Chapter 1: Preamble

I have now lived in Exmouth House for over thirty years and my life has become so entwined with it that I almost feel when writing about the house that I am writing about myself - indeed, in the final sections of this chronicle, which deal with the way in which the house has been treated since 1991, I will often be speaking autobiographically. But I have also always felt a kind of duty to write the history of the house, in part so as to preserve what I have discovered about its earlier history during the course of rehabilitating it - information that was otherwise preserved only in my memory or in notes virtually illegible to anyone but me - and in part out of pure curiosity. The process of getting around to write it has been protracted, largely because until recently I was always preoccupied by scholarly tasks relating to the early modern period.

There have, however, been various stimuli. Christopher Whittick, for many years the chief stalwart of the East Sussex County Record Office, played a key role by cataloguing the deeds relating to Exmouth House that came into my possession following my purchase of the house. Since then, he has been a constant source of useful encouragement and advice, not least in giving me the references that led to my visit to the London Metropolitan Archives in July 2019, and the necessary contacts for my highly productive foray into the records relating to Lydd at the Kent Archives and Local History Centre at Maidstone late in the previous month. These at last enabled me to collect a dossier of useful information about the house’s builder, Matthew Fagg - without which I hardly felt able to get started on writing the history of the house as a whole. A further stimulus was provided by my former Birkbeck student, Daisy Shell, who sadly died in 2022. Following a visit to the house in June 2018, Daisy spontaneously volunteered to investigate the house’s history in the census records and related sources, collecting a rich cornucopia of information on which I have drawn heavily in the chapter dealing with the Victorian occupants of the house. Looking back even further, perhaps the greatest coup - though it has taken me a long time to do it justice - was the discovery in 1992 that the mother of another Birkbeck student, Roger Fearnside, had been a pupil at Exmouth House School in the 1920s. Alice Fearnside (who died aged 92 in 2004) provided detailed memories of the set-up and personnel of the school on which I have drawn heavily in the account that follows; she also gave me various memorabilia and in September 1995 she actually paid a visit to the house, providing further testimony about the school which I recorded at the time and have also drawn on here.

The account of the history of the house that follows is just a plain narrative. I note that, at some point in the past few years, I acquired a copy of Gillian Tindall’s Three Houses, Many Lives (2012), evidently in the hope of gaining inspiration for my own house history. But I never read it and only came across my copy serendipitously after I was well advanced with my own account of Exmouth House, which lacks the pretensions of her book. Instead, it is a simple narrative of the house’s builder, Matthew Fagg; of the original fabric that he erected and the ways in which it was modified in its early years; of the house’s fashionable heyday, and then of its Victorian occupants and the changes that were made to the house in that era; of Exmouth House School, which occupied the premises for much of the early twentieth century; and lastly of my own work on the house since 1991. How many people read it remains to be seen: but at least I have put this chronicle on record.

Lastly, just a few further acknowledgements. The Lydd tithe map is reproduced by permission of Kent Archives and Local History Service, and the 1964 photograph of the house (before the garage was constructed) by permission of the Historic England Archive. I am indebted to Jim Breeds and Roy Penfold for reading the text and making useful comments on it; to Steve Peak and Stephen Brogan for miscellaneous advice; and to David Sulkin for help with the illustrations and more generally - indeed, David’s assistance and advice has been invaluable throughout.