Chapter 6: Victorian Occupants
The Maynards and the first Exmouth House School
This is in fact the end of Brett’s account of the house, and it may be elucidated as follows. Pike’s Directory for 1878 states that Exmouth House was then occupied by Thomas Maynard and it is described as a ‘gentlemen’s school’; the same is true of the entry in the directory for 1880-1. The background is as follows.
Thomas Maynard, who was born in Hertfordshire in 1806, married Jane (b. 1810) in 1833. In the 1841 census they were running a well-established and sizeable school for boys at Bushey Grove House, Bushey, Herts., with a household consisting of Thomas and Jane, his mother and sister, one assistant teacher, three servants and twenty pupils. At some time between 1841 and 1851 they moved to Sussex where by the latter date they were running another school at 15 Marley Lane, Battle, where they lived with Thomas’s sister and five children. By 1861 they were in Hastings, at 1 Paragon Buildings, with four children and a lodger, and they were still there in 1871, at which point they had two lodgers and three child boarders. The directory evidence suggest that they moved to Exmouth House between 1876 and 1878, but, as Brett noted, Thomas Maynard died in September 1880, after which his widow, Jane Maynard, continued to run the school.
There is a classified advertisement in the Hastings and St Leonards Observer under the date 20 November 1880 for ‘Mrs Maynard’s Middle-Class School for Boys’, described as ‘Old Established and Highly Successful’, and stating that, since the death of her ‘late lamented husband’, the new head of the school was a well-known English teacher, whose name is unfortunately not given. Some light is shed on this by the 1881 census return, which includes Jane herself and her daughter, Mary Jane Maynard, aged 32, both described as ‘Scholastic Profession’, together with Frederick Martin, described as ‘Assistant School Master’. There was also Henry Peter Hutching, aged 58, described as ‘House Property/Boarder’ and Mary Bate Shute, aged 16, described as an assistant, and a cook and a housemaid. There were also five girls and four boys aged between six and eleven, evidently pupils at the school, mostly born in Kent or Sussex but including Ada Maud Wheeler and Willie Mortimer Wheeler (to my knowledge, no relation of the archaeologist of that name), whose place of birth was given as South Africa.
Just a few details about the school can be gleaned from notices in the Hastings & St Leonards Observer. Uniquely, under 26 June 1880, a cricket match is recorded between Exmouth House and Ore Saxons C.C. (a local cricket club, whose first AGM is reported under 26 March 1881): the teams are named and the Exmouth House one, admittedly three men short, was thrashed. Otherwise, the advertisements, which appear regularly over the next couple of years, specify that the ’middle class’ clientele at which the school was aimed was ‘sons of tradesmen’; it was available to both resident and daily pupils. The curriculum was said to be ‘classical and commercial’, presumably including the rudiments of literacy and numeracy.
‘Exmouth House School’ appears in further advertisements in the Hastings & St Leonards Observer in 1883, the proprietress now being said to be ‘Miss Maynard’, although her mother is still given as the occupant of the house and as running the school in Pike’s Directory for 1884. However, she died that year and in the 1885 directories her entry is indeed replaced by one for ‘Miss Maynard’; she is said in Hutchins & Crowley’s 1885-6 Directory to run a ‘ladies’ school’ whereas in Pike’s Directory for 1885 it is described as a ‘preparatory school’. (A lodger is also included in the latter entry, Benjamin F. Pearson, replaced in 1886 by Albert W. Case; Case also appears in the Hastings Electoral Rolls for 1885-7, renting ‘Two furnished rooms, viz., sitting room on the ground floor front, and bedroom in succession on the top floor front’ for 15 shillings a week.)