Three Houses, Many Lives by Gillian Tindall

Author:Gillian Tindall [Tindall, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, social history
ISBN: 9781409041207
Google: EP5BuisiwMUC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-06-30T23:58:45.292236+00:00

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parts of Stanhopes – alias – the Manor House, seen from the lawns in the mid-twentieth century. Note the belfry on top and the shadow, far right, cast by the huge ilex tree out of shot.

The Leveson-Gowers seem to have rented the house out to a number of different tenants during the 1850s. In the census of 1861 it was noted as being ‘To Let’ and was occupied only by two ageing Lovelands as caretakers: John Loveland, ‘gardener and domestic servant’, and his wife. And now, for the first time, it was called the Manor House. As we know, it had no entitlement to the name. Hookwood House, often occupied by Leveson-Gower relations, would have been a slightly more suitable candidate, though the true seat of the lord of the manor was Titsey Park, halfway up the Downs. But someone with a taste for grandeur (who?) had re-baptised the house in the village, and from now on, to avoid confusion with the housing estate called Stanhopes that would not appear till the late twentieth century, I shall refer to it as the Manor House.

By the 1870s in Limpsfield, as in many parishes all over England, another strenuous round of church Improvement had set in, much of it over-zealous and destructive of ancient fabric. (The vicar of Burford was a particular offender. It was, famously, after a public argument in the church between him and William Morris, that Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments.) A photograph taken in Limpsfield church c. 1870 shows the chancel effectively reduced to a roofless ruin for rebuilding. Much of this was paid for, like so much else, by the Leveson-Gowers.

1870, too, is the start of the great era of documentation, and not one but two Directories (Kelly’s and the Post Office one) give us a picture of what was generally agreed to be the ‘large village’ of Limpsfield. The population was not yet twice what it had been in 1800, for the nearest railway stations were still five and ten miles off as they had been twenty-one years before, but Limpsfield was probably the more thriving and self-sufficient for that. There were ten farmers in the parish, one of whom was also a brick-maker – a small but significant sign of greater urbanisation to come. There was a wheelwright, a baker, three carpenters, two grocers, two butchers (which meant, in those days, that they slaughtered their own meat), two blacksmiths, three shoe- and bootmakers, a builder (a Loveland, of course), an owner of a threshing machine, a cattle salesman, a plumber and glazier, a miller, a ‘general shop keeper’, another grocer combining his trade with drapery, and a ‘draper, grocer, clothier, baker and dealer in new and second hand furniture’. There were two pubs, a post office, an insurance agent and a twice-weekly carrier’s cart service to and from London. There were various National (i.e. Church of England) elementary and infant schools for both sexes, built on land donated by the Leveson-Gowers and funded by the inevitable church bazaars.

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