Chapter 5: Fashionable heyday
Vincent Francis Rivaz, insurance broker
Then, extant directories provide some clues. The entries for Hastings in Pigot’s directories for 1823-4, 1826-7 and 1839-40 do not include the name of anyone resident at Exmouth House. However, that for 1832- 4 does, in the form of Vincent Francis Rivaz, Esq., who in fact turns out to have died at the house on 2 November 1834, being buried at St Mary in the Castle.41 Rivaz, who was born in 1766, was of Huguenot descent; when baptised at the Huguenot Church in London on 13 March 1766 he was described as a ‘Gentleman’, and he went on to become a prosperous merchant and insurance broker of Lloyd’s. His marriage to Wilhelmina Cornthwaite took place at St George the Martyr, Queen Street, Holborn, in 1796; then, in 1821, his daughter married Baden Powell, Professor of Geometry at Oxford and a leading controversialist in the debates over science and theology of the day, at St John’s church in Hackney (where the Rivazes then lived).42 Wilhelmina Rivaz survived her husband, and the record of proof of his will shows that she had by then moved to Tunbridge Wells. Rivaz’s death at Exmouth House is recorded in various newspapers at the time, and this episode further reinforces one’s sense of the opulence of the kind of people to whom Matthew Fagg’s residence would have appealed.
41 Pigot, Directory for 1832-34 (at Leicester University Special Collections website), sv ‘Nobility, Gentry and Clergy’ for Hastings; The National Archives PROB 11/1839/86; St Mary in the Castle Burial Register, sv 8 November 1834.
42 See ODNB sv ’Powell, Baden’.