The History of Lee

BY DAVID KINCAID (2018)

Origins

Lee’s simple name has tempted people to think it was an insignificant place.   Far from it: Lee has a fascinating history and its name was an important clue to its early nature.   When the Domesday survey of 1086 described the area as “trees” or “clearing of trees” – in Old English, “leah”¹ – it was quite likely suggesting an area managed for firewood and timber i.e. specific resources to be used by settlements (hams) such as Lewisham, Eltham and Mottingham in addition to Kidbrook and Charlton whose boundaries all adjoined Lee.

Lee parish was relatively recent having been created between 862 and 1100 AD²  before which there was an area to its east called Horn and whose Saxon lord could have been Alwin of Horn, a royal thegn mentioned in Domesday^3,  He ran a private court in North West Kent and that Alwin was the name of Lee’s Lord in 1066 seems rather more than a coincidence.

Norman Lee

Lee’s woodland nature apparently saved it from Norman depredation as values at Eltham, Wricklemarsh and Lewisham reduced between 1066 and 1086 whilst Lee’s value increased perhaps because burning woodland was seen as unnecessary.  By then people inhabited the woodland as the 1086 Domesday survey described that:

Walter of Douai holds LEE from the Bishop [Odo of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half brother].   It answers for ½ sulung.   Land for 4 ploughs.   In lordship 2 ploughs.

11 Villagers with 2 cottagers have 2 ploughs.

2 slaves; meadow, 5 acres; woodland, 10 pigs.

Value before 1066 and when the Bishop acquired it £3; now 100s.

Alwin held it from the King

Being a poor community with about 70 inhabitants (including family members etc), Lee’s Norman lord, Walter of Douai settled instead at Uffculme in Devon where he married the wife of the previous Saxon lord.   His West country tenants saw him as a “good lord” and physically tore his habit away when he nearly became a monk at Glastonbury^4.   There was, however, a continued interest in Lee as Walter’s son, Robert de Baunton (or Bampton) seized valuable land to its west that belonged to Ghent Abbey and which remained in the family until 1222⁵.

13^th century Lee

With an absentee landlord, the dynamic element in Lee life came from its inhabitants and by the latter 13^th century names emerge such as Richard Attewelle and Ralf Attewood  who lived by a well and in woodland⁶. Such names suggest scattered habitations rather than a specific village area.  

Henry Cheriche and Thomas Attechirch⁷ lived by the church (its Rector was William de Welvethan) which in 1279 gave refuge to four men who robbed, stripped and bound Symon of London on the heath.   Having sought sanctuary after their victim raised a hue and cry, they then escaped before Lee inhabitants caught and hung them (for goods worth 3/6d)⁸.

By then there were signs that Lee’s 1,238 acres had significant areas of agriculture.   In 1282 Henry le Mareschal of Guldeford acquired 80 acres from Margaret le Poleter by unusual methods.   She arrived with him and, for whatever reason, verbally delivered her house and land to him before spending the night together.   When Henry left the subsequent day he placed a boy there for 14 days which ensured the land legally became his ⁹.

In addition to the above 80 acres there was land held by important families such as the Bankwells and de Lees.

The Bankwells

The Bankwells were quite likely the first medieval lords of the manor to reside in Lee.   William Bonquer acquired land in about 1260 and his successor, John de Banquel, “one of the most notable men of the period”, with his wife Cecilia, acquired Lee and Shroffold manors before being allowed in 1302 to hunt “beasts of the warren” (i.e. pheasant, partridge and hare) which suggests they lived on their estate¹⁰.  

Lee’s attractiveness was its nearness to Eltham which became increasingly favoured as a royal residence.   Despite her husband being crushed at Edward II’s coronation in 1308, Dame Cecilia became by 1327 the wealthiest resident in Blackheath Hundred¹¹ with a prestigious house whose moat stood until 1825 between what is now Boone and Lee Church Streets.   Referred to as the “mirror of Lee” in the early nineteenth century it was supplied then by “beautifully clear water” with many waterfowl and fish and an avenue of lime trees up to the house with a brick arch above the moat¹².

Dame Cecilia’s grandson Thomas Bankwell (1321-1361) inherited a prosperous property and in 1334/5 the Court of Lee (in terms of moveable property) was the fourth wealthiest place in Blackheath Hundred¹³.  This was significant as the Hundred, along with Lesnes, was an island of wealth within North-West Kent containing, as it did, Eltham Palace, Lewisham Priory and Sayes Court.

The manor house would have been impressive and busy with a hall where servants ate and manor meetings presided by the lord or steward.   However, the Black Death impacted substantially on the Bankwells.   Thomas’s wife died in December 1348 and when the plague returned in 1361 Thomas died at Lee on 20 June aged 40 and his second wife Elizabeth on 2 August¹⁴.  

De Lees

Prominent amongst other families were the de Lee’s, whose name suggests a long link with the area, perhaps as stewards to the absentee Lords of the Manor.   Hugh and Letitia de Lee increased their estate in the early 14^th century and by 1322 Hugh was Steward and Receiver of nearby Eltham Mandeville.   Their son Simon accumulated more land; received royal commissions; and was one of three subsidy collectors for Kent in the 1350s¹⁵.

Perhaps a relative was John de Lee who was vicar of Lewisham church 1328-46 and links may have been established at the Royal Court where a John atte Lee (alias John of the Lee of Lewisham) became the King’s porter and was granted a pardon of all felonies in May 1399¹⁶.

Other important families in Lee were Ricard, Ffranceys, Reve, Gilberd, Riculf (important in the 15^th century), Frere and Alsty.   That Frere and Alsty disappear after 1348 and new names emerge from 1360 suggests Lee was affected more by the return of the plague than its initial visitation in 1348.   Probably a third of England’s inhabitants were killed by the Black Death and it has been plausibly suggested that communities at Kidbrook and Romborough (now Hither Green¹⁷) disappeared through disease and survivors moved to Lee or other places where work was available.   The Black Death’s aftermath was a factor leading to the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 when rebels led by Wat Tyler gathered on Blackheath.   With such a mass assembled on Lee’s doorstep it is easy to imagine prominent family’s unease that tenants would rise up in sympathy.   The temptation, however, seems to have been resisted.

The Stury family

Five years after the Peasant’s Revolt (i.e. in about 1386), William Bakewell transferred Lee as a gift to Sir Richard Stury who in 1392 was given “free warren” (previously granted to the Banquels)¹⁸.   As a powerful man and member of Richard II’s Parliament, Stury needed to be near Eltham to advise the King.   Certainly it was at Eltham Palace that Froissart, the chronicler of the Hundred Years War, met him after a meeting of Richard II’s Parliament there, and keen to hear what had happened, reacquainted “after dinner with this ancient knight, whom in my youth I well knew …. Sir Richard Stury seemed very glad to see me, and made me a hearty welcome” and on their walk near the King’s apartments described the result of the Parliament¹⁹.

Politics, literature and religion were important to this man who was “much given to intrigue and gossip”²⁰ and was included in a Chaucer literary group of powerful men in London in the 1380s.   Geofffrey Chaucer was indeed a friend who had been elected a knight for the shire of Kent in 1386 (the year Stury gained Lee) – another reason perhaps for Stury to stay at Lee.

The year before, Sir Richard had been made responsible for the safekeeping of Richard II’s mother, Joan of Kent, who had sympathies with Wycliff and Lollardism.  Stury was a staunch supporter of this movement with its views on church corruption, papal authority etc and the rectors he appointed to Lee church quite likely held such beliefs (he appointed five in nine years).   However, Stury had to renounce its tenets after the Lollard creed was nailed to the door of St Pauls in 1395 and Richard II vowed to hang all Lollards.  

For two more generations Lee remained with the Sturys until 1438 when another Sir Richard gave the manor to his mother Lady Katherine Stury who had lived there since about 1425 when she presented a rector to the church and, rather intriguingly, allowed oxen to be taken from a neighbour²¹.

In 1445 she gave Lee and Shroffold manors to Sir Richard Wydville whilst appearing to remain at Lee until October 1452 (and perhaps beyond) when she presented another rector to Lee church²².  

Lee, Bankers and Shroffold

Records often describe the manors of Lee, Bankers and Shroffold together.   In general terms Lee Manor included Lee parish (other than land east of Burnt Ash Lane which was in Eltham manor and belonged to the Crown); and much of what is now St Swithun Hither Green nearly as far as Lewisham High Street along to Brownhill Road.

Bankers was essentially within Lewisham from near the police station to the Deptford boundary in Brookmill Road; the top of Loampit Vale; along the hillcrest to Brockley; the Bankhurst Road area near Ladywell Recreational area; and to the police station again by the river.

Shroffold was from what used to be the Tigers Head at Southend to the Bromley boundary; via Beckenham Place Park; the present borough boundary from Downham to Shroffolds Wood at Grove Park and along Whitefoot Lane.   (These descriptions have been derived from Josephine Birchenough’s Some Farms and Fields in Lee, p1).

The Ryculfs

Prominent amongst families in the early 15^th century were the Ryculfs who came initially from Woolwich and had been established in Lee for at least a century and acquired property, including that of the de Lee family who disappear from the sparse historical record.

By 1450 Edmund Ryculf was Constable of Blackheath Hundred when the War of the Roses erupted.   Rather curiously he sympathised with the Cade rebellion of May 1450 when 5,000 rebels camped on the heath before invading London and was amongst many men of the area granted a pardon, being forced to receive it in February 1451 merely wearing a shirt²³.

1452 saw important gatherings on the heath: in February Richard Duke of York arrived from Wales to be met by the King with 15,000 men.   Then Henry VI pitched his pavilion on the heath when preparing to confront his cousin Edward (later Edward IV) who had camped near Dartford.    Such important gatherings created pressures and there were hints of turmoil in the area as very shortly after Lady Stury’s appointment of a Rector in October 1452, the Ryculf brothers (Thomas and Edmund) transferred property to Edmund’s son-in-law Robert Elwyn and two others (including John Ripon, a serjeant at arms in 1459)²⁴.   Within three weeks Thomas had died and his will bequeathed his best hooded gown of “Musterde Villers” “furred” with beaver to his brother – a reminder perhaps of Edmund’s freezing incident of the previous year.   To his son he gave all his armour²⁵.

The final mention of a Ryculf was in 1473 when John Riculf (Edmund’s son) delivered Smthesland (at what is now Leegate) to Robert Ripon²⁶.

Robert Elwyn (alias Ripon)

For 25 more years Robert Elwyn (Edmund Ryculf’s son-in-law) added land to that acquired by the Ryculf’s to create what became Lee Farm.   By 1469 he had altered his surname to Ripon to perhaps gain legal benefit from property acquired earlier with a John Ripon.  By his will of 1500 Robert Ripon asked to be buried in the south side of Lee church’s chancel beneath a tomb engraved with his arms and that of his wife ²⁷.

Landscape in the 15^th century

Lee church had a steeple by 1500 as wills of 1495 and 1503 gave funds for its repair²⁸.   Nearby was Rose Field²⁹ where the red rose could have been cultivated for the nominal rent Thomas Bankwell paid his parents for the estate transferred to him in 1306.    Perhaps the ancient manor house stood by the church until the Bankwell’s built a modern house in the valley to attract the attention of the monarch when visiting Eltham.  This addition to the landscape tends to be confirmed by the drastic angles (now Old Road) the highway from Lewisham made to skirt the house and resume its course to Lee Green.

Liberally scattered in Lee were crofts (hedged enclosures) which included Crab Croft (at modern Melrose Close, Burnt Ash Hill) and others.   Majotsgrove feasibly became Magget’s field which survived into the 18^th century to the north east of Lee Green.

Hedges and trees along boundary ditches defended land from people and grazing animals: Bohemian travellers in 1466 saw that “peasants dig ditches round their fields and so fence them in that no one can pass them on foot or on horseback except by the main roads”³⁰.   An important highway in this respect was Wood Street³¹, now Burnt Ash Road, which marked the division between Lee and Eltham manors.   It was quite likely an ancient right of way as its northward line from Lee Green (now Lee Road) marked Lee’s parish boundary.

Wood Street’s name suggests it led to woodland and by 1500 it is surprising to discover that a mere 10% of land in Lee, Bankers and Shroffold was wooded.   A 1492 survey of 580 acres in Lee defined 50 acres as being woodland³².   And a comparison with a more general assessment in 1425 suggests that arable land accounted for about half of land use with pasture increasing from land previously used as meadow and woodland³³.   By the 1490s there may have been about 200 acres of woodland in the three manors, including about 100 acres in Lee.

Horn Park

The above figures were for Lee manor etc.   Lee parish included an additional area  east of modern Burnt Ash Road, within Eltham Manor, which incorporated the western half of Horn Park – a deer park created for Eltham Palace by Richard II (reigned 1377-99)³⁴.   If any ancient residence stood at Westhorne (rents were paid from there in 1384³⁵) it could have been converted into the hunting lodge.   A subsequent keeper was James Pemberton, Edward IV’s sergeant and chamber groom, who was paid 4d a day in 1482.

Land use was varied.   In addition to deer (managed until 1649), the keeper pastured cattle and grazed pigs on acorns and beech nuts³⁶ ; and areas of land remained cultivated such as a strip of marshy fields beside the highway to Eltham near Lee Green³⁷.   The park’s boundary, defined by what is now Eltham Road; Burnt Ash Road; Winn Road (generally) and Mottingham Lane, bounded about 350 acres, the size of the medieval walled City of London.

Wydvilles (or Woodvilles)

It has long been suggested that Elizabeth Wydville (future Queen of England) was born and brought up at Lee.   However, the historical record indicates her birthplace was more likely Grafton, Northamptonshire and whilst her father, Sir Richard Wydville, acquired the land of Lee manor as early as 1425, the manorial rights and privileges were acquired in 1445³⁸.   And Lady Katherine Stury was living at Lee  when Elizabeth was already 8 years old.   Additionally it seems unlikely that her mother (of royal blood) would have given birth in the relatively humble habitation of Lee manor – particularly if her husband was yet to become its Lord.

However, Lee had a degree of importance.   Conveniently situated between the palaces of Eltham (occupied by the King) and Greenwich (the Duke of Gloucester etc) it adjoined Blackheath, an important site for royal pageants and rebel masses.   Despite Sir Richard having seven daughters, Lee was inherited by the eldest stepson rather than being included within a dowry.   Whether the Wydvilles lived there after 1445 is uncertain and it is significant that Edward IV’s famous meeting with Elizabeth in 1464 happened at Grafton rather than Lee³⁹.   It seems likely, therefore, that a steward lived at Lee and the Wydvilles stayed there if (if ever) when circumstances made it convenient. 

1.  Muir, Ancient Trees Living Landscape (2005), p30
2.  Lee does not appear on Bromley’s boundary in Anglo Saxon charter of AD   862; it does appear in Textus Roffensis
3.  Domesday Book, Kent
4.  Keats-Rohan, Domesday Book (1999)
5.  Lewisham History Journal 1 and Drake’s Hasted p270 (D in future)
6.  D pp 77, 95 and 232
7.  D p232
8.  Transactions of the Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarian Society (GLAS), Volume 1 pp21, 140 and 379
9.  Ibid p215
10.  D p214
11.  Lay subsidy; D p280
12.  Bagshaw Directory of Kent, 1847
13.  Lay subsidy/Medieval Kentish Society, Kent Records (in Bromley library)
14.  National Archives (NA) Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem
15.  NA Calendar Patent Rolls and Calendar Fine Rolls
16.  NA Calendar Patent Rolls
17.  Godfrey Smith, Hither Green, the Forgotten Hamlet
18.  NA Calendar Patent Rolls
19.   D p215 and Froissart Chronicles iv
20.  English Historical Review, June 1998
21.  NA Early Chancery Proceedings, Bundle 11 Number 349
22.  D p216n
23.  D p55n
24.  D pp 216 and 232
25.  www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/research/libr/wills
26.  NA Calendar Ancient Deeds 4977
27.  D p210
28.  D p233
29.  D p232
30.  Seward, War of the Roses (1995), p11
31.  NA Calendar Ancient Deeds A4972
32.  D p217n3; NA Calendar of Inq p.m. Richard, Earl of Rivers;
33.  D p216 n6
34.  English Heritage, Eltham Palace (2011) p38
35.  D p177n
36.  Charles Cesar, Survey of the Three Parks (1710)
37.  NA Calendar Ancient Deeds A4972 etc
38.  NA Calendar of Close Rolls
39.  Edward Halle, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (1550)

Tudor Lee (1485-1603)

Lee attracted the attention of Henry VIII who in 1512 gained Lee, Bankers and Shroffold from Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset (Elizabeth Wydville’s grandson).   With woods to be enclosed before the land was relinquished¹, access would have been effectively denied to a substantial proportion of Lee’s working inhabitants who needed to seek grazing, timber and fuel elsewhere.  

The enclosure suggests Henry had particular reasons for the acquisition.   When Henry’s Bailiff, William Hatcliffe, was made Verderer or Woodward for the Eltham parks (including Horn Park)² the intention was to create conditions for the pursuit of deer – an important pleasure for Henry.   Secondly, the King established Deptford’s royal dockyard in 1513 and Lee’s woodland would have been available to help build ships.   That additional woodland was created is indicated in about 1550 when Edward VI granted to Thomas, Lord Seymour, 248 acres of woodland in Shroffold, which was a massive increase from the 30 acres recorded in 1492³.  

The Hatcliffe’s

William Hatcliffe (1472-1519) was a trusted member of the King’s household being a Clerk to the Green Cloth (i.e. a member of the Royal Exchequer).    Whether he lived at Lee is a moot point: in 1518 he did dine with the Pope’s legate at Rushey Green Place, Lewisham and journeyed with him to Blackheath and then London.

His elder brother Thomas (1470-1540) is more likely to have lived at the moated manor house at Lee.   Thomas, a Master of the Household and then a Clerk to the Green Cloth, had married his brother William’s stepdaughter Ann Leigh.   Descendants of Thomas’ family lived at Lee for another generation and his brother-in-law, Nicholas Leigh (of the King’s household), was appointed bailiff in 1516 and established a strong property interest in Shroffold⁴.    John and Oliver Leigh (Keepers of Horn Park in 1600 and 1607) could have been descendants.   Rather curiously a map of 1578 identified the dwelling of “Mr Leigh his man” (i.e. a servant) in Eltham Road⁵.

Court Rolls

Court rolls for 1525-9 and 1546 give tantalising glimpses into Tudor Lee⁶.   Annual Courts were held at Lee manor where the visiting Steward, Surveyor and servants enjoyed meat, drink and lodging with hay and fodder for the horses.

The amount of business suggests Lee’s population was limited and particularly law abiding.   Yet there was a degree of liveliness: a yeoman of the guard hit the chaplain with a cane hard enough to make him bleed.   The chaplain, John Robynson, returned the compliment with stones and a weighted club.

Despite its modest size, Lee had at least four alehouses that sold drink and victuals.    One stood in a place that became Alehouse Field by 1607 and on which the Manor House, Old Road, was built in the 18^th century. 

Lee’s nearness to Eltham and Greenwich Palaces increased its attractiveness and court members (spearheaded by Thomas Hatcliffe) purchased property and decided to live there.   Specific evidence is sparse in Henry’s reign – there was, however, Henry Byrde, a chamber valet and provider of the King’s bows and arrows who acquired land from a Gentleman of the King’s Chapel in 1542⁷ and was commemorated by a brass in Lee church.   Houses gathered by the manor house which, in the 19^th century, were discovered to have stone arches and mullions embedded in their walls⁸. 

Edward VI (1547-53)

Edward was desperate to have a Protestant England with church roods removed and Prayer Books printed in English.   Lee church was resistant.   An inventory in 1552 revealed that in addition to satin vestments; silk cushions for the altar; three candlesticks; and many more items, the church retained a “grete stone that was before thighe alter” and “a painted clothe upon the roode loft with Jesus in the midst”.   There were, additionally, three bells in the steeple and “a bere to bere the dede upon”⁹.

Mary (1553-8)

Mary’s reign was bespattered with casualties.   Henry Duke of Suffolk, who had 38 acres in Lee (in addition to barns, stables and pigeon houses) was beheaded and his land given to a groom of the larder¹⁰.   And Sir Richard Darcy, steward of the manor in 1550¹¹, was similarly despatched despite service during Wyatt’s rebellion of 1554 when rebels against Mary camped at Blackheath.   Unwisely, he signed the device in 1553 that declared Mary illegitimate and Lady Jane Grey the true heir to the throne.

Lee, with other manors, was regarded as a resource for the monarch’s pleasure and because of a great decline in game (hare, pheasant, partridge, mallard and heron) in the Greenwich area (Lee was specifically mentioned), Mary ordered inhabitants to avoid hawking or hunting and instead make every effort to increase game for their majesties’ pleasure¹².   Whether her wishes were observed is another matter.

During her reign, Mary appointed keepers of the woods for Bankers and Shroffold rather than Lee¹³.   Perhaps Bankers and Shroffold were developed primarily for woodland whilst Lee generated income from farming rents.

Elizabeth (1558-1603)

Lee flourished in Elizabeth’s reign and members of the royal court, actors, and craftsmen were attracted there¹⁴.   A sense of stability came from the Rector, Robert Hale (previously a Canon of Lesnes) who survived from 1526, before the establishment of the Church of England, until 1567 using perhaps a combination of personal astuteness and reluctance amongst inhabitants to abandon the old religion.   A relic could have been Hokum Pokum Lane (now Weardale Road) where a Catholic celebration such as Rogationtide may have been held.

By Elizabeth’s reign the woods had matured and Peter Pett, a Deptford shipwright, was permitted to fell timber in the Eltham parks, including Horn Park, in 1586¹⁵.    Before then, in 1578, a group had entered Horn Park at night “cut down a tree, brake down a range of pale and brought in a cart”.   They included the son of the Queen’s trumpeter at Eltham¹⁶.   From 1599 the Park’s Keepers included Sir Thomas Walsingham, cousin of the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and patron to Christopher Marlowe.   He lived at Scadbury Manor near Chislehurst and would appear again in Lee’s history.

Elizabeth’s reign brought in parish registers which revealed Lee church’s attraction for court members whether they lived in the village or elsewhere.   These included Pearsiphall Platt “p’teyninge to the Court” who married a Lee woman; Thomas Samson (of the Queen’s Chapel); John Toune of London (player)*; Richard Laynam (another of her Majesty’s players); and William Warde (yeoman of her Majestie’s Pastrie) who settled and raised a family in Lee.

*This was almost certainly the same John Toune (or Towne), an actor in the Queen’s Men, who in 1587 killed another actor in self-defence at Thame, Oxfordshire.   A tenuous suggestion has been that this sudden gap in the cast list gave William Shakespeare the chance to join the travelling company.   John Toune had two sons christened at Lee in 1586 and 1589.

The registers record the beginning of Lee’s black history when Cornelius “a blackamore” was buried at Lee in 1593.   At that period the term referred to people of African origin and he was probably brought from there as a slave.

Annesley family

Cornelius would have served a wealthy family of which the Annesley’s were prominent with three families living in Lee by the 1590s: brothers Nicholas and Bryan (whose father had been a servant to Henry VIII); and from 1596 their cousin’s son James.

It was Nicholas Annesley’s (c.1535-1593) marriage to Thomas Hatcliff’s daughter, Isabell, that brought them to Lee.   Isabell lived until 1582 and Nicholas to 1593 and whose brass had a verse:

When ye Quene Elizabeth full five yeres had raind,

Then Nicholas Ansley, whos Corps lyes here interred,

At five and twenty yeres of age was entertayn’d

In to her servis, where well him self he carred

In eche man’s love till fifty and eight yeres ould,

Being Sergeant of her seller, Death him then countroul’d.

Nicholas’ brother Bryan (?-1604) had acquired land in Lee from at least 1564, becoming lessee of Lee and Kidbrook manors in 1587¹⁷ and lived with his wife Audrey in the old manor house previously occupied by the Hatcliffe’s.   Bryan’s wealth was generated from a monopoly on imported steel (which he leased to others); a monopoly on trading rabbit skins; and the slave trade (his crest included a “Blackmore”) and was a friend and legatee of Sir John Hawkins who raided Africa for slaves in the 1560s.   Additionally he was a gentleman pensioner to Queen Elizabeth for 30 years and a governor of Lewisham’s Free Grammar School founded in 1574¹⁸.

Visitors included a cousin from Newport Pagnell whose son James Annesley married Mrs Mary Todd of Lee in September 1591.   Again the charm of Lee prevailed as they settled there until James burial in 1606, sadly after the death of two of his sons.

Lampmead and Burnt Ash

Since the Middle Ages a lamp had illuminated Lee church – to alleviate the gloom and perhaps act as a beacon for travellers on Blackheath.   Funded by income from a field given by an unknown benefactor; Lampmead was first mentioned (as Lampfelde) in the 1504 will of William Carpenter¹⁹ and then included in William Hatcliffe’s will of 1518²⁰ before his great-nephew William’s put rentals to the church’s general income in 1620²¹.   Lampmead was roughly in the area of what is now Northbrook School rather than Lampmead Road!

By 1560 hints of industry emerge when Greenwich potters dug clay from Little Margaret field (later Maggett’s field) near Lee Green²².   There were further developments in south Lee where Burntashfield was mentioned in 1596²³ and Burnt Ash Lane (previously Wood Street) in 1608²⁴.   Modern thought suggests the name Burnt Ash referred to charcoal burning, which was feasible in Lee’s coppices.   However, an alternative was that the name derived from brick and tile making which required substantial amounts of sea coal ashes to be burnt with brickearth.   The latter was certainly available as claypits were dug there in subsequent centuries (modern Marvels Lane was previously called Claypit Lane).   A final observation is that bricks were normally made in a field (hence the reference to Burntashfield) whereas charcoal making was essentially a woodland activity and woodland remained a resource subject to the enforcement of Elizabethan laws.

1.  NA Calendar Ancient Deeds Vol IV A6220
2.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic 1172:12 & D p220
3.  D p220
4.  Ibid
5.  NA SP15/25
6.  NA SC2/181/42
7.  D p59n
8.  D p231 n13
9.  Arch. Cantiana Volume 9
10.  NA Calendar Patent Rolls
11.  NA Calendar Patent Rolls 1557
12.  NA Calendar Patent Rolls 1556
13.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic
14.  Parish registers
15.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic
16.  Ibid
17.  D p222
18.  D p268
19.  D p233
20.  D p226
21.  Ibid
22.  D p215
23.  D pp136 and 233
24.  D p233 (2^nd column)

17^th CENTURY LEE

Bryan Annesley

On 18 October 1603 Bryan Annesley was visited by his son-in-law Sir John Wildgose, with permission from Lord Cecil, to make an inventory of Annesley’s belongings.   The stated reason was that Annesley had “fallen into such imperfection and distemperature of mind and memory, as we thought him thereby become altogether unfit to govern himself or his estate”¹.

Fortunately Bryan’s youngest daughter, Cordell kept Sir John at bay for 5 days which forced Lord Cecil to send a larger party consisting of Sir Thomas Walsingham (of Scadbury Manor); James Croftes (who had been Comptroller of the Queen’s household); and Samuel Lennard who between them “sealed up all such chests and trunks of evidence and other things of value”.   That Lord Cecil was to decide who should care for the old man prompted a letter from Cordell suggesting that Sir John Wildgose wanted “her poor aged and daily dying father” to be “begged for a lunatic”.   She felt his long service to Queen Elizabeth deserved better and that Sir James Crofte should care for him as a person “who from love of him and his children will take charge of him and his estate, without intention of benefit to himself”.

In 1600 Bryan had willed the majority of his estate to Cordell, rather than her elder sisters, and shortly after his death in July 1604 Grace and Christian contested the will suggesting he was senile when he made it.   Fortunately he had not been registered insane and Cordell was able to inherit the estate².

Whether it was intrigue (as suggested by Lord Cecil’s interest) or greed there is a similarity to Shakespeare’s King Lear with its theme of a third daughter’s love for her aged father.   Whilst the play was ancient, the celebrity of the Annesley case possibly prompted Shakespeare’s version in 1606 with its heroine Cordelia.

The names could be coincidence.    A more substantial fact was that Cordell’s husband Sir William Harvey (they married in February 1607 before moving from Lee and leasing the house) was the stepfather, from a previous marriage, to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton (1573-1624), an early patron of Shakespeare³.

Several of the Queen’s players had lived or visited Lee and there was a possible link with the bard’s business partners, the Burbages, who ran the Globe and Rose theatres.   John and An Burbage * were married at Lee in 1587 and buried there in 1604 and 1609.    A week after An’s burial a master Burbage brought his daughter to be baptised at Lee church on 6 August and when Rebecca was married in Lee church nineteen years later, she was recorded as having come from St Saviour’s Southwark, where the theatres stood.   By then Robert Burbage (citizen and embroiderer of London) had acquired a cottage in Lee from Sir Nicholas Stoddard (a Catholic recusant) and could have been a relative⁴.   The Southwark link is interesting.

*John Burbage of Chislehurst married Anne Myddleton on October 12 1587 at Lee.

There was a tragic addendum to the Annesley tale when, in the 18^th century, James Annesley was kidnapped as a boy and put into slavery on the River Delaware plantations.   After 13 years of servitude he returned to England to claim a peerage with estates worth £50,000 p.a..   Acquitted of a false charge of murder, he died, before being able to claim the title, in obscurity at Lee in 1760⁵.   Sir Walter Scott is alleged to have used these events as the story for Guy Mannering.

Landscape

The deer park at Horn, which adjoined Lee Manor, remained a prominent feature and people who ventured to look through the 8 foot high paling would have seen a heavily wooded landscape (12 trees an acre) with 240 deer (including 60 stags)⁶.   To prevent the pursuit of such temptations, James I insisted that hunting laws be used “with all severity” against poachers in the Eltham parks⁷.   As it happened, the Chief Ranger, the king’s physician, preferred to stay in his London house and the work was done by the underkeeper Richard Slynn of Eltham.   Such duties stayed with the family as Thomas Slynn was the last Keeper of Horn Park in 1649.

James I was a keen rider and in 1622 hunted in a new deer park created by Sir Nicholas Stoddard in south Lee⁸.   When the King requested the park to be enlarged by a further 100 acres Sir Nicholas emparked woods etc with paling.   It was when he decided to chop down 65 acres of trees that a warrant was issued to prevent further damage⁹   as he had removed about 10% of the woodland from the King’s estate of Lee, Bankers and Shroffold where 565 wooded acres were recorded in 1633¹⁰ compared to 92 in 1492.

Shroffold was particularly wooded.  Lee on the other hand had two areas of woodland:

• Lee Wood of 36 acres on the Crown estate was in the area now covered by the railway and Hither Green Goods sidings.   Its alias as Bunting Wood suggests it was used for buildings and perhaps the dockyards (“bunting” referred to “strong timber”); and
• Hookes Wood, Lee Farm, of about 40 acres in the area between Burnt Ash Road and Manor Lane from Taunton Road running south to St Mildred’s Road.   A possible interpretation of “hook” (from many) is that of a curved instrument for cutting branches which suggests firewood and everyday uses.   Hookeswood was indeed used as coppice¹¹.

Incursions were made into the woodland.   In addition to Stoddard’s felling of 65 acres from “good woodland to ill pasture”, William Cawsten, a yeoman, let cattle and horses graze in 100 acres of Hookeshaw and other Lee woods in 1634 where coppice and woodland were spoiled¹².   In 1608 Sir William Withens legally granted permission for timber to be felled on Lee Farm¹³. And elsewhere woodland held by Trinity Hospital was felled.    This became a theme of the century:  the use of woodland for quick profit before becoming farmland.

Other resources were used: from about 1630 natural springs in modern Lee Park (near Blackheath) supplied large houses in the Manor House area with running water via lead conduits from a reservoir¹⁴.   And in the north an “old ruinate house” stood on the Rectory site¹⁵ and archery was (or had been) practised in the area as a Butt Lane (alias Lee Lane) ran south of the Rectory.

Charities

In the early 17^th century Lee benefitted from and contributed to charities.

William Hatcliffe, the grand nephew of Thomas Hatcliffe and Anne Leigh (who had lived at the manor house nearly a century earlier) was particularly important.   A lawyer of the Inner Temple he bequeathed in 1620 one half of profits from land in Greenwich to its poor with the other half shared between the poor of Lee and Lewisham.   In addition, he gave Lamp Mead to the church of Lee for ever¹⁶.

On the other hand it was profits from land in Lee (and elsewhere) that enabled Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, to found Trinity Hospital in 1613 at Greenwich to aid twelve poor men of Greenwich and eight poor men of his native town of Shottisham in Norfolk¹⁷.   Hospital funds helped purchase more land in Lee in the 1640s and when the Mercers Company became Trustees for the charity, the name “College” became attached to the properties: hence College Farm which faced Crab Croft in Burnt Ash Land.   In addition there was Trinity College land near the bottom of Belmont Hill between Lockmead and Boyne Roads¹⁸. 

Charles I

In 1632 Charles I granted Lee, Bankers and Shroffold to Ralph Freeman of Aspeden for £87 10s 2d annual rent¹⁹.   Ralph (married to the daughter of a London clothworker), was on the East India Company Committee; knighted; and Lord Mayor of London in 1633.   The estate remained with his family for about 150 years – despite them living elsewhere.  His daughter married George Sondes, the 1^st Earl of Feversham, a royalist and Deputy Lieutenant of Kent 

The King, retained the right to appoint Lee’s Rector in addition to keeping Horn Park where tension was apparent in 1640 when a “fat buck” was supplied for the Queen’s Chancellor.   Attached to the warrant was a letter which stated: “If any keeper shall be slack in serving your warrants I shall propose a way soon to bring him to conformity”²⁰.   People had become reluctant to always support Court requirements.

Civil War and Commonwealth

Lee was now increasingly inhabited by Parliamentarians and the Eltham Parks (including Horn Park) were particularly affected by the Civil War.   After the monarch’s despatch in 1649 the poorer people, with Parliamentary soldiers, “tore down the fences that enclosed the Royal Parks, killed the deer, laid waste the gardens and pleasure grounds and ransacked the palace”²¹.

In July Colonel Nathaniel Rich arrived with Parliamentary troops to defend Royal property which Parliament had retained for state use and to preserve the deer²².   Timber was needed for shipbuilding at Deptford and Woolwich and a survey in 1649 marked 1,700 trees in Horn Park for the Navy with another 2,620 recorded as old and decayed²³.   The deer had either been eaten or escaped.

By 1651 Colonel Rich had purchased much of the Eltham estate and in 1655 the Navy Commissioners discovered “great embezzlement” after he felled and used trees that had been identified for the navy²⁴.   Very quickly all of Horn Park’s woods were converted to farmland.

Whilst this was happening, Lee’s Rector, Abraham Sherman, remained loyal to the Crown.   Instituted under the King’s patronage in 1633, his brothers worked at Greenwich’s Royal Armoury and a sister married the King’s farrier²⁵.   In 1633 he rebuilt the cramped Lee Rectory into a more comfortable building with 10 rooms.   And the “tumults and insurrections” in Kent of May 1648 confirmed his royalist links, when he attempted to appease the situation²⁶.   On Saturday 27 May he appeared at Derby House at 5 pm to inform the Parliamentarian Committee there that he had met several commanders in the area who had assured him they would be quiet if they had indemnity for their actions.   The House instructed him:

….to declare to those lately risen about Greenwich and Deptford, that the Houses have lately published a declaration concerning petitioners to be brought to the Houses, that when they have delivered up the towns, magazines and arms which they have seized, and shall be retired peaceably to their houses, they may bring and present a petition to the Houses, according to that declaration.   You shall also declare to them,that upon their disbanding and departing home quietly to their houses before 2 o’clock tomorrow morning they shall have indemnity for what is passed.

He presumably passed on the message yet the Kentish insurrection continued.   He died in 1654 and was buried in Lee church.

Sherman’s replacement, William Heicocks (1628-1670) was appointed in 1655 by the Commissioners for the Approbation of Public Preachers and quickly adjusted to village life by marrying the stepdaughter of George Thomson who lived at Lee Place (the medieval manor house).   With Thomson being a prominent member of Cromwell’s Council of State, the marriage conveniently brought Lee Place and Lee Rectory together in a way that paralleled the modern politics and religion.

Colonel George Thomson (1603-1690) had lived in the village since the 1640s with children baptised there.   An enterprising adventurer, he had travelled to Virginia in 1623 with his brothers to achieve incredible success there, creating wealth from schemes that included plantations using slave and indentured workers.   His decision to buy property in Lee could be linked to the Virginia Company (founded in 1606) as a Raph Freeman of that Company died in Virginia in 1624, shortly after George arrived.   Whilst a long shot it is possible that Raph was related to the Ralph Freeman who held Lee from 1632* and George learned about Lee from him.   And George’s niece, daughter of his brother Maurice, who too lived at Lee, married an Annesley²⁷ with their daughter marrying another Annesley.   It is tempting to think that such marriages strengthened business links between the Thomsons and other important Lee families of Freeman and Annesley.

*As an assertion of Parliamentary power, the rents of Lee etc were sold by the Commonwealth in 1650 to William Jones of Canterbury for £747 6s 5d which returned to the descendants of the Freeman family on the Restoration²⁸.

George Thomson returned to England during the 1640s (as, it seems, did Maurice) perhaps due to Parliamentarian beliefs or the chance to create more wealth.   He has been described as one of four brothers who were “Presbyterian merchants prominent in the service of the Commonwealth”²⁹.   With a wooden leg (after action at the battle of Tiverton in 1644) he was a distinctive character in the village.   In 1647 he was elected MP for Southwark and became a Councillor of State 1651-3 and 1659-60.   Under suspicion for disaffection in 1661 he made his peace with the Government and was put on the Brooke House Committee in 1668.

It was suggested that George Thomson and Heicocks were included in the Fifth Monarchy Movement of the 1650s which held strong beliefs (essentially the establishment of a Fifth Monarchy as foreseen in the Old Testament, after which Christ would reign, with abolishment of the monarchy and Church of England hierarchy)³⁰.   Yet such beliefs were inconsistent with his reconciliation to the restored monarchy and were more likely gossip.    Another suggestion in 1650 was quite revealing.   Visiting Virginia on business a colleague told his wife there that George had been unfaithful – which rather suggests widow Elizabeth Tufnayle, by whom he had a family in Lee, was his mistress rather than his wife.   He died in 1690, living then at Clerkenwell, Middlesex, when his wife’s name was Abigail: which rather suggests he remarried.

George’s brother Maurice (1600-1676) had sailed to Virginia when he was 18 and established a multitude of business interests on either side of the Atlantic.   These included a sugar works in Barbados and a presumed involvement in the slave trade with links to African Guinea being by1649 a partner in the Guinea Company of London.  

Unsurprisingly Lee was one of several places where he lived (Lee House) or held property.   Others were generally in London to which he added the manor and entire parish of Elsham in Lincolnshire in 1655.

Another Parliamentarian, Colonel Leonard Lydcott had children baptised at Lee in 1646-7³¹ and it was obvious the village had gathered an important group of Parliamentarian sympathisers.

After the Restoration

Such sympathy aroused interest after the monarchy’s restoration when in the autumn of 1661 a government spy (Edward Potter) described congregations at Lee church³².   Heicocks happened to be absent on Sunday 22 September, when Caleb Trenchfield (who had established a school in Eltham) used the phrase “Because iniquity shall abound the love of many shall wax cold” to develop a theme which Potter felt contained “dangerous matter against the present government of the country”.

On the subsequent Sunday Potter found a group of gentlemen of “good station” from Lee and nearby towns who, despite having previously been punished for it, persevered in coming to Lee.   In addition to Colonels Thompson, Lydcott and Blount (of Wricklemarsh, a nouveau riche City radical) there was Major Offeley; Mr Antony Webster; Mr Robert Probet; Mr Robert Edmonds (perhaps a member of a prominent Lewisham family); Mr Thomas Randall; Mr Captain Clarke (perhaps a member of Cromwell’s Council of State); and two others likely to have been Lee inhabitants (William Springett and William Constable).   Heicock appeared restrained as the sermon was unremarkable.

However, three weeks later Heicocks invited to the pulpit people who, in Potter’s view, “are disallowed in other places to come to that place to preach seditious doctrine” and who he concluded were dangerous.   A Sunday later a yet more important sermon (by an unnamed visitor to the pulpit) encouraged the congregation to not delay in pursuing positive action.

Potter saw that visiting preachers were usually invited to stay the night at the “richly furnished” Rectory (Heicocks seems to have acquired material from the royal palaces at Eltham and Greenwich) with a feast and where there was “much argument at times”.   Potter’s view (biased necessarily) was that there was increasing danger from the movement which Colonels Thompson and Blount and others encouraged.   He thought that these men may be keeping arms and stabling horses and adherents were told that “a man may as well go into harvest without his sickle, as to his work without his sword”.   Tensions were apparent as Lewisham’s Minister was much abused by Heicock’s supporters who “will not come to him but all run to Lee”.

That autumn Blount and Thompson were briefly imprisoned and Colonel Leonard Lydcott was detained in Lambeth Palace gatehouse until March of the subsequent year when he was released due to ill health.   Whilst congregations at Lee church continued to give concern, Potter felt “that things will remain peaceful as long as their worship is not disturbed”.

Heicock’s ministry ceased on 24 August 1662 when 1,800 clergy were ejected from their living.   He returned to Bermondsey Street and took up residence at the family brewery and joined the Independents who worshipped at Jamaica Road.   He formed a partnership with the Rev James Janeway who courageously remained at his work during the Great Plague of 1665*.   Heicocks died in 1670 at the age of 42.

*Despite missing the Plague’s devastation of 1665, Lee’s parishioners (including any who fled their London residences) gathered £4 6s 10d “for ye relief of those whom God visited with ye plague”³³.

There were important changes now that the Crown connection had, as it were, been severed.   Horn Park rapidly became farmland and the hunting lodge “part pulled down and part made into a farmhouse …. and another farmhouse adjacent erected”³⁴ at what is today the junction of Horncastle and Alnwick Roads.   It could have been now that Lee Green Farm was established at what is currently Leegate shopping centre.

George Thomson occupied Lee Place (his daughter Mary was married at Lee church in 1668) and, with his brother Maurice, made peace with the government.   In 1662 Maurice leased Lee Farm and George was appointed a Commissioner of Accounts in 1667.   Indeed Pepys found him attentive to his business and “mighty kind” to the diarist in his work.

In other respects Lee returned to former ways.   From 1662, after Heicock’s departure, St Margaret’s regained its status for couples beyond Lee to get married and his replacement, the Reverend George Shaw, performed ceremonies in accordance with the Revised Book of Prayer.

And Lee retained its preponderance of large prestigious houses.   The 1664 Hearth Tax ³⁵ revealed Lee as an unusually wealthy village with 7 (25%) of its 28 hearthed houses having 10 or more hearths.   This compared to 2% of such sized houses in Kent and 8% in Eltham, Mottingham and Charlton.   60% in Lee had 5 or more hearths, including that of Sir John Lenthall whose brother was the Speaker of the House of Commons and who was a Marshal of the Kings Bench in Southwark and an active JP.

A lack of uninhabited houses confirmed Lee’s desirability and its inhabitants numbered about 190 (the Compton Survey of 1676 counted 114, including 24 non-conformists to which families’ younger members needed to be added).

George Thomson sold Lee Place to Christopher Boone, another merchant and a member of the governing body of the East India Company from 1660 to about 1676.   His American links perhaps included Daniel Boone.   Between 1679 -83 Boone and his wife were visited by the diarist John Evelyn (usually after a service at Lee church) who, evidently impressed, described Boone’s house as “a Cabinet of all elegancies, especially Indian” with Japanese screens in the hall “where an excellent Pendule-Clock inclosed in the flower work of Mr Gibbons in the midst of the Vestibule is very remarkable”.   There were paintings by Streeter in addition to gardens in which stood a plane tree that survived for another 200 years³⁶.   A later account described how:

The principal rooms of Lee Mansion were wainscot in oak and Spanish chestnut, carved and polished.   The hall was decorated with emblems of the chase and agriculture carved by Grinling Gibbons in festoons, which remained until the house was pulled down [in 1825].   It had been substantially built; its roof girders were solid oak-trees roughly squared by the adze³⁷.

To perpetuate their names, childless rich merchants tended to establish almshouses, which Boone did in Lee.   By the summer of 1682, according to Evelyn, he had “builded and endowed an Hospital” for poor people.   This ultimately consisted of 6 almshouses and a chapel built on waste ground adjoining his estate.   A schoolmistress taught 12 poor children of Lee to read and girls to sew, knit and mark; and accommodation was available for six poor elderly alms-people.  

The latter were Lee’s poorest men and women “who had led orderly lives, and supported themselves by their honest labour in their younger days, and could say the Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Ten Commandments”.   Required to attend Lee church twice on Sunday and Chapel every Monday and Thursday, they had the benefits of a wash house with an oven and other conveniences.   The wainscot chapel was furnished with a bell, a reading-place, desk, pews, seats and other accommodation.   Whilst the almshouses, which stood westwards from the chapel, were pulled down in 1877, the chapel remains in Lee High Road (and has been restored by the Blackheath Historic Buildings Trust).   Income was derived from land held in Lee and the fee-farm rent from the city of Hereford.

During the tumultuous 17^th century history, Lee Farm’s several holders included Francis Sherman, a member of the Royal Household who lived at Greenwich and had a brother instituted that year (1633) by the King as Lee’s Rector.   He leased the farm to Richard Slynn; Sir John Lenthall (who altered, repaired and built the farmhouse, barns and stables); and then to Maurice Thomson from 1662³⁸.   The farmhouse stood in 2 acres along with “other housing …. Yards Orchards and Gardens”.

In 1682 about half of Lee Farm was sold by Sherman’s nephews to Samuel Lewin who, unlike his predecessors, actually lived in the village on the site of the Manor House built in the 18^th century.   The farmer was Thomas Butler (d.1687) and until 1690 more than half (94 ½ acres) of the farm’s modest 178 ½ acres remained woodland.   However, in that year Lewin let the woods to Daniel Wolfe of Beckenham (a “collier” supplying coal, wood and charcoal for the London market) for 1,000 years in a lease that comprehensively let him “fell cut downe and also grubb dig up break up root …. take carry away convert and dispose of” the woodland³⁹.   By 1693 Wolfe had built a brick house on the land he had denuded, quite likely in the Burnt Ash area and by 1720 a mere 20 acres remained woodland.

It is reasonable to assume that Crown woods in Lee and Shroffold were felled alongside the private estates (the earliest maps reveal they had become farmland by the 1740s).   After the illegal yet generally minor incursions in the early 17^th century, large swathes of woodland were now legitimately felled for quick commercial gain and subsequent agricultural benefit.

1.  Calendar of Salisbury MSS Volume XV (copies at NA/HMC)
2.  NA probate/11/104 image references 742 and 1009
3.  www.rsc.org.uk
4.  Lewisham Local Studies and Archives (LLSA) A62/6/48
5.  D p235n and Lockhart’s Life of Scott
6.  D p180 1605 Survey
7.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic
8.  D pp193 and 241n2
9.  D p193
10.  LLSA A79/22/1 1633 Rental
11.  Josephine Birchenough Some Fields and Farms in Lee (1981) p129
12.  Kent Assizes July 1634; 1107 and 1108
13.  Birchenough op cit p24
14.  Birchenough op cit p31
15.  D p227 1634 Survey
16. .D p92
17.  D p90
18.  Neil Rhind and Birchenough op cit p28
19.  D p220
20.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic
21.  Lysons or Eltham in the Making
22.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic
23.  D p182
24.  D p183
25.  Lewisham History Journal 9
26.  NA Calendar State Papers Domestic Volume DXVI
27.  Birchenough, Two Manor Houses in Lee, p14
28.  D p220n
29.  www.pepysdiary.com
30.  Birchenough, The Manor House Lee and its Associations (1971), p12 and Alfred W Wood, Fifth Monarchists in Lee, LHJ Number 9 (2001)
31.  Parish registers
32.  Lewisham History Journal 9 and NA Calendar State Papers Domestic SP29 volumes II and III
33.  Notes in parish register
34.  Charles Cesar, Survey of the Three Parks, 1710
35. 1664 Hearth Tax (copy at LLSA)
36.  Diary 30 July 1682 and D p223
37.  D p222
38.  LLSA A62/6/4
39.  LLSA A62/6/44

18^th CENTURY LEE

After the tumult of the 17^th century Lee regained a degree of stability and by 1719 was:

….finely situated at a due distance from London and ‘tis as well inhabited by Persons of Fashion only, who as they are all to a Man hearty Friends of King George, the Church of England, and the Protestant Succession, so they live in an entire Friendship and good Correspondence one with another¹

Being near London’s rapid commercial development yet safe from its pestilence and hoi polloi, Lee’s wealthy arrivals brought important qualities.  First, they converted money into landed leisure by improving village properties.

Second, they developed enlightened ideas of the period. Some were famous in their day: Will Pate, a woollen draper “remarkable for his learning and good nature”² was visited by Jonathan Swift in 1710; and Sir Edmund Halley was buried in Lee churchyard.   Additionally, Sir Thomas Fludyer (of Lee House) was a former President of the Royal Society who helped establish in 1758 with his brother Samuel (of Dacre House) the Magdalen House charity for Penitent Prostitutes; and a significant number of Lee inhabitants had links with Guys Hospital founded in 1724.   In a more general way, Nature was nurtured with landscaped gardens (e.g.  at Manor House and Lee House) and the implementation of more efficient farming methods.

The result was a double order within the parish neatly encapsulated by two early 18^th century public houses.   The Huntsman³ (perhaps near the Lewisham area of Lee High Road) hinted at the conspicuous (hunting jacket) rural leisure aspired to by wealthy Londoners.   On the other hand the Plough⁴represented the physicality of creating wealth from the land and where farm workers quite likely quenched their thirst.   Lee’s agricultural workforce felt the effect of improved agricultural methods as by 1801 a modest 13% (44 individuals) of Lee inhabitants worked on the land⁵.

Farmers did, however, flourish: particularly the Butler family.   Thomas Butler (c.1676-1735) worked Lee and Lee Manor Farms near the village before living at the brick and tile house at Burnt Ash Farm.  His son James (1718-1762), lived at Lee Manor Farm, a large three-storey building later redesigned as a gentleman’s residence at what became the junction of Manor Lane and Old Road.   James’ farms were then worked by his elder brother Matthew (1714-1784) a prominent farmer of Burnt Ash, Horn Park and Lee Green Farms⁶.

Living alongside the farm community were inhabitants of the seven large houses that had been present in Lee since at least the 17th century: five by the moat; one on the hill near the church and another west of the church.   Frequently linked by family, business or political interests, the relationships of these families helped define village life.

Lee Place

By 1719 the mansion of the Annesleys was “quite ruined”⁷ with the Quaggy running alongside its wall and forming a moat to the south. This suggests that a more modern mansion called Lee Place was built within the land and which passed from Christopher Boone to his wife and then Thomas Boone (perhaps his cousin’s son) another East Indies trader who inherited curiosities that included diamonds, Japan cabinets, Goa stone, Pallenkeen, ivory figures, muslins and china ware⁸.   Thomas’s last days in 1748 (when he was 62) were recorded, rather succinctly, by a neighbour:

Poor Boone …. Was at church xmas day, at ye vestry on yr Monday, taken on Tuesday with a Paralytick and dyed on Wednesday Evening, an awefull exit⁹.

His illegitimate daughter Mary and husband Charles Cornforth improved the house before his mother joined them from Yorkshire.    Mary was accepted in the village and despite living at St George’s Hanover Square * when she died, was buried at Lee in 1772 as was her husband in 1775.   The house was then occupied by the Boone family until it was let in 1796 to Mr Benjamin Harrison, Treasurer of Guy’s Hospital who lived there until 1809.

*The vicar of St George’s Hanover Square, from 1774 was in fact Lee’s Rector (HR Courtenay) before he became Bishop of Bristol and then Exeter.    Several Lee inhabitants had links to this select parish with its vestry of 7 Dukes, 14 Earls, 7 Barons and 26 other titled persons¹⁰.

Dacre House

Increasingly more prominent than Lee Place was a large house on the east side of modern Brandram Road.    During the 18^th century it became a country residence for men of wealth and power in London.

After Sir John Lade (a Southwark brewer and MP for the Borough), it was occupied from 1743 by Sir Samuel Fludyer.   With a fortune made from wool he became a London Alderman (1751); MP for Chippenham (1754-68); and a baronet in 1759.   The pinnacle of his career, however, was as London’s Lord Mayor in 1761.   Being the first year of a royal reign his banquet was attended by the newly married George III who during the course of the festivities knighted his younger brother Thomas.   Sir Samuel’s grand wig inspired William Hogarth’s satirical engraving Five Orders of Periwig.

House improvements were made in about 1757, the year in which his first wife (Jane Clerke) died and in 1758 he married Caroline Brudenell¹¹ (painted in c.1772 by Gainsborough) who a neighbour observed was “a lady about thirty but little fortune high bred & [niece] of Lord Cardigans.   Tis a great luck for her, there is to be six horses to the coach and you may judge what a load of jewels for her by what ye have seen in his former ladys time”¹².

Abandoning non-conformist beliefs as he accumulated wealth, Sir Samuel built a palatial mansion at 17 Downing Street (at what is now the Foreign Office) in 1761.   From 1766 he was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England until his death in January 1768.   Buried in Lee churchyard his inscription described that:

By indefatigable industry and uncommon abilities, he carried the woollen manufacture of this Kingdom to the greatest heights¹³

He was, however, interred in linen rather than the material that made his fortune.   His legacies included a £900,000 fortune and a godson named after him – Sir Samuel Romilly, the famous law reformer.   After Sir Samuel the house transferred (briefly) to his brother Thomas.

It was Thomas’ daughter Mary who occupied the house from 1773 (after brief occupancies by General John  Carnac (MP and captain of the East India Company) and Henry Verelst (Governor of Bengal) – Lee really did have a select, if transient, group of inhabitants.   That was the year Mary married Trevor Charles Roper who became Lord Dacre in 1786 after which the property was called Dacre House.

After Lord Dacre died aged 49 in July 1794 Lady Dacre visited his grave at Lee churchyard every evening until 7.15 pm on 8 October 1804 when a ruffian pointed a pistol at her and demanded her watch and purse with 6 guineas.   Thereafter a footman escorted her to the churchyard gate¹⁴.

It was Lady Dacre’s “hospitable and charitable manner” that prompted Gillray’s portrait of her in 1802 sitting grandly in a carriage and entitled “A bouquet of the last century”¹⁵.   She had a genuine concern for the less fortunate, including the occupants of Boone’s almshouses that adjoined her estate to whom, in the hard winter of 1807, she gave warm gowns, red cloaks and “Quakerette” bonnets for the women and brown coats with large silver buttons for the men.   The ladies wore the cloaks for many years after her death “until they nearly turned from red to black in consequence of age”¹⁶.

She died at the house on 11 September 1808, aged 55, and was buried at Lee.   As the couple did not have children, the estate became the property of her husband’s relative Cadwallader Blaney Trevor Roper (1765-1832).

Ha-ha fences and dwarf thorn hedges bounded the Dacre House and Boone estates, the former of which was from Brandram Road in the west (then called Church Lane) to present day Lee Road.   The forerunner of Lee Terrace formed the northern boundary and the southern was defined by the Boone estate (marked by the northern garden walls on the north side of Fludyer Street).   Dacre House faced west with broad views and its large gardens, shrubberies and kitchen garden (with walls for fruit) included a detached billiards room, hothouses and greenhouses.

Lee House

In the angle of modern Old Road, where the Aislibie Road Institute and 2 Lenham Road’s garden stand, was a Tudor mansion with rush and clay partition walls.   Lee House may have been modernised during the boom period of the 1630s when nearby houses were built¹⁷.

From about 1738-1754 it was occupied by Sir George Champion (?-1754) who joined the rush from London where his family had been City merchants since the age of Elizabethan.   An Alderman; MP for Aylesbury; and knighted in 1736/7, he attempted to become Lord Mayor in 1739 and 1740.   He appears to have been happy at Lee where he married his third wife in 1743.   The property was willed to his illegitimate daughter Frances, perhaps because in 1742 his legitimate daughter Mary (1712-61) married Thomas Fludyer (c.1711-1769) – brother of Sir Samuel who in the subsequent year (1743) lived at what became Dacre House.

Apparently it was Mary and Thomas Fludyer who actually lived in Lee House (rather than Frances) in addition to London where their children were baptised at Bassishaw Ward.   However, family life was shortlived as in December 1761 Mary died and was buried at Lee.   Sir Thomas continued to live at Lee House and seems not to have remarried.   Perhaps his intellectual interests helped, being a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1767.   He died in 1769 at his London house at Hackney and like his brother was buried at Lee – in linen.

His only daughter Mary Jane Fludyer (1753-1808) would inherit the property when she was 21.   In fact she was 19 when she married Trevor Charles Roper on 2 January 1773 at Lambeth Palace Chapel and the couple lived at Dacre House, her late uncle Samuel’s house, rather than Lee House¹⁸.

By then Lee House had been acquired by Henry Pelham who virtually rebuilt it with a wine cellar, stables and coach houses.  The 12 acre gardens with trees, fruit trees and an ornamental water feature were interspersed with classical statues¹⁹.

Henry Pelham’s large family had strong links with 18^th century politics: the Duke of Newcastle was a relative; and his cousin, another Henry Pelham, was Whig Prime Minister 1743-1754 handling the Jacobite rebellion (see Papillon family).   His acquisition of Lee House came a year after his marriage to Jane, daughter of Nicholas Hardinge (antiquary and Secretary of the Treasury) and with a wife, splendid country house and financially rewarding work as a Commissioner of Customs, life would have felt secure.   He was an MP between 1754-8 and kept the house at Lee until his death in 1803.

The Manor House

What became the Manor House was built on Alehouse Field which by 1662 had two houses.   The smaller disappears from history and the larger became two dwellings joined by a common courtyard.   The eastern building was occupied by the Lewin family until William Coleman the younger acquired it in January 1744 to give to his father William Coleman the elder (1678-1771)²⁰.

Coleman the elder was a wealthy City merchant in the West Indian sugar trade with profits generated from slave labour.   He refrained from living in the eastern house until 1748 when its occupant Captain Limeburner* had departed.

*Captain Limeburner (1692-1750) led an adventurous life as a captain of the frigate Sea Horse in the West Indies, where he captured three privateer ships, and then became Captain of the Royal Yacht Fubbs.   Lee was a handy place to live (1744-48) when the yacht docked at Greenwich.    He and his wife were buried at Lee as was his biographer John Charnock, who prepared the Biographia Navalis.

Coleman regathered Lee property dispersed by Richard Lewin and created an estate comparable to that of the Dacres.   Given his age (and that he was a widower) he invested in the estate for the benefit of his nephew and business partner Thomas Lucas who inherited the bulk of it on Coleman’s death in December 1771, aged 93.

Shortly afterwards Thomas Lucas (1723-1784) demolished the house and replaced it with a mansion built in the modern classical style.   This currently stands as Lee Manor House – not called as such in his life.   It is described in Pevsner as an “elegant structure of brick”.   The architect was quite likely Richard Jupp who designed East India Company’s House in Leadenhall Street and Severndroog Castle on Shooters Hill.   Fires were lit every day after its completion in January 1773 to keep it warm and dry with the gardens considerably re-landscaped and a lake created by 1796 by redirecting the Quaggy’s natural course.   Ice from the lake was kept in the surviving ice house.

Of West country and Baptist origins, Thomas had three wives.   Ann and their infant daughter were buried at Lee on 18 February 1756.   In 1757 he married Mary who died in December 1776, aged 43, after “nineteen years of mutual endearment which death alone could dissolve” and was buried at Lee.   They did not have children.   His third wife, Emily, who survived him, was the daughter of the Rev Joseph Payne whose sister was the Dowager Countess of Northampton.   Their marriage in May 1778 was at St George’s Hanover Square.

A kindly man and President of Guy’s Hospital, Lucas was interested in parish politics and entered the national arena in 1780 as an MP for the pocket borough of Grampound, where he was succeeded by Francis Baring who ultimately purchased his house.   Thomas Lucas held Lee Farm to which he made improvements.   He died suddenly at Lee on 29 September 1784 and was buried in the family vault.   As he died without issue, the bulk of his estate was inherited by his wife who quickly (i.e. in October 1785) married John Julius Angerstein, a wealthy widower, and lived at his house – the Woodlands in Mycenae Road, Blackheath.

Thomas Lucas’ residuary legatee, Thomas Lucas Wheeler, was a Captain in the 100^th Regiment of Foot and died aged 35 in 1792 as a result of services in the East Indies.   He was buried at Lee.

From 1792 the house was let to Sir John Call, who had received his baronetcy the previous year.   Much of his early years were spent in India, including the 1761 siege of Pondicherry, and was strongly recommended by Clive for the Governorship of Madras before returning to England in 1766.   He helped found the bank Call, Marten & Co in Old Bond Street; was Treasurer to the Board of Agriculture; MP for Callington in Cornwall; and had the leisure to study the increase of the English population.   Such an active character naturally sought to repair and improve the house: stables were reroofed; modern sashes and glazing put in the greenhouse and an area of the roof leaded.   However, after his son died in the house in November 1794 he and his wife lived in London, where he died in 1801.   Like many Lee inhabitants (whether they lived there for a long or short while) he was buried in Lee churchyard.

When the Angersteins decided to auction the house at Garraway’s Coffee House on Thursday 18 August 1796, it was Sir Francis Baring (1740-1810) who acquired it along with Burnt Ash Farm and other property and land.   He then purchased the lordship of the Manors of Lee, Bankers and Shroffold from Lord Sondes in 1798 – again at Garraways.

Sir Francis had helped found the John and Francis Baring Company in 1763 (renamed Baring Brothers and Company in 1806) which became the independent merchant bank ultimately linked with the Leeson debacle of 1995.   Sir Francis in fact worked with William Pitt the Younger to help finance the Napoleonic Wars.

In a particular regard however, Sir Francis was unusual.   Despite frequently using the Lee house (from 1798 it was genuinely the Manor House) he was buried in 1810 at the Hampshire village of Micheldever which he had purchased in 1801.   Whilst remaining near London for business, Lee’s attraction as a rural retreat for City merchants was on the wane.

Pentland House²¹

A “new built tenement in Lee” mentioned in Christopher Boone’s will of 1686 is identifiable as Pentland House and was occupied by the Smith family (including a John Smith, High Sheriff of Kent) for another century or more.    Whilst Matthew Smith pursued a military career, the house was let to a French refugee M. Grimaldi who ran a ladies’ boarding school there.   It was subsequently let to Admiral Sir George Martin (1764-1847), a contemporary of Nelson who commanded the Irresistable at the Battle of St Vincent in 1797 and was, as it happened, Lee Rector’s brother in law.   He was buried at Lee.

Lee Manor Farm House

Residents of a modernised Lee Manor farmhouse included Admiral Hugh Palliser (1723-1796), quite likely while he was Governor of Greenwich Hospital in 1780.   At sea since he was 11 he had commanded ships in the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War and the siege of Quebec after which he became Governor of Newfoundland 1764-68.   Like many of his Lee neighbours he had been an MP (for Scarborough) between 1774-79.

However, in 1778-9 he was embroiled in a serious dispute with Admiral Keppel, “which became very public and political and brought naval discipline into disrepute”²².   After rumours that he had disobeyed orders, Palliser brought a court martial against Keppel, whose subsequent acquittal forced Palliser to resign from Parliament and as Lieutenant General of Marines.   Despite acquittal at his court martial (brought at his request) Palliser was appointed Governor of Greenwich Hospital, rather than being reinstated as Lieutenant General of Marines.   He did however rejoin Parliament as member for Huntingdon.   He died in Buckinghamshire.

Lee Grove (to become the Cedars in the 19^th century)

West of Lee church stood Lee Grove, the residence between 1710-1746 of Will Pate (1666-1746) whose visitors included Jonathan Swift.   On the 17^th September 1710 Swift dined with this “learned woollen-draper” and commented that “we left Pate after sunset and were [in London] before it was dark”.   On the 24^th he returned to London at night “weary and lazy.   I can say no more now, but good night” and presumably sank into the swirling pits²³.   Pate in fact became Sheriff of London in 1734 and was buried in Lee in 1746 when Swift was said to have written his epitaph (in Latin).

After being occupied by Thomas Edlyne and his daughter, Mrs Elizabeth Boyfield, the house was sold in 1796 to Samuel Brandram (1742-1808) a vitriol and white lead manufacturer who added more rooms; created an ornamental lake in the Kid Brook valley; purchased land to access Blackheath; and added to the house’s seclusion by diverting roads and paths in the area.   His daughter married the son of the architect, George Gwilt, who designed the works²⁴.

Samuel’s son Thomas, a colour merchant and magistrate, later lived in the house and used the full force of the law in 1814 when a worker in his London firm was transported for seven years for stealing half a guinea’s worth of blue pigment to paint his room²⁵.

Lee Lodge

Lee’s third largest house (with 13 hearths in 1664), in the modern Murillo and Abernethy Road area, had been occupied by a Mr Delanoy before the  Papillon family arrived in the 18^th century.

Of Huguenot ancestry, the Papillons were London merchants and politicians who settled their main residence at Acrise Place near Folkestone.   However, their much used Lee house was purchased or leased from at least 1707.    Three generations lived there, all of them working on the Excise Commission and the first two were MPs.   There were links with other Lee inhabitants: Thomas Boone of Lee Place was on the Excise Commission Board and John Smith, of Pentland House, was a Governor of St Thomas’ Hospital when Phillip Papillon was there.

The second generation, David Papillon (1691-1762), had an active interest in parish affairs becoming a churchwarden in 1738 when he obsessively reduced costs, uniquely not paying a penny to the vagrant poor or parishioners who brought dead vermin to his door for the customary few pence.   He left a positive balance, with seeming pride, of 2d having spent £5 15s 6d purchasing a “surplus and Pulpitt cushion”²⁶.

Unsurprisingly, the Papillon faculty pew in the church was mounted on pillars with steps built in the tower to avoid others looking in.   Light came from a small window in the church roof which admitted glimpses, remarkably, of the Bishop of Exeter’s goat.   The Bishop, who was Rector of Lee, kept this creature in the churchyard which, when pestered by children, would climb the church’s leaning buttresses and run along the ridge of the roof²⁷.

However, the Papillon family’s amazing legacy were the letters David Papillon’s daughters sent to their absent brother between 1746-8 and which give a unique insight into everyday life amongst Lee’s elite.

Papillon letters²⁸

It was apparent that Lee was a dull place for young women to live as it was observed:

….for Private [news] it may Properly be said, as was in ye beginning is now & ever more shall be this Parish will never alter (1746)

Interests included dinners, drinking tea (perhaps smuggled – in 1744 a Lee man smuggled goods worth £15,000)²⁹, gossip and playing cards.   The curate especially enjoyed the latter and was “much disappointed” before he sat to a game with the Papillons, when the Doctor called him away to attend to the dying “Old Mr Pate”.

Evenings could be enjoyed at the Assemblies at Eltham (at a place yet to be established) that included neighbours from Lee and consisted of card tables, dancing, couples and singles (usually male) who “sit stil for want of Partners.   Other activites included walking in Sir Gregory Page’s park (at modern Wricklemarsh); visiting Blackheath Fair; and viewing the Prince and Princess of Wales on their visit to Blackheath.   

In May 1746 the Duke of Cumberland’s victory at Culloden was celebrated with bonfires in the area, with windows lit up and soldiers visiting “for something to Drink ye Duke’s Health” and who “fired at every Door”.   The soldiers’ inevitable departure “caus’d a great many Tears to be Shed by ye Fair Ladies in ye Town of Greenwich & Parts adjacent for ye Loss of ye Officers”.

They visited London to see Garrick perform (November 1746) and view Bedlam “wch is a very shocking Place to see so many Poor Creatures bereft of their Reason & Understanding who are otherwise seemingly in good health lying upon Straw in such a Miserable Condition it made me shudder & i own i did not recover it a good while” (September 1746).

Susannah Papillon visited “Raneleigh” in August 1746 and went into the Grand Room “which i think worth going a great way to See, it being far beyond any thing I could have imagined but i should have liked it better if it had been full of Company and all the Lamps alight …. And i think the garden is very Pritty far beyond Vauxhall only one cannot hear ye misick in it”.

She visited the same day “Chelsea Colledge for Old Soldiers” which she considered “a very Pritty Place much fitter for the Purpose then Greenwich hospital for it does not make such a grand apearance at the outside and i believe is fit for ye purpose within”.   Afterwards they travelled by coach to St James Park and walked in the Mall.

However, the highlight for them (after weddings) was the trial of Jacobite rebel Lords in 1746.   With tickets obtained from the Lord Chancellor, Mrs Papillon and daughter Ann stayed the night in town, got up at 4 a.m. “being to be quite drest” to arrive at the Hall at 6 a.m. where “being almost ye first got in Pretty well Set on ye Left hand Side”  they were able to see the prisoners’ faces.   They described the trial when the Lords pleaded guilty and were returned to the Tower.

At another visit to the trial they stood in the rain for one and a half hours which gave one sister a cough and the other “a cold and sore throat that I can hardly speak”.

In November that year the Reverend Mr Holford witnessed the despatch at Tower Hill of Charles Radcliffe (a 1715 Jacobite captured in 1745).   Again he had a particularly near view as one of the sisters casually observed that he “had some of the blood on his face when he came home”.    Another cleric attracted their attention when in 1746 the recently appointed Rector John Lawry (who had barely been there for half a year):

….came from London on Sunday Morning Preach’d and returned Back to dine with my Lord Chancellor (thalt was doing business) but i Think tis doing it to much in a hurry and not as St Paul says Let every thing be done Decently and in order.

Their views held a degree of importance as their father dined with the Archbishop at Lambeth in November that year.

Other classes were rather distant: the sound of carousing servants drifted up one evening from the kitchen whilst celebrating the absent Papillon brother’s birthday .   On another day the family got lost in fields at Burnt Ash and a servant was made to travel ahead of the party into the muddy lane.   In one particularly boggy slough “the man’s horsh lay down with him and would not rise till he was off” (and presumably wading through the mud).   This persuaded the women to force their way through several hedges before rejoining the lane further on.   Incidentally, hedges in the villages were used by the washerwomen to dry their linen.

Now and then the sisters gave vivid descriptions of the natural world:

…. ye Country now begins to be Pleasant & Nature Seems to have Deck’d Herself in her best Cloathing to Welcome in ye Sprightly Month yt gives Life & Vigour to all Human Things.   Ye Garden is not very forward having had such Cold Winds that have been very Nipping to ye Trees …. (May 1746)

….we have had very fine hay weather here last week ours is in they say there is nine load of it …. (June 1746)

….the weather is exceeding hot and faint this is the first of the Dog Days so expect it will Continue hot …. (July 1746)

….we had terrible Thunder and lightning a teusday in the afternoon and i hear it struct of the top of a yew tree in a garden at Eltham and made a great hole in ye ground big enough to Put a Jack wait in …. (June 1746)

More letters

An additional writer was their neighbour Ann Smith³⁰ of Pentland House who confirmed that life for women featured visiting neighbours; weddings; death; and gossip (rather Jane Austen really).   Every detail of a Papillon daughters’ wedding in Lee Church in 1748 was meticulously described:

….they appeared at Church last Sunday, ye bride in a very rich flower’d silk on a white ground her Lace’s very fine, lapels, Diamond earrings, solatarr & girdle buckle, gold watch, & made a fine figure, so they did all, Mrs Papillon had a great many Diamonds on, very fine new lace her cloths a rich white satten ground, flower’d with shades of purples, Mr Papillon in a wine colour’d cloth suit gold buttons & button holes and a tye wig, the Bride-groom you know is confined to grey, he has a very handsom new coach & liverys ye wastcotes lac’d with colour’s lace, the four sisters all in new gowns & cotes, & she has given ye three elder ones, according to antient custome as she is step’d before them, silk stockings with rich imbroidered clocks [cloaks] Molly’s gold the others silvir, Miss Curtiss [the bridegroom’s sister] is there a fine girl in a blue damask robe trim’d with silvir, Mr Papillons coach new painted & cuts a figure, they sent a card to receive company Monday & Tuesday & indeed they had a prodigious deal 20 or 30 coaches each day, ye whole family dress’d as at church.   Wine bride-cake French cake coffee and tea brought in, green silk & stuff damask window curtains in ye great room & ye drawing room door’s open made it very commodious.

Their brother’s wedding in 1758 caused a stir as Phillip Papillon “whom you [know] any of the Lee ladies could charm has thought fit to marry his late sisters house maid Betty whom you have seen, a strange match, they were married at Lewisham, her parish, & he brought her thro’ Lee in Palmers Coach and four in their way to East Malling, I saw them go by”.

With regard to more mundane matters her letter of April 1749 revealed that “I made twenty gallons of wine last Mich[aelmas], am now making forty.   I hope to have you at the drinking of some of it.   I write this over a nose-gay of jonquils, I wish your head was strong enough to do so and now I must take leave and go to my book the History of Tom Jones the Foundling that all the world reads”.

Unsurprisingly, her letter of 26 August 1758 debated whether a neighbour, Miss Jones, would return to Lee, as “Lee has the bias of pleasure, and she is a sort of delicate lady” – which is pretty succinct really.

Tiger’s Head

Ordinary people had a modern place to drink when, in 1743, Lewis Earl of Rockingham (Lee’s absentee Lord of the Manor) granted a lease to Roger Roberts for the Tiger’s Head to be built³¹.   The name derived from hunting in India, particularly Bengal, and there was sense in establishing an inn at the prominent green to catch stage coach traffic.    It was additionally used by JPs for several of their itinerant sessions.

Churchwardens Accounts³²

Tantalising glimpses of village life emerge in the Churchwardens accounts.   There were mysteries: a foreign (and unspecified) prince’s visit in 1730 prompted much needed spend on the church; the village constable was sent to London to capture a man and woman called Lawrence and Tindon; and substantial Robbery Money was paid to a man.  

More mundane activities included payments of 4d for each hedgehog and kite presented to the churchwarden (and a shilling for a polecat).   These were considered vermin and gave poorer people an opportunity to gain additional income.   The record was 16 hedgehogs in a payment to Captain Limeburner’s coachman who seems to have been particularly adept at catching them.

Wandering vagrants who received payments included individuals, sailors, small family groups or several women with their children.   Individuals could be sick or a woman “great bellied”.  Matthew Butler was for many years the churchwarden (with individualistic spelling: “wooman” for woman and “harmshous” for Boone’s almshouses) and he and his brother James let poor people recover in their barn when sick.   This seems to have been a feature of village attitudes as poor sick women found shelter in the barns of Boone (1739) and Mr Ingalton of the Tigers Head (1747).

Church

In 1680, the church was “in great danger of falling” yet a subscription to important citizens for improvements stalled.   Another century continued where rate surpluses in any particular year led to a reduced rate, if any, in the subsequent year rather than being spent on repairs³³.  

Yet inhabitants sat every Sunday in a church that by 1796 was so much beneath the surface of the ground that it had become “damp, dirty and unwholesome”.   The vestry decided at Christmas 1795 to build a larger church as it was then too small (it seated 105 when inhabitants were near the 376 recorded in 1801) and in “too Ruinous a state to be effectively Repaired and enlarged”³⁴.   Enthusiastic attempts to gather the necessary £1,600 were met with any reason to avoid paying, including Lord Sondes (the recent absentee Lord of the Manor) who promised to give the request “all attention” before deciding to sell the manor.   The plan, yet again, was scuppered.

Lee’s small churchyard was crammed with people whose links to the parish were limited.   People who had stayed for a while tended to return for burial.   Others included Jenny Mills of London who requested in 1781 to be buried at Lee on the basis that two of her brothers and a sister lived in the parish as housekeepers³⁵.

Several 18^th century burials were of real characters.   Edmund Halley (1656-1712), the Astronomer Royal of comet fame, was buried there with his family.   Another in 1795 was William Parsons (b. 1736), the comedian³⁶, who lived then in Lambeth and had been invited by Garrick to perform at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1763.   He seems to have had the Tommy Cooper stage presence in that “His features were so truly comic and his power of exciting laughter so irresistible, that his brother performers have frequently found it extremely difficult to preserve sufficient gravity to do justice to their own parts”.   Asthma restricted his later appearances and his adieu was as Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic earlier in 1795.   His 12 year old son had been buried at Lee some four years earlier and perhaps they had lived in the village about then.   William Parson’s inscription read:

Here Parsons lies oft on life’s busy stage

With nature Reader has thou seen him vie

He science knew knew manners knew the age

Respected knew to live lamented die.

Others with seemingly limited links to the parish included: Charles Leslie (late Captain in the Navy, 1775); Joseph Pilgrim (Chief Judge of the Court of Common Pleas for Barbadoes, 1733); family of Charles Earle (woolendraper, Southwark, 1801); William James (fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies and formerly a banker in Lombard Street, 1786); the Rev Nathaniel Bliss of Greenwich (Astronomer Royal, 1764); etc.   People may have leased properties in the area and perhaps eminent citizens such as Halley preferred his resting place to be with societies’ elite rather than the people of Greenwich.   Interestingly the Butler family of farmers, found acceptance by being allowed to build a tomb in the midst of their more high ranking contemporaries.

During the century the southern woods became farmland; seven large houses dominated village life including the creation of a Manor House that replaced, in terms of status, the moated (and recently rebuilt) Lee Place.   And a large inn dominated Lee Green where tradesmens’ dwellings gathered.

Wealthy inhabitants were frequently linked by governorships of London Hospitals; the House of Commons; Excise Boards; the woollen industry etc.   And a degree of charity was available for the poor as in addition to Boone’s almshouses (established in the previous century) an arrangement developed by 1800 where each of the seven almspeople could call one day a week at each of the seven large houses to receive the previous day’s “surplus broken victuals” (i.e.food that had been partially eaten) placed in a brown Welsh dish on hall sideboards for that purpose³⁷.

And the increasingly decrepit church became a near-ruin at the heart of this otherwise smart area.   From there a short walk to Greenwich Park revealed a view of London’s ever increasing boundary that was to substantially influence the village’s character in the century to come.

1.  John Harris, The History of Kent in Five Parts (1719) (Lee Manor Society Newsletter 2015)
2.  Sir Richard Steele, Guardian number 141
3.  K White, Public Houses of Lee and Lewisham (1992)
4.  Ibid
5.  1801 census
6.  NA MR 702 (map)
7.  John Harris op cit
8.  D p223
9.  LLSA Ann Smith letter A81/22
10.  Porter, London, A Social History, p151
11.  J Birchenough, Two Old Lee Houses, 1967
12.  LLSA Ann Smith letter
13.  J Birchenough op cit
14.  D p223 n4
15.  Lysons and NPG (National Portait Gallery) 12779
16.  Hart, The History of Lee
17.  Birchenough op cit
18.  Ibid
19.  Ibid
20.  Birchenough, The Manor House Lee and its Associations (1971) p27
21.  Birchenough, 1746 Vestry (essay at LLSA) p111
22.  Royal Naval Museum.org
23.  Neil Rhind and Swift, Journal to Stella letters 3 and 4
24.  Neil Rhind
25.  Proceedings of the Old Bailey website
26.  Churchwardens accounts (at LLSA)
27.  D p227
28.  Copies at LLSA A98/16/1/16
29. Aslet, The Story of Greenwich (1999) p217
30.  LLSA A81/22
31.  Justices Minutes at LLSA (have Roger Roberts as a victualler in 1743)
32.  LLSA
33.  D p227n
34.  Churchwardens Accounts 20/2/1796
35.  Churchwardens Accounts
36.  D p231 and note
37.  Hart p10

EARLY 19^TH CENTURY LEE

Lee’s inhabitants doubled to 376¹ in the 125 years from 1676 yet within thirty more (i.e. by 1831) it trebled again to 1,108.   Witness to the change was the Reverend Lock who, in a 61 year Rectorship from 1803, saw such dramatic alteration to the parish that his rapidly increasing congregation came to regard him as a treasured relic of Lee’s grander past.   Inducted at the “personal solicitation” of a royal Princess² – quite likely the Princess Sophia of Gloucester (1773-1844) who regularly attended Lee church to hear sermons delivered in his precise, slightly hesitant manner, he practised what he preached.   In 1809, for instance, he had all children, whose parents allowed it, vaccinated against smallpox.   And he was pragmatic in using the limited size of the churchyard when in 1836 he suggested that Pond, the Astronomer Royal, could be buried within the tomb of his esteemed predecessor Edmund Halley.   The Castor and Pollux of the Observatory together.

By then Lock preached in a modern church after the ancient chalk and flint edifice had been replaced by a brick building in 1814*.   This was replaced again in 1841 by the present church where his youngest daughter was the first bride to the altar.

*1814 was the year when Lee (with other places) presented a petition to Parliament against the slave trade and requested a clause in the treaty with France to make France abolish its trade.   It was signed by 40 members of the community ranging from the Reverend Lock; Sir & Lady Palliser; Lydia daughter of Lord Edgcumbe; to the baker; inn keeper; builder; gardener; bricklayer; and hair dresser.   It additionally included JR Williams, a member of the Friends of the Abolition of the Slave Trade with William Wilberforce³.

In 1812 the Gentleman’s Magazine described how:

The little Church at Lee, near Blackheath, has frequently been mentioned in terms of approbation, not for the elegance of its outline or decorations but for the beauty of the situation⁴.

This damning with faint praise was justified as the church was in a low, damp and alarming state.   The south walls of the nave and chancel leant severely (near the pulpit it was 15 ¾ inches within 12 vertical feet); the north side was more upright with the result that the roof had spread dangerously in between; earth was piled up against the south side to prevent collapse; and the wall between the pulpit and gallery had split in several places.   The surveyor’s conclusion in 1813 that the church “may hang together five years or drop into ruins within as many days” spurred ratepayers to build a replacement⁵.

 All but the tower was demolished and a new church 56 feet long (in which the parish’s increased numbers had to fit) was attached while the congregation worshipped temporarily at Boone’s chapel.  

Despite the improvement, however, prestigious community members gradually departed.  After 1810 the Barings visited Lee intermittently and it was Sir Francis’ butler, Thomas Postans, who gained significant influence, becoming a man of substance and described as a gentleman.   From about 1808 he farmed Lee Farm with a modern farmhouse built where Wolffram Close stands.   He managed the Manor House gardens which supplied the officer’s mess at St James’ Palace for several years from 1830⁶. 

The Manor House’s tenant from 1815 was Mr Frederick Perkins of the famous Southwark brewery firm.

Lee’s prestigious house remained Dacre House.   After Lady Dacre’s death in 1808 it was occupied by Charles Trevor Roper (who marched men of the West Kent Volunteers on the lawn) and then let to Matthias Prime Lucas (1761-1848) between 1813-32⁷.    A friend of Sir Francis Baring, Lucas led an amazing life – rising from lighterman to Alderman by 1822.   He helped arrange Nelson’s cortege in 1805 when, as Commodore of the River Fencibles (which he had established) he travelled in the Lord Mayor’s barge.

Lucas used enlightened farming methods to produce early peas and wheat crops on the warm south-west incline, now covered by the Blessington Road estate and Glenton Road.

And his career was helped by having amongst his friends the Duke of Clarence (later William IV) and his brother the Duke of York.   Clarence and the Duke of Wellington in fact attended Lucas’ Lord Mayor’s banquet in 1827.   After a magnificent pageant they sat to a meal famously remembered for a large board of fairy lights that fell onto Lucas’ head.   Whilst Lady Margaret escaped with a fright, he was cut about the head by the glass and his pride dented with a cartoon subsequently published with the statues of Gog and Magog winking slyly to each other.   However, his reputation remained intact and he became President of St Bartholomew’s Hospital between1830-48.    A daughter married Sir John Rennie, the civil engineer and designer of the modern London Bridge.

On his retirement from business he moved to an estate purchased (in similar fashion to the Barings) in 1821 at Wateringbury, Kent where he died and was buried in 1848, aged 86.

The house’s decline, after Lucas’ departure, was rapid.   From 1841 a portion of the estate passed to its tenant, Thomas Allan Shuter who lived there 1833-42 and then Richard Bousfield (1844-49) when the estate began to be built over; the views obscured; and the old house stuccoed and divided into three units in 1855.   In 1884 Dacre Gardens was built on the site’s northern area and the converted blocks demolished in 1897⁸.

Lee House had been purchased by William Morland, a wealthy London banker and MP, in about 1807.   His grandson had grander ideas and in addition to replacing the mansion with a modern building in 1830, bought and demolished another old house to the north (previously occupied by Alexander Rowland, the inventor of Macassar hair oil) to create a lodge and grand front entrance onto the New Lee High Road⁹.   The pleasure was shortlived as in 1832 the family banking business collapsed and in 1886 the unoccupied house was demolished with Lenham and Aislibie Roads built on the estate.

Lee Lodge, a large brick house with high brick walls, joined the decline in Lee’s prestigious inhabitants.   After David Papillon’s death in 1809 it was sold successively to two solicitors who leased it to General Sir Edward Paget who had one arm and whose brother, the Marquess of Anglesey, had one leg.   By 1851 it was occupied by Joseph Sladen, the second of the solicitors¹⁰.

It was Lee Place that saw the biggest change.   Charles Boone let it in 1809 to Benjamin Aislibie (1774-1842) a partner in a firm of London wine merchants whose customers had included Nelson.   Aislibie, despite weighing 20 stone, was active in village life being a keen huntsman and cricket player – playing for Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex in addition to becoming the MCC’s first Secretary.    Quite an achievement for a man who played 100 first class matches between 1808-41 with an average of 3 and highest score of 15*.¹¹   

Aislabie’s departure to Sevenoaks in 1823 was significant.   The house had been inherited 4 years earlier by Boone’s daughter Harriett whose husband, Sir William Drummond, sold the estate in summer 1824 to a Mr Peach who knew there was value in the land, particularly with the need to straighten the highway that skirted the house and garden¹².

It was quite likely when the ancient moated manor was constructed (since replaced by a more modern Lee Place) that the highway through Lee was diverted from its natural course along the Quaggy valley.   Since 1764 the highway had been included in the New Cross Turnpike Trust with a tollgate put up near modern Cambridge Drive with its boundary furthered from the Tigers Head to Footscray in 1780.   A major issue for increased traffic, however, was the “dangerous, narrow and crooked” section that skirted Lee Place, especially the right angle bend at Boone’s chapel.   In 1813 a horse and chaise were driven at such pace along modern Old Road that the horse could not turn and “burst open the door of the …. chapel and fell to the floor, to the astonishment of the Rector and congregation” who were gathered (indeed squeezed) inside for morning prayers whilst St Margaret’s was being rebuilt¹³.

The Trust’s need to straighten the highway was an opportunity seized by Peach who quickly sold them the necessary land at £180 per acre (half his predecessors asking price) and made the remainder available for development.   This was auctioned on 22 October 1824 for £5,500.   For Lee this was pivotal as the sale of Lee Place and 12 acres in 10 lots was to substantially alter its appearance and nature¹⁴.

A New Road was built between 1825-6 along Lee High Road’s modern course from Boone’s chapel nearly as far as the Tigers Head and which removed the troublesome bends.   The ancient moat (still a substantial ditch 25-30 feet wide and 8-10 feet deep) was filled in and Church Street subsequently built on its island¹⁵.  Furthermore the previous highway’s eastern course was blocked by Lee House’s broadened estate in about 1830 to establish the truncated length of Old Road that stands today.

Suddenly, after being at the heart of village life for centuries, four of Lee’s seven large houses (Lee Place, Pentland House, Manor House and Lee House) were sidelined into a much quieter area.   Worse was to happen when Lee Place was demolished in 1825 and its rubble spread along the new highway as road material.   

There were further implications.   A lot of 3 acres was purchased by the Merchant Taylor’s Company (trustees of the old Boone Almshouses) who built from 1826 the 30 almshouses that stand today.  And several other lots seem to have been divided and resold to speculators who built working class accommodation in the heart of the previously select village.   The first were Dacre and Church Streets.   The shock for established inhabitants was compounded by developers really squeezing buildings in – there was an acre, for instance, on which 44 houses were built¹⁶.   Deprived of rural views and quiet village life, wealthier inhabitants continued their migration to the countryside – hastened from Sunday 18^th January 1829 when an attempt was made (fortunately foiled) to steal a body from Lee churchyard¹⁷.

The final straw was the construction of beerhouses: Lee had six by 1831 which prompted the magistrate to comment that this had been “attended with injurious Results to the Morals of the People”¹⁸ (whereas Lewisham’s 21 beerhouses apparently created “no injurious consequences” at all).   Two were the Woodman and Royal Oak. The former’s landlord was Thomas Couchman whose occupation as a carpenter and wheelwright gave the beerhouse its name and whose duty as the parish constable meant that Lee’s “cage” or “watchhouse” (a small building used to briefly house petty infringers) was situated nearby¹⁹.   Concerned at the magistrates’ reluctance to give a license for the Woodman, Couchman acquired land further along the New Road on which he built the Swan in about 1833.  

The Royal Oak on the other hand was built by a bricklayer (Jonathan Hervey) in the heart of the modern district and initially called the Bricklayers Arms supplied liquid sustenance for workers constructing houses in that area²⁰.

Before the beerhouses appeared, crowds of pleasure seekers attended the Tiger’s Head which being the first stage from London in the early 19^th century (where Maidstone coaches changed horses)

….was a favourite resort and house of call.   Cribb, John Gully and Molyneux, the noted pugilists, used to meet here before they were trained at the Porcupine Inn, Mottingham.   These assemblies were attended with great rudeness and often on Sundays, men could be seen stripped to the waist, and fighting.   The file of chaise carts, on the side of the road, mostly covered the eighth of a mile; and all the persons, both male and female, being gaily dressed, the whole country appeared to be keeping holiday.²¹

William Phillips, the landlord, and his wife Amelia, were there in 1815 when:

…. the cavalry regiments of the Horse Guards and Hussars and also regiments of Foot, for three weeks were on the march through this village, en route to Waterloo.   The roads were almost impassable day and night, and the whole country seemed to be a complete moving arsenal.   It was very imposing to see the assembled soldiers with transports of arms of war.   The space in front of the Tigers Head and the Green were very commodious for the transfer of baggage from the waggons of the farmers from the other side of London to those of the farmers in the neighbourhood, which were pressed for that purpose, to convey them fifteen miles further on the journey to Dover.²²

However, it was a distressing spectacle when the troops returned: “some were grievously wounded; others had lost a leg, an arm, or an eye” – yet the scene was more celebratory in 1816 when Lee Green received Marshal von Blucher on his way to London where he joined the allied Sovereigns visiting Britain.

Improved access increased business and Thomas Sears arrived as landlord when the New Road was built.   By the 1830s large parties of city gentlemen played cricket on the green (then a large area of about two acres) before visiting the inn for additional entertainment – including a bowling green for which it was famous.   Additionally, a large open area in front of the inn was used for processions and meetings²³.

Sport was the entertainment of the day and on Wednesday 23 July 1834, Sears held two days of horse racing in fields (covering 150 acres) behind the inn – with the support of the landowner, the slightly insane Gregory Osborne Page-Turner.   Helped by good weather a “numerous and respectable” crowd gathered to watch the racing, with large numbers of carriages parked in the fields.    Conjurors and mountebanks livened the atmosphere and “humbler classes” were orderly until fighting occurred late in the second day.   Horses had names such as Mad Moll and Bouncing Betty and the initial “admirably contested” race for the Lee Cup was won by a horse called Trickery.   There was, however, scant regard for human life: an old collegeman was killed when he wandered onto the course and a jockey seriously injured when falling from his mount²⁴.

In 1835 the Lee Races moved to the Harrow Fields by Eltham Road (quite likely at modern Scotsdale and Crathie Roads or perhaps the corner of Eltham Road and Kidbrooke Park Road) with stands beneath which a “most notorious gang of gamblers” set up their equipment.    They had quite likely been sanctioned by the Clerk of the Course, Benjamin Ward, who then established alternative Lee races near Shooters Hill in 1836 – a month after Sear’s races.    They became fierce rivals.   Sears claimed that Ward “manifested the subtlety of the serpent” and Ward claimed that Sears was supported by the village constable (Thomas Couchman) who was an “esteemed and active friend and bill sticker”.    Facilities at Sears’ races included;

….Algar’s booth, which was built on an extensive scale, and so arranged with tables on each side, and an open space down the centre, that gentlemen could ride under cover without dismounting; indeed there appeared at times from one hundred and fifty to two hundred gentlemen assembled within on horseback in order to avoid the heavy showers which came on during the afternoon….Indeed the chief point of attraction between the races was the mustering at Algar’s which continued the whole time as dry as a drawing room.²⁵

The races were a success and the presence of the police (after Eltham’s vicar complained about the forthcoming entertainment)²⁶ encouraged respectable support.   Indeed with inflated pride the Kentish Mercury commented that “the meeting altogether was conducted with a spirit, liberality and judgement, not exceeded at any of the crack meetings”.

On the other hand, Ward’s races near Shooters Hill, attracted a different crowd:

The “swell mob” were down in hundreds, and made a rich harvest in consequence of there not being a police force of any description to keep the “family men” in awe, who carried out their depredations with the utmost effrontery.   The “Pea and Thimble Rig” was on a larger scale than we have witnessed for some years and it is to be hoped that, if the races are to be continued, those who are more particularly interested in them will devise means to prevent a recurrence of those truly infamous scenes.²⁷

However, at his 1837 races Sears was assaulted by a boothholder and faced accusations of illegally selling gin.   As a consequence he passed stewardship of the races to another person with unfortunate effects:

LEE RACES: On Monday and Tuesday the beautiful little village of Lee was thrown into the greatest confusion by the gathering together [of] one of the most motley and disreputable assemblages that could possibly be collected, to witness amusements pompously announced under the above title.   The course was a small meadow distant about half  mile from the Tigers Head, on the road to Eltham, decorated with two very rough boarded erections, called the Stewards and Grand Stands, correspondingly fitted up and graced with all the beauty and fashion of the Deptford costermongers, and Blackheath donkey drivers.   Around these were the table of thimble riggers and other low gamblers behind which were several drinking booths and hopping shops, the scenes in which beggar description, and reflected the highest discredit of the supineness of the local magistracy and police.

Of the races themselves, we can only say that they were not equal either in quality of the cattle, or for jockeyism to the commonest donkey races in the kingdom, and drew forth repeated shouts of laughter and ridicule from the ladies and gentlemen present, whose vexation and disappointment were expressed in very coarse but trite witticisms on the riders and their steeds.   On the second day the Company was perhaps a shade course, but skulking around the booths, evidently ashamed, thank God!, of being recognised.²⁸

Indeed as the annual races moved nearer to Eltham the condition of the course (and its attendees) deteriorated further – yet they kept above the quality of Ward’s races which ended in about 1838.

By then the building of railways hastened London’s development and after London’s first passenger service to Greenwich in 1836, a line was built along Lee’s northern boundary in 1849 on which Blackheath station (within Lee parish) was built.   Lee was about to enter an astonishing age from which much of its modern appearance would emerge.

1.  1676 Compton Survey and 1801 census
2.  Kentish Mercury (KM) 26/11/1864
3.  LLSA A99/4/1
4.  Gentlemen’s Magazine August 1812
5.  LLSA Churchwardens Accounts
6.  J Birchenough, Some Farms and Fields in Lee (1981) p10
7.  Neil Rhind
8.  Ibid
9.  D p225 n1
10.  D p224 n2
11.  www.cricketarchive.co.uk
12.  Greenwich & Lewisham Antiquarian Society, Volume IV p242
13.  Hart p9
14.  Ibid
15.  Hart p10
16.  LLSA Tithe Schedule
17.  LLSA JP Minutes Lewisham Bench
18.  LLSA JP Minutes 14/4/1831
19.  LLSA JP Minutes 12/9/1833
20.  Pigot’s Directory 1840
21.  Hart
22.  Ibid
23. .ibid
24.  KM 26/7/1834
25.  KM 23/7/1836
26.  LLSA JP Minutes 14/7/1836
27.  KM 20/8/1836
28.  KM 11/8/1838

LEE FROM 1837 TO 1860

Victoria became Queen on 20 June 1837.   On 24 July, Robert Cocking ascended 5,000 feet in anticipation of gliding to earth on a parachute.   Instead he plummeted into a field near Burnt Ash lane, quite likely on its western side.    A witness later described how

….with a sick heart I turned my eyes from the sight of that thing like a dull drunken day-meteor tumbling swiftly and unsteadily to earth with a friend’s life at the heart of it thus visibly coming to its end.¹

That friend was a landscape painter in his early 50s who supplemented a modest income by teaching pupils at his house near Kennington.    A passion for balloons rising from Vauxhall and Surrey Gardens, led to an attempt from the former where he ascended at 7 pm in front of an immense crowd that “swarmed on every eminence” and covered the Thames in their vessels.   At the instant of launch a band struck up the National Anthem with a loud huzza from the gardens and beyond².

It was above Lee that Cocking pulled the cord to disengage from the balloon and his parachute, unfortunately designed as an “umbrella reversed uppermost”³ (i.e. the wrong way up)  descended rapidly with a violent oscillation so that the basket detached and Cocking and his parachute fell separately into fields.   Farm labourers carried his body to the Tiger’s Head on a hurdle where Sears (allegedly) charged 6d a head to have a look.   Items such as his purse, watch, snuffbox and shoes disappeared and the inquest at the inn was crowded.   Despite such indignities, Cocking was buried in Lee churchyard and his wife settled debts by selling sketches in addition to a subscription raised for her that included £50 from the young Queen.

Much sporting activity was generated at the Tiger’s Head in the 1840s with its keeper,  Charles Morton (who replaced Sears in 1840) being the son of the chief huntsman to the Earl of Derby⁴.   In August 1842 a two mile trotting race between two mares (from Greenwich and London) was held between the inn and Eltham, which the Greenwich horse won⁵.   Six months later Morton held a shooting match at the inn⁶ and in September 1843 a spirited foot race between two celebrated pedestrianists: Gazley (the “Star of Kent”) and Wylde (“Merrylegs”) was on the same course as the horses in 1842 repeated for a distance of eight miles.   A “vast concourse” of people” attended to see Gazley winning until, in the 6^th mile, he made a “sudden halt as though suffering under acute pain”, walked a few paces, was overtaken and did not catch up⁷.

By 1844 horse racing returned to Lee Green and was of “first rate quality” with a grand steeplechase in January 1845 at a place opposite the Tiger’s Head⁸.   This attracted a crowd that became alarmed when a Captain of the Royal Lancers drunkenly rode his horse over them outside the inn⁹.  Then in August 1845 Morton organised two days of the Lee Green Revel where a large crowd enjoyed the “usual country sports” of gingling matches*; sack racing; climbing a greasy pole, foot races; and hurdle jumping¹⁰.

*Gingling was where blindfolded players within a ring attempted to catch another player with bells attached to him.

Perhaps a longer gap was required before the Lee Green Races were held that September and which “proved a miserable failure”¹¹.   Another reason emerged in January 1846 when a two mile foot race planned between Cook (the “Greenwich Cowboy”) and Byrom attracted hundreds to the inn before the police declared it would be “no go” and if either of the competitors ran they would be arrested¹².

That was the last attempt to organise such sport in the area (cricket emerged as the game of choice) at a period when visitors from London found it easier to travel by train to Greenwich and people with land realised the benefits of development.   In 1835 an organised fight (between David Evans and William Hart) continued after two brothers physically prevented the parish constable (Couchman) from intervening¹³.   However, several years later Lee could call on the R Division of the Metropolitan Police Force to quell such boisterous happenings and who, by 1848, had built their Lee Police Station within sight of the Tiger’s Head¹⁴. 

In 1839 the parish was essentially rural ¹⁵ other than 100 acres chiefly north of Lee High Road.   Earlier in the century Burnt Ash Lane had features such as a Manor Pound; a dog kennel (for hunting purposes); a well by farm labourers’ cottages; and a large Horse Pond at its north east corner where horses and droves of cattle drank¹⁶.

It was far from idyllic:  agricultural depression in the 1840s ignited incendiarism in Kent and was an element in the uprisings that convulsed Europe in 1848.   Four wheat stacks were destroyed by fire at Burnt Ash Farm that year and a barn partly incinerated¹⁷.  Surprisingly, it was the neighbouring farmer, Mark Cordwell of Lee Farm and his wayward son Robert who were suspected, rather than labourers.   They were subsequently found innocent.  

Important landlords remained cautious of development: the Lord of the Manor held 23 of Lee’s 305 houses and whilst 98% of the land belonged to 20 individuals, they had a mere 30% of the houses¹⁸.   More enterprising were individuals such as William Morriss, a farmer of Crab Croft in Burnt Ash Lane, who in about 1840 rebuilt Lee Green farmhouse and converted Horn Park Farm from lath and plaster to brickwork with a slate roof¹⁹ .  He additionally developed properties in Lee Road and built 44 and 46 Tranquil Vale in Blackheath Village²⁰.

Morriss was a member of the Greenwich, Lewisham and Lee savings Bank  (established in 1816) which had its Lee branch at the house of Francis Hosier Hart (1807-90) in Boone Street²¹.   The bank quite likely²² supported the purchase and subdivision of land from the Lee Place sale in 1824 and which led to the creation of Lee New Town (i.e. Boone Street etc).

Several Lee tradesmen and inhabitants seized that chance: F H Hart had 6 properties²³ ; Harriett Barff of Albion Place had 8; George Gates (3 properties) lived in New Road as a grocer and became a successful builder; Jacob Durham (1 property) was a printer at Lee High Road; and John Sidery (bricklayer) had 2 properties*.   Consequently, by 1841 Lee’s population of 2,360 had become mainly working class with 38% in the New Town²⁴ in addition to tradesmen etc moving into Lee High Road from Lewisham.

*Alongside them was the eccentric Thomas Smart Kibblewhite who invested  in land and when he died in 1843 had a house remarkable for the “meanness” of its furniture in addition to 2 ½ d in his pockets²⁵.

Hints of life in Lee New Town emerge.   For instance John Sidery named his house in Boone Street “Francis Place”²⁶ – quite likely a pun on the famed London radical reformer (1771-1854).   When a shopkeeper was arrested in 1848 for selling sweets to children on a Sunday²⁷ he suggested the action against him was unchristian.   And when a stonemason’s wife bigamously married the 18 year old son of a Lee cowkeeper in 1848²⁸ she, in effect, repeated the actions of a middle class wife in 1843 who “inveigled away” a young man, aged 16, to a smart part of Lee, perhaps Blackheath²⁹.   The “inveigler” and her female companion, were famed “votaries of Bacchus” who travelled each day in a carriage of wedding bouquets.

Drink was an everyday feature.   The Lee Races (see previous chapter) were a boozy get together and a brewery had been established in Lee High Road by 1841.   By 1851 Lee had nine beerhouses, including six in its New Town.   Such places were lively.   Outside the Woodman and Swan, for instance, fights regularly occurred between two men egged on by 20-30 noisy, generally sober(ish) customers who clubbed together to pay the subsequent fine³⁰.   On the other hand the Royal Oak was lively inside with (according to the police) “rioting and drunken conduct of the worst description”³¹ with customers seen as a “bad set” who “after having saturated themselves with beer at the beershops, went to finish the same with spirits”.

And occupants of Boone’s almshouses joined in the spirit when they gathered fruit for  elderberry wine – a favourite tipple of Lee’s poor.   The almshouses in fact had a dame school with another near Lee-bridge run by Mrs Groves “an ancient dame”³².   Better educational opportunities were available further afield and Francis Hart used to run to Eltham as a child³³ to learn his 3Rs.   Standards improved when the National School was opened in 1839 with children literally called in from the streets to attend³⁴.   By 1847 113 boys, 64 girls and 83 infants received instruction³⁵ with bonnets, cloaks and sheet music purchased for the girls.   The boys, it seems, had to make do with what they had.

By comparison there were nine schools for middle class education in 1841³⁶ with the majority being on the hilltop between Lee Terrace and Lee Grove.   Most prominent was the Blackheath Proprietary * School built in 1831 at the corner of Lee Terrace and the village (where Selwyn Court now stands) and which had strong links to the Established Church.   Amongst its founders was the Reverend Andrew Brandram (1790-1851) (Thomas’ younger brother) who was joint-secretary of the British & Foreign Bible Society.   Another founder was John Meadows White (1799-1863), a Parliamentary solicitor who lived at the Paragon, Blackheath.   The school’s pupils included many who achieved distinction later in life³⁷.

*A proprietary school was where proprietors purchased capital shares in return for an entitlement to send or nominate a pupil for the school.

White formed a breakaway Blackheath New Proprietary School further along Lee Terrace in 1835.   After initial success the schools declined in the 1840s until the old school recovered under its headmaster the Reverend Edward John Selwyn (1822-1893).   The New Proprietary School struggled before shutting in 1866 as a private grammar school.

In addition to such schools, Lee’s northern hilltop contained large houses occupied by people such as the Rector; Thomas Brandram; Dr Carr (who featured in Lee’s subsequent history); and Wapping mastmaker Charles Augustus Ferguson.   Importantly, the historic estates were being developed:  12 acres of the Dacre House estate with “very handsome timber, walnut and other fruit trees” were sold in 1841³⁸.   And lime, elm, English fir and oaks from an adjoining estate were auctioned in 1844 at the Royal Oak*.  

*The pub was quite likely named after a nearby tree visited by the Astronomer Royal Sir G B Airey ³⁹.   Its trunk had a girth of four yards “with a fine clean stem, twenty feet clear of the ground before throwing out its main branches”

By 1851 the area by the church was transformed from tree-studded gardens to middle class accommodation squeezed between the New Town’s working class grid and the northern hilltop of wealthy residents.

St Margaret’s was rebuilt between 1839-41 to tackle the twin issues of an increasing population and inadequate foundations as the 1814 church had been built directly above its medieval predecessor.   It was cheaper to use a field on the other side of Lee Terrace which was made available by Thomas Brandram (1777-1855).   The first stone was laid by Sir T Baring within a marquee filled by 100 National School children singing psalms at 1 pm on Wednesday 18^th July 1839⁴⁰.  Already £3,000 of the estimated £7,746 cost had been raised by voluntary subscription and an Act of Parliament allowed £6,000 to be borrowed and repaid from pew rents.   Celebrations were marked by class distinctions: the top brass (including the Bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas Baring) took a “dejeuner” in the Rectory; a large body of the gentry had a meal at Mr Brandram’s (not at the “dejeuner” despite his generous contributions); whilst the National Schoolchildren enjoyed an “elegant and substantial dinner” in their schoolroom.   More fun was had in the evening when 30 gentlemen dined at the Tiger’s Head.

The children had another free meal in 1842 to celebrate the first marriage in the church of the Rev Lock’s daughter Julia⁴¹ when he supplied an old English dinner of roast beef, plum pudding and other “substantial fare”.

The building was hard to miss being nearly as wide as it was previously long (118’ by 54’) with a tower and spire that reached 136 feet⁴².    After the modern church and churchyard were consecrated on 11 March 1841⁴³ the previous church was sold for materials and dismantled on 31 May⁴⁴ with a section of tower allowed to remain standing.

Gradually, the realisation dawned that having more (rather than larger) churches was the way forward and in 1853 it was decided to build a new churchto celebrate the Reverend Lock’s 50^th anniversary as Rector⁴⁵.  More than £1,000 was immediately subscribed from, amongst others, the Lord of the Manor; Thomas Brandram; and W Carr Esq, a neighbour of the Rector⁴⁶. It was named Christ Church after the Cambridge college Lock had attended in his youth⁴⁷.  

On 3 September 1853⁴⁸, precisely 50 years to the day since he began his incumbency, the Rev Lock with a silver trowel in his hand spread mortar on the foundation stone in Lee Park to the accompaniment of “merry peals” from St Margaret’s.   It was on a grand(ish) scale: 300 sat for a “cold collation” inside a spacious marquee with a massive plate at the table given by Mr G W Bennett of Blackheath.   The Royal Artillery Band played at intervals.   The church was 99’ by 63’ in the early English style with a 150’ spire from a design by Mr G G Scott (1811-1878, master of high Victorian gothic architecture) with 300 of the 1,000 seats being free.   It was consecrated in August 1854.

At a suitable distance from the marquee, one hundred poor people were “regaled with substantial fare” at the National School Room where Josiah Thomas, Lee’s working man’s poet (and shoemaker) presented a poem to the Rector.   One of the four verses praised him:

Oh when did the wretched for sympathy wait,

Or the widow or fatherless turn from his gate,

The beggars he’d chide, but relieve his distress,

For the fires of pity burned high in his breast.

The dying would bless him; with purse and prayer

He’d drive out the demons of want and despair

          Then a hearty hurrah, shout again and again

          For the heart that can feel for another man’s pain.

Compared to Christ Church’s site acquisition at a “merely nominal price” from Sir Gregory Page-Turner’s estate, nonconformist worship struggled to get a permanent place of worship.   Before 1851 some nonconformists had to travel “several miles to avail themselves of Christian privileges”⁴⁹ and Baptists were restricted to cramped accommodation that year in Church Lane.   Afterwards, (after great difficulty) they leased a larger site at Dacre Park which had its foundation stone laid on 31 May 1852.   Then in November 1854⁵⁰ another Baptist Chapel became available in Lee High Road, where the Rev R H Marten BA was settled as its pastor, and the original building in Dacre Park became available for the Lee Working Men’s Institute.

Various institutions developed as Lee’s population increased to 6,162 by 1861.   To survive in their early years a division emerged between those that sought support from the establishment and those that did not.   A particular contrast was between the Working Men’s Institute which from its first day recognised the need for gentry support, whilst Friendly Societies established in public houses asserted their independence.

The Lee Working Men’s Institution was created from a meeting at the Riding School, Dacre Park on Thursday 10 July 1854 which considered:

….the propriety of establishing an Institution for lectures and classes for instructing the middle and working classes of the neighbourhood, and also a library and reading room⁵¹

Its promoters were a small yet varied group: Thomas Jenner (1791-1867) a 63 year old retired farmer, was the prime mover who later acquired the site of the first permanent meeting place.   He was happy for the chair to be occupied by George W Bennett (1816-1861), a Blackheath watch and clock maker who enthusiastically supported many schemes in the area.   Others at that meeting included shoemakers; a master carpenter; a gardener; a Baptist minister (the Rev T Jones); and a Lewisham solicitor (Mr Mote).

Importantly the meeting resolved that

• It was the duty of all men to aim at mental improvement;
• Lee had been singularly neglected in the provision of an instructive society;
• A suitable building was to be built or hired where modest regular payments would purchase books, papers, classes, lectures and entertainments; and
• A committee be established to create a plan and gain support from gentry.

The latter was a telling point of realism.

The promoters particularly felt the lack of such an institution had resulted in “a vast amount of depravity and demoralisation” in Lee, which Mote thought was due to there being “no place for the working man to go and see the papers of a day other than the public house”.    The demarcation between public houses and temperance was a theme developed that century despite the likelihood that plenty of Institute users enjoyed a pint.

When the Lee Working Men’s Institution and Reading Room⁵² was opened on 27 September 1854, such an attendance gathered that many had to stand outside the small building the size of a “lean-to”⁵³.   Inside, the Chairman (G Bennett) put forward his view that “members of the society must recognise no class – the corded jacket should have as much respect as the black coat” – a view read both ways, particularly by J Meadows White who stated that “he was a working man [actually a Parliamentary Solicitor and Legal Writer] and he felt therefore that it was just the society for him”.

Prescient thoughts as within 6 months he was its President⁵⁴ by when it had secured a Wesleyan chapel as its more spacious hall.   White immediately brought in his church values.    In his view God had put the idea of an Institution into the hearts of Lee’s working men; he read letters from the Rector of Lee, and other clergy, indicating interest in the Institute; he read from a report by the Chaplain of Lewes gaol on the “frightful level of ignorance prevailing among the prisoners”; and then urged that as “the building before …. was dedicated to the worship of God, he hoped although now they would put it to secular uses, they would not use it less to God’s glory”.   A man with a particular perspective.

It was a military man, General Alexander, who put forward the more generous view that despite being called the Working Men’s Institution, it should include women.   One of the committee members, F J Turner, became important in its management.   With prominent gentry establishing control of the Institute (Jenner remained as Treasurer) membership unsurprisingly plummeted to the point where the situation was “very bad”.   Work had to be done to keep the Institution running and for the rest of the decade it was barely mentioned. 

On the other hand the 1850s saw increased support for the local volunteer corps.   Adverts in 1852⁵⁵ invited residents of Lee and the area to join the Blackheath Rifle Corps.   By 1859 the Lee and Blackheath Rifle Volunteers had H B Farnall as its chairman (who actually built a rifle range in his Lee Manor House gardens) and F J Turner as Honorary Secretary.   By December that year 90 members, in dark green uniform with black facings, were drilled into shape by a real Regimental Sergeant Major from Woolwich.   Eighty signed their allegiance at the Blackheath Literary Institution⁵⁶ where above cutlasses ranged on the wall, there hung a banner with the vicar of Lee’s family crest.   A particular incentive became apparent when the hall was filled with women who “most loudly applauded” the company as it entered, led by Captain Farnall.

It was lady residents who ceremonially presented a silver bugle to the Company in May 1860⁵⁷ at the Manor House gardens: many women attended and Mrs W S Shove* of Lee Terrace presented the bugle to the company via their captain Henry Burrard Farnall*

*In 1855⁵⁸ Lee’s two parish overseers were called Shove and Penny.   In 1859 Farnell’s name was gloriously misspelt by the Kentish Mercury as Henry Buzzard Farnell⁵⁹.

Within one week in October 1855⁶⁰ three of Lee’s venerable and wealthiest inhabitants died – Benjamin Crichton, shipowner of Lee Cottage; Joseph Sladen of the Firs; and Thomas Brandram.   The latter, an active magistrate of Lee Grove, had apparently “watched with untiring zeal and energy over the affairs of the parish for more than 50 years”.   Changes were immediate when his house (with 50 acres) was bought for £30,000⁶¹ by John Penn (1805-78) who renamed it The Cedars after trees planted by its former owners the Boylands.   He remodelled the mansion; acquired the site of the old rectory in 1866 and widened the public highway⁶².   An engineer of world-wide reputation, born in Greenwich, Penn was twice President of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in 1858-9 and 1867-8; Fellow of the Royal Society in 1859; and his Greenwich and Deptford workshops employed 2,000.   He was important in Lee’s subsequent history and worked hard to create a sense of community including a treat for the Lee National School children when in July 1857 “one of the largest assemblages of residents that ever occurred in the village took place” at the Cedars.   Games included:

….the girls running for cakes and oranges, and the boys …. Climbing for legs of mutton, barrow races, rounders, footballs, gingling matches, donkey racing, leapfrog and scrambling for various articles⁶³

And whilst his works band played, the house was magnificently lit up at night.

In 1858 the fete had three bands, fireworks and again a large number of attendees that prompted the Kentish Mercury to comment: 

The poor and rich are, unfortunately, generally too far apart and opportunities like this, which associate them together in one common enjoyment, are of infinite service to all.⁶⁴

Penn was particularly representative of the Victorian Age’s sense of confidence as described in 1854⁶⁵  .

The present is an age of unprecedented progress and invention; an age in which time and space appear to have been annihilated – in which intelligence is made to speed from one country to another with the quickness of thought or the rapidity of lightning – in which the very elements are set at defiance and made subservient to our wants – in which a difficulty has but to be encountered to be overcome, a want felt to be supplied –  a century which has beheld the perfection of the steam engine, the introduction of railways and steam vessels, the discovery of the electric telegraph, the construction of the tubular bridges and the formation of a tunnel beneath the bed of the Thames [at Rotherhithe]

At the foot of the hill, however, life was different for poor people when cholera struck Lee in 1849⁶⁶ and several labourers and their children died.   Another outbreak in 1854⁶⁷ killed two children in one family and prompted a comparison between Lee’s previous picturesque beauty” and healthy climate to the situation where waste was now carried from farmland and “numberless houses”.     A writer to the Kentish Mercury urged the Kent Water Works Company to cleanse the Quaggy and compel developers to link properties to the common sewer which ran along Lee High Road from the Tigers Head to Lewisham.   This sewer had been completed the previous year (1853)⁶⁸ before which the old parish drain drained into the Quaggy * from the village.

The Quaggy had been a convenient natural sewer for centuries.   Origins of its name are obscure (on Rocque’s 1749 map it was called Lee Water) but appear to derive from the same prefix as quagmire, describing its marshy course.   It passed two important thoroughfares in the parish – Lee Road to the north of the Tiger’s Head and Lee High Road to the west of the same building.   The first of these was particularly dangerous in certain conditions – a Bromley famer had drowned after floods swept away his horse and cart in 1830 – and a bridge was required.  

Thus, it was with good fortune that the Plumstead Board of Works was created in 1855 which brought various elements of the community together to improve Lee’s physical environment and increase its attractiveness to incomers.   Reports confirmed Lee’s⁶⁹ dual nature – to the south was an “open countryside and a free access of pure atmosphere” whilst to the north about 500 acres were covered by houses.   That the village was generally built on an incline was seen as an advantage for “perfect and rapid drainage for cleansing the streets, and for carrying off the surface water in wet weather”.   It was observed that the “virulence and extent of [cholera and othe zymotic diseases] was always in inverse ratio to the elevation of the locality” – which was wrongly ascribed to purer air (hence smart houses on top of the hill) rather than the water-borne waste that travelled down it.

Lee’s population of 4,148 in 1856 occupied 746 houses (i.e. 5.56 per house) with the labouring population estimated at 1,785 (43%).   Whilst the death rate was about 17 per 1,000, it was the labouring classes who bore the brunt with 85% of mortalities.   Infant mortality in particular (41% of deaths were under 5 years) was perceived by the Parish Office of Health to be equivalent to that of many large and crowded towns.

In addition to drainage, having an adequate water supply was an issue.   Whilst Lee benefitted from abundant springs with “bright and sparkling” water, they were inadequate for more populated areas where one pump could serve several families.   And a system to thoroughly flush drains from closets to the sewer had to be found.   Conditions in some places were genuinely shocking with a preponderance of cesspools and a single pump serving a dozen or more houses (in Union Place it was 20 houses, of which 11 had been wooden stables belonging to a stage coach manager).

To their immense credit, the Board acted quickly.   By March 1857 (i.e. a year after the Report), 140 connections had been made to main sewers (in lieu of cesspools); several courts had been cleansed and paved with ash pits added; minor streams purified; and the large polluted stagnant pond at the corner of Burnt Ash Lane filled in.

Illnesses suffered by people at Lee Green were unfairly blamed on Irish families living in cramped housing.    These may have included John Toban, an Irish Labourer of Lee Green who in April 1856 arrived at Blackheath village riding a horse “a la Don Quixote” with hod and shovel as shield and lance.   Unsurprisingly drunk his defence was that he had found a stray horse when carrying his tools from Woolwich.   Fortunately he was believed and released⁷⁰.

For the remainder of the decade improvements were made to repair highways; build sewers; and put up gas lamps (111 by March 1858), which helped attract more middle class occupants.

Another of the modern breed of energetic men was Lewisham-born George Wright (1827-1883) who since February 1852 had been landlord of the Royal Oak.   He tamed the pub’s character to a degree, despite having his trousers torn off by drunks he ejected on Christmas Eve 1865⁷¹.  He actually displayed the trousers as evidence in court.  George was the Treasurer of the Royal Oak’s court of the Ancient Order of Foresters (a Friendly Society) established in 1856⁷², with his brother Henry as Secretary.   He and Henry were additionally active in the Plumstead Board of Works: George becoming its Inspector of Nuisances and Henry its Chairman in 1862/3.  He and his brother formed a link between the concerns of ordinary people and people at the Board of Works such as FW Hart who were more church orientated. 

Friendly Societies helped wage earners become “independent of the cold hand of charity” and had been present in Lee since the 1840s with a branch established of the Oddfellows at the Swan⁷³ and a society at the Prince Arthur⁷⁴ .

Particular pubs had links to the building industry: a subcontractor paid brickmakers at the Woodman until they struck for the right to be paid at the builder’s office⁷⁵; and Henry Gladwell Mortimer, landlord of the Highlander beershop, near Lee Bridge,  supplemented his income (£49 profit in two years)⁷⁶ with grander schemes such that by 1871 he employed ten men in his builder’s business⁷⁷.   He was quite a character:  in 1855 he acquired the adjacent (vacant) house by making an entrance through the wall⁷⁸.    And when in court for his fourth bankruptcy the Commissioner commented that “what surprises him most was that people should trust such a man”⁷⁹.

Between 21 and 22 February 1854 his actions literally created a riot when “scenes of the most disgraceful and alarming character were perpetrated” ⁸⁰ at Eliot’s Estate, near Lee Bridge, when a sale of materials was claimed by another party.   Mortimer’s men were faced by that of Douglas (a former business partner) and Samuel Newman (builder on the Mount Eliot’s estate*) and 40 on either side launched into each other with bludgeons, brick bats and stones.   The fight continued into the night when another gang joined in:  heads were hurt, bodies bruised and a man named Abbott (from Lewisham) was carried to hospital on a litter with a fractured leg.

*The land belonged to Edward Granville Eliot 3^rd Earl of St German’s, who had many streets linked to either his name or places on his Cornish estate.

In addition to the violence, residents were shocked by a “posse” of police that stood idly by as the riot continued until they were joined by mounted police – at night, which alarmed the residents further.  

Others discovered other aspects of the development dream.   James Hawkins of the White Horse purchased the pub for what he later realised was “a great deal of money and lost seriously by it”.   The house had been considerably enlarged and recently licensed by its previous landlord.   Hawkins took the bait that “the new neighbourhood was a new one and he had hoped to make a trade and that his position would be daily improving”.   Four years later, in March 1858, he was declared bankrupt with debts of £900, an ailing wife and 10 children to support.   “We are almost starving” was his poignant plea⁸¹.

Alongside physical development, charities had to adjust to modern requirements.   In 1858 authorities unilaterally changed the terms of Hatcliffe’s charity (more than 200 years old) such that funds distributed to the indigent and aged of the parish were reduced from £160 p.a. to £30⁸².    The remainder was used to fund four scholarships (two from National School children) to an adult evening class with the purpose of sending them into the world.      Two years earlier, in 1856⁸³, Abraham Colfe’s bequest (again 200 years old) of distributing bread to the poor at church every Sunday was replaced with small loaves distributed in winter from a soup kitchen in Church Street.

Whilst Church and other authorities had to adapt to an increased number of poor, reductions in charitable provision was clearly resented – including people new to the neighbourhood for whom the workhouse remained a real fear.   And several established residents preferred to retain Lee’s traditions.

Alongside the adjustments to modernity, a belief in in maintaining life’s hierarchy remained – particularly with servants as revealed in 1858 when a footman took his employer to court⁸⁴.   Robert Soames (of Belmont House), believing his footman enjoyed a drink, had struck James Hancock, dragged him along the floor and knocked him down the pantry stairs.   It has to be said, that earlier that day, when sitting with the coachman Hancock had been seen “to sway and fro with a sort of exaggerated movement, and apparently unable to hold himself on the carriage.”   Then at dinner he appeared “unable to keep his legs” (Hancock’s more descriptive version was that he stumbled after catching his toe on the governess’ chair).    However, it was his reply to Mrs Soames in the carriage that “when you get another servant you had better get one made on purpose for you” that was his undoing.   The magistrate believed “proof of insolence was even worse than loss of understanding by drink” and dismissed the summons.   Beyond the comedy, however, lay the acceptance of using violence to keep servants in line.

1.  All The Year Round 2/8/1862
2.  Weekly Chronicle 30/7/1837
3.  KM 29/7/1837
4.  KM 26/10/1844
5.  KM 6/8/1842
6.  KM 25/2/1843
7.  KM 16/9/1843
8.  KM 21/9/1844
9.  KM 25/1/1845
10.  KM 6/9/1845
11.  KM 20/9/1845
12.  KM 17/1/1846
13.  LLSA JP Minutes 30/3/1835
14.  KM 21/10/1848
15.  1841 census and tithe schedule
16.  Tithe map and Hart p36
17.  KM 5/2/1848
18.  Tithe map and schedule
19.  NA CRES 2/372, April 1842
20.  N Rhind, Blackheath Village & Environs p126
21.  1841 census
22.  Bagshaw Directory 1847 and 1841 census
23.  Tithe schedule
24.  1841 census
25.  KM 30/3/1843 and 23/9/1843
26.  1841 census
27.  KM 11/3/1848
28.  KM 10/2/1849
29.  KM 15/4/1843
30.  KM 21/3/1840
31.  KM 5/10/1850
32.  Hart p54
33.  KM 9/10/1875
34.  Hart p65
35.  Bagshaw Directory 1847
36.  Census
37.  Rhind op cit pp157-8
38.  KM 23/1/1841
39.  Hart p11
40.  KM 20/7/1839
41.  KM 9/7/1842
42.  KM 7/1/1843
43.  KM 24/4/1843
44.  Hart p4
45.  KM 26/2/1853
46.  1851 census
47.  Hart p6
48.  KM 10/9/1853
49.  KM 5/6/1852
50.  KM 24/1/1855
51.  KM 22/7/1854
52.  KM 30/9/1854
53.  KM 6/4/1878
54.  KM 3/3/1855
55.  KM 13/3/1852
56.  KM 24/12/1859
57.  KM 9/5/1860
58.  KM 7/4/1855
59.  KM 20/8/1859
60.  KM 13/10/1855
61.  KM 12/4/1856
62.  D p225
63.  KM 18/7/1857
64.  KM 31/7/1858
65.  Bohn’s Illustrated Library, Pictorial Handbook of London (1854), p831
66.  KM 11/8/1849
67.  KM 16/9/1854
68.  KM 7/5/1853
69.  Plumstead Board of Works (PBoW) Minutes 22/3/1856
70.  KM 5/4/1856
71.  KM 9/1/1865
72.  KM 14/7/1882
73.  KM 3/7/1875
74.  KM 15/6/1872
75.  KM 9/12/1854
76.  KM 2/10/1852
77.  1871 census
78.  KM 1/2/1862
79.  KM 1/8/1857 and 3/10/1857
80.  KM 25/2/1854
81.  KM 6/3/1858
82.  KM 27/2/1858
83.  Hart p51
84.  KM 2/10/1858

•  

LEE FROM 1861-1880

Inhabitants

From 1861 to 1871 there was a rapid increase in inhabitants from 6,162 to 10,493: i.e. more than a person a day¹ and, inevitably, reminders of Lee’s past faded.

However, modern advantages included a railway station opened on 1 September 1866 where, if the ceremony resembled Mottingham’s, the first train was brought in by the stationmaster dressed in tails and a gold crested top hat².      The railway company  paid £7,376.10s for Crown land (east of Burnt Ash Lane) and a further £506.16s.3d in January 1865 for 2 acres on which to build a station³.   Development quickly spread south from Lee Green where shops replaced Lee Green Farm and orchard by 1867 and Burnt Ash Lane was converted “from a narrow and not much frequented country lane to a broad and populous highway”⁴.   Leyland and Dorville Roads were built in 1867 and 1868 and the Crown benefitted substantially from being able to lease building land at £30 an acre rather than the £3 for farming rents⁵.

Houses (from 953 to 1,646 by 1871)⁶ were linked by paths where people had to “wade through mud that covers the boots of male pedestrians and prevents females and children from getting out at all”⁷.   Another consequence, observed in 1862, was:

In this neighbourhood (Lee) foot-passengers must soon be driven on the road, seeing that not only are perambulators a permitted nuisance, but in addition to them we have washerwomen, laundresses, gardeners and others, wheeling their barrows on the footpath.   These, for the most part, being used in broad daylight we can avoid; but the greatest nuisance are Bath chairs …. and on Sundays they may be seen in abundance…….The last Sunday in February was a very foggy night; and as the inhabitants were returning from church, many of them suddenly came across one of these carriages and to avoid injury were driven off the path into the mud.⁸

In the 1870s much of the population increase (from 10,493 to 14,432 by 1881) was middle class and significantly transient, with many more people actually arriving in Lee than the 4,000 net increase would suggest.   If Horn Park was typical, two thirds of people present in 1871 were replaced within 10 years.  

Physical improvements included a Sunday water supply; asphalt paving; the filling in of wells and cesspools, and general street improvements.   Other additions were a drinking fountain at the corner of Burnt Ash Lane with Eltham Road (1870); a fire escape (ie a ladder on wheels) near the Tigers Head (1874); and a fire station (with steam fire engine) in Weardale Road (1879).   Modern buildings included the Merchant Taylors’ Almshouses in Lee High Road (1873) and the Congregational Church in Burnt Ash Lane (1873).

In 1872 four vans of employees from a fire engine manufacture arrived at the Tiger’s Head.   Several entered the butcher (on the site of what became Lee Green Post Office) to purchase pease pudding which they then pelted at each other.   When an intrepid constable got into the heart of the roistering mob of  300 people, he was “very roughly handled, being pushed against a wall, knocked down and trampled upon”.   Two arrests caused the crowd to besiege the police station (then a cottage) with calls to pull it down.   Peace (rather than pease) prevailed and the men were released by the magistrate ⁹.

Housing development continued until 1870 when there was a sudden 70% reduction in construction¹⁰ and in the 12 months up to October 1871 John Pound ceased his brick manufacture¹¹.   In the subsequent recovery people such as Pound were joined by speculators  –  such as William Winn (from Stratford, Essex) who constructed Winn Road in about 1876 that generally adhered to what had been Horn Park deer park boundary¹².  By 1876-77 streets were built on Lord Northbrook’s estate between Burnt Ash Hill and Hither Green Lane and the church (of the Good Shepherd) was built in Handen Road in 1880 and consecrated on 12 December 1881 ¹³.  

By 1876 Lee was described as a large suburban parish where its

convenient distance from London, the pleasantness of the neighbourhood and the proximity of Blackheath have made it a favourite place of residence with City merchants and men of business, for whose accommodation every available piece of ground has been appropriated.   Parks (Lee Park, Manor Park, Dacre Park, Belmont Park, Grove Park, etc), in which the houses are not too closely packed, mingling with the terraces of detached and semi-detached villas and genteel cottages, and a sprinkling of older houses in good-sized grounds, secure the place from the cheerless monotony of some suburban districts, but leave little to interest a visitor.   Nor has the place any historical association.¹⁴

Lee’s history now required a keen eye to be discerned.   And it was easy to squeeze in more housing: 1879-80 saw the highest number of houses (253) ever built in Lee in  the 19^th century¹⁵ – which was optimistic as 14% (372 dwellings) of all housing remained vacant in 1881.   And historic houses continued to have a development value, such as Lee House in Lee High Road put up for sale in 1875 with 4 ½ acres of “building land of the highest character”¹⁶.

Lee Green Turnpike

The turnpike tollgate in Eltham Road (near Cambridge Drive) was removed in 1867 and its final keeper, William Crawley had witnessed various sights whilst there -including the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh when they travelled to the Middle Park horse races in the 1860s.   And there was the day he requested payment from Prince Arthur who lived at the Ranger’s House, Greenwich Park.   When the Prince, then a youth, asked him if he knew who he was, the gatekeeper replied that he did not.   “I am Prince Arthur” was the reply to which Crawley answered “You are so much like other people that, upon my soul, I didn’t know the difference”.   Apparently the Prince enjoyed the riposte and afterwards always saluted the gatekeeper and paid up his 1 ½ d ¹⁷.    A reminder of the tollgate, shortly after its removal, was the Prince Arthur, a modest pub built in 1867 by John Pound (1827-1896) at Lee Green.

John Pound built many houses in the area, particularly in Burnt Ash Lane where he lived at Stratton Villa.   And in 1870 he built the infant school in the recently established Robertson Street (now Hedgely Street) when the Church Street school became too crowded.   Contemporary middle class sensibilities (and fears) surfaced in the fund appeal which stressed that “it ought never to be forgotten in dealing with children of the working classes that the great deterrent of crime is a sound religious education”¹⁸.

Another supporter of schools was Penn whose company van “drawn by a splendid horse” conveyed National schoolchildren to Keston Common for their annual treat in 1869 where they camped near the spring source of the Ravensbourne¹⁹.   He supported working people with generous contributions to ease distress during the hard winter of 1861 and established a telegraph link between his house and factory so that its fire engine could attend fires in Lee²⁰.   These included John Pound’s workshop near Lee police station in 1867 ²¹ (when a spark carried from a workman’s pipe) and at Holy Trinity Church in 1868 ²².

Brickmaking

Pound used Lee’s clay deposits to manufacture bricks, particularly in Burnt Ash Lane – where the industry had flourished since the Tudor period (or before), and 18^th century Horn Park had fields (including Pitts Fields) linked to such work²³.   By 1866 Horn Park made at least 3 ½ million bricks a year²⁴ with the result that Burnt Ash Lane was “much cut up during the winter months by the large number of horses and carts employed in carting chalk and other materials for brick-making purposes to the brickfields which have been established in that neighbourhood”²⁵.

The “other materials” were cinders and rubbish as described in Bricks and Brickmakers in Sittingbourne, Sittingbourne Heritage Museum:

Brickmaking was hard work in a harsh environment and partly seasonal.   In winter the clay was dug by hand and built into piles …. about 3 ft. high and 20 ft. square.   Chalk and cinders along with other rubbish were then mixed in and the pile left to weather.   The cinders …. [meant that] the bricks, when placed in the kiln provided much of the fuel themselves thus reducing the cost of fuel.   The “fuel” for the bricks came from London rubbish …. Moving the rubbish was dirty smelly work.

          In the spring the process of making the bricks began.   The work was organised in gangs paid by piecework.   Lumps of the weathered clay were taken to the moulder’s table often by women and children ….  After moulding, the bricks were moved in barrows to the drying racks.   One man said that as a child he was required to carry about 40 lbs of clay at a time to the moulder’s table and then move the shaped bricks to the drying boards.   After drying, the bricks were moved to the kilns by Crowders who pushed loads of 80 bricks in a barrow, total weight some 400 pounds.   When the kilns were fired, the burning rubbish gave of fumes and unpleasant odours.

The pits were dangerous: in 1862 a youth drowned after falling from a plank into a pool²⁶ and in 1871 a 7 year old boy drowned near Burnt Ash Farm after arguing with a friend about fish they had caught in a disused pit there²⁷.

It was thirsty work and in 1866 a beershop in the north-west corner of Horn Park’s largest brickfield was licensed²⁸ as the Crown (being on Crown land, previously the deer park).  Competition came from an unlicensed beershop in Burnt Ash Lane in 1869 where beer, at 4d a quart, was bought by the foreman of the brickfield to supplement workers’ wages.   Kilns were kept heated on Sundays and the men waited in the “shanty” for his arrival with the liquid nourishment²⁹.   The area actually attracted a missionary, Mr Atkins from the City Mission, whose preaching and teaching room on Mr Drewitt’s brickfield in 1867 optimistically supplied tea rather than beer³⁰.

Another public house built in Burnt Ash Lane was the Lord Northbrook – named after the Lord of the Manor, Sir Francis Baring, who became Baron Northbrook on 4 January that year (1866).   It was built by John Pound who employed 40 men in his business³¹.   Another housebuilder was Nathan Nevard to whom Pound, in 1865, refused to supply further bricks until a £44 debt had been paid.   Nevard, who “might have had a glass or two of ale” visited Pound’s house to remonstrate and upset the family to such a degree that Pound “caught hold of him, dragged him off the chair on which he was seated …. tore his shirt and coat and waistcoat” and physically ejected him from the house³².

Friendly Societies

Friendly Societies continued to flourish.   Prominent was the Royal Oak’s Ancient Order of Foresters whose march in 1864 had banners, flags and a brass band before  cricket, quoits, running and dancing were enjoyed at Manor Farm.   90 members and friends had a meal that evening in the pub with musical accompaniment from a band³³.   Such societies gathered a lot of support: this particular Court had 125 members in 1867 (70 of whom contributed to a Widows & Orphans Fund) with funds of £683³⁴ .   And, there were Court surgeons: doctors who helped the poor generally in addition to Court responsibilities.

Lee Working Men’s Institute

And the Working Men’s Institute’s premises were improved to include a reading room and library.   Free talks were given by gentlemen of the area on subjects that ranged from Milton to magnetism.   Separate benefit clubs were established for men and women, which paid sick relief in addition to Christmas dividends of £1. 3s.11d in 1862 for women compared to the men’s 19s 4d.  A coal club, established by 1864, purchased coal at a cheap rate³⁵.

In 1866 there was a sudden “great improvement of the Society” when membership increased; the Men’s Society spent £401, the Women’s £197; the Coal Club £409; and there was a general surplus of £82³⁶.   Reasons were various: an increase in working class inhabitants in Lee; an increased political awareness before the 1867 Reform Act; increased desire for Self Help (Samuel Smiles actually lived in Granville Park between 1860-3); more benefit societies (a co-operative meat store³⁷ and a Lee Branch of the Universal Beneficent Society* ³⁸ were established in 1866); and a strengthening of the temperance movement which held meetings at the Institute.

The Universal Beneficent Society was (and still is) a national charity, founded in 1857, with Charles Dickens as a founder member.   The aim was to “assist financially all those in need with no distinction of class or creed”.

And the 1867-8 lectures covered more pertinent issues such as The Dwellings of the Poor; Trades Unions; the Relief of Distress; Education; and Benefit Societies³⁹.

With broadened membership and activities a larger building was needed and a site was found in Old Road.   Building funds were raised from bazaars (£600 in the summer of 1868); a dollshouse display (with a Lee contractor paying the entrance fee for schoolchildren on a Sunday); and subscriptions.    Support came from the Reverend W F Sims of Christ Church whose liberal view was that newspapers helped people “understand one another, and sympathise with one another”.   In more general terms he added:

In these days it is said that much danger would accrue from working men having a voice in the government.   From what he had seen of the culture and way of thinking among the working men in this place, he was sure they were well qualified for the franchise⁴⁰.

More than artisans attended the Institute: “In the reading room, in the discussions, in the social meetings connected with the society, men of all circumstances meet together, and by friendly intercourse help to break down those barriers which too often separate class from class”⁴¹.   

The Institute particularly flourished during the Reform Bill debate in 1867.   A particular issue for Lee was whether it should join the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich or remain in Kent which had a higher franchise requirement.   After the gentry declared for Kent, the 1868 vestry election meeting attracted an “unusually large attendance of parishioners who evidently seemed to take a more lively interest in the parish affairs than has been observed for some time past”⁴².  And when several vestrymen (particularly Henry and George Wright), attempted to restrict attendance by doubting that all attendees had paid their rates, “considerable confusion and uproar” ensued with cries of “point them out” and “sit down”.   An attempted adjournment prompted more uproar and the meeting was forced to continue.   A Ratepayers Association was formed and the 1869 meeting attracted such a large attendance it was adjourned from the National School to the Gymnasium⁴³.

The Gymnasium (at a building yet to be identified in Dacre Park) was used for various activities that ranged from Christian worship (when St Margaret’s was being repaired) to use by the Rifle Volunteers.   And in April 1865 it had a gymnastic display and Assault D’armes performed by the proprietor M. Huguenin, a “modern Sampson”, which included “fencing, sabre versus Bayonet, cavalry sword exercises, cutting a sheep in halves in addition to a lead bar and an apple in a handkerchief”.    All to the accompaniment of the ubiquitous Rifle Volunteer Band⁴⁴.

Another “assault of arms” in 1868⁴⁵ was impressive and entertaining.   With an assurance that activities were safe (and could be achieved with proper training) it included: boxing; sabre against bayonet (won convincingly by the sabre holder); club swinging (with clubs weighing 35 lbs); dumb bells (including a pair at 70lb each!); fencing; and a series of sword skills.   The latter by Mr Kelly (previously a Sergeant Major in the Royal Artillery) included “severing the leg of mutton, cutting the silk handkerchief, the apple on the hand, the egg, the lemon etc”.   His attempt to slice a thread holding an apple and then back-slice the descending fruit failed (uniquely it was claimed) because a gas lamp flickered.   And his finale, designed to prove quickness of eye was proved when “with eight thrusts of the sword as many slices were cut off a poached egg on a table” –  impressive if you were there.

By 1871 the gymnasium was managed by Mr McTurk and at a demonstration in front of a large audience, a Mr Galpin performed a high kick of 9 ½ feet which “fairly brought the house down” (not literally it is presumed).   He is likely to have used dumbbells⁴⁶.

The Working Men’s Institute moved into premises in Old Road in October 1877 (the current Institute building in Aislabie Road is a separate Institute) when the opening ceremony attracted an audience of tradesmen and working class families⁴⁷.   There were nice touches – the spacious platform in the lecture hall was carpeted and bounded by brass railings whilst the reading room was lit by a handsome four-light chandelier presented by Mr J Aldous of Lee High Road.   The President, F J Turner, proudly described how from half a dozen men it currently had 60-70 members; 900 users; 450 benefit club members; and 200 teetotallers whose temperance comrades (again chaired by F J Turner) converted the Institute’s initial building in Boone Street into the Lee Temperance Hall⁴⁸.

The Institute made a modest profit of £3 in 1876⁴⁹ (membership was 1/6d per quarter) and the income of the men’s and women’s benefit societies was £434 and £321 respectively.   Its Christmas club accumulated nearly £100 and the Institute had a penny bank (quite likely the Lee, Lewisham and Blackheath Permanent Building Society) “where the working man could on Saturday night drop in his penny, twopence, threepence or pounds”.  

By April 1878⁵⁰ the premises had “a lofty well lighted hall, capable of holding nearly 400 persons, a comfortable reading room, a library, two large rooms upstairs for club, class and committee meetings, and one ante-room”.   One of the large rooms was supplied with a bagatelle board, chess, draughts and dominoes.   Amazingly Mr Nettlefold had been Secretary since its inception 24 years earlier.

From about 1876, Penny readings on Monday nights attracted substantial audiences and included music; readings (which could create “roars of laughter”); and dissolving views of subjects such as the Zulu war.   And there were entertainments on other evenings given by bodies such as the Lee Choral Society, the Burnt Ash Literary Society and meetings by the Lee Church Missionary Society and the Lee branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society (with its predominantly female audience facing an entirely male platform).

Scientific lectures included an evening in March 1878 on electricity, light and heat where the presenter stated his little finger held more electricity than a thunderstorm and lit a gas jet with it (the current in his body being generated by a machine that rubbed glass on silk).   Sparks appeared from a clenched hand and he made the hair on a wooden doll’s head stand upright.   Particular wonders included a leyden jar; ignition of gunpowder by electricity; and an early telephone where people in an upper room “were freely conversed with”.   The audience had glimpsed the world to come⁵¹.

Lee & Blackheath Horticultural Society

It was from a meeting at the Institute in May 1868 that nurserymen and gardeners established the Lee & Blackheath Horticultural and Floricultural Society⁵².   Dr Carr and Francis Hart became President and vice-President and patrons quickly included Lord Northbrook; the Rector; H B Farnall and John Penn.   Its declared purpose was “the bringing together of all classes …. the diffusion of practical and theoretical knowledge …. periodic flower shows …. and above all to encourage practical and remunerative gardening”⁵³.    It attracted an amazing degree of interest from “gentry and artisans” and its Show at Dacre Park meadows that September had flowers and fruits arranged in tents and music from John Penn’s band⁵⁴.  

1872 was an important year for the Horticultural Society with, firstly, the establishment of the Gardener’s Registration and Mutual Improvement Society.   Secondly, Emperor Napoleon III (who lived at Chislehurst) visited the Flower Show with his wife and son the Empress and Prince Imperial⁵⁵.   For half an hour they perambulated amongst flower and fruit displays at the Cedars and were presented with a bunch of winning grapes by Dr Carr’’s wife.   The Emperor mentioned to Dr Carr his high regard for the Show – a fact repeated and embellished in subsequent years.

The Committee dinner that year in the Royal Oak became crucial for the Horticultural Society’s future when Mr Jennings (a printer of Blackheath) commented “that the affluent residents of the district did not support the society as they ought”⁵⁶.    Dr Carr, as the Chair, listened and then acted such that people of influence gave their support.   There were, however, consequences.   Admission prices at the 1873 Show separated classes with 2/6d on the first day; 1/- on the second reduced to 6d after 3 pm.   Despite rain on the first day there was a good attendance by Lee’s elite with “as is usual, the ladies mustering in considerable force”.   On the second day “vast numbers” attended with about 500 in the gardens of the Cedars.   “Dancing was the craze of the evening and was kept up until dark” with music from the band of the 25^th Kent Volunteers ⁵⁷.

The annual Flower Show at Penn’s came to be seen as the village fete which brought together young and old; poor and rich (albeit on different days); and perhaps church and pub.   At the 1876 prize giving Dr Carr gave a positive picture of the Society’s benefit:

Look at our cottage gardens, those small, yet charming additions to our labourers’ homes in Dacre Street, Turner Road, Boone’s Road and many other localities, where there is the incontestable proof of industry, taste and good gardening.   Compare them with themselves a few years ago.   Formerly, one saw a mass of untrained roses of the commonest kind, with a few fuschias or an occasional Tom-Thumb geranium.   Now we see a series of beds arranged artistically, containing many of our choicest varieties of both flowering and foliage plants, thus ensuring throughout the whole summer both colour to enliven and flower to make still gayer the cottage home.⁵⁸

By 1877 membership reached nearly 500 from the 325 of three years earlier and Dr Carr gave his typically enthusiastic support at the General meeting in January⁵⁹.   Sadly in March that year he died after a short illness and was remembered at the 1878 Show with a silver challenge cup awarded for the person with the largest number of prizes.   The Society received another shock in 1878 with the death of John Penn: fortunately his family were happy for the Show to continue at their property.

Dr Carr (1814-1877) was a Yorkshireman from Hunslett near Leeds who wore a bouquet in his button hole and had studied medicine in London before being forced to live on his resources after his father lost his fortune.   He practised as a doctor for 40 years in Lee and was famed for his kindness (giving free service to the poor or spending money to assist them).   Supporting a wide range of causes and Societies, he had contacts in high places being presented at Court in 1864 and attending subsequent levees.   And he was appointed Prince Arthur’s medical attendant when the Prince lived at the Rangers House, Blackheath.   The Prince (by then the Duke of Connaught) sent a hand written letter of sympathy on hearing the news.   And yet in his personal habits Carr was “most abstemious, living on the simplest food and never exceeding in the indulgence of the table”⁶⁰.

John Penn (c.1805-1878) had married at 42 the daughter of another engineer (William English) by whom he had 4 sons and 2 daughters.   He performed unseen acts of charity; aided workmen in genuine distress; and for any major emergency (such as the Princess Alice) was a generous contributor.   That he was held in high esteem was apparent at his funeral when several thousand assembled by the church.   1,400 from his engineering firm formed a procession (four deep and a quarter of a mile long) from Lewisham, up Belmont Hill to the Cedars where two lines were formed (2 deep) from there to the Church – a distance of 50 yards – as his coffin passed by⁶¹.

Volunteers

The Volunteers were an active group (with manoeuvres in 1863 to defend Belmont Hill in an imaginary battle⁶²) with the gentry in charge: Colonel Hillyard was chairman and Dr Carr vice-Chairman.   Inevitably, the real enemy was perceived to be the public house and Colonel Hillyard urged that “artisans, instead of going to the public house for his beer and pipe” should, in his words, enjoy “a good drill”.   And Dr Carr, whilst urging the promotion of temperance amongst all classes, toasted such sentiments in the Gymnasium with “excellent wines, port, sherry and claret supplied at cost price”⁶³.   A feature of the Volunteer’s dinner in 1867 was the many women that watched from the balcony.

In July 1879 500 Volunteers (from Lee, Blackheath, Greenwich etc) assembled by the Tiger’s Head to march along the “white dusty road” to Chislehurst for the funeral of Prince Imperial (Napoleon III’s son) who had been killed in a bungled military skirmish in Zululand .   He was buried with much ceremony, being attended by royalty (including Queen Victoria), members of the Napoleon family and large numbers of French and English public.    It had been 7 years since the Prince Imperial had attended Lee’s Horticultural Show⁶⁴.

Churches

1864 was the year when the “highly talented, amiable and beloved” Reverend Lock died aged 94 and was buried in the family vault in the old churchyard.   Mourners assembled by the church precincts and “active life in the parish appeared to be suspended” for the day⁶⁵.

By then, churches had acquired a commercial value: in 1864 the Crown permitted the Reverend W F Sim (1811-1887) to build a chapel of ease to Christ Church on the west side of Cambridge Road as it would then “act as an inducement to persons to build there” (being on Crown land)⁶⁶.   The temporary iron church, costing £800, was dedicated to St Peter and accommodated several hundred people before a more substantial building was built on Crown land to the north of Eltham Road for about £5,000 in 1871⁶⁷.

Plans in 1869 for improvements to St Margaret’s directed by Gilbert Scott included substantial alterations with services held in the Gymnasium, Dacre Park, for 2 months⁶⁸.   St Margaret’s was thoroughly repaired in 1871 including the release of its vane which had pointed west for 11 years⁶⁹.  In 1875 it acquired three more bells, making six in all.   Additionally a chancel was suggested for which the Rector would give £1,000 if parishioners helped dismantle the galleries and replace the pews with oak benches.   Other alterations included the relocation of the organ and the church was re-opened on 28 June 1876⁷⁰.

The views of senior clergy became apparent in the week before Christmas 1871 when the Bishop of Rochester, in his sermon, compared the situation then to the French Revolution.   He dwelt particularly “upon the attempts now made for the overthrow of all social laws and regulations; the insubordination rife amongst the lower classes, contempt of the powers that be, wealth accumulated by means unlawful, the breaking of the Sabbath day etc”.   His thoughts chimed with parishioners as £151 was then collected for his fund⁷¹.

In 1873 the Rector, Reverend Frederick Henry Law (married to Lady Adelaide, daughter of the late Marquis of Londonderry) came from a living worth £100 near Darlington to Lee which was worth £900.   He did have sensibilities that were an important legacy for Lee.   He and his wife (who inherited substantial wealth) were influenced by the Oxford Movement, Pugin and Gothic revivalism.   As a consequence he conceived and helped implement, with the architect James Brooks, the decorative transformation of St Margarets using the best artists and craftsmen of the period.   It was an impressive achievement.

However, he did reveal particular attitudes when talking to the Working Men’s Institute  saying “he knew there was too much degradation going on, not to try and raise working men from the level to which they had fallen”.   Rather incongruously he then freely admitted to having “purposely abstained” from the work of the Institution “on the basis that working men did not want their pity or sympathy” adding that working men admired a “manly independence”⁷².   Inevitably he repeated the view of previous committee members that the phrase “working men” did not have a class link as it referred to all people who worked.   Whilst his views were personal they revealed attitudes where attempts to establish constructive relations with working men were limited – a view at variance to the active participation of earlier prominent citizens such as the late Messrs Carr and Penn.

By way of contrast, the congregation of St Mildred’s purchased 1,000 lbs of beef with flour, plums, suet etc for 300 poor people in the area for Christmas 1872⁷³.  

In 1872 an Association of Christian Workers was formed to help Lee clergy perform their commitments to the poor and ill.   Prominent was the Reverend Badenoch (a man of “unflinching Protestant zeal”⁷⁴), chair of the Protestant Educational Institute, who filled the Working Men’s Institute with a lecture there in 1876.   Respectable ladies flocked to such meetings: they dominated a meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society in the Working Men’s Institute in 1878 and were the largest group of contributors to the Lee Missionary Society.

The 1870s saw other churches established: in October 1874 the Congregational Church in Burnt Ash Road seated 600 (in addition to a lecture room capable of seating 200) and cost £7,000 on a site given by John Pound with £500 from Lord Northbrook⁷⁵.   On 25 July 1878 Lord Northbrook laid the foundation stone of St Mildred’s church to supersede a temporary iron church where the Reverend Helder – previously curate at St Margaret’s – held services.   The church was consecrated in 1879⁷⁶.

Quaggy

Another important issue was the Quaggy which coursed directly on Lee Road near the Tigers Head and an urgent remedy was needed “on account of the great and increasing traffic …. to Blackheath Railway Station, which is greatly impeded by the floods that often occur from heavy rains during the winter months”⁷⁷.   A bridge was needed and, inevitably, as foundations were being laid in October 1862 heavy rain made floods likely.   The crisis brought the best from George Wright (the Assistant Surveyor) who with “zeal and assiduity induced the excavators to work with himself during two nights to dig out and form the concrete foundations”⁷⁸.   The crisis was averted and the Lee Road bridge quickly completed.  

Further improvements included: culverting the middle Kidbrook stream, formerly an “open and rather deep and dangerous ditch” beside Lee Road, in 1862-3⁷⁹; a brick and iron bridge built above the Quaggy, near Lee Bridge in 1866-7 ⁸⁰.    And then, when human ingenuity had seemingly achieved victory, Nature made its presence felt with a series of floods.   In 1866 a 10 year old slipped into the Quaggy and was carried along by the high water, before being saved from drowning by a carman (Thomas Harryman) nominated to the Royal Humane Society for his action⁸¹.   Flooding by the Ravensbourne, in the same month (January) inundated the cellar of the White Horse to a depth of 6 feet in addition to the Highlander on the other side of the road where “fortunately nothing more serious occurred than the filling of the cellars with the wrong class of fluid”⁸².  

And rainwater rushing along recently built streets became an important concern from the 1870s.   Heavy snow and rain on the night before Christmas Eve 1876, caused flooding at Lee Green particularly in several houses where goods were “floating about in 4,5, or 6 feet of water and in many cases provision for the Christmas dinner was spoiled”⁸³.   Near Lee Bridge the river was diverted into houses and the street by a recently built wall beside it.  And whilst Elm Place had regular inundations before (a landlady allowed her tenants an allowance of coal per annum for drying their houses⁸⁴) they had been more manageable than this.

More devastating floods (that drowned several pigs) occurred in April 1878 after 19 hours of continuously heavy rain⁸⁵.   Elderly inhabitants were unable to recall such floods which blew up the brick bridge at Eastdown Park (at the rear of Lee Chapel near the Rose of Lee); forced water up from sewers in dense columns several feet high; and flooded Lee High Road from Lee Bridge to the Rose of Lee.   Water reached such a height that boats and vehicles did a good trade in the conveyance of passengers⁸⁶.

A voice of common sense was John Halley (1798-1879) of Turner Road who appreciated the ways of water having been born beside the upper Kid Brook and whose nursery had recently been covered by Blackheath Station.    He remembered the thaw after the 1814 frost (when London had a Frost fair) when his father avoided flooding by the construction of a snow dam from which melt water gradually dispersed.   In 1878 he observed that floodwater at Lee Green and Weardale Road was running at 3 mph and therefore concluded that rather than there being an obstruction at Lewisham the flood was caused by too much water upstream at the Harrow-meadows and Eltham-green bridge.   As a result water ran along Eltham Road “as it always had done during heavy floods” and his suggestion was for a reservoir to retain and gradually release the floodwater⁸⁷ – an idea implemented 120 years later in Sutcliffe Park!

Floods continued: in August 1878 Lee Green presented the appearance of a lake⁸⁸; there were two in 1879⁸⁹ (in which a chicken drowned in Clapham Place); and another in 1880 which affected Lewisham more than Lee⁹⁰.   A heavy snowstorm on 18 January 1881 caused drifts up to the top of the hedges in Marvels Lane.   Fortunately the thaw when it came in February was gradual⁹¹.

Temperance

Temperance Society meetings were held from the 1860s.   Earliest, perhaps, was the Lee & Blackheath Temperance Society formed about 1863 by the Reverend Bucke of Holy Trinity whose entertainments included “songs, duets, choruses, recitations and dialogues”⁹².   Meetings varied in the amount of cheer:  in 1872 the Chairman (W Broomfield) described how in addition to working men buying beer rather than bread:

no idea could be formed of the number of ladies moving in the upper circles who drink to excess ….[in addition] he had known a minister who had advocated the view of taking a small quantity but had died a drunkard⁹³.

Other temperance groups appeared: the Champion Lodge of the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT) was founded on 28 September 1871⁹⁴; and in 1873 the “Still Your Brother” Lodge of the IOGT used the Dacre Park Chapel Schoolroom for public meetings⁹⁵.   On New Year’s Day 1873 the Champion Lodge welcomed Brother and Sister Copping’s return after their marriage to present them with a “splendid lamp and teapot”⁹⁶.

There could be disadvantages however.   In October 1872 Mr Kennard, a toy dealer was summoned for obstructing the public footway with a packing case.   It transpired that other tradesmen doing the same were not summoned because they gave the police ale whereas he, being teetotal, did not⁹⁷.

In 1880 F J Turner (Chair of the Institute) chaired a meeting of the Lee Church of England Temperance Society with support coming from the Reverends Bucke and Sims.    The audience was largely women and perhaps the intention was to inspire middle class ladies (who spent more of the day in the area than their husbands) to help others improve their habits.   The vicar of St Peter’s, Greenwich happily admitted that his Band of Hope initially had two members – him and his eldest son⁹⁸.

Temperance (in the sense that a glass of wine was acceptable now and then) was an important tenet for Dr Carr, President of the Lee & Blackheath Horticultural Society.   His influence included being able to persuade Lord Northbrook to make land available as allotments for Lee’s working classes.   With the best of intentions, however, he could be rather keen.   Work as a doctor led him to observe that Lee’s working class housing could be more cramped than that in hospitals and workhouses and spending money on drink he believed was the reason wives were driven to the wash tub, young children to work and rooms being sublet.   Education would ease the situation, particularly in good domestic economy and he suggested the purchase of Mrs Beeton’s Penny Cookery Book.    Rather indicatively his lecture at the Institute in 1871 was called “Our parish as it is, and as it ought to be”⁹⁹.

There was such a strong reaction to his views that the subsequent month’s meeting was crowded with many unable to gain admission.   Many were working class men and women whose views were either unrecorded or they listened in silence as others queried various aspects of Carr’s views.   In particular there was consternation that wives needed to learn to cook when they worked as cooks in the large houses¹⁰⁰.   Others with limited appreciation of working class life included Mr Pitt BA of the Boone Street schools who felt that the working classes were not good economisers, nor were they judicious.   “It was a fact” he said “that on Monday morning he had more absentees than on any other day because the children had been made “bilious” by over indulgence.   Would it not be better to spread the mutton-gluttony of Sunday over the whole week and thus avoid the evil of over-feeding” !!¹⁰¹

Entertainments

A short distance west of Lee station, at what is today a timber merchants, was a roller skating rink built in 1876¹⁰² .   If it was typical, a band would have played whilst couples “whirled their partners round in every variety of waltz” and single males “rushed up and down the asphalte in reckless “spread eagles””.    The inevitable reaction to Rinkomania (others sprang up at Blackheath, Lewisham etc) included concerns about bands playing comic ballads, the “whining of the roller skates; and the noisy and oftimes vulgar laughter of the by no means select company”.   Others saw it as a way to keep fit; meet others; and of moral benefit as it kept “young men away from the public house, billiard-room and the music hall; young women from the ball room, the theatre and the dangerous habit of novel reading”¹⁰³.

The mania quickly passed and the building became a public hall where meetings were held for various functions: to discuss the Quaggy floods (1877); for penny readings (from 1878); raise building funds for St Mildred’s church; and Summer Festivals of “alarming proportions” by Collingwood and Nelson Colleges.   Additionally, there was a performance of The Messiah; a display by the South Lee and Burnt Ash Dahlia Society; and in 1880 a “most instructive and delightful entertainment” of a Pacific Railway Panorama with commentary enlivened by the presenter’s wife at the piano.   It quickly become an important building for the recently established community in South Lee¹⁰⁴.

Cricket

Cricket was another keenly enjoyed activity.   The Lee Institute team was particularly prominent in the 1860s with matches between groups that included Lee tradesmen and police teams.   Others were the Lee and Lee Morning Star Clubs and the Northbrook Cricket Club whose President was, naturally, Lord Northbrook.   The latter’s cricket ground was in Burnt Ash Lane, near the Public Hall where in 1871 22 gentlemen of the Club played 11 players of Kent and Surrey for the benefit of the Kent professional H L Palser¹⁰⁵.   The Club had the pleasure of WG Grace (who lived at Mottingham) attending their 1876 annual dinner¹⁰⁶.

Lee had further links to county and national cricket with John Penn’s two younger sons being members of the MCC and Kent County Cricket Clubs.   The eldest, Frank Penn (1851-1916) was considered amongst the best batsmen of his day and in addition to being at Kent 1875-81, played at England’s inaugural test match in 1880 at the Oval where he hit the winning runs.   His younger brother Alfred (b.1855) played for Kent 1875-84 too before his early death in 1889¹⁰⁷.

Whilst the working classes created entertainments and activities in Lee, the middle classes (other than individuals such as the Rector, Dr Carr, John Penn, and F J Turner) lived contentedly with their families in comfortable houses and villas.    It was in their work (and church) that they were active. If the area to the east of Burnt Ash Lane was typical the majority of houses in 1871 were occupied by middle class families with parents, generally, in their 40s.   Childrens’ birthplaces suggest about half had moved from elsewhere in Lee or the area (into more modern houses); 30% came from London and the remaining 20% from elsewhere (including the Empire).  Smarter areas had merchants, doctors etc whilst other neighbourhoods attracted bank, publishing and legal clerks¹⁰⁸.    Particular inhabitants had an interesting past: John Carr (1808-1891) of Leyland Road had been trained as a barrister before becoming Chief Justice of Sierra Leone for 15 years.   Being black he was relevant to Lee’s racial history.   And John Sutherland, who lived in the same street in 1881, was Inspector General of Hospitals and had been awarded the Order of the Legion of Honour by Louis Napoleon for his work on sanitary science. 

Education

Education was a particular feature in Lee life.   The National School continued to give annual visits (frequently St Paul’s Cray) to its pupils and by 1876 had 285 on its books with an average attendance of 265¹⁰⁹.  The governess’ speech on her departure in 1875 to get married revealed the education she wished to instil (to girls in particular):

Try while you are children to show you are better for your Scripture teaching; be modest, not running about the streets at a late hour or after dark; be truthful in all you say and do to your own selves; be true and then you cannot be false to any man; don’t buy sweets or anything on a Sunday, get mother to do all she has to do during the week by helping her, and then you can with father enjoy the Sunday at home together.   Abstain from drink while young and then you will not want it when you get older, for it leads to a great deal of crime and unhappiness and the habit of drink in a great many cases grows upon one until it becomes a disease.   Be respectful to your superiors and they will respect you; remember, as I have often told you, that it does not take fine clothes etc to make ladies and gentlemen; you can be ladies if you are kitchen maids, not by aping the dress and manner of your superiors, but by a steady, humble perseverance in doing your duty in that state of life in which God has placed you, looking to Him for guidance and help day by day.¹¹⁰

More buildings were required and in 1874 a school room, chapel and mission hall were opened at the Bromley Road Tabernacle, Burnt Ash Hill.   Certain ways of life persisted, however, as five cases were discovered that year of children working in the brickfields at Lee and Lewisham¹¹¹.

Lee Middle Class School held half yearly public tests where, in 1879, 150 pupils (generally the sons of tradesmen) received prizes for “diligence and neatness; “recitation and painstaking“; “good conduct and hard work”; and “great perseverance”¹¹².

Of other private schools, Collingwood College for girls in Leyland Road was famed for its remarkably long annual concerts.   In 1872 the entertainment ranged from dancing and music to ventriloquism.   It was successfully run by Ann Palmer (born 1845) at what is now the southern entrance to Carston Close and where boarding pupils increased from 76 in 1871 to 134 by 1881.   Ann’s husband, 21 years her senior, ran Nelson’s College boys school in Newstead Road.   Schools generally aimed high, claiming to prepare pupils for public schools; the Civil Service; the Military; Law; and Medicine.   Gatefield House, in College Park, specified that it was “for the daughters of gentlemen only”.

The 1870s was a decade of consolidation for Lee with the development of amenities to meet its inhabitants’ needs – whatever their class.    This included education (in its broadest sense); churches; and transport.    The latter improvements included Lee station where modern waiting rooms were built in 1872 and a stationmaster’s house in 1873¹¹³.   The booking office had been on the Dartford side and as passengers tended to walk on the railway line to get to the up side, a subway was built in 1880.   Perhaps for that reason a booking office was built on the London side; platforms raised and paved; and a corrugated iron cover placed above the platform “making an open shed of it”¹¹⁴.   There were nine trains a day into Charing Cross.

And development continued in Burnt Ash.  James Playford ran the Crown beershop in 1871 and when the brickmaking industry was in a cyclical decline the brickfield and other land were leased by the Crown to William Winn for development.   At Christmas 1874, he removed brickworkers from their huts and tents and commenced development¹¹⁵.   Winn Road was built by 1876 and Corona and Guibal Roads by 1880.  He rebuilt the Crown as a hotel in 1877 and obtained a spirits license in 1878 when he confidently advertised the supply of wines and spirits of the best quality in addition to Bass ale and Guiness stout in bottles.   The building had billiard and smoking rooms, and generally supplied “good accommodation for City gentlemen”¹¹⁶.   Whether these improvements would attract custom would become apparent in future years.

Attitudes hardened towards the poor.  In 1880 a 20 year old servant girl (Sarah Winch) plucked a rose from Lee churchyard when visiting her grandfather’s grave thinking she would avoid trouble as such flowers were cheap.   She was sent to prison, being unable to pay the 5 shillings fine.   The lack of mercy to the poor woman, who “kept up an incessant howl” in the dock, is likely to have blighted her life¹¹⁷.

And there was scant sympathy for people who acted differently to others.   In 1871 a boy called Fitzgerald was remanded for performing somersaults in Lee High Road and who had rubbed his face with his mother’s bag to make it blue and gave him a “very extraordinary appearance”.   When he escaped from the workhouse, his mother returned him to court where he was told to expect a “sound whipping” if he appeared again¹¹⁸.   And a diminutive, hungry, 13 year old boy who ate apples and beetroots from an outhouse (where he worked as a sort of “Boots” for the Reverend Stephen Jenner of Leyland Road) was sentenced for 1 month and given 12 strikes of the birch¹¹⁹.   Nor were the elderly safe: William Blow, a carpenter of Taunton Road, was told in 1873 that if he was discovered drunk again he would be given a month on the treadmill¹²⁰.

The future

Lee in the 1880s became an active and vibrant community before modern housing in places such as Bromley affected Lee’s character in the 1890s.   There were, however, joys to happen in the future.   In June 1903, Lee station’s safe weighing 3 cwt was put on a cart at night and driven away.   However, the police traced the heavy wheelmarks on the unswept streets via the Blackwall Tunnel to a house in Canning Town.   “In the kitchen there the safe was found intact, although an attempt had been made to blow the door open with explosives”.   The police hid in the house and arrested the culprits when they appeared*¹²¹.   History needs such people.

*If the account has the air of Sherlock Holmes about it then Lee was actually mentioned in a couple of the short stories: The Man With the Twisted Lip (which described the Cedars) and The Retired Colourman¹²².   Another literary link for Lee with Arthur Conan Doyle having obviously visited the area.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are four main sources for Lee’s history:

1.Drake’s edition of Hasted’s History of Kent to which he added a vast amount of information;

2. Hart’s History of Lee that recorded unique information about life in Lee;

3. Josephine Birchenough’s amazing researches that have been particularly relied on for the 18^th century; and

4. The Kentish Mercury which recorded details of Lee life from 1834 onwards.

My thanks to John Coulter, Richard Martin, Jonathan Oates and the late Jean Waite for all their help and encouragement over the years at Lewisham Local Studies and Archives (in addition to current staff); to Neil Rhind for reading a draft and generously giving additional material; to Graham Shaul for comments on an early draft; and to Pete Seaman for his as usual brilliant help.

Reference abbreviations

Birchenough:Josephine Birchenough:

                     Some Farms and Fields in Lee (1981)

                     The Manor House Lee and Its Associations (1971)

                     Two Old Lee Houses (1967)

The Meeting of the 1746 Vestry, Lee 31 March 1746 (1989) (essay in       LLSA)

D                  H H Drake’s edition of Hasted’s History of Kent, the Hundred of Blackheath (1886)

GLAS           Transactions of the Greenwich & Lewisham Antiquarian Society (copies in LLSA)

Hart              F H Hart, History of Lee & Its Neighbourhood (1882) 1971 reprint

KM               Kentish Mercury

LHJ               Lewisham History Journal (Lewisham Local History Society)

LLSA            Lewisham Local Studies & Archives

NA                National Archives, Kew