PANKHURST family
From photo, Douglas Pankhurst (grandfather) centre in photo aged 74, and Bernard Pankhurst, her great uncle, aged 70, wearing glasses on left – with Bert Stubbings aged 85. The photo is taken in December 1969.
Gill Walters who gave us the photo is the granddaughter of Douglas Pankhurst. Bernard is her great uncle.
Bernard Pankhurst lived at Chestnuts and was an engineer at Hall Place and a member of the local fire brigade.
Douglas Pankhurst worked for Watneys in various London locations. He lived at 4 The Square. Their father, James, was a groom/coachman and then chauffeur (Gill thinks) for the village doctor.
Below is a Certificate of Attendance at Leigh School for Bernard Pankhurst.
Lily Passingham 1913, taken by Rev. Walton. The trick image of the two “Lilys” was created by the Rev. Walton
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Among the papers and photos that were given to the Society by Gill Walters were some hand-written notes about the village and village life by Douglas Pankhurst. These have now been typed up and follow here
The following notes were made by Douglas J Pankhurst and given to the Leigh Historical Society
by his granddaughter, Gill Walters.
Douglas Pankhurst was born in Leigh on 4 November 1895[1] and died at Leigh in 1990. He is commemorated on the Leigh Memorial Wall along with his wife Doris (née Kerridge, whom he married at Norfolk in 1929).. He had a brother, Bernard William, who married Lilly Passingham at Leigh in 1932). Their parents were James (born Leigh 1865) and Thirza (Thurza) Pankhurst, née Moyce, born Underriver in 1864. They married at Leigh. Sadly,Thirza died in 1909 aged 45
Douglas’s writings, I believe, were never finished, but contain a history of Leigh, of Hall Place, of some of the workers on the Estate, of the architecture of some of the buildings, of game-keeping and shooting in the village and on the Penshurst estate.
D J Pankhurst records some more memorable incidents from a long life
amongst Road Vehicles
I was born in 1896[2] in the village of Leigh near Tonbridge, Kent. My father was coachman (and later chauffeur) to Dr Fraser, who had a practice in Leigh and district.
The greater part of the village was on the Hall Place Estate, owned by the first Lord Hollenden, born Samuel Morley, a Nottingham man who made a large fortune from making and selling men’s wear. He bought the nucleus of the estate in 1870 – it had, before, been owned by the Bayley (sic) family[3] – pulled down the house and rebuilt it on a grander scale in Elizabethan brick style. As opportunity offered, he added other parcels of land to the Estate as they came on the market and rebuilt many of the village houses. He also built an estate water supply and put in steam pumps – my brother, Bernard, was later one of the enginemen in charge. He also saw to the draining of the village and the sewers discharged into drainage ditches on the other side of the railway – the “mess dykes” they were called and fairly aptly named.
He also had a house in Grosvenor Square and when he was in residence there, he used to have Estate product such as chicken, butter, cream and eggs from the Home Farm, logs and kindling wood for the fires, and vegetables and fruit from the garden sent up from hall Place to Grosvenor Square in a large, covered, four-wheeled horse-drawn van driven by old Jim Fitzjohn. This was a two-day job, up one day and back the next, for it was about a thirty-mile journey and hilly.
Lord Hollenden[4] was a great man for his horses and kept a good stable. He sometimes drove his own four-in-hand and his head groom was a man call Meachem. Meachem’s nose was put a bit out of joint when his Lordship got a car -which meant, of course, a chauffeur as well somewhere about 1906.
My grandfather was moved out of his bungalow near the back gate to the stable yard into another cottage in the village so that Rowe, the new chauffeur, could live near his work. After they got Rowe, the horse van no longer went on its London journey and the trip was done instead by Rowe driving a van – probably about a one or one and a half tonne – bought for the purpose. I believe it was a Commer but I cannot exactly remember though I do recall that it was on tyres, the peculiar solids with circular parts that came into contact with the road like a series of feet. They were supposed to be non-skid, I believe, but soon died out in favour of conventional solids.
Later on, when I was living away from the village, about 1924, the Estate acquired a Vulcan for the same purpose. This had side windows, longitudinal up-up seats and folding near steps, so that it could be used for transporting shooting parties as well as its other duties, but I think that when the present Lord Hollenden[5] succeeded to the Estate and the London house, he decided that the trips by Vulcan to London were an excessively expensive way of acquiring the necessities of life and he discontinued them, though the old Vulcan was about for many years. With very few miles on it and maintained like his Lordship’s cars it would have been a treasure for a preservationist but instead it went for scrap.
In 1910, I went to work for Kenward and Court, a small firm of brewers at Hadlow, about seven miles or so from home and on the other side of Tonbridge, though most of the time I was in their order office in Tonbridge.
Apart from the Foden steam wagon I wrote about in an earlier article, they did all their transport with horses and very long hours the men worked. At haying and harvest times, when farmers were buying a lot of beer for the men engaged on the work, I have known the drays pass through Leigh on their way back to Hadlow at past 8 o’clock in the evening with still seven miles to go and, after that, they had to unload the drays of empties, stable and bait the horses and give them a grooming before going home. Nevertheless, they were still expected to be at work at 5.30 the next morning.
Old Hillen, one of the proprietors, would often be at the gate to meet them. After one late night one of the carters told me he was five minutes late in arriving. At the gate, he said good morning to Mr Hillen. “Good afternoon, Sands,”, the old man replied. I think he might have been the origin of the saying that you cannot do too much for a good master nor ever enough for a bad one.
After three years with them, I applied for, and got, a job with Bligh’s Brewery, at Sevenoaks, which had just been taken over by Walney, Coombe & Reid. They stopped brewing there and sent in the beers from Mortlake. Amongst the vehicles used for this traffic were some 4-ton Hallfords, very primitive chain driven affairs, and slow, though one of their few refinements was the casing in of the chains. These draymen, too, had a hard day for often they had to do a round trip from Mortlake to Croydon before setting off for Sevenoaks, where they would arrive sometimes as late as 4 o’clock. They still had to unload, reload with empties and return to Mortlake.
Soon after leaving Sevenoaks, they had to climb Polhill and often, for draymen liked their beer, they would pull in at the Polhill Arms at the top and spend a couple of hours there before getting on their way with another thirty odd miles before them and an early start the next morning. As I have already related, there were also overtype steam wagons on this work and later the firm got some Standard Sentinels and, later still, some Supers.
The Hallfords were put on to local delivery from depots in London and the last of them ran until the early thirties. At Sevenoaks our delivery was done, with horses and drays on contract hire from a local carter named Humphries. He also used to cart the house coal from Sevenoaks goods yard to Knole House and there were some rare old goings on with this. I should think the Sackvilles helped to warm a good many Sennockian household in their time. The tenant of one of our off-licences in Lavender Hill, Tonbridge had a Halley lorry of about 30 cwt or two-ton capacity and this was a rattle-trap device.
VILLAGE DAYS
Chapter 1: The Village
Hall Place Estate and Samuel Morley
The village in the last hundred years centred on the Hall Place Estate, created by Samuel Morley, the Nottingham hosiery millionaire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Hall Place itself superseded an earlier house and was bought by Samuel Morley from the former owners, the Farmer Bailey’s[6] (sic) in 1870 and which the new owner deemed insufficient in grandeur to match his financial standing. It was accordingly demolished and replaced by a large and somewhat diffuse mansion, in Victorian Elizabethan style, from the hand of George Devey, who had already done work for Lord de Lisle on the adjacent Penshurst Castle Estate and had built a house in Penshurst for James Nasmyth, of steamhammer fame, who called it appropriately Hammerfield, [built 1848 and originally called Culver Hill, and extended by George Devey – ed.] a choice of name which has always seemed to me to combine a reference to the source of his fortune with a suggestion of a connection with the local iron industry. Its site is scarcely a mile from Cinder Hill, itself the reputed site of mediaeval iron works.
Hall Place, then, arose between 1872 and 1876, an agreeable, if not especially distinguished country house, and the largest that Devey was responsible for. To go with it, he designed a matching stable yard and coach houses, three lodges, a park wall of diapered red brick with stone aprons and has imposing gated entrances to the park. The house was intact until the night of 28 November 1940 when one wing was gulled by an accidental fire. During the afternoon, a seemingly trivial chimney fire was discovered and dealt with, as it was thought, but in the evening Gentry, the butler, found smoke and flame coming from a cupboard on an upper floor and, by the time the fire brigade arrived, it was well away. At its height, appliances from all the adjacent areas were on the scene. The underground mains were quite inadequate for the demands and the firemen laid hoses through the pleasure grounds to the lake with trailer bumps as intermediate boosters and the remainder of the house was saved. Some reinstatement of the damaged wing was done but finally in the 1970s it was demolished.
Samuel Morley was not only a Gladstonian liberal but also a convinced non-conformist. With Hall Place well in hand, he endowed the village with a chapel of a size and architectural style compatible with the house, using, it is said, the hammer beam trusses from the demolition of the hall of the old house. The chapel had an underfloor stepped tank for baptisms by total immersion, vestries, school rooms and a house for the minister. Whether it was by Devey or not I do not know – the styling suggests that it was.
To serve the mansion, Samuel Morley built an estate gas works and water works, but lacking any suitable eminence upon which to build a reservoir, he was forced to use a low knoll in the park which gave a very poor head of water in the distribution mains. By systematic purchase, he became the landlord of much of the village by buying farms, houses and cottages from the Penshurst Estate and from other owners and eventually had an estate of XXX acres.
The parish was crossed, more or less east to west, by the South Eastern Railway’s line from Tonbridge to Redhill, part of its main line from the Kent Coast to London until the opening of the direct line from Tonbridge through Hildenborough, Sevenoaks and Orpington, always known as “the new road”. The railway divided the flood plain of the river Medway from the slightly higher ground on which the village stood. Between the railway and the back of the gardens of the cottages in the village street was Constable’s brickyard and east of it, in my father’s “top” field, was a dip with a pond in it which again must have been an old clay pit, whilst the parcel of ground to the east of that was known as ‘Kiln Bank’ and had in it an over-grown pit.
Whether the output of this brickyard was enough to have provided the bricks for Hall Place, I do not know, but it certainly provided the bricks for the reconstruction work in the village itself, with which Samuel Morley amused himself in the eighties and nineties. [n.b. Samuel Morley died in 1886: editor]. After Devey’s death in 1886, he used Ernest George as his village architect [DJP must mean Samuel Hope Morley: editor]. In the middle of the village street, facing the wall of the park, he pulled down a row of old clap-board cottages built right to the road and built a row of nine cottages round three sides of a rectangular patch of grass [The Square: editor]. At the west end was the butcher’s shop and at the other a reading room. The ground floors of the cottages were in red malm facings [a chalk and clay mix?] and the internal walls in commons. All these bricks came from the Leigh brickfield and the late George Bowra was employed as a carter boy in carting them, before he became a bricklayer’s apprentice to his uncle.
The reading room cottage had an imposing brick bay with stone dressings on two floors, facing the grass square but the remainder of the first-floor construction was a mixture of very stiff and formal half-timbering, either exposed and pargelled or covered in oak shingling. The first floors of the rear and side elevations were tile hung, except on the reading room cottage, where the roof came down salt-box fashion to the first-floor level. The long leg of the square was tile roofed, the two wings thatched.
The builders of these cottages were Longley’s of Crawley. Whilst they were being built, the workmen lodged in the village and, since cricket was the summer sport of the village, they formed their own cricket team. George Edwards of Penshurst, who would now be a hundred and twelve if he were alive, worked as a bricklayer about the same time on Seal Chart church on the ragstone ridge north east of Sevenoaks, staying there all the week and walking home on Saturday afternoons. As he walked through the village one Saturday, he found Longley’s playing the village and short of one man, a vacancy he was entreated to fill. So, having already worked half a day and walked eight miles, he played throughout the match and then resumed his walk the further two and a half miles to Penshurst.
Penshurst Road Cottages
Two further blocks of cottages, a pair and a three, and a pair of bungalows, were built in generally matching style on the Penshurst Road, just below the kitchen gate of the estate and at the east end of the village a more ambitious rearrangement was put in hand.
Porcupine, the Fleur, and Forge Square
The east entrance to the village was down a short hill known as Porcupine Hill from the pub of the same name. Most stood on a bank overlooking it on the north side, only a few feet clear of the entrance drive to the new East Gate. To rid himself of the public house, Samuel Morley had a new one, the Fleur de Lis, constructed further up the street to which the licence was transferred. I say constructed but it was, in fact, a reconstruction and extension of part of a row of existing brick cottages.
Since the Porcupine was a substantial building of some antiquity and picturesque into the bargain, it was not demolished but reconstructed as a residence for the agent of the estate. Below the bend of Porcupine Hill and under the lee of the churchyard wall there was an old row of saltbox cottages. These were done away with and another square built, known as Forge Square, the east wing of which formed the “Cottage Home” which was used as a convalescent home for needy Londoners. This square was called Forge Square from the presence of the forge, shoeing shop and forge cottage which was built just to the west of it. Forge Square faced across the Green, a large grassed area, levelled and ornamented with horse chestnut trees at Samuel Morley’s expense and placed by him at the disposal of the village for leisure sports.
Thomas May and the Vicarage
His rival for leadership in the village – and it was a very unique contest in terms of personal wealth – was the parson, Thomas May, usually referred to behind his back as “Tommy” May, was a landowner and farmer on a fair scale in the eastern part of the parish. He built himself a new red-brick vicarage on the south side of Porcupine Hill, handy for the Church, complete with stables and coach house which, with his private means, he was able to staff with indoor and outdoor servants but which proved an incubus to those of his successors who lacked independent means on that scale.
School
Probably because of Tommy May’s influence and quite possible as a result of his benefactions, the village had a Church of England School, with schoolmaster’s house attached, which stood at the junction of the west-side of the Green and the High Street.
Hall Place Estate Farms
The Estate, as originally assembled was enclosed by four public roads and the four principal farms – Home Farm, which was kept in hand, Price’s, Leigh Park and Lower Street which were let – lay inside this belt of roads, except for some of the outlying fields of Lower Street. Later Lucy’s Farm was added and on the death of Tommy May the bulk of his land including XX Farm was added to the Home Farm.
Curtis and Harvey; Duke & Sons; the Railway
About the turn of the century this pattern was well established as were two other influences, namely Curtis & Harvey’s gunpowder mills in the south-east corner of the parish, bordering on Tonbridge (then still spelt Tunbridge), with its own hamlet of company houses; and Duke & Sons cricket bat and ball factory in the adjacent parish of Chiddingstone Causeway to the west. Though the South Eastern Railway travelled the parish from end to end, east to west, there was no station. Intending passengers had to board trains either at Tonbridge or Penshurst, the latter station being actually in the midst of Chiddingstone Causeway village. Both the Powder Mills and the Ball Shop provided employment for village men and there were other similar establishments to the latter in Hildenborough and Tonbridge.
To counterbalance the hamlet of the Powder Mills, there was the second hamlet of Charcott in the west of the parish, tight up to the parish boundary with Chiddingstone Causeway.
Penshurst Farms
The railway acted as a kind of dam to the Hall Place influence. South of it the principal farms, Paul’s, Ashour, Ensfield and the smaller Cinder Hill, belonged to Lord de Lisle’s Penshurst Estate.
Chapter 2: The Estate
Two clocks struck the hours publicly in the village, the Church and Hall Place, the latter invariably slightly slow by comparison with the Church. It used to be said that the Estate workmen went to work by the Hall Place clock and knocked off by the Church. They had a name amongst their peers for taking life steadily. Some denied it, others acknowledged it. Jack Brooker once remarked it’s Old Dick Wood, a notorious slow-mover, on a very cold day. “I should have thought you’d have moved a bit faster this weather Dick, if only to keep warm,” to which he drew the rejoinder, “Ah, I’d rather go home cold than tired”.
Old Dick had a good sense of humour. He said on one occasion, enlarging upon the niceties of work dodging, “Always have a piece of string in your hand. If you are challenged, you’ve either been to tie something up or have just tied it up”. Dick worked a lot of his time in the Wood Lodge, the Estate sawmill, which was just off the west drive. There, Estate timber was milled into scantlings for fencing rails and farm building repairs. Before there was electricity in the village, it was driven by a portable steam engine and in the twenties, this was an old Hornsby shared with the Home Farm. The conversion of round timber was done perhaps once or twice a year and the sign that the sawing season was about to commence was the portable being hauled up the street from Home Farm to the West Gate. Later, it was found more convenient to use a tractor.
Another Estate worthy was Lew Bennett – uncle Lew, for he was a distant relative of my wife – who was a bricklayer. Like George Edwards, Lew, as a young man, had worked on the building of Seal Chart Church, walking to work early each Monday and back each Saturday, using all the short cuts he could. One Monday, a farmer intercepted him travelling an unauthorized cut-off. “Are you aware you are trespassing Bennett?” he was asked. “Shouldn’t be at all surprised, sir, haven’t any land of my own”, was his answer. On another occasion he chanced by the village gardeners discussing their potato crops and became drawn into the discussion – a not very difficult thing for he loved conversation. “What are your potatoes like, Lew”, asked one. “Oh, I’ve got a wonderful crop”, said Lew. “Some as big as marbles, some as big as peas and a devil of a lot of little ‘uns.”
Another involved story about Lew is still savoured by those who knew him. The estate pumping station, gas works and work-shops were approached by the same road as Constable’s brickyard – attached to the retort house was a WC and Lew found himself caught there one morning without any paper. Lewis Brooker, the shoe-mender, used to exercise his dog in the brickyard meadow and, whilst pondering his predicament, Lew heard him coming. The following conversation ensued:
“Lew”
“Yes, Lew”.
“I’m in here and got no paper. Have you got any in your pocket”.
“No Lew, but I’ll pop up to the shop and get a bit”.
(The shop was about fifty yards away and there was a pause while he fetched it – a longer pause than Lew Bennett thought admissible. After a bit he heard Lewis approaching again).
“That you Lew?”
“Yes, Lew”.
“Well don’t worry, while you have been gone, I’ve found a match box”.
After Lew had retired in 1929, John Smith was the senior bricklayer until he died in July 1931, whereupon his son, Frank, who had been his mate, stepped up to bricklayer. Frank had had a bad time in the 1914-18 war and had a very abrupt manner of speaking and had “odd” days when he would mutter phrases over and over again under his breath. “They think I don’t know but I do” and other reflections on his condition. On his better days, however, he was a very good old mate and great fun to be with. He was, moreover, adept at picturesque similes. In 1947 he, Bert Humphrey and Bernard[7] were given a fallen beech tree in the park for firewood and, as Bernard’s friend, I used to go along to help with the work. We spent many enjoyable evenings that summer in the beauty and solitude of the park clearing up that tree. Whilst we went about breaking up the crutch of the tree with hammer and wedges, there was a great deal of creaking and snapping of fibres as the interlocked grain was torn apart. As we paused for a moment for a breather, the whispering and snapping went on. “Hark at it”, said Frank, “Hissing and snapping like a sack of adders”.
Frank never married and after his father died went on living with his mother in the cottage at Lightfoots, opposite the West Lodge. Mrs Smith was a dumpy, chirpy woman and on one of Frank’s abrupt days, they were sitting at dinner with Frank profoundly silent and staring ahead. After a bit he said “Pass the salt”. “Pass the salt!, pass the salt! If you what? Frank” said his mother. “If you can bloody well reach it”.
The other bricklayer at that time was Tom Nye, a taciturn and withdrawn man.
The Estate services were under the control of what used to be known as “the Engineer”, a man of perhaps the status of a foreman in a good engineering shop. He was responsible for running and maintaining the steam pumping station, managing the gas works, looking after the steam fire engine, running the central heating in the house and keeping an eye on the street mains and the plumbing installations and appliances in the house and the Estate cottages. To help him in this, he had two enginemen/fitters and a gas works labourer. In the opening decades of this century, the incumbent of this post was a man named Richards, assisted by Billy Baldwin. The post of deputy requires care and integrity but not vast energy and old Billy fulfilled the requirements nicely. The older he got the more ponderous his movements became. On one occasion when the fire brigade – of which more presently – was summoned, he was so slow at reaching the assembly point that it left without him. “How dare they?” he fumed “How dare they?”
In 1920 Richards retired and left the village to live with one of his children in Australia. He was succeeded by Harry Heney, an intelligent and ingenious man and a most able mechanic but well beyond description. Bernard[8] was one of his assistants and old Billy Baldwin the other. They would frequently find themselves left in charge whilst Harry took himself off to London, nominally for some spare parts – perhaps joint rings and gauge glasses – which, with the efficiency of the post at the time, could have been ordered by letter and delivered in a day and a half.
Despite his aversion to hard work, Harry was a man of parts, a good draughtsman and a fair shot with a sporting gun. He had served his time in the engineering works and garage of Halls in Tonbridge, at a time when motor engineering really meant just that and when new parts were often made on the premises. Halls actually went as far as building a car of their own design – which still exists – and gave their apprentices and workmen experience which it would be difficult to acquire today.
Harry kept a log of the principal events on the Estate and it forms an interesting commentary. The first entry records his starting on the Estate on 15 March 1920. Later that year, he noted the cleaning of the Cornish boiler and its being listed to 110lbs per square inch pressure by Gapp & Co, the London boiler makers, an annual event. In July 1921, the gas holders were painted by Isaac Kneller, the Estate painter and, incidentally, the knocker-up for the fire brigade. Outside Ikey’s cottage in the Square, a gas lamp burned during the hours of darkness with a chipped enamelled sign below it “FIRE CALL”. In May 1922 the “village mound” was cleaned out, an operation that meant turning off the street mains. The same year he noted that the rewiring of Hall Place was completed (by Drake and Gorham Ltd). Until the village was connected to the Tonbridge mains, the house had its private generating set and battery room.
On 25 July 1923, Gapps repaired and listed the portable engine and, the same day, Merryweather and & Co dismantled and tested the boiler of the fire engine. On 12 March 1924 Harry recorded the first of many trips to London, to Gapp & Co to get a new 1½” flange. On 16 April he went again to see about new boiler tubes and a new pressure gauge for the portable. There was a third visit on 7 May for a new gas valve. Another on 6 August for a new lubricator, and a further one on 22 October to order a new suction hose for the fire engine.
He noted Billy Baldwin as off work through sickness – on 25 October and not back until 12 January 1925. The old man never got back into his stride and was retired with a pension on 9 April. In his place Harry Wood, son of Dick, whom we met earlier in this chapter, was taken on. Harry Heney continued his London visits on various matters, including ordering new milk cans on 12 November 1925, when his expenses were £1-0-0 – normally they had been seven and sixpence (37½ pence in today’s money). Perhaps he had overplayed his hand and raised some eyebrows for there was thereafter a pause in his travels the next year.
Nineteen twenty-six was, however, an exciting year. On 1 January, the new electric light plant was brought into use at Hall Place. On 28 January, the Cornish boiler in the pumping station developed a leak. The Tonbridge Water Company mains had reached the village by then and were connected to the mound for emergencies such as this. Tonbridge Water was turned on and the draining and opening up of the boiler was begun. On 1 February, Gapp’s boiler maker – always known as Jack though his surname escapes me – shook his head over it and suggested that the Manchester Steam Users Association inspector be called in. He was and condemned the boiler.
This was the first crisis for the Estate water works. It was in the balance whether it would be scrapped and Tonbridge Water used permanently or whether a new boiler would be obtained, but it was reprieved and a new vertical boiler by Cochran of Annan was installed and steamed for the first time on 16 April. The quality of the water was checked by the country analyst on 25 April and on 1 May pumping from the Estate’s own well began again.
Events were running against the Estate establishment, however. In 1929, Samuel Hope Morley, Lord Hollenden, son of Samuel Morley died on 18 February and with Geoffrey, his heir, in full control of the Estate , a more searching and critical eye was turned upon the expenditure. Gas making ceased and the Tonbridge Gas Company mains were brought to a bulk supply meter in the old retort house, though the building remained intact until it was demolished by a German bomb in October 1940. The gas holders were demolished in 1930 and one of the last duties of the steam fire engine was to pump out their pits to enable the underwater parts to be demolished. Soon afterwards, the fire engine went to Buller, the Tonbridge scrap merchant, as scrap metal.
On 2 December 1932, all hands on the Estate were given two months’ notice. Harry Heney closed his entries for the year with the reflection “through lack of funds and high taxation?” Harry and Bernard[9] were subsequently taken on again at a reduction of ten shillings (i.e. 50p) a week in their wages (about twenty per cent) but Harry Wood was not re-engaged nor was his father. Tom Nye and Frank Smith were reinstated as bricklayers, Bert Humphrey, as the Estate carpenter, and Jack Cload as the chauffeur and there were some others, but the payroll was drastically and permanently reduced.
By the late 1930s, the replacement boiler in the waterworks was showing signs of corrosion and the future of the works once again came into question. This time the scales came down against it and it was closed down, the old emergency main from Tonbridge waterworks to the village reservoirs being put permanently into use. The delivery arrangement there used to fascinate me as it consisted merely of a large ball-valve and the reservoir functioned in just the same way as a domestic W.C. cistern, but on a bigger scale. The demand for scrap at the time was brisk and the engines and boiler were cut up within a few weeks of ceasing work. Harry Heney retired about the same time and Bernard[10] carried on as the Estate mechanic and plumber on his own.
The job had its moments – one morning just as he got to work, he was met by one of the footmen holding a broken denture. “I’ve got to serve his Lordship’s breakfast in half an hour and I dropped my teeth. Can you fix them so that I can wear them?” Despite protesting that he was a fitter and not a dental mechanic, he managed to fix them up, using, I think, some fuse wire. I doubt if they were very comfortable but at least they served their cosmetic purpose.
The head gardener during my boyhood was a Scot named Pringle who lived in a house opposite the lodge, in which Mr and Mrs Billy Baldwin lived at the garden entrance. The house was made from a pair of cottages, which made it quite spacious but excessively divided into small rooms. Mrs Pringle was knocked from her cycle and killed soon after the 1914-18 war and thereafter his spinster sister kept house for him. Though they were a pleasant pair in many ways, they were marred somewhat, in our village eyes, by their self-importance.
Pringle’s predecessor was Charles Davis[11], another very thoughtful and prudent gardener. It was he who instituted the practice of paying six old pence for every wasp nest brought to him, with a view to diminishing the damage to his and others’ stone fruit. It was searching for wasps’ nests under this scheme that landed Pop[12] and some of his mates in trouble. His friend, Vic Burchett, walking through the water fields noticed a wasp nest in a bank by the mess dykes – the ditches which the village sewage was allowed to settle before the overflow went into the river. After marking the place with a stick, he waited till nightfall when he and Pop and one or two others, including probably his brother, Harry, went back with a smoke squib, the then popular method of stunning a nest. They were engaged in setting this in the hole Vic had marked, when the stirred-up wasps emerged from an adjacent hole. It was a pity that the situation was so noisome! Vic, incidentally, achieved the distinction of a commission in the Arab Services during the 1914-18, a considerable feat for a village lad in those days.
His Lordship must have like Scottish head gardeners for Ferguson, the man who followed Pringle also came from Scotland. Economics pressed heavily upon the estate by this time and he tried hard to produce garden and greenhouse crops commercially. The battle was too hard, however. Indeed the greenhouses, laid out with vast headroom, in the days when coal cost about fifteen shillings a ton and a man’s wage for a week about eighteen, wanted far too much fuel ever to have had a chance of being competitive.
Chapter 3: Game-keeping and Shooting in Leigh[13]
Lord de Lisle, whose Penshurst Castle estate came partly into Leigh parish, had no taste for game preservation or shooting parties and, in the twenties and thirties, let his shooting to Lord Hollenden so that his Lordship had the choice of the Hall Place shoot or the rather wilder domain of Penshurst Park.
The keeper of the Penshurst Park shoot, in my time, was Fred Maddox, who had various junior keepers over the years. Charlie and Victor Brown, brothers of my friend Jess, occupied the position in turn. Fred lived in a large old cottage, midway between Paul’s Hill and Cinder Hill. Whichever way you approached it, whether along the footpath, which struck west along the ridge of Paul’s Hill or by the cart track which ran from Cinder Hill farm down into the valley behind the house from whence a path climbed up to the back door, you were involved in a walk of about three quarters of a mile from the hard road. Where the path from Cinder Hill left the cart track, there was a slightly chalybeate spring, bricked in and covered with a wooden lid, which provided the sole drinking and culinary supply of these two cottages. All water used for drinking or cooking had to be carried up the path in buckets. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the soft water barrels were valued possessions. Set with a piece of coarse sack tied over the top to keep out debris and mosquitoes, under the spouts of the rainwater pipes, they provided – so long as supplies lasted – water for washing and cleaning. Hot water supply was a big black kettle always on the hob. The tea kettle was smaller and kept filled with spring water. Washing days or bathing meant lighting the copper in the outhouse.
The house had large, low rooms, mostly brick floored downstairs and was devoid of any main services. Lighting was by oil lamps or candles, waste water was thrown into the garden, the lavatory was a pail under a wooden seat, involved what most people called “burying the dead” – not a popular task but one which at least improved the crops. My late friend, Bill Pelling, always averred that “cottage gardening had never been the same since they abolished the privy”.
Fred was a biggish man who seemed always to be dressed in the breeches, boots and leggings, Lovatt coloured jacket which were, more or less, the keeper’s uniform. I suppose I must have seen him in other attire but the only variations I can remember are for him to have worn long stockings in place of leggings or to have varied what he wore under the jacket, according to the seasons – sometimes a cardigan, sometimes a waistcoat, sometimes but rarely, neither. I never saw him in any other mood than good tempered though, I suppose, he must have had his bad moments, but he was said to be severe with poachers and trespassers. Mrs Maddox, nicknamed for what reason I know not “micker” was short of stature, short-sighted, peering through steel rimmed glasses, and when in company, was an incorrigible and general chatterbox. She spent plenty of time by herself and probably had a lot of arrears to make up.
At one time, the Browns lived next door and even after they moved down in the village, she never failed to drop in on her friend whenever she visited the village; about twice during the week and, as a rule, once on Sundays for evensong at the Church, at least in summer. Jess was always welcome, in turn, at her house and, if I was with him, so was I. The water they drank, coming as it did from an unprotected surface source, must, I suppose have been fairly heavily contaminated, but a glass of it from the jug under the candle filter always seemed cool, clear and refreshing after a hot walk from Paul’s Hill and, indeed, despite its drawbacks and the fact that little, if anything, was spent upon maintaining it, the old house was a comforting and welcoming place, the contents of which, since heedlessly discarded, would have made a contemporary antique dealer squirm with avarice.
We always thought of it as old without defining its age in our minds in terms of the passage of years. The style was the Wealden vernacular with a salt box roof, partly brick and partly tile hung and obviously altered and added to at different times. Probably, on reflection, the oldest parts were three hundred years old and I often wondered if, in the days when it had been all one, it had been an ironworker’s house as the name “Cinder Hill” is said to have denoted an iron-working and the ground beneath it was iron bearing. The chance of going back to look has vanished, however, as it was demolished, as far as I know without a second thought in the 1960s.
Considering the total absence in their lives of most of the amenities commonly taken for granted, Fred and Micker rarely grumbled and compared with their agricultural neighbours, they enjoyed a number of advantages. Fred spent many hours a day at work, patrolling is territory, but except in the anxious weeks in the bird field in spring, setting pheasant eggs under domestic hens and watching over and guarding the chicks, when one or other of the keepers was constantly in the hut day or night, he was largely his own man, taking his own decisions and acting on his own initiative, walking, observing the seasons, shooting the odd rat, weasel, stoat or jay bird, all of which he deemed vermin.
His Lordship’s shooting parties[14] on winter Saturdays, however, meant noting where the birds were, working out routes and positions for the guns and deploying the beaters. Beaters were drawn from the workmen on the Estate, from boys of the village and from trusted outsiders. Several used to come on the morning train from Tonbridge. Provided a shoot was conducted properly – and mostly the Hall Place shoots were – there was no danger to any one present and, it must be conceded in the case of some of his Lordship’s guests, not much peril to the birds either. I never heard of any serious incident at a Hall Place shoot thought Alf Faircloth, who farmed at Great Barnetts and, later, Charcott, shot his foot off climbing over a stile carrying a cocked 12 bore. The only incident on Fred’s beat, and I heard this second-hand, not being present at the time, happened to an old beater named, I think, Ashby, from Tonbridge, who on a very cold morning was wearing a sheepskin jacket. Trouble with one of his boots caused him to straggle from the line of beaters and whilst he bent down to attend to his footwear, one of the sportsmen, who had rather lost his bearings, caught sight of a small piece of white bobbing about in the undergrowth and, as he explained, thought it to be a rabbit, whereupon he committed the unforgiveable sin in that context, of loosing off at it, fortunately at extreme range. The distance, the spread of the shot and stout clothes saved the recipient from serious injury but some pellets lodged under the skin. Declining all aid, it is reported, in not over-gracious terms, he tramped off purposefully and uncomfortably to the Halt, took the train to Tonbridge and had his wife extract the shot with a needle.
Rabbits were trapped or shot fairly systematically and were sold as part of the Estate revenues. Nothing was said if one or two found their way into the domestic pot and, as far as I can remember, one or two found their way to other recipients. Pigeons were also taken and at the end of a good day’s shoot, the keepers were sometimes, but not invariably, given game. There was some minor income to be made from pelts and, of course, there was plenty of wood to be picked up. Coal for the range was left by the coalman at the first gate up the path from Paul’s Hill. Milk was fetched from Alf Jenner at Cinder Hill farm. Meat, bread and groceries were mostly fetched either from the village or from Tonbridge though the path was navigable on a trade bike and tradesmen’s boys did from time-to-time delivery there.
About mid-day, the sportsmen used to be provided with refreshment. If access was good enough, it was taken to them in the motor brake driven by the chauffeur, but if the going was too rough or too constricted for the motor, the horse-drawn game van, driven by George Hand, was used instead. What was contained in the hampers sent out for the guns, I do not know, but the beaters were provided with bread, cheese and beer and with ham or beef sandwiches. Guests varied from the prodigal to the stingy in their tippings of the keepers. The keepers, in their turn, took great care neither by expression nor gesture, nor, it goes without saying, by overt comment, to give any indication of what their feelings were about the merit of any gun’s skill, secure in the knowledge that using guns and cartridges inferior to those of the guests, they could have put up a performance equal to the best and very much better than the worst.
Though Fred (Maddox) was a first-class shot with a sporting gun, he never made much of a shot with the rifle. When the Home Guard was formed in 1940, after Dunkirk, he was a volunteer and during practice shooting on the rifle range at Castle Hill, distinguished himself by putting a bullet through a corrugated iron range-warden’s hut at about 3 o’clock to the target, at which he was supposed to be shooting. There was a moment’s pause, then the door of the hut was hurled open and the range warden, who had been pasting up targets inside, emerged at high speed and took to the woods.
Fred’s counterpart on the Hall Place home shoot was a man named North, whom I never knew nearly so well. He lived in a Victorian red-brick bungalow with brick dog-houses and corn sheds built in the best manner of nineteenth century estate improvement, all approached by a long straight and relatively well paved track which ran from the Home Farm along the west flank of the Turbine Field (so called because a building in the corner of it at the Bid Brook once housed a small turbine used for pumping) in the shadow of the wood.
+ + + o o o O O O o o o + + +
This is the end of Douglas’s main notes, other than some sheets which I have entitled ‘Miscellaneous Jottings’ and I have recorded on the following pages.:
Miscellaneous Jottings
Fairfield: the field behind the building at “the Halt”. Owned by Jack and Mrs Root, later by Laurie and “Puss” Coomber (née Root) of Brickmakers Arms. Also used for steel quoits.
Brickfield: Constables; Commons; Malm facings; pug mill by horse work.
Lewis Brooker. A baker at Godstone pre-war and became allergic to flour as a result of the war. Tom Porter.
The Howick
- 1923 from Edenbridge. Yellow Ford T Baico conversion. Very unreliable.
Maude and Flo Heath: The Woods. Father in the trade. 35 pairs of Cullon boots. New halfpenny to each choir boy.
“Tinker” Tom and Nina Friend
Lil’s[15] great aunt and uncle. Travelled in a caravan as young people. Hence the arthritis that crippled Nina in later life and made her bedridden. Lived in cottage, now demolished at Hildenborough where Tom sold lemonade and children’s sweets such as humbugs. Collection of thirty or more clocks in living room where Nina was in bed. Clever pot mender and tinsmith.
Tom Porter
Shoe repairer. Originally lived in the old butcher’s shop on Church Hill where he practised his trade and also sold penny dreadfuls, bottled lemonade known as “penny monsters” and cheap sweets etc. Moved to the middle cottage at Park View. Snog Seal on one side (later Ed Brown) and Chas and Charity Passingham (née Hope) the other side.
Pringles[16]
Lived in two cottages knocked into one by garden entrance. Mrs Pringle killed by a car at Flying Dutchman c. 1920. Thereafter Miss Pringle (is sister) acted as house-keeper. Charlie Bennett (George’s dad) lived in round house.
Stan Jacque 4.4.80
Was working in West Riding when he applied to Bell Brown’s brother at Leyburn and was referred to Bill at Crowborough. Worked as a driver and loader. Was on the ex-J & H Friend Fodin when it broke the crankshaft opposite Garden Road, Tonbridge. They were engaged on carting elms from Snodland to Turners at Bells Yew Green. The driver was Bert Bennett of Maidstone – a good driver who was no use at loading.
The first tractor he drove was a Tasker with drum under the boiler. At Bedgebury, they were hauling a big load out and Bill Brown said “Make her mad, Stan – make her mad”. He gave it a good wump of throttle and the front end reared up and the front axle dropped off. Bill Brown shouted “Don’t shut off steam, don’t shut off steam” and got the axle back so that the pin came down into the turn plate.
Goodwin
Went to Pauls 1889. Fetched water and pails at the time from “the hole in the wall” opposite Brick.
Airship
Pop recalls the Clement Bayard airship passing over Leigh on a very find October Sunday either 1909 or 1910 on its way to Wormwood Scrubs. The weather for several days had been shucky[17]. “A spell of shucky weather”. Miss Hollamby, sister of the farmer at Great Barnetts, saw it as she came out of church and drew Pop’s attention to it (he was a choir boy). Old Hemsley, who worked on the farm, described it as “like a great crop-pocket with a self binder in the front.”
Harry Burchett.
Guardsman – used to sit on Green “with something round his head” to train his ears back and another hung up his nose to straighten it. He later married his officer’s widow.
Gate House (Porcupine). Bridgeman was the tenant. Had a peculiar car.
Sir Charles Bright
Upper Kennards. Father laid first Atlantic cable. He was connected with telegraphy and wireless. Supported Leigh football team and used to run up and down the touchline. A Southborough supporter asked Pop “who is that old fossil running about?” When told he said “what him who is connected with wireless and all that”. He once let off a 12-bore in the bedroom. At a tennis party at Waltons[18], he suddenly said “I must go, I must go. I must go and have a mustard bath”. And off he went leaving the other players beat. Brewer Faircloth once distinguished himself by proposing at a Brit Leg(ion) dinner “a holey heart of … to Sir Charles Bright”
Bill Baldwin.
Inter alia fire brigade engineer. One Wednesday there was a call from Larkins and Bill got behind and found the brigade had left without him. He was furious “How dare they, how dare any go without me”.
An Estate engine man. Lived in round house. After he died, Mrs B moved across to Tom Wheatley’s.
Tom Wheatley
Estate gardener. Lived where Bill and Bertha now are.
Youngs
Lived in house above Harry Heaney.[19] Alan Young used to sit in choir and blow peculiar kisses with one finger.
“Painter” Wells.
Lived at 7 The Square.
1926 Air Crash
Saturday. Bern (Bernard) was with Fuggle fishing. Fuggle ran him up to village in car. Next day B & L[20] biked out to Southwood. Like a fair, cars, buses and ice cream men. People prodding in ashes for souvenirs.
Gordons, the gin people. Now demolished.
Joel Jempson
Brother of Noel. 74 in 1980.
Nellie Taylor
Died November 1980. Had sister Rose (?), who had her left foot attached where her knee should have been.
Tennis on Green
Courts by school in Nethercott’s time as schoolmaster.
Ringing
Lil joined by 1924. Perce Denton was ringing master. Dick Gardner was a ringer.
Cardons
Mrs Cardon was “Tassy” Hassell from Charcott.
Tea Room at Brick? Built ca 1920.
Moorden
Days always there.
Fleur
Offen, then Coates.
Brick
Parker (who kept cows)
Fred Ford
Ball maker. 4 The Square. Tall. Bandsman – played the trumpet.
Shop
Before Burt, it was Crandells. Previously Lindridge; Allchin; Peters.
“Thirsty Four”
Four musicians used to come over from Tonbridge Wells and play by the Big Bridge.
Halt
Opened 1911. Porter – Bailey. Used to shut iron gates when train due.
Bus
Autocar via H/boro station c. 1912. For a while a horse bus from Fleur to Tonbridge.
Cabs
Martin, Station inn, had horses and cabs. At one time used to provide fire brigade with horses.
Howick (also see above)
Owner Roger le Bas, Stangrove Road, Edenbridge. Parents had “King & Queen” in the Square.
“Days”
Put up in field at Spittal Cross[21] where the school now is.
Brickyard
“Pudgy” Nichols – afterwards at Powder Mills
Stivery Upton. Stivvy had a son “Swoppy” who worked at the shop.
Obadiah Beech (with beard) lodged with Mrs Killick.
Pony walked in a circle to work pug mill.
Wasps[22]
Hall Place head gardeners paid 6d for a wasps’ nest.
Pop and Vic Burchett and one or two others spied out a nest by the mess dyke. Vic marked entry in daylight. Others went back after dark and were putting a squib in the hole when the wasps came out of another hole. Vic had a commission in the Arab Service, in 1914/18 war.
Tailor
Smith – the “City Tailor” who had Target Stores and made the breeches for Obadiah Beech.
Bill Card
Worked on Hall Place and then, after 1932, at Vivian Phillips. Dot was a Miss Ford, Quazzies sister-in-law.
Jack Jezzard
Haycutter. Father of Frank and Jim. Worked (if poss) only three days a week and drank the other three. Had drinking competition with Jim Bowen at the Stag’s Head one Boxing Day. Each drank 23 pints and then went home to dinner.
“Shoddy” Bligh
Drover. Worked with Les Goodwin’s father and with Les. Foreman. Noted for drinking and swearing.
One duty was Moorden to Shoreham. Son Percy worked at Mayhams (died 18.1.81)
Jim Bowen
Horseman at Baltic. Jim’s mate was a man named Curling (?)
Fred Wallis
Fred’s mate was Horace Blackman.
Hop Growers
Barnett: Hollamby, later Alf Faircloth (remember his wooden leg)
Little Barnetts; Charlie Faircloth
Leigh Park: Tommy King
Price’s: Pearson
Kennards: Miss May
Burfield
Bob and Maria. Carpenter. Forge Square flats. Worked at Redleaf. Prone to sharpen saws at night. Chapel man. Mrs loved velvet and lace and bones and ribbons.
Incident of gailer (?) in Bike tyre. Put it on the outside, round the rim. When the rake was put on he went “arse over head”.
Coach at Hall Place
Geoffrey’s father liked coaching. Meachem was the head coachman. Not much coaching after 1914/18 war.[23]
Kaleidoscope of TE: Extra Captions
In the latter end of 1904, a Garrett 10 nhp straw-burning Style cylinder traction engine destined for M E Mattas in Buenos Aires, probably works number 25060, was photographed threshing, on test, at Knodishall Hall Farm near Leiston. The Coopers who farmed Knodishall Hall, were friends of the Garretts and also of the Sherwoods, one of whom John Sherwood Junior was manager. of Leiston works in the eighties and part of the nineties. An earlier strawburner No. 23652, a 8 nhp built in 1902 failed to find a purchaser and had to be equipped as a coal burner before it was sold (with the new number 23737).
The date of this picture[24] of high density baling in progress is not known accurately though it is said to be about the period of the 1914/18 war. Straw was in surplus in the extensive arable areas of East Anglia but it was a difficult commodity to ship far afield until the advent of strawpressers, the use of which was given great impetus by military demands for horse fodder and bedding int eh 1914/18 war. Mr Carley is using a Fowill traction engine was made a few miles from Chalteris at St Ives, Hunts at Cromwell Ironworks which is still in action.
[1] Date of birth given in the Civil Registration Death Index.
[2] See note 1.
[3] Baily family of Hall Place – see Leigh Historical Society website.
[4] Samuel Morley never accepted a title: his son, Samuel Hope Morley became the first Baron Hollenden.
[5] Assume he means Rt Hon Geoffrey Hope-Morley (who died 1977): the first Baron Hollenden (Samuel Hope-Morley) died in 1929: as the text refers to the present Lord Hollenden, it possibly means Geoffrey Hope-Morley, and so pinpoints a date when Douglas Pankhurst might have written this particular section of his various memories.
[6] See note 3.
[7] Had assumed this was Bernard Pankhurst, but as Douglas refers to himself as Bernard’s friend later in the sentence, I am not sure. Bernard Thompsett who lived in the village would have been much younger, born in 1937. I cannot at this time find another Bernard to whom he might be referring.
[8] Assume here he means his brother, Bernard William.
[9] Again, assume Bernard William Pankhurst
[10] Again, assume Bernard William Pankhurst
[11] Charles Davis – gardener in 1871 aged 24 and living at Lodge Park Gate. 1901 census gives him as Head Gardener.
[12] Pop – James Pankhurst born 1865.
[13] The following section of notes did not have a ‘chapter’ or ‘heading’, but as it is about game-keeping and shooting parties given by Lord Hollenden, I have titled it so.
[14] Lord Hollenden
[15] Lil Passingham (wife of Bernard Pankhurst)
[16] Pringles are also mentioned in Chapter 2: The Estate
[17] Kent dialect: shuck – can mean shifty, unreliable, uncertain – ‘looks as though we be going to have a lot of this shuckish weather’.
[18] Octavius Walton, Leigh Vicar 1906-1918, lived at what is now “The Old Vicarage”.
[19] Probably means Heney, as it is spelt elsewhere in the text.
[20] Bernard and Lil
[21] There was an area/field known as Spitals Cross on the junction of Four Elms Road (B2027) with what is now Station Road at Edenbridge, where the school used to be. Douglas could be referring to this former area of land. It is clearly named Spitals Cross on the 1936 OS map, although not on any of the earlier OS maps.
[22] Also included in text in Chapter 2: The Estate
[23] See also in main text.
[24] Do not have this picture.
Joyce Field : editor (June 2023)