Chapter 6: Victorian Occupants

Mary Jane Maynard is last listed as the occupant of Exmouth House in Pike’s Directory for 1889 (she was to marry Henry Glover Horton at Westhampnett, West Sussex, in 1892) and by the 1890 Directory she has been replaced by John Willdey. On Willdey and his relationship with the house, information is available from the deeds, which include an agreement made by Willdey on 1 March 1889 with the owner of the property, John Walker Moulton, for a lease of the house from 24 June that year at an annual rent of £40 per year; the lease included fire stoves, a kitchen range and a book case and cupboard in the parlour (evidently that which is still there, though the stoves and range are no longer extant). Moulton died on 3 August 1889 and on 21 May 1890 his widow agreed to sell the house to Willdey for £650. As would be expected, Willdey does indeed appear in the 1891 census for Exmouth House, with his wife Sophia Willdey and their grandchildren, Agnes and Malcolm, aged 12 and 8. Willdey is described as a ‘Pensioned Officer Post Office’: he had evidently been the Superintendent of Hastings Post Office, being thus described in the 1881 census, at which point he was living at Woodbine House, Godwin Road, Hastings (with two children, Arthur and Ada, a servant and a boarder: the 1891 Exmouth House entry is oddly short, as if the parents were away, leaving their children in the care of their grandparents).

John Willdey died in 1893, at which point the house descended to his widow, Sophia Elizabeth Willdey. She appears in directories as the occupant of the house from 1894 till 1900, when she died and the house descended to her daughter, Ada Sophia Dalby of 22 Highbury Terrace, Middlesex, who took out a mortgage on the house in 1901. In the 1901 directory no name appears attached to the house, as if it was empty, and neither is there an entry for it in the 1901 census, but on 10 April that year Mrs Dalby granted a lease to Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Kenneth Gibb at £40 a year, to run until 24 June 1904; an extant covering letter suggests that the agreement was a continuation of an existing tenancy. Lieutenant-Colonel Gibb was a retired army officer formerly resident in Bayswater, Hendon and Tunbridge Wells; in the 1901 census he had been living at 86 London Road, and it was there stated that he had been born in the Cape province of South Africa. He is indeed listed as the occupant of Exmouth House in the directories from 1902 to 1904, but during this time the house changed ownership. An advertisement by the local estate agent, John & A. Bray, appears in the Hastings & St Leonards Observer for 29 November and 6 December 1902, in which the house is described as ‘a Commodious Residence in sunny sheltered position, on high ground, commanding good views of, and close to the sea’, comprising ‘A spacious double-fronted residence, in excellent decorative and sanitary condition, and let to a good tenant’. It was sold on 21 March 1903, evidently with Lt.-Col. Gibb as sitting tenant, to John Weatherseed of 40 Church Road, St Leonards, builder, for £700.