Chapter 5: Fashionable heyday

The next inhabitant of the house of whom we have record is one ‘Mrs Smith’, who was reported to be in occupation in the Sussex Advertiser for 9 November 1847. Then, in the 1851 census, the house was occupied by Anna Cabell, who also appears as the resident of Exmouth House in Osborne’s Hastings and St Leonards Directory for 1852.48 Anna Cabell was the widow of Thomas Strutt Cabell, a man of independent means who died in 1847, by which time the family had moved to Hastings. The Cabell family was quite distinguished, particularly William Cabell, Anna’s father-in-law, who had been a loyal employee of the East India Company and who, on his death in 1800, received an eloquent tribute in the European Magazine and London Review. Her husband apparently followed in his footsteps: the European Magazine account of William Cabell mentions that he had three sons of whom the eldest, who is not named, was a Clerk of the India Office, while their son, William, actually served in the army in India, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and dying in 1915.49 Not much is known of Anna, who died in 1860 aged 74, by which time she had evidently moved away from the house. But that she was an opulent figure, similar to others whom we have already encountered as early occupants of Exmouth House, is implied by the fact that, when she died, she was in possession of sufficient funds to merit an appearance in the Index of Death Duties. It is worth noting, incidentally, that among those listed as occupants of the house in the 1851 census return were Anna’s daughter, also called Anna Cabell, who after her mother’s death was adopted by the Revd. Thomas Vores, perpetual curate of St Mary in the Castle, prior to her marriage in 1862, and Ann Apps, whom we have already encountered as caretaker of the house at the time of the burglary in 1841; this perhaps implies that the latter had a long-term relationship with the house as caretaker for its rentier landlords, Charles Deudney and his wife, Eliza, née Fagg, and their successors, as described in the transactions concerning the property already noted.

48 The 1851 census is the first in which Exmouth House is explicitly named. It does not appear in the 1841 census; for that of 1831, see above.

49 The European Magazine and London Review, September 1800, pp. 164-6, esp. p. 166 on his son.