Chapter 6: Victorian Occupants

In any case, Hunt did not last very long at Exmouth House, and by the time of the 1859 Post Office directory the occupant is instead given as George Edward Moulton. This man was the son of the new owner of the house, Richard Moulton, and had been born in 1826. The 1861 census confirms that by that time he was living in the house together with his French wife, Maria, and five children with ages ranging from less than a year to ten; there was also a cook, a housemaid and a nurse. Earlier, in the 1851 census, George Edward Moulton had been living at Spring Gardens in the parish of St Mary in the Castle, Hastings, at the house of Thomas William Burfield, whose wife, Catherine, was George’s sister. Thomas Burfield is described in the 1851 census as a wine merchant and brewer, and George had evidently gone into the same line of business: it was perhaps while in France acquiring wine that he had met his wife, and it is possible that he died in Paris in 1896, when there is an entry in the Death Duties Register to the death of one George E. Moulton. The Hastings & St Leonards Observer carries numerous advertisements for Moulton’s wine and spirit merchants, trading from Wellington Place, and the family evidently moved to that address sometime in the late 1860s. In Simpson’s Directory of 1865 George is listed both among the ‘Clergy, Gentry, etc’ at Exmouth House, and also in the Trade Directory as a wine merchant at 21 Wellington Place and George Street. In Mathieson’s Hastings & St Leonards Directory of 1867-8, George E. Moulton is still given as the occupant of Exmouth House, but in the 1871 census he was listed under Wellington Place, still residing there in 1881.