Chapter 5: Fashionable heyday
Fagg as rentier
In any case, there is some evidence that, initially, Matthew Fagg himself lived at Exmouth House for a least part of the time. ‘Matthew Fagg Esquire’, identified as being of ‘Hastings’, appears in the subscription lists to W.G. Moss’s History of Hastings and to William Holloway’s History of Rye, both published in 1824. Then, in the extant returns for the census of 1831 in the records for St Clement’s, Hastings, Matthew Fagg is included under Hill Street, with a family comprising 2 males and 3 females: these are the earliest census records for Hastings to survive, and they unfortunately give only the name of the householder in question, without any details of the property that they owned. On the other hand, it seems highly likely that this entry refers to Exmouth House, and that Fagg and his family were at that point actually living there.36 In addition, in 1832 Fagg was named as one of the Town Commissioners for Hastings under the Act for Improvements to the town that was passed that year.37
Increasingly, however, as the years went by, Fagg may have become more of a rentier in relation to Exmouth House as well as Exmouth Cottage, although he is consistently identified as the rate-payer for both properties. My impression is that he actually spent most of his time in Lydd, catering for the fashionable new seaside business by merely using both houses for fashionable lets as a source of income.
Letter addressed to Matthew Fagg at Lydd, 2 May 1835
It is thus revealing that, when a letter was written to him about the availability of a neighbouring property by the agent, Shorter Phillips, in May 1835, the letter was addressed to ‘Matthew Fagg Esq., Lydd’.38 Equally conclusive is the published list of voters for East Sussex in 1837 in which, though he appears as the owner of Exmouth House, Exmouth Cottage and a freehold house in George Street, Fagg is identified as being of Lydd, Kent.39
Who, therefore, were his tenants? The evidence is unfortunately patchy. There are scattered references to be found in newspapers with some degree of Hastings coverage. For instance, the Brighton Gazette in 1824 records the marriage of a ‘Miss Plummer’ of Exmouth House to a Mr Corder of Hollington Lodge: I have not been able to find out more about this figure, who could, of course, have been a house-guest of Matthew Fagg. A few years later, equally tantalising evidence comes from the columns of what was effectively the first newspaper to be established in Hastings, the Hastings & Cinque Ports Iris, which ran from October 1830 to July 1831.40 Each week, this included a section entitled ‘Fashionable Chronicle’, which contains an account of the arrival and departure of high class residents, partly from hotels like the Marine and the Swan, and partly from what are described as ‘Diplock’s subscription books’ (or sometimes Powell’s or Jackson’s). There is just one reference to Exmouth House, in the entry for 27 November 1830, where the arrival of ’Mrs J. Kenrick and family’ at the house is recorded from Diplock’s list: unfortunately I have not been able to find out anything about the identity of the party involved. Of course, by then winter was approaching and, come the next summer (which the paper eagerly anticipated in its issue of 11 June), there is just one relevant entry -- sadly in the very last issue of the paper, no. 37, for 2 July 1831. The ’Fashionable Chronicle’ for that date reads: ‘Hastings is filling very fast. Exmouth House, No 3 Glocester Place, No 26 Wellington Square, and No 2 Crescent, with many other houses, have been let during the past week’. However, no names of occupants are given and, with the demise of the paper, that is the end of the matter.
36 East Sussex Record Office PAR 367/37/2/18, 20, printed in 1831 Census. St Clement Hastings (PBN Publications, 1988), p. 14.
37 See the list included in ‘Brett Manuscript Histories, vol. 1, ch. 8’, on the Historical Hastings website, https://historymap.info/1832_Town_Commissioners.
38 East Sussex Record Office, PEW 9/2/3. Also, he does not appear at all in the Hastings vestry minutes: PAR 367/12/1/4-5.
39 East Sussex. 1837. List of the Registered Electors (Lewes, 1837), p. 90 (available on Google Books; the 1832 List is also online and similarly includes Fagg in the Hastings entry while identifying him as actually being of Lydd).
40 For information on this and other early Hastings papers, see Steve Peak, The Hastings Papers: A History of the Hastings and St Leonards Newspapers (Hastings, 2007).