Chapter 9: Mid Twentieth-century Developments
Ernest and Sybil Willett
Anyway, Elizabeth Hayhurst died in 1963 and in 1965 her executors assented to the vesting of Exmouth House in the beneficiary of her will, the occupier Ellen Hayhurst, Elizabeth’s elder sister. Ellen in turn died on 18 June 1973, and in 1974 her executors conveyed Exmouth House to Ernest Willett and his wife Sybil, of 9 Castle Drive, Ilford, at a price of £9,000. Mr & Mrs Willett subsequently moved to 337 Eastern Avenue, Ilford, and I remember visiting them there at some point during the negotiations over purchasing the house. I don’t know a lot about them, but I found a visiting card somewhere in Exmouth House advertising the services of ‘E.V. Willett, Plumber’, giving both a daytime and a night time phone number, presumably in case of emergencies. Also, I evidently gave them a copy of my book, The Victorian Villas of Hackney (1981), and in a letter of 12 May 1991 Mrs Willett wrote:
We found your book very interesting, particularly Fassett Square, where we started our first business & had a small builders yard way back in 1947. Ernie used to live opposite in Massie Road, his house now pulled down to make way for flats.
The Willetts seem to have done quite a lot of work on the upstairs flat in the early years of their ownership of the house, though they seem to have left the downstairs much as it was (they were just starting work on the sitting room when I bought the house: see the photograph of it that I have, with paint tins, etc.). View image.
One substantial alteration for which they were responsible was to make the central upstairs room at the front of the house into a kitchen, opening a door from it into the front bedroom on the north-east side of the house, which they used as a living room, and closing off the doorway from the bathroom towards the staircase. There is an old plan for this among the planning papers for the house, dated April 1974, which is when they applied to the council for permission to carry out the work, and papers relating to this survive in the Hastings Council planning file. (By the way, the letter from Mrs Willett to me in May 1991 was mainly devoted to requesting the three-way tap from the sink of the kitchen, since they had a similar fitting at their property in Ilford and were having difficulty in obtaining a replacement.)
It was evidently also Mr & Mrs Willett who divided the two bedrooms on the south-west side of the house with a flimsy partition, and constructed wooden wardrobes along the rear walls of both rooms, using cheap, off-the-peg panelled doors. They seem to have had plans to install a bathroom at the back of the house (in the room that has since become a bathroom), though this was never plumbed in. They also must have installed the ‘Plenum’ heating system, which involved a furnace in the rear corner upstairs room from which hot air was conveyed through elaborate pipework in the attic and blown down into the various upstairs rooms of the house through grilles.
Exmouth House before the construction of the garage. Photograph taken by Kenneth Gravett, Jan. 1964 (ref BY742) (c) Historic England Archive
Lastly, in response to queries from Christopher Gauvain, the solicitor acting on my behalf, they explained that the garage was built under the house in 1977, and that plans for it were deposited with the Council. It is indeed the case that a planning application was submitted, and papers relating to this again survive in the Council’s planning file on the house.55 This must have been a significant undertaking, involving the removal of large quantities of sandstone and necessitating the front wall of the house being supported on a huge RSJ. I presume that it was supervised by the district surveyor, and if anything it seems to be over, rather than under, engineered.
A further point that Mr & Mrs Willett confirmed through their solicitor in a letter to Gauvain of 7 March 1991 was that, although the property was divided into flats when they purchased it, they altered it to single residency in 1990 due to the imposition of the Community Charge. That ought to have augured well for the future of the house, but in fact the nomenclature of a separate ‘East Flat’, ‘West Flat’, etc., continued, not least in terms of water rates. I remember that, when I made representations in 1991 to the effect that the house had been recombined into a single unit and that I should therefore pay only a single set of water rates, I discovered that this was impossible as the appeal system for rating had been abolished with the introduction of the Community Charge! The only option (which I adopted) was to pay to have a meter installed, which I duly did and which saved me more than the cost of the combined water rates in a single year.
On the other hand, despite the Willetts’ initiative in 1990, the house was well and truly divided into flats, with robust partitions in the hallway and the dining room, and one can well imagine that it might have seemed its destiny for this demarcation to be made more permanent. Such was the case at ‘Hillside’, nos. 3-4 Exmouth Place, just up the road, where two once-separate terraced houses were merged together as a block of six flats with a concrete staircase running up the centre. At the very least, one could imagine Exmouth House being permanently split into two, with the upstairs section being entirely separate from the downstairs one, even if the downstairs might have been combined into a single flat. According to the hard logic of property prices, this would surely have made more sense to a putative developer (of the kind from whom the Willetts claimed that they had received offers on the house) than reinstating it as a single family residence. But a major change was about to occur, as we will see in the next chapter.
55 HS/FA/77/255/4399.