The Green - Area 1
This section is under development.
Millstream Cottage
We know from the early maps that what we now call Millstream Cottage was originally 2 separate cottages, built very close to each other between 1807 and 1841 on land which belonged to Heath Mill (owned by one of the James Honers, depending on the exact date). It is difficult to work out in the 1841 census who occupied the cottages: Apart from James Honer III (who probably lived in Heath Mill House), 4 families lived near Lower Mill, and the census does not specify exactly where they lived. Since “Millstream Cottages” (if we can refer to them in such a way) were the only other dwellings in the vicinity, we can assume that they all lived there in what were probably two 2-roomed houses. The families concerned are listed below, together with a few comments about them.
1. The Faggetters (1): Mary Faggetter (aged 47) and 4 children.
2. The Faggeters (2): William (aged 26) and his wife Mary and their 4 young children
3. The Boyletts
4. The Saunders
As one might expect, the Faggetters (1 and 2 above) were related to each other. The Mary Faggetter in the census was the second wife of Henry Faggetter (1783 – 1838), a bricklayer. William was the son of the aforesaid Henry Faggetter by his first wife. So Mary was William’s stepmother. One of Henry’s grandsons was John Faggetter, who built Pirbright Cottages.
The Boyletts (No 3 above) comprised 40 year-old William Boylett (youngest of 12 children of Henry and Jane Boylett and a blacksmith by trade) and his 30 year-old wife Hannah and their 2 children. Oh yes, and 2 of Hannah’s children from a previous marriage, and Hannah’s 64 year-old mother Patience.
James and Hannah Saunders (No 4 above) lived with one of their 4 children. James was an agricultural labourer.
In 1851 the situation is much clearer. One of the cottages was unoccupied, but “Mill Cottage” was occupied by John Pelling, a miller, his wife Mary and their daughter, Fanny. John was born at Rudgwick, near Horsham in 1817, the son of an agricultural labourer. In 1841 he was living at Rudgwick, but in 1847 he married Mary Knight (who was born at Ewhurst c1822) at Stoke (the area north of Guildford), where he was living. By 1851 he was installed as the miller at Lower Mill, a post he was to hold for some years.
In 1869 John Frost Sherman had bought the Cottages (presumably from the executors of James Honer III) with the help of a mortgage. They formed part of the purchase by John Sherman of Heath Mill at the same time.
In 1871 the Pellings were still living at “Lower Mill Cottage”. James and Mary Seymour and their 2 young children were living in the other cottage. James was a “Miller’s carman”, which presumably meant that he was the Mill’s delivery man.
At some stage during the next 10 years the Pellings moved to West End, where they lived the rest of their lives, John dying in 1898 and Mary in 1891.
By 1881 Arthur Burberry was installed as the miller at Heath Mill and was living in one of the cottages. He had been born in Capel in 1852, the son of a farmer, and had married Mary Whittington (born in Bramley) in 1873 in Abinger, where they were both living. Mary was 10 years his senior. Their stay in Pirbright was a short one, as they left Pirbright in 1883, returning to Abinger.
From the 1880’s to the onset of WW1 there was a succession of different occupants in each of the 2 cottages (and next door Heath Cottage, which had been built in the 1870’s). The average tenure was only 2 or 3 years. Why did people working at the mill only stay such short lengths of time? There are many possible reasons. But the main cause was surely the “Great Depression of British Agriculture” of 1873-96, which itself was caused by a series of bad harvests in the late 1870’s, importation of cheap grain from the US (which had recently opened up the prairies to agriculture and provided rail transport) and cheaper transatlantic shipping costs. Other possible causes could be: poor working conditions, poor pay, or a demanding boss (John Sherman). We invite the reader to take their pick. [In the present day such a list would include factors such as lack of learning and development opportunities poor environmental or social responsibility, and lack of diversity or inclusion, but we doubt that these featured highly in peoples’ minds at the time].
We won’t list every occupant during this period, but we will highlight a few:
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Joseph Hankins (1883-84) was born in Bramley in 1833, and was probably the younger brother of John Hankins, landlord of The Fox between 1870 and 1878.
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Horace Chaplin (1899-1904) leased the mill from John Frost Sherman and was the miller at the time the mill caught fire in 1900. This story is told in the Heath Mill section above.
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William and David Marshall (1906-08). The Marshall brothers were sons of David Marshall, who was a gamekeeper on Merrist Wood Farm. David Marshall became a gamekeeper at Ockford Cottage, and we tell his story there.
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John and Emma Stevens (1909-14) lived at Heath Mill Cottage as a general labourer, prior to moving to No 2, Malthouse Lane. Their story is told there.
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James and Alice Larby (1905-11) had previously been living in No 13, Pirbright Cottages. James was a house painter, and maybe he used Heath Mill Cottage simply as a convenient place to live (and didn’t work at the mill). In 1911 James and Alice moved near to Burners Heath.
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Charles and Harriett Lopez (1911-14) and their 6 children only lived at Heath Mill Cottage for a short while before moving to Broad Street and then to Chapel Road, Pirbright, where the family occupied 3 houses. There were members of the Lopez family in Chapel Lane until at least 1981, and possibly after that as well. Harriett (nee Balchin) had been born in Worplesdon and lived at Stonebridge Cottage, Rickford in her youth. Her parents, William and Harriett, later lived at Malthouse Cottages in Berry Lane.
In 1915 John Sherman sold both cottages to Rose Johnston. The tenants at the time (David Lassam and John Stacey) rented the cottages on a weekly basis, so they didn’t stay long. Rose and her husband Thomas immediately merged the 2 cottages and named the new house Millstream Cottage. Evidence of the “join” between the 2 cottages can still be seen, as the doorways on different sides of it don’t align properly. The current owners have also found traces of an earlier thatched roof.
Thomas (“Tom”) was a road contractor, born in Cardiff in 1876, having an Irish father who farmed 60 acres in Wales. Rose (nee Rose Pengelley Scantlebury) was from Buckinghamshire and was 2 years older than her husband. They had 2 children. In 1911 Tom had described himself as a “Granite merchant”, and the family had been living at a large house (Woodruffe) on the Bagshot Road with 2 servants. Hence their ability to buy a property such as Millstream Cottage. What was their reason for moving? Perhaps the traffic on the Bagshot Road was increasing and they wanted somewhere quieter. Apart from the comings and goings at Heath Mill, their new home would have certainly met this criterion.
As well as merging the cottages and renaming them, the Johnstons quickly set about extending the house (in 1915). A drawing from the plans showing the proposed view of the front of the cottage is shown below.
4 years later in 1919 they added the garage (which still stands today and was built by James Ball of Malthouse Lane. Judging by the drawings (pictured below), they were helped to develop the plans by one of their younger children.
Further additions to the rear of the property were made by the Johnstons in 1922, this time by the builder Henry Rance of Holly Bank, Rickford, whose story is told there, along with an accompanying sketch.
The Johnstons were early installers of the telephone, having the number Worplesdon 26 by 1920. However by 1934 the Johnstons moved out of Millstream Cottage, and by 1939 Rose was living on her own in Stroud, while Tom was lodging with a family in Kenilworth, working as a Road contractor superintendent. We fear this may have been a permanent separation, as Tom died in 1958, living in a Kenilworth hotel, while Rose died in Stroud in 1963.
Between 1935 and 1937 Geoffrey and Hope Wilkinson lived at Millstream Cottage. Whether they purchased it or rented it while the Johnstons made other arrangements we do not know. Geoffrey Kedington Wilkinson was born in Cheshire in 1907. His father was a barrister who had been educated at Charterhouse School. He married Elinor Hope Gordon (who was 4 years older than him) in 1929 and had a daughter, Jill, the following year. In 1939 they were living in London – Geoffrey as a stockbroker’s clerk and Hope as a short story writer (though I can’t trace any of her output). After that we don’t know much about them, except that at some stage they lived in the US. Geoffrey died in Grasse, France (a few miles north of Cannes) in 1988.
The next occupants of Millstream Cottage in 1938 were Muriel Goodridge (nee Swayne), a widow born in 1887, and 3 of her 5 children, having moved from Charterhouse Road in Godalming. Muriel’s late husband, Owen Goodridge, had been the manager of Lloyds Bank in Godalming, but had died in 1929 aged only 54. Muriel only lived at Millstream Cottage until the end of WW2, moving back to Godalming and then to Horsham, where she died in 1970.
But their youngest child, Alys (born Tonbridge in 1921) used the time profitably. She met William Henderson, who lived at Bullswater Lodge, and married him in 1941. Their story is told there, but we should mention here that (as we understand it) one of her grandsons married the daughter of Halcyon Broadwood of Heath Mill House (see above) in 1983.
Another of Muriel’s children, Roy, a solicitor, was a partner in the law firm that handled the purchase of Millstream Cottage in the early 1970’s. He enjoyed having look at the house he had played in as a young lad.
Next into Millstream Cottage from 1945 were The Hon Edward Carson, his wife Heather, and their son, Edward. That year Edward had been elected Conservative MP for the Isle of Thanet, and was the “Baby of The House” (an unofficial title awarded to the youngest serving MP of the Parliament). It was a title that he passed to Roy Jenkins 3 years later. Clearly Edward was one of Pirbright’s most distinguished residents, and we’ll tell his story a little later, but first let’s look at his rather interesting background.
His father was even more distinguished: Edward Carson MP, Lord Carson aka Sir Henry Carson. This gentleman was born in Dublin in 1854 into a wealthy family (his father, also named Edward, had been an architect and a freemason). He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, became a barrister and was appointed QC (Ireland) in 1889. His most famous case was to lead the defence for The Marquess of Queensberry against the case brought by Oscar Wilde for libel in 1895. The background and outcome of this case are well known, but the following (summarised with thanks from Wikipedia) gives some insights into Lord Carson.
[Carson and Wilde met as children, playing in the summer along the seashore in Ireland. They also knew each other when they were students at Trinity College, Dublin. When he heard that Carson was to lead the defence, Wilde is quoted as saying that "No doubt he will pursue his case with all the added bitterness of an old friend."
Carson portrayed the playwright as a morally depraved hedonist who seduced naïve young men into a life of homosexuality with lavish gifts and promises of a glamorous artistic lifestyle. Wilde abandoned the case when Carson announced in his opening speech for the defence that he planned to call several male prostitutes who would testify that they had had sex with Wilde, which would have rendered the libel charge unsupportable as the accusation would have been proven true. Wilde was bankrupted when he was then ordered to pay the considerable legal and detective bills Queensberry had incurred in his defence.
Based on the evidence of Queensberry's detectives and Carson's cross-examinations of Wilde at the trial, Wilde was subsequently prosecuted for gross indecency in a second trial. He was eventually found guilty and sentenced to two years' hard labour, after which he moved to France, where he died penniless.
In a 1960 film, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, the part of Sir Edward Carson was played by James Mason.]
His political career began in 1892 when he was appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland. Here are some other highlights of his career:
• Solicitor-General for England & Wales (1900-05)
• Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party (1910-21)
• Attorney-General for England & Wales (1915)
• Leader of the opposition (1915-16), following Bonar Law, and preceding Asquith
• First Lord of the Admiralty (1916-17) under Lloyd George
• Member of the War Cabinet (1917-18)
• Was created Baron Carson (1921)
He was a very committed Ulster unionist, campaigning against Home Rule, and was at times seen as veering towards extremist.
Lord Carson had 4 children with his first wife, but after she died, remarried Ruby Frewin, a lady from Yorkshire who was 31 years younger than him. In 1920, when Lord Carson was aged 66, they had a son, Edward, who was later to live at Millstream Cottage.
The Carsons bought a house in the Isle of Thanet, and he retired in 1929. A statue to him was erected at Stormont. He died in 1935 and was given a state funeral (in Britain). Baroness Ruby Carson died in 1966.
Below are shown a Vanity Fair cartoon of Lord Carson at the bar, a posed photo, and his statue at Stormont.
That has dealt with Lord Carson. Now let’s turn to his son, Edward, who lived at Millstream Cottage. Edward was educated at Eton, and was only 15 when his illustrious father died. In 1943, when he was 23, he married Heather, daughter of Frank Sclater, OBE MC and Elizabeth Sclater (who lived to the age of 102) of Milford. Heather was only 16 when she married Ned, and was reportedly rather attractive.
Having entered Parliament in 1945 at the tender age of 25, he managed to hold his seat in the 1951 general election (although he was rushed to hospital with gastric influenza within an hour of being elected). However, his political career was surprisingly short. He resigned as an MP for health reasons in 1953.
At one stage Ned worked for Eric Boyd (of Heath Mill House – refer above). At another time he had to retire to Brookwood Hospital to “dry out” for a while.
The next we hear about him is in 1955 when The Hon Edward Carson was fined and disqualified from driving for 12 months for a series of offences: Failing to stop after an accident, 3 cases of dangerous driving, driving without a licence, and using a car with a dangerous wheel. We have shown an article about the incident below from the front page of a local newspaper. The full article goes into considerable detail about Mr Carson’s journey, and how erratic it was, but is too long to include in fulll here. At the same time he was managing director of Export Trades Ltd, a company set up to expand the country’s export trade. He also became a director of Urban and Commercial Developments Ltd, a company set up to revive an ailing Scottish port at Stranraer.
A later occupant of Millstream Cottage was surprised to receive a letter several years later from the daughter of a lady who had been helped by the Carsons. The lady in question had previously been made homeless (despite having a young daughter in tow), and had begged the Carsons for help. The Carsons had put them both up at Millstream Cottage for a few weeks to help them get their lives back together. A very nice thing to do, and so touching that the daughter remembered the Carsons’ kindness after so many years.
Edward and Heather left Millstream Cottage c1964, and Edward died in 1987, aged 67. His obituary in The Times (see below) makes interesting reading.
The next family to live in Millstream Cottage have remained there ever since. Two further extensions of the front were subsequently made (c1989 and 2007) very much in keeping with the original style, so as to square off the front of the cottage and give it its current elegant appearance. Arthur Croker was the builder, but Halcyon Broadwood of Heath Mill House (above) joined enthusiastically in the building activities. The current owners have clear visions of Halcyon shinning up ladders, busily carrying building materials.
2 pictures of Millstream Cottage are shown below: The left hand photo is from c1970 (before the 2 recent extensions), while the right hand picture is recent, with Heath Cottage in the background.
Heath Cottage
John Frost Sherman, who had bought Heath Mill in 1869 was responsible for building Heath Cottage. We can work out within a few years when it was built: It does not appear on the 1873 OS map, but in the 1881 census it is listed as “Heath View Cottage”, with a William and Hannah Randell living there with their son. So that dates it to the mid-late 1870’s. William Randell had probably responded to a newspaper ad placed by John Sherman – possibly the one pictured below placed in the Surrey Advertiser in March 1880.
William Randell was born in Chichester in 1852 and had already reached the dizzy heights of “Manager, Singer Sewing Machines Company”. William’s father was a Master tailor, and this could have influenced William’s choice of career.
Singer had opened a UK factory in 1867, and a larger one 6 years later, but these were both in Glasgow. Perhaps Mr Randell was a salesman, tasked with selling sewing machines in the South East of England. Curiously in 1897 another Singer employee moved into No 3, Pirbright Cottages, and we talk a little more about Singer there.
We cannot trace what happened to the Randell family after 1881, but in 1882 John Sherman placed an ad in the local newspaper for a tenant. The house had 6 rooms, a washhouse, a pantry and a good garden. Further ads were placed a year later and also the following year, but additionally the property was now “well-adapted for keeping poultry”. More ads were placed in 1886 and 1888, so tenancies were pretty short-lived. In 1891 Thomas Sherman (aged 25, the son of John Frost Sherman), his wife Ann and their 2 sons were living at what was then called Heath Cottage – a name it has retained ever since. Thomas described himself as a miller and a farmer and his life is covered in the section dealing with Heath Mill (above).
As with Millstream Cottage (above), there was a series of short-term occupants of Heath Cottage – probably mostly labourers at the mill - in the 1880’s and 1890’s, too many to list here.
But in 1903 John Frost Sherman and his wife Sarah extended the house (a copy of 2 of the drawings is shown below [the drawing on the left should be rotated anticlockwise by 75 degrees to align it properly]) and moved into the house until John’s death in 1917. In the 1911 census the house was described as having 6 rooms – probably 2 sitting rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and 3 bedrooms upstairs - and was described by the census enumerator as “The White House”, for reasons which seem obvious today.
We don’t know who purchased Heath Cottage after John Sherman’s death in 1917 – John’s wife Sarah moved to Guildford, where she died in 1920 - nor who lived in it for the next 17 years.
From 1934 Heath Cottage was occupied by Bessie Huber. She was born Bettina Bessie Ann Gutfreund in Vienna on 29 December 1893, and married a John Henry Huber. Her parents were Sigmund and Mathilde Gutfreund. She had 3 brothers, one of whom died in infancy.
c1928 John and Bessie Huber decided to leave Vienna to come to Britain. Why? We are guessing here, but their reason may have been to escape what was happening in Austria at the time. There had been some nasty clashes in Vienna in 1927, leading to a general strike, and further violence.
John and Bessie will have been very glad that they did escape at that time. The Gutfreunds were a Jewish family, and Austria, like Germany was not a good place for Jews to be after 1938. Bessie’s father died at Treblinka in 1942 and one of her brothers, Heinrich, perished at a camp in Belarus the same year. Below are family photos of the Gutfreunds: L to R Bessie as a young girl, Heinrich, Sigmund with 2 of his sons, and Paul (one of Bessie’s brothers).
Bessie and John (who was born c1895 and was a carrier for Thomas Cook) were living at Danes End in Send Marsh (a sizeable house) from at least 1928. However the marriage was not a happy one, and the couple divorced c1934. After their divorce, John Henry remarried Gladys in 1937, and they lived at Burnt Common and then Ripley (both of which are close to Send Marsh). Gladys died in 1955 and John Henry died in 1958.
Bessie however purchased and moved into Heath Cottage (c1934). In the 1939 census Bessie is living with 5 others at Heath Cottage. One of these is Paul Godfrey. 2 others are Jakobi and Hertha Liebert. A fourth is Lucie Horwitz. The fifth and final name has not yet been made public (presumably because the person is still living). This seems a strange collection of companions, and so we will look at them in turn.
Paul Godfrey was Bessie’s brother, who would have been old enough to fight for the Germans in WW1. He came to Britain during the 1930’s and presumably anglicised his name from Gutfreund to Godfrey. He later married a German lady, Ruth Heilbrun, in Hendon in 1944, but Ruth died in 1947. Paul died at Waltham in 1971.
Jakobi Israel Liebert was born in 1892, then in West Prussia but now in northern Poland. Hertha was born in Berlin in 1899 and the couple were married in Berlin in 1921. Like Bessie, the Lieberts had escaped from their home country between the wars. Jakobi was interned in 1940 but released 5 months later just as Heinrich Haendler had been (the background to this can be found here under Braemar). Jakobi’s internment card is shown below.
The Lieberts emigrated to the US in 1946 (giving their last address as Worplesdon, a name which must have puzzled the American immigration staff). They had no children. Jakobi died in Los Angeles in 1972 and Hertha in 1980.
Lucie Horwitz was born near Hamburg in 1907 and in 1945 married Herbert Cohen, also from Germany, in Paddington.
How do we interpret what was going on here? A strong possibility is that Bessie had opened her home to German and Austrian Jewish émigrés from the Nazi regime, giving them an initial place to live and helping them settle in England. She may well have helped the Haendlers the year before, prior to them purchasing nearby Braemar in Heath Mill Lane. This would have required her to establish contacts with emigration authorities in Germany and Austria. We don’t know how long this noble cause went on for, how many families she helped, and the extent to which the British authorities helped her in this worthy cause. But we can only imagine the mutterings that might have been heard in deepest Pirbright during the war about “those Germans round at Bessie Huber’s place”.... But Bessie was clearly a determined woman, and I doubt she would have worried about that.
Bessie did not talk about her wartime exploits after the war, but continued to live at Heath Cottage, accompanied by her faithful maid, Mitzi (whose husband worked at the Australian embassy). Neighbours remember “Aunt Bessie” as a kind, but rather strange, lady. She worked at the dairy in Merrow, and helped one young neighbour with his German studies, until her death in 1983.
A photo of Heath Cottage c1970 is shown below.
The next family to live in Heath Cottage have remained there ever since.