Chapter 9: Mid Twentieth-century Developments

Exmouth Place from an old postcard

With the school closed, I suppose it made sense for the house to be restored to domestic use. Mrs Hayhurst senior had died in 1935, thus rendering the use of 139 Priory Road as a residence less crucial, and the house may even have been disposed of at some point. In any case, at some stage - presumably during the 1940s - Exmouth House was converted into flats, thus providing accommodation for Elizabeth and Ellen Hayhurst, together with an income from renting out the remainder of the property. Unfortunately, there is no documentation of the changes that were made at this point, and only a little more on those subsequently made by Ernest and Sybil Willett, who bought the house in 1973, though certain documents at Hastings Borough Planning Department will be referred to in due course. Hence in this account I will first describe the changes that were made which seem to be integral to the initial conversion of the house to flats, coming later to changes that were made by Mr & Mrs Willett.

Basically, the house was split into three flats, one of which, occupied by the Hayhursts, comprised the entire first floor. The other two, which were rented out, each occupied approximately half of the ground floor, with one comprising the sitting room, dining room and scullery (the east flat), the other the front and rear study and laundry room (the west flat); there was then a shared bathroom in the room now occupied by the Aga. The principal change that this entailed was the erection of a partition at the bottom of the main stairs of the house, through which a door opened onto the stairs giving access to the upstairs flat. The partition then continued along the stairs to the rear of the house, where a square shape was cut out of the architrave where the stairs reach the landing to accommodate it. Forward of this, the ceiling cornice was smashed at intervals so that a false ceiling could be accommodated over the narrow passage that was formed, with a blank panel at the front beside the doorway to the staircase, the top of which was again smashed through the cornice. (This windowless corridor was presumably used for storage: it is hard to see what other function it could have served.) View image.

In the study, a pair of large, Victorian doors was now installed to divide the room into two, presumably to provide a separate sitting room (into which entrance would be made from the hallway), and a bedroom behind. These presumably came from some Victorian house in the West Hill area -- conceivably even from 139 Priory Road. The laundry room became a kitchen. Then, a wooden structure was erected in the rear corner of the dining room to allow shared access to the bathroom by the occupants of both the east and west flats; this was supported by timbers driven through the flagstones of the dining room floor, the cavities made by which have been cemented up but are still visible. I remember that the bathroom - which I used for a few weeks after first moving into the house - had green plastic bathroom furniture (which could have been an innovation of the Willett era): unfortunately I do not have any photographs of it.

At the back of the house, the scullery became the kitchen of the east flat, and the back staircase that Mrs Fearnside remembered using to ascend to the first floor must simply have been removed. Instead, a fire escape was installed, opening from a door which was opened up in the rear wall of the extreme corner room on the first floor, which had previously been solid (it is so depicted in the prewar view of the rear of the house by E. Leslie Badham). View image.

The fire escape at the back of the house

The fire escape descended adjacent to the wall at the back of the house, and the remains of the very bottom of it may still be discerned. The door to it, incidentally, was in fact the door to the ground-floor scullery re-used; this was replaced on the ground floor by a rather flimsy door, which was discarded in 1991 when the original door was reinstated. Beyond that, not many changes were made to the first floor. I have a note (the source of which is unclear) that the Hayhursts used the double room as their sitting room and that their kitchen was the room by the fire escape.

The other main change that was made was to the garden. As has already been noted, the asphalt that had formed the playground was not removed but was simply covered with about a metre of topsoil. As we have seen, this had dire consequences in causing rot in the floors at the rear of the house, but presumably it seemed the simplest option at the time.