Chapter 6: Victorian Occupants

By the time of Parsons Directory for 1871, as also in the census of that year, Exmouth House was occupied by John Melhuish, a druggist or chemist, with his wife, Clarissa, and seven children aged between less than a year and ten years old. No servants are recorded. The Melhuishes were a mobile family. John hailed from Crediton in Devon, and, after being recorded as living in Ashton upon Mersey, Cheshire, in 1860, in 1863 they were back in Devon, living at Salcombe Regis. After turning up briefly in Hastings, the family left the town early in the 1870s and moved to Islington, where a daughter is recorded as being born to them in 1874. In the 1891 census Melhuish is recorded as living in Islington, still practising as a druggist.

Meanwhile, Exmouth House had formed part of the estate of Richard Moulton, who died in 1873 and who in his will dated 14 September 1870 had appointed his three sons, Richard, John Walker and George Edward, as his executors. On 20 February 1874 the house, which was then in the occupation of one John Stewart, was sold to John Walker Moulton for just £550. I know little about John Stewart, except that in the 1867-8 and 1871 directories he is listed as in charge of a gentlemen’s school at West Hill House. However, he did not last long at Exmouth House as in the Pike & Irving Hastings Directory of 1876 the house was stated to be occupied by Mrs Hassell and this is borne out by Brett, who writes (after noting that George Edward Moulton ‘with purchasing nous, / Will take it, and live a few years in the house’):

H. Haxell [sic], methinks, will next hold it on hire, / And lodgers will take, at the latters’ desire.

Unfortunately I have few details of Mrs Hassell (or Haxell), or of her lodgers: she advertised in the Hastings & St Leonards Observer for 17 April 1875 for a girl, 14-16, to help with housework ‘and make herself generally useful’, while two men who gave the house as their address in the paper were presumably her lodgers, Dr Wainwright and H.L. Hutchins (13 Feb. 1875 and 12 Jan. 1878). However, Brett goes on:

This lady, ere ‘Eighty, the house will decline, / And Maynard be here in the tutoring line; / But ere the ninth month of that year shall be o’er, / T. Maynard will die at the age sev’nty four. / But Exmouth-house School will be still carried on / By widow of him whom I’ve said will be gone.