anchor’s tied trade that amounted to 24,000 barrels a year – it is known that they supplied at least two Lewisham pubs – The Roebuck (covered in Running Past) and the White Hart, along with Eltham’s Rising Sun, Forest Hill’s Railway Telegraph and Beckenham’s Greyhound amongst many others.

The brewery did more general sales to the trade and private customers as this advert from the Kentish Mercury which appeared in various guises during the 1880s and 1890s shows (5).

The photo above is from just after World War 2 it shows the bottling plant from the air – it is on the right hand side of the picture about half way up.  Just above it is the then very new Lewisham Hill Estate, and a little further up are the prefabs next to Hollyhedge House are clear – there is a photo from a different angle from an earlier post.  Just below the bottling plant is the engineering firm Elliot Brothers (which the blog will probably return to).

The bottling plant continued in operation until the 1980s when it was sold to Tesco for the current supermarket.  The bottles below may have been used at Lewisham during  Whitbread’s ownership.

The Anchor name does live on close to the site, what  the brewery tap is on the corner of Lewisham Road and Lewisham Hill (known for a while as Bridge House).  It closed for a while in the early 2000s but re-opened in 2011 and was still open when this post was updated (June 2018).

Notes

1. Godfrey Smith (1997) Hither Green –The Forgotten Hamlet p29
2. Kentish Weekly Post or Canterbury Journal 30 November 1804
3. Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser 24 November 1838
4. 11 February 1905 – Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, Upton Park and Dagenham Gazette
5. Kentish Mercury 02 May 1890

Photo Credits

The black and white photo is from the Britain from Above website which allows use of its photos for non-commercial blogs; bottle photos come from eBay.  The photo of The Anchor is by Chris Whippet and is on a Creative Commons via Geograph.

The census and related information comes from Find My Past.

 

 

The Lost Methodist Church of Hither Green Lane

The Church had an impressive position on the angle of Wellmeadow Road and Hither Green Lane and was part of the St Germans Estate, now generally known as the Corbett Estate, it was one of seven places of worship built on the Estate – although there were no public houses or off-licences.

Source – EBay February 2016

The foundation stone was laid in July 1899 and completed the following year at a cost of £4,800, and accommodated 700 worshipers.  The building work was carried out by C. Castle & Son of Lower Clapton, little is known of them other than it was may well have been the son, Frederick William Castle, who was carrying out the work.  The firm went ‘bust’ in 1911 when Frederick was living in Alcester Crescent in Lower Clapton trading out of Milton Works Shacklewell Lane in Hackney.

The church has been described as being of

red brick with stone dressings in the 16th century Gothic style with heavily traceried windows and a tall pinnacled tower. The interior consisted of a nave, two aisles, a transept, chancel, organ chamber and galleries on three sides.

Its architect was Josiah Gunton was born in the tiny Fens village of Manea, about 4 miles north west of Ely in 1862. In the 1871 census he was 9 and living with an elder brother, William, and his father, also Josiah who was a farmer.  His mother died just before the census was carried out.

In the 1881 census, he was lodging with the Collard family in St Phillips Road in Hackney and was listed as an Architectural Assistant.  He isn’t recorded in either the 1891 or 1901 censuses but married Jessie Runchman from Hackney in 1886, it was probably his second marriage as both his children pre-dated the marriage and his staunch Wesleyan Methodist views would have no doubt ‘prevented’ having children outside wedlock.  They probably stayed around East London – he was captain of Walthamstow Cricket club in in the late 1880s.

By 1911 he and Jessie were  living at 23 Orchard Road in Bromley  and had  two children still at home who had been born in Hackney two decades before, and  along with 3 servants.

Josiah Gunton was articled to the firm Gordon & Lowther and was taken into partnership in 1885. After the death of Lowther in 1900, the practice continued as Gordon & Gunton. William Henry Gunton, Josiah’s son who had been born in 1881 joined as partner in 1916.  Josiah Gunton designed many Wesleyan chapels but the firm Gunton & Gunton tended to specialise in commercial buildings after World War I.

Gunton was a City of London Alderman, having initially been elected for Coleman ward in 1904.  He was a member of the London County Council for the Municipal Reform Party (allied to Conservatives) from 1928 until his sudden death on 5 March 1930 at Hotel Metropole, Monte Carlo, Monaco. There were suggestions that but for his death he might have been elected as Lord Mayor.

The church was destroyed during a raid on the night of 11 September 1940, which also caused a fire a few hundred metres up the road at the Park (later Hither Green) Hospital.

It is not clear why some local churches destroyed in WW2 were rebuilt, such as the Good Shepherd in Lee, but others such as Holy Trinity in Glenton Road and Christ Church in Lee Park weren’t – the latter two have both already been covered in Running Past.  Hither Green Methodist church was one of those that were never rebuilt.  The congregation seems to have largely moved to another Methodist church on the Corbett Estate – what was then known as the Benson Memorial Church on Torridon Road.

The site of the church was redeveloped for council housing after World War Two which is known as Littlebourne – while they are flats that, from the outside at least, have stood the test of time well, and been on the site much longer than the church, they are perhaps not quite so impressive looking.

The Benson Memorial Church suffered bomb damage in 1944, possibly as a result of a V1 attack on 4 August which hit Arngask Road, which was opposite the church,although it was initially reported as hitting Torridon Road.  The congregation had to move into the neighbouring church hall.  The Benson Memorial Church eventually became known as Hither Green Methodist Church and remained in the church until 1995 when it was sold for housing.  The hall was modified and refurbished as both a hall and church in 1996.

Note

All the census and related data came via Find My Past 

 

Lee Manor House – The Years Before the Library

Last week’s post looked at the early days of the Manor House, particularly its links to the slave trade.

While the ownership of the house remained in the Baring Family until the House became a library, it wasn’t their residence for much of the final century of their ownership. They had bought Stratton Park in Hampshire in 1801 – the estate included the village of Micheldever, hence the link to the Lee street name.

The first tenant of the Barings seems to have been Frederick Perkins, whom F H Hart describes as an ‘opulent brewer’. Frederick Perkins father, John, had been Chief Clerk to the owner of the Anchor Brewery, Henry Thrale. The brewery was put up for auction in 1781 when Thrale died and bought for £135,000 by Robert Barclay, of the banking family, who seems to have seen the brewery as an investment and needed some industry knowledge. So he kept Perkins on, making him a partner. John Perkins died in a freak accident at Brighton Racecourse – being kicked in the head by a horse in 1812.

His son, Frederick Perkins, was born in 1777, he and his brother Henry were each given half of the eighth share in the brewery sometime around1805, Frederick seems not to have taken much interest in the brewery, seemingly being content to live off the income from his valuable share. He spent large amounts of money collecting books. When he moved out of the Manor House in the 1830s, the brewery was producing around 330,000 barrels a year – it was probably the biggest brewery in London.

As for the brewery, it continued on the South Bank, close to the current Globe Theatre, as Barclay Perkins, until 1955 when it merged with rival London brewer Courage.  Courage rationalised their operations, demolished the buildings and sold the site in the early 1970s.

The Barings returned to the Manor House at the end of Perkins’ lease, the House being used by Sir Francis Thornhill Baring, the 1st Baron Northbrook (from 1866), who was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1839 to 1841 – possibly whilst he was using Lee as a close-to-London base. He was the grandson of the original Sir Francis. Francis’ father would have still owned the house at that stage, it didn’t pass onto Sir Francis Thornhill Baring until 1848 when his father died.

From information board next to Boone’s Chapel

How long Sir Francis stayed at the Manor House is unclear, he may have moved back to Stratton Park when his father died. Whenever he moved out though, it is worth looking at the final two occupants as they are both interesting in their own right. The penultimate occupants were the Farnalls who seemed to have moved there at some stage in the late 1850s. Harry (Henry) had been born in Clifton in Gloucestershire he has been described as

an example of that extraordinary Victorian ideal, the gentleman civil servant defending the patrician notion of a generous, caring state in the absence of any very firm evidence that the state was routinely either of those things.

He seems to have come from a military family and had a privileged education taking him to Downing College Cambridge, via Brasenose College Oxford and Charterhouse.

His married soon after leaving Cambridge, although by the time he had moved to Lee he was in a second marriage; his new wife, Rhoda, came from Sandford, near Weston Super Mare. Before arriving in Lee, they lived in Sandal Magna, now part of Wakefield in Yorkshire, where the three children living at home in later censuses were all born.

Farnall was a Local Government Board inspector, there are several reports written by him or mentioning him, including poor law in South Wales (presumably before he moved to Yorkshire) and health reports on the North West, where he was a Poor Law Insepctor – this included being sent by Parliament to report on the Lancashire Cotton Famine.  The family’s arrival in Lee presumably coincided with him becoming the Metropolitan Inspector for the Poor Law Board.

Along with Florence Nightingale, Farnall instituted the first enquiries into the quality of nursing in workhouse infirmaries, having previously been criticised for his ‘blindness’ to this;  he was also later criticised for his ‘light inspection’ of the notorious Bethanl Green Workhouse.

He had a sudden fall from grace after falling out with Gathorne Hardy, later Lord Cranbrook, who was President of the Poor Law Board, and he was ‘transferred unceremoniously to Grantham’ where he was responsible for more mundane elements of public health. The family remained in Lee though.

Harry Farnell was also heavily involved in the 3rd Company of the Kent Volunteer Rifles; they were set up in 1859 and were to become part of the Territorial Army in the 20th century. He was made Captain in November 1859 and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1863. He received a sliver bugle from ladies of Blackheath and Lee to recognise his work in 1860 in front of the Manor House.

The family moved to Wingfield House which was attached to The Firs (covered before in the blog) between 1871 and 1881 – probably around the time of his retirement and/or the end of a lease. Harry died in 1883, the rest of the family seem to have remained at Wingfield House until it, along with The Firs, was demolished in the early 1890s to make way for the new housing on Old, Abernethy and Lochaber Roads. The family moved out of the area – by the 1901 census his widow Rhoda is listed as living in Chelsea.

By 1881 the Manor House was home to the Military ‘crammer’ School run by Henry Wolffram which was designed to prepare young men for the entrance examinations for the Army. The 1881 census lists 21 pupils along with a resident tutor, a housekeeper and a cook. Henry Wolffram was born in Stuttgart in Germany had been in Britain for a while. He had married Anne from Surrey and in the 1871 census he was running some sort of education establishment in Greenwich – it had two Swiss boarders. There is a small photo of the school in front of a now demolished extension of the House in 1884.

Wolffram’s name is remembered by a small cul-de-sac off Manor Lane Terrace, located roughtly where the final home of Manor Farm was. As with Aislibie Road, the spelling is incorrect and is given as ‘Wolfram’.

Source – EBay Feb 2016

Earl of Northbrook sold the Manor House and estate to the London County Council for £8,835 in 1898, worth a little more now given the increase in London land values. The previous tenants had left it in a poor state of repair, the LCC describing the House and Gardens as being in a ‘somewhat neglected condition’ . The House became a Library and the gardens a public Park opening in May 1902.

Source EBay Feb 2016

The House itself is listed, along with the wall forming the boundary with Pentland House to the west, the entrance gate posts and the telephone kiosk in front.

Finally, it is important to remember the history covered in the first part of the story of the Manor House – it is worth repeating the final paragraph of that post;

If you are a current Lee, Hither Green or Lewisham resident, next time you use the park, the library or just walk or travel past and admire Richard Jupp’s fantastic architecture, please at least pause to remember the ‘dark heritage’, to remember the lives of those transported 5,000 miles from New Calabar to injustice and misery in the Leeward Islands, and to remember that it was the enforced and unpaid toil of slaves that largely paid for what you are looking at. If you live somewhere else, something similar may well apply to your local ‘country house’ too.

Note

All the census and related data came via Find My Past 

Slavery and the Manor House

The Manor House in Lee is an impressive building, rightly listed, but amidst the grandeur and beauty it has financial foundations that lie very firmly in slavery – it is a prime example of what has been referred to as ‘dark heritage’.

The House was built for Thomas Lucas around 1770, he had lived in Lee for a while, renting Lee Place (on the opposite side of Old Road) from the Boones – it is a ‘country house’ that Running Past ‘visited’ a while ago.

But to understand the history of the Manor House, we need to go back a generation.  It certainly wasn’t the first building on the site – John Roques map of 1746 (1) a quarter of a century before the Manor House was built shows a lot of properties around where it is now located.  It was probably the location of Lee Farm, although there is some uncertainty about this.  Lee Farm seems to have moved around 1745 to become Burnt Ash Farm and the vacated buildings were bought by William Coleman, Thomas Lucas’ uncle, who sought to re-create the old Manor of Lee for his nephew (2)  which had been broken up after the death of Brian Annesley – covered earlier in Running Past.

Coleman was the agent for a number of Leeward Islands plantation owners, notably the Pinneys of Bristol who were who were at that time probably the wealthiest plantation owners in St. Kitts and Nevis. He also jointly owned a plantation in Antigua with his nephew – Roundhill which had 150 slaves.

Thomas Lucas was born around 1720, possibly in the West Country.  He was Treasurer (1764-74) and later President (1774-84) of Guys Hospital and has been described as ‘a wealthy merchant’, much of his wealth came from  joint ‘business interests’ with his uncle in St Kitts in the Leeward Islands, along with the Roundhill plantation with 150 slaves in Antigua.  In his own right, Lucas probably owned land at Barbados Bay in Tobago – which almost inevitably would have had direct or indirect links to slavery.

A Thomas Lucas of this era part owned a number of ships directly involved in taking slaves to the West Indies – while there  is nothing definitive linking him to Lee, there cannot have been many of that name, with sufficient wealth to own a share in a large ship, who had  links to the West Country and who were involved in the slave trade at that time.  One of these ships was the ‘Africa’, jointly owned by a Thomas Lucas and seven others.  It left Bristol in 1774 and its captain purchased slaves at New Calabar (in what is now Nigeria) and then proceeded to St Vincent for instructions on their sale in 1775.  The net proceeds were a staggering £5442, millions at today’s prices.

Manor House was designed by Richard Jupp, a well-known 18^th century architect and surveyor, employed for much of his career by the East India Company.  The Manor House is one of a trio of relatively well known south London properties that he designed – the others being the Sevendroog Castle and the entrance and wings to Guys Hospital (1774-77), presumably as a direct result of his work for Lucas  at the Manor House.

Lucas died in 1784 and what happened next in terms of ownership and occupancy is a little confused with some contradictory evidence, although some elements of this ‘confusion’  may relate to the author’s poor understanding of 18th and early 19th century legal jargon.  It seems that the former Lady Lucas let the house to the Call family, Sir John in 1792 on a 61 year lease.  However, he seems to have moved out before his death in Westminster in 1801 – there is an impressive pyramidical family tomb in the old St Margaret’s churchyard.

Lucas wife, who later married John Julius Angerstein (someone else who had made money from slavery) and appears to have sold the estate in the 1790s; there is a report of a sale in August 1796 at Garraway’s Coffee-House.  However, to confuse matters there is also the granting of a lease to Sir Francis Baring by the executors of Thomas Lucas in 1797. There are also frequent reports of a sale by a Sir Joseph Paice of the Manor House to Sir Francis Baring for £20,000 in 1796.  This may be the same sale as that by former Elizabeth Lucas, in that the House might have been due to pass to him after her death – there is a mention of him as the reversionary legatee which might point to this. Whatever the chain of events was, the net result was that around the end of the 18th or early in 19th centuries the Manor House became the London home of the Barings – this was certainly by 1801 as John Baring, the 3rd son of Sir Thomas was born there.

Before moving onto the Barings, it is worth touching on Sir Joseph Paice.  He would certainly have known Thomas Lucas as Paice was also trustee at Guys.  While there were no direct links to slavery, the Paice family had ‘trading links’ with Jamaica for produce and crops inevitably produced by slave labour.  Paice was also a childhood friend of Francis Baring – growing up in the same part of Devon, and was to help with the setting up of Barings Bank.

Despite their purchase of Stratton Park in Hampshire in 1801, it seems that the Barings remained at the Manor House, using it as their London base.  Sir Francis died there in 1810 and Sir Thomas lived there for a few years after that, although the family was to own the House for almost another century.

The links of the Barings early wealth to slavery is relatively well known and well documented;  the whole family of that era and before seem to be imbued in the trade.   The graphics above come from the University College, London Legacies of Slave Ownership database – the maroon plaque from the Manor House.

Sir Francis had ‘interests’ as at least a lender at the Bogue Estate in Montego Bay in Jamaica from 1792. But he was more than that, in the detailed records of sales and related from the estate from 1792 to 1808, Sir Francis is listed in the ownership – Bogue is described as the ‘property of the heirs of Richard Atkinson Esq deceased and Messrs Baring and Clayton.’ The transactions included ‘hire of enslaved people’ in 1795 and 1796. In 1800, at around the time of the purchase of the Manor House there were 215 men, women and children enslaved on the estate.

While his son Thomas Baring is known to have eventually opposed slavery, unlike his near neighbour Benjamin Aislabie – whose murky past Running Past covered a while ago – his home and lifestyle at the Manor House and Stratton Park were under-pinned by past links to slavery.

Given this past it seemed odd that it is a family deemed worthy of a Lewisham maroon plaque without mention of what the ‘merchant’ refers to.  This was finally recognised in June 2020, when, after pressure, Lewisham Council covered it up, pending a broader discussion about its future. The context of this was a series of Black Lives Matter protests across the country and in Bristol the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down and dragged into the harbour.

The next post will look at the latter years of the House in private ownership, when the Barings retained ownership but rented the House out.

If you are a current Lee, Hither Green or Lewisham resident, next time you use the park, the library or just walk or travel past and admire Richard Jupp’s fantastic architecture, please at least pause to remember the ‘dark heritage’, to remember the lives of those transported 5,000 miles from New Calabar to injustice and misery in the Leeward Islands, and to remember that it was the enforced and unpaid toil of slaves that largely paid for what you are looking at.  If you live somewhere else, something similar may well apply to your local ‘country house’ too.

Notes

1. From information board at Lee Green
2. Josephine Birchenough &  John King (1981)Some Farms and Fields in Lee p3

Horn Park Farm – Lee’s Last Big Farm

Over the years Running Past has looked at a number of the farms around Lee and Hither Green notbably Burnt Ash,at College, Lee Manor, North Park and of course Lee Green Farm  which stood where its name suggests and its farmer – William Morris (no obvious relation to the eponymous textile designer, poet and socialist activist).  Morris, soemtimes spelled Morriss was also the tenant of the neighbouring and slightly bigger Horn Park Farm from 1838.

Horn Park Farm, like Lee Green Farm, was owned by the Crown and in 1838 it consisted of around 221 acres of a mixture of arable and pasture. It seems to have stretched from around Winn Avenue to Eltham Road and probably further northwards to the Quaggy – certainly the land what is now Courtlands Avenue was orginally part of the Crown Estate.  At the Winn Avenue end  it bordered College Farm, and from around 1914 Melrose Farm (sometimes known as Woodman’s Farm), a largely market gardening enterprise that was probably carved out of Horn Park Farm. .

An area nearly twice the size, 345 acres, known then as West Horne, had been enclosed in the 15th century and was one of three parks that belonged to Eltham Palace.  The Royal family stopped using the Palace early in the reign of Charles I and the Palace was badly damaged during the Civil War and the Commonwealth – John Evelyn noting in 1658 that “both the palace and chapel (were) in miserable ruins, the noble wood and park destroyed by Rich the rebel (Nathaniel Rich)”.

After the Restoration of the monarchy, Horn Park was converted into to a mixture of arable land and pasture with the Crown Estate retaining ownership.

The first subsequent on-line mention was in relation to a dispute in 1816 between the Lee and Eltham parishes in relation to the boundary between the two, it oddly went through the bed of the ill farm worker who was claiming poor relief. He got out of bed on the Eltham side so they ended up paying.  The farmer at that stage was a Richard Stames.

While Morris seems to have lived at Lee Green Farm, there were farm buildings at Horn Park marked from the earliest Ordnance Survey Maps up until the 1930s when the area was developed as Horn Park estate, a development not completed until the 1950s due to the intervention of WW2. The farm is pictured above (see credits below).

Maps source – Ordnance Survey 6″ via National Library of Scotland – surveys from 1862, 1930 and 1938.

The farm buildings were roughly where the grassed area on Alnwick Road, opposite Horncastle Road – close to where Westhorne Avenue now is.

It seems likely that when Morris’ lease ended around 1860, that the silk merchant Thomas Blenkiron, son of the racehorse trainer William leased Horn Park and used the farm for grazing racehorses.   It is possible that William, while more generally associated with Middle Park, also had some interest in Horn Park as it was one of the addresses listed in bankruptcy proceedings in 1884.

The next significant tenants were the Wood family who seem to have moved to Horn Park in the 1880s, presumably after the bankruptcy proceedings of Blenkiron.  The first tenant would have been Walter William Wood – his son Walter Thomas Wood was born there in 1888.

It was the Wood family’s second farm, Walter (William) seems to have started farming at Crockenhill in Kent – a farm they retained an interest in up until the 1930s.

The farming changed under the Woods – while it was predominantly grazing under both Morris and Blenkiron – cows and horses respectively, by 1912 the farm was described as having ‘well cultivated fields.’ (5). There were also orchards at the southern end of the farm – clear on the later Ordnance Survey maps above.

The Woods seem to have moved the farm towards market gardening – certainly they were advertising for a ‘man well up in growing tomatoes, cucumbers and mushrooms for market’ in 1895

They also grew flowers for the market too – there was a court case involving theft of lilacs the same year in the short-lived Blackheath Gazette .  They later diversified into growing bulbs, they were subject to legal action (6) at Greenwich County Court in 1920 relating to a dispute with a Dutch firm of bulb sellers, which they lost.

They sold produce locally too, opening a shop at what was latterly referred to as 10 Eltham Road at Lee Green around 1896. The location of the shop changed to 34 Eltham Road in the early 1930s. This was next to another bit of land, on the corner of Leyland and Eltham Roads which they had greenhouses on – its now the Leegate ‘piazza.’

The shop seems to have been run by a cousin of Walter’s Arthur Russell who lived at the farm in both the 1901 and 1911 censuses.

Walter senior died at the farm in 1924 and Walter Thomas died in 1929 in Bromley, it is not clear whether he was still on the farm at that point – he was certainly there in the 1901 and 1911 censuses though.  The younger son Sidney, born in 1892, stayed on after the deaths of his father and brother.  He married Audrey in 1920.

Sidney was made bankrupt in 1935 – possibly as a result of the shrinking size of the farm, the land around the farm house had been lost to the Horn Park Estate but development of private sector housing on roads like Horn Park Lane and Upwood Raod will have seen the acreage dwindle too. 

Despite the bankrupcy, Sidney was still listed as a ‘Farmer etc.’ in the 1939 Register, living at what was clearly not a farm house – 3 Guibal Road. There was a logic in living at 3 Guibal Road – it provided access to some orchards and a couple of fields which were the last remnants of the farm.

The open fields descent down the hill towards Mottingham Lane and the Quaggy – they were later to become the park Horn Park. The orchards to the north were used by local children for camps and tree climbing.  to become part of the council housing on the redeveloped council housing with the children scattering on the sight of Mr Wood (7)

The shop though continued though until the 1950s, the orchard and fields may have lasted into the 1960s when the prefabs were replaced by permanent housing over a wider areas and the fields became the park Horn Park.

The couple stayed in Lewisham after the break-up of the farm around the outbreak of World War 2.  Audrey died in 1968 and Sidney ten years later.

The Farm was home to a number of sporting events – this included many of the fields that the horses and riders of the Lee Races would have galloped through in the 1830s.  In 1914 it was home to the annual Lewisham Horse Show.

There was at least one illegal prize fight between Emmanuel Bilby and Jeremiah McCarthy, both of Deptford which was spotted by a local constable who followed crowds there in early 1899. It isn’t clear whether the fight was with the Wood’s sanction or not.

Finally, one of the early ‘losses’ of land was what is now the Old Colfeans sports ground – the Old Alleynians played rugby there for at least a season around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and it seems to have been used for sport ever since.  It was sold to the Leathersellers Company as Trustees for Colfes School, then a Grammar School sometime after 1929.  The current site of the school was also part of the farm.

Notes & Credits

1. Census and related data comes from Find My Past (subscription required)
2. Information about the shop comes from Kelly’s Directories, accessed via Lewisham and Southwark Archives
3. The picture of the farm is part of the collection of Lewisham Archives, it is used with their permission but remains their copyright – the date, the artist and period it depicts isn’t clear though
4. This post was written in early 2016 but was substantially updated in February 2022
5. This was originally sourced via an on-line book called London South of the Thames – the link was broken in early 2022 though
6. Again this was a link that was broken by 2022 – it was to an online version of Gardeners’ Chroncile from 1920
7. Many thanks to Susan McCarthy for her memories about this
8. The last map is on a non commercial licence from the National Library of Scotland.

William Morris – A Farmer from Lee Green Farm

It is easy to forget that Lee Green was once a village green – large enough for cricket matches – with a windmill and a village pub.  Unsurprisingly, there were farms too – over time, the blog will probably cover most of the former farms in the area. The starting point though will be a farm next to the green – the imaginatively named Lee Green Farm.

The location of the farmhouse was roughly where the decaying remains of the Leegate Centre are now located.  Its age is uncertain, oddly it wasn’t covered in Josephine Birchenough’s fascinating booklet ‘Some Lee Farms and Fields’. However, the information board at Lee Green suggest dates it around the mid to late 17th century, there were certainly buildings there in John Roque’s 1740s map (1).

The land was owned by the Crown, probably as part of the extensive lands held through Eltham Palace, and the first on-line reference to the farm was a lease granted to William Morris in 1838 of both Lee Green Farm and the neighbouring Horn Park Farm.

Lee Green Farm (see picture below (2)) was 131 acres in size, according to tithe records, and was a mixture of arable and pasture but it was just a small part of the land that William Morris (sometimes spelled Morriss) farmed.  As early as 1815 he was leasing much of the current Cator Estate (3) and his 9^th (ninth) child was born in Kidbrooke.   The land was largely rich pasture that he used for dairy cattle – important in terms of proximity to London, prior to the development of the railways.

By the 1830s he had relinquished much of this Cator estate interest, Kidbrooke tithe records for 1850 had his interest at just 7 acres.   Some of this was to allow development – such as a field where 97-115 Lee Road now stands (4).

The 1838 lease of Lee Green Farm was presumably a continuation of a previous one, certainly he was farming in Lee in 1820 as there was a case as the Old Bailey involving the theft of two cows and an attempt to sell them to a farmer in Mile End – William Smith was found guilty and hanged. The timings of his move to Lee are confirmed with the birth of his 11^th child there the same year.

What is clear though is that William Morris had interest in a lot of land around Lee Green other than the Farm, F H Hart noted that at this time he and ‘Farmer Giles’ from Burnt Ash Farm leased most of the land in the area.  Morris’ land included

• 212 acres at Horn Park Farm –  from the size this would presumably have been College Farm, more on that in a post
• 61 acres leased from the Mercers Company
• 26 acres in Eltham also leased from the Cator Estate
• 53 acres leased from Thomas Waller – 41 in Mottingham, 12 in Lee
• Around 4 acres in a field called Crab Croft, which seemed to be in the area of Marvels Lane in Grove Park (5)

William Morris(or Morriss, the spelling of the surname varies) was from Banstead, Surrey was the son of Samuel and Sophia Morriss, and was baptised on May 29 1780. By 1804 he had married Elizabeth Walker and they had their first child Sophia and they were living on Blackheath Hill – presumably close to the Green Man Hotel.  At that stage he was described as a ‘milkman’ or ‘cowkeeper’ – possibly having a small amount of land (as was the case with Clark’s of Summerfield Street).

Elizabeth died in 1829 and was buried in the old St Margaret Lee Churchyard (see middle vault above).  William Morris remarried in early 1832, Susannah gave birth to the first of six children for the new family at Horn Park and seem to have made that their home rather than Lee Green – their youngest child was baptised in Eltham, rather than St Margaret’s Lee.

The farm buildings moved slightly to the east in the 1840s to what was to become known as Tudor House (roughly where the Leybridge Court estate is now).  This was presumably under the stewardship of Morris, who also built a few speculative homes adjacent to it (6).

One of the frustrating elements of writing this and other posts about the history of the area is that written history tends to focus on the rich and influential in society.  Nothing is known about the farm labourers on Morris’ land, other than there were a number of tied cottages, whether Morris was a good employer, his rates of pay and so on.  The only references to the rural working classes in Lee tend to relate to crime, and as we have seen with the case of the theft of cattle in 1820 and its draconian punishment, and when there were calls on poor law relief – such as in the bitterly cold winter of 1814 – referred to in the post on Benjamin Aislabie.

There were some attempts to redress this by William Cobbett in the 1820s.  Cobbett was a late Georgian and early Victorian radical, the son of an agricultural labourer from Surrey, he opposed to the Corn Laws who undertook a series of ‘Rural Rides’ to look at the condition of farming in the 1820s.  In addition to the Corn Laws, his ‘rides’ were against a backdrop of the Enclosure Acts of the early part of the century, where the rich landowners took ownership of what hitherto had been common land.  While there seems to have been little common land in Lee, the Acts had a major impact elsewhere in Lewisham – particularly in Sydenham.

Cobbett visited farms, talked to farmers and labourers on his horseback rides; he did not visit Lee, so it is difficult to judge on conditions locally but he did note in terms of land close to Dartford “Here dwell vanity and poverty.”

It is certainly difficult to generalise based on Cobbett’s observations and whether there was this “poverty” in Lee is unclear but elsewhere in the south-east when describing farming poverty he noted that

The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground on the road side, where the space has been wider than the road demanded.

We will return to William Morris in his final days at College Farm where he was to pass away in 1851, by then Lee Green Farm was being run by his son Richard, three of his sisters Eleanor, Rebecca and Mary were living there too – the farm was listed as 302 acres and employed 20. Richard was still at the farm in 1861 although the acreage was much reduced, just 114 acres were being farmed.  He moved to Days Lane Farm in Blackfen around 1868 (see comment below), he clearly had some interest in land in Lee after he left as he was on Electoral REgisters into the 1870s. Beyond 1861 there seem to be no mentions of the farm, through on-line sources at least, – maybe it became unviable as land was lost to development.

The original site of the farm was redeveloped in the 1860s as housing called Carston Mews, although the name lived on it Carston Close, just to the south.  Carston Mews itself was demolished to make way for Leegate shopping centre in the 1960s. The centre has been in decline since Sainsbury’s opened to the west of Burnt Ash Road, something compounded by an increasing amount of empty office space above the centre.  There are plans to redevelop the centre going through the planning process at the time of writing (January 2016).

Notes

1. Map from information board at Lee Green
2. ibid
3. Neil Rhind p34
4. ibid p162
5. Josephine Birchenough with John King (1981) Some Farms and Fields in Lee p28
6. Rhind op cit p34

All the census and related data came via Find My Past 

I am indebted to Mike for providing most of the family information via a fascinating comment (see below, you may need to click on the title first if you can see another post below this one) – the post was substantially updated in June 2016 as a result of this.

Victorian Shooting at Lee Green

Charles Morton, the landlord of the Tiger’s Head always seemed to be on the look-out for sporting events, particularly those that involved gambling, that might bring in customers.  The blog has covered distance running, sprinting and hurdling and horse racing before.  So it is of no great surprise that live pigeon shooting, common in Victorian Britain, was tried out at the Tiger’s Head over the winters of 1843 and 1844.

It was a sport that had a ‘not quite respectable’ reputation – there were sometimes reports of those operating the traps being bribed to pull out the tail feathers from an opponent’s bird to make it fly erratically and hence be much harder to shoot.

The picture below is of the sort of ‘trap’ that was probably used – this one is in the Ryedale Folk Museum – several would be lined up in a row.  They would have a lever connected to a rope at the side – once ready the shooter would shout ‘pull’, the rope was pulled and the pigeons escaped into a hail of shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In February 1843, ‘The Era’ noted ‘A goodly muster of shooters attended at Morton’s, the Tiger’s Head, Lee Green, where several sweepstakes and matches were excellently contested’ (1).  The second reported shoot was the following year, although sadly for Moreton, poor weather seems to have restricted the turnout for the meeting during the second week in January 1844 (2).

Two weeks later another shooting match was advertised for up to 10 people with 10 shilling entrance fee, 7 pigeons each, for a silver cup prize (3).   In the end only 6 participated, including an appropriately named Mr Bang – the cup being won by a Mr Luffman (4).

There were no reports in subsequent years of pigeon shooting at the Tiger’s Head, while the poor turnout amongst the competitors may have had a bearing on this, the changing neighbourhood with the area around Lee Green with new housing being developed on Lee Road and Lee Park was probably as significant a factor though. Horse racing, the Lee Races which the blog covered a while ago, met a similar fate during 1844 too.

Moreton though had troubles of his own which may have distracted him from his business – his father, also a publican working then in Blackfriars, had got into serious debt after an employee stole from him and he took his life in 1844.  The inquest was at the Tiger’s Head.

Notes

1. The Era (London, England), Sunday, February 19, 1843; Issue 230.
2. The Era (London, England), Sunday, 14 January, 1844; Issue 277.
3. The Era (London, England), Sunday, 31 December, 1843; Issue 275
4. The Era (London, England), Sunday, 21 January, 1844; Issue 278 (including press cutting)

Picture Notes

Photo of the (Old) Tiger’s Head in its original incarnation is from the information board by the Leegate Centre at Lee Green.

Benjamin Aislabie – Lee Resident, Slave Owner & Possibly the Worst Ever First Class Cricketer

The blog has touched on Benjamin Aislabie a couple of times before, notably him being the last tenant of Lee Place – the first of the country houses of Lee, that was situated in the area bounded by the current Old Road, Lee High Road and Bankwell Road, although its estate extended much further.

The long-term owners of the house, the Boone family, had ceased living in the house around 1770, letting it initially to Thomas Lucas who was to build the Manor House.  Aislabie became its final occupant in 1809, taking on a 14 year lease.

(Picture from information board opposite St Margaret’s Lee)

Benjamin Aislabie, son of Rawson and Frances Aislabie, was born in 1774 at Newington Green.  By the time he moved to Lee he was a wealthy man, he would have needed to be to afford to rent Lee Place; he had made much of his wealth from the wine trade and was widely reported as having Nelson as one of his customers.

Like a number of the former wealthy inhabitants of Lee, he had links to slavery in the West Indies and the southern states of the current USA, this is something that the blog will undoubtedly return to in the future in posts on Lee Farm, the Manor House and Dacre House.  Aislabie was more unusual in that his links with the slave trade continued after it had been abolished in the British Empire in 1807.  However, it still existed elsewhere and there was nothing to prevent British citizens having interests in it outside the Empire.

It is known that Aislabie had a mortgage interest from 1812 in an estate in Antigua, and in his will he was owner of two estates in Dominica, one of which had 111 slaves, leaving them to his son Rev. William John Aislabie along with an income to his wife from them of £100 a year.

Unsurprisingly, he was one of those in Lee who did not sign the Lee Petition in 1814 – calling on the government to insert a clause into a treaty with the defeated French to end slavery in their empire.

Picture source – via creative commons

In addition to his interests in wine and slavery, Aislabie was actively involved with the affairs of the parish of St Margaret, both helping oversee the construction of the short-lived second incarnation of the church (which had to be replaced three decades later due to subsidence) and helping dispense the largesse of the parish in the bad winter of 1814.  The late 19^th century Lee historian F H Hart notes that Aislabie

took a lively interest in distributing the charities that severe winter to the poor; he also placed to the use of the parish the buildings in the front yard of his mansion, for the storage of coals and potatoes, which were given to the poor during the thirteen weeks’ frost; bread was very dear at this time, and Lee had no poor-house.

Aislabie’s erstwhile landlord, Charles Boone, had died in 1819 and when the lease ended in 1823, it was not renewed, and Lee Place was sold.  While F H Hart suggests he may have moved to Sevenoaks, it certainly wasn’t his permanent residence; in his latter years this was Park Place, next to Regent’s Park and close to the new home of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), Lords.  He was buried in Marylebone church in 1842.

Aislabie had a passion for cricket and was heavily involved in the administration of the game through the MCC, becoming its President in 1823 and secretary from the year before until his death.  In cricketing terms he is remembered though as having one of the worst first-class cricket records of all time.  In part this was because he continued playing well into his later years – his final match was played against Cambridge University at Lord’s on 1 and 2 Jul 1841 when he was aged 67 years 169 days – the oldest ever English participant in a first class game.

His record suggests that he managed 100 first class innings, with a highest score of 15 and a batting average of a paltry 3.15; he didn’t bowl.  The cricket records website, Cricinfo, suggests that

His lack of skill was further hampered by his girth, and towards the end of his career he was so fat that he had a permanent runner who also used to field for him

His record as an administrator seems little better, the same source notes

Under his tenure the club lurched from crisis to crisis, and while not dishonest, he was certainly a dreadful financial controller. He was also, among other posts, Custodian of the MCC Snuffbox.

The MCC at the time though was a little kinder to his memory – it was noted in the Sporting Magazine that

Given his links to slavery it seems strange that a man of Aislabie’s ‘pedigree’ has been remembered with a street name (albeit incorrectly spelled) from the 1890s, although perhaps the late Victorians in Lee and Lewisham were only aware of his past via the rose tinted glasses of F H Hart.

The McMillan Sisters and their Open Air Nursery

One of the more interesting regular South East London Open House venues is the Rachel McMillan Nursery in Deptford; it is an open-air nursery that evokes a time of the pioneering health care already covered in the blog in relation to the ground breaking work done in Bermondsey by the Salters and then taken up by the then Borough of Bermondsey at Solarium Court.

The Open-Air Nursery School & Training Centre, set up by the McMillan sisters, Rachel and Margaret, opened in 1914. Their philosophy was that children learned by exploring and would achieve their full potential through first-hand experience and active learning.  They stressed the importance of free play, particularly with craft and water activities, and also outdoor play – providing large and varied external areas for this. Such views seem commonplace now, but were very different to the teaching methods generally used at the time.

The new school consisted of a series of  ‘shelters’ which each had bathrooms,  there was a clear daily routine

• The school opened at 7:30 am;
• Most children were dropped off between 08.00 and 09.00 by their mothers on their way to work in factories – often taking on roles traditionally undertaken by men, who were then on the WW1 front;
• Breakfast with porridge and milk at 9:00 am;
• The mornings were spent doing hand work or playing in the garden (or in the shelter in poor weather);
• Lunch 11.30 and 12 noon;
• The afternoon activities consisted of free play, music and games;
• Tea at 4:00 pm; and
• Collection of the children between 5:00 and 5:30 pm.

Much of the early ethos remains at the nursery as the photographs above show. The nursery was filmed by British Pathé News in the 1939 (part of the footage was from a 1930 visit by Queen Mary – there is more on this later in the post).

So what of the journey of the sisters to Deptford?  Their parents were originally from Inverness but had emigrated to New York State in 1840, Margaret was born in 1860 and Rachel in 1859. They returned to Inverness following the death of their father and sister, Elizabeth, in 1865.

Their mother died in 1877 and Rachel remained in Inverness to look after her very ill grandmother.  Margaret left Inverness and trained as a governess.

In 1887 Rachel visited a cousin in Edinburgh, whilst there she heard a sermon preached by the Christian Socialist, John Glasse – about whom was written that he ‘gathered around him many ardent idealists, to whom he administered doses of Proudon and Marx … the faithful were favoured with the words of wisdom from the lips of Morris, Kropotkin, Stepniak and other distinguished visitors.’  Rachel was also introduced to John Gilray who gave her copies of Justice, a socialist newspaper and Peter Kropotkin’s ‘Advice to the Young’, and took her to a number of socialist meetings in the city.

The sisters’ grandmother died the following year and Rachel joined Margaret in London and both worked in homes for young girls. Rachel shared her Socialist views with Margaret and they attended political meetings where they met many of the important socialist and anarchist thinkers of the day including William Morris, Henry Hyndman, Peter Kropotkin – whose time in Bromley was covered in the blog a while ago – and Ben Tillet.

They became involved with the Christian Socialism that had first impressed Rachel in Edinburgh but also joined the Fabian Society, the Labour Church, Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation and later the newly formed Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The moved to Bradford in the early 1890s and became involved in campaigning to improve the physical, emotional and intellectual welfare of the poorest children through improvements to housing, free school meals and early medical inspections of school children.

The sisters returned to London in 1902 and remained actively involved in campaign for free school meals, which was enacted as part of the Liberal Welfare Reforms in 1906.  They lived at 127 George Lane in Hither Green for a while after their return to London – commemorated by one of Lewisham’s maroon plaques.

The remained convinced about the need for medical inspections within schools and opened the first school clinic in Bow in 1908.  Margaret and Rachel McMillan opened another, the Deptford Clinic, in 1910 which served a number of schools in the area providing a range of services including General health checks, some dentistry, lessons in posture and breathing.

The McMillan Nursery followed a few years later, while Rachel died on 25th March, 1917.  Margaret continued the run the Nursery also serving on the London County Council and setting up a training college for teachers and nurses in Deptford,  the Rachel McMillan College. The College was opened by the Queen in May 1930 and captured by British Pathé News; it was taken over by the London County Council after WW2 and eventually became part of Goldsmiths College.

Margaret died the following year – her friend Walter Cresswell wrote a memoir of the sisters, remarking about them

Such persons, single-minded, pure in heart, blazing with selfless love, are the jewels of our species. There is more essential Christianity in them than in a multitude of bishops.

The sisters are buried in the same plot on the Brockley side of Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery – a peaceful location despite the proximity to Brockley Road.

Hocum Pocum Lane – an old Hither Green Street

Hocum Pocum Lane was a former name of what is now Dermody Road in Hither Green; it was known by a number of variants including Hokum Pokum or Hocus Pocus. It was part of an ancient footpath that started opposite St Mary’s church, following roughly what is now Romborough Way, then the footpath by the side of Canada Gardens, following Ryecroft Road before joining what is now Dermody Gardens and Road crossing the Quaggy roughly where the current pedestrian bridge is now and then following what is now Weardale Road to Lee High Road.

Map Source – National Library of Scotland http://maps.nls.uk/view/102343453

There was a fork in the right of way around Ryecroft Road where another route headed towards the early settlement of Rumbergh or Romborough which was centred around the junction of Hither Green Lane and George Lane – which was covered a while ago in the blog.

It has been suggested that the name comes from ‘latin’ mumbled by locals along what was a dark lane to ward off the devil and footpads. Attacks by ne’er do wells in the area were featured by the 19^th century Lee Historian, F H Hart, who pointed to

• An attack in 1813 on the parish constable in this area by a sheep stealer;
• An attack on some of the Martin family of bankers who were travelling back from Lombard Street in the City to their home in Chislehurst; and
• Pistols, lantern and jemmies were found hidden in a hedge near Lee High Road (close to the Rose of Lee) presumably around the same time.

Hart also asserted that ‘medical gentlemen, too, on their journeys from Greenwich to Lee, when attending their patients, never went without arming themselves with a brace of pistols’ and that Lee in the early to mid-19^th century ‘was so rural as to be unsafe to be about after dusk’.  Mr Hart though was not always the most reliable narrator….

The area around Hocum Pocum Lane had been one of nurseries in the first half of the 19^th century – the main one being the then renowned Lewisham Nursery, run in its later years by Willmott and Chaundy, which finally closed in 1860.  Amongst the plants they specialised in was wisteria – although the street name seems to come from a 14th century name for the hillside leading down to the Quaggy (1).

The closure of the nursery in 1860 was to sell the land for development, and as F H Hart notes

a number of genteel houses, which have been constructed with astonishing rapidity on Eastdown Park, and which are daily augmenting, being much sought after by those whose business is in the city, and who seek a residence here.

The early ones and the current street pattern can be seen from the 1870 Ordnance Survey map above (source)  which was surveyed in 1863.  Many of those early houses didn’t survive that long – Clyde Villa and Campbell Villa made way for the Edwardian Telephone Exchange, covered on the blog in July 2015; and Ashburton and Eastdown Villas too were short lived.  It may be that two of their gateposts survived – one is on the corner of Wisteria Road – although they could be earlier and relate to Lewisham Nursery.

Top left clockwise – gatepost from early development, current view along Hocum Pocum Lane (Weardale Road) towards Lee High Road from bridge over Quaggy, looking up ‘Hocum Pocum Lane’ (Dermody Road)

Development continued apace and by the time the Ordnance Survey mapmakers returned to survey the area in 1893 the street pattern and most of the housing was mainly as it is now.

Presumably it those marketing the homes, particularly on the former Hocum Pocum Lane itself, felt that the well-to-do of the new London suburb would rather that their street was not associated with term relating to something untrue or insincere (or a magical term with the Hocus Pocus variant).  So instead, the road was renamed in 1879 after an alcoholic Irish poet who had died in a Sydenham hovel and buried at St Mary’s Church – Thomas Dermody, whose sad story was covered in the blog 18 months ago.

Anyone following the link to the 1893 surveyed OS map will see that what is now Leahurst Road is marked as Ennersdale Road, which then was a dog-leg – the name was changed a year or two later when Leahurst Road was developed to the south.  The house of the corner with Dermody Road has a just visible street sign marking its former name.

Note

1. Joan Read (1990) Lewisham Street Names & Their Origins (Before 1965)