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The Centenary of a London House
(5 St. Michael's Road, SW9)

The following was initially written in 1964:

On 22 March 1865 Owen Parsons took a 97-year lease of No. 5 St Michael?s Road, Stockwell, from James Stiff and John Walker, so that in a few months? time this house will reach its centenary.

1865 seems at first sight one of those prosperous placid Victorian years which we to-day tend to look back upon with nostalgia. Prosperous it certainly was, but there was plenty of exciting news reported in the Press. Across the Atlantic a long and bloody civil war came to an end and a great statesman met his death by violence. A general election took place in Great Britain, where another great statesman died, peacefully. Cattle plague ravaged the countryside, whose physical and social aspect was to be much changed by the Union Chargeability Act passed in that year. It is also interesting to recall, now that Stockwell is one of the main centres of West Indian settlement in London, that it was in the autumn of 1865 that the revolt in Jamaica, so ruthlessly suppressed by Governor Eyre, broke out.

None of these things vitally affected the average Londoner. But the rather eccentric weather of 1865 certainly did. Owen Parsons probably first saw his new house in very unfavourable conditions, in one of the bitterest Marches ever recorded. Still slightly damp like all new buildings, with an unmade (and probably frostbound) garden, he must have wondered whether he was doing right to take it. But spring that year came with a rush. April 1965 was the warmest on record, with one day rising to 81 degrees Fahrenheit and midsummer temperatures daily for a whole week. So the actual move to the house took place under most favourable circumstances ? and we may hope that he managed to get the garden in order for his family to enjoy their September in it. For this month was warmer than the preceding August and probably very sunny ? at least, a mere 4 millimetres of rain fell during the month, making it one of the driest on record as well as the warmest September of the 19^th century. It is perhaps also worth noting that the greatest 24-hour temperature range ever observed in London (43 to 85 degrees) occurred in 1865, appropriately on Midsummer Day.

The house itself need not detain us long. It is of a type that was being built for middle-class occupation all over the London suburbs in the 1860s. It is a terraced house of basement and three upper floors, two rooms on each of the lower floors (with folding doors between the ground floor rooms) and three rooms on the top floor. A solidly practical house (the division of the top floor front, very convenient, was most unusual at that date); ceiling cornices were only introduced in the three ?public rooms?, and there were no balconies or porticoes. A less happy feature is the absence of a ?well? in the staircase; the handrails are framed into newel posts at every change of direction and do not flow continuously through the house as in most mid-Victorian specimens. It is doubtful whether the slight increase of space so obtained in the back rooms compensates for the cramped appearance of the hall, stairs and landings.

Fairly early on a back addition was made, with a brick-built scullery in the basement supporting the typical Victorian conservatory on the ground floor. More recently the house has been adapted for multiple occupation by the division of the first floor front into two rooms, the installation of kitchen equipment on each floor and an extra bath put in the basement. The house escaped serious structural damage in both World Wars.

Before we consider the 1865 lease more fully we must go back a few years. Although permission had been granted as early as 1860 for the name ?St. Michael?s? to be applied to a new road, Mr. W.F. Bray, the original prospective developer, does not seem to have followed the matter up, and it was only in 1862 that steps were taken for houses to be built. On 24 September of that year William Wild and William John Wild made an agreement with James Stiff that the latter should build houses worth ?450 each in St. Michael?s and Burnley Roads, and ?350 in St. Martin?s Road, observing prearranged building lines and such rudimentary by-lawe as then existed. This James Stiff was a member of a family which retained its interest in the estate until very recent times, and the John Walker who acted with him in granting the 1885 lease to Owen Parsons was the builder he employed. Walker?s address is given as 11 St. Martin?s Road; it is tempting to suppose that he had his yard on the site of nos 15 to 35, which remained empty for a number of years. He certainly worked in a small way, letting his houses one by one as they were finished.

The unusual 97-year term of Parsons? lease was to allow it to fit in with the original leases granted two years earlier on the houses (Nos 10 &c. St. Michael?s Road) which were the first to be built under the 1862 agreement, probably by a different builder. The financial terms ? a capital sum of ?500 and an annual rent of ?6 10s ? suggest that Stiff and Walker were making a profit of some 16% on their houses. Money in the 1860s was worth about ten times what it was worth a hundred years later, so it would seem that the value of our house (the equivalent of the modern 3-bedrrom semi) did not change much until the inflation of the last ten years or so. To pay for his house Parsons made a deed of mortgage with the Tower Hamlets & General Building Society, in which he held 10 ?50 shares.

Owen Parsons lived in the early days of form filling, and long enough ago for the forms now to be available for public inspection, so we know quite a lot about him. His unusual Christian name (which he gave to his elder son) suggests Welsh blood, but he was in fact born in Stepney, and was 45 when he moved to St Michael?s Road. He was a tailor by profession, working on his own in the City, in 1851-52 at 32 Little Noarfields, Fore Street, and from 1853 at 1 Angel Court, Throgmorton Street. The fact that he held ?500 in a building society suggests that he was quite prosperous; no doubt he supplied the higher ranks of city clerks with their working uniform. His wife, Ann, was a Yorkshire woman, two years older than himself; they seem to have been married about 1843. Their family was enormous even by Victorian standards ? at the 1861 Census it consisted of Margaret E. Parsons (then aged 17), Walter Owen (16), Diana (14), Martha (13), Louisa A. (12), Ruth (10), Naomi Isabella (9), Lydia W. (6) and William J. (3 yrs old). All the children except Walter, born ? probably at his grandparents? ? in Stepney, and William, born at Newington, were genuine Cockneys; the Parsons family must have lived above their shop till about 1857, when they moved to 3C Newington Crescent near the Elephant & Castle, a 2-storey plus basement terrace house recently demolished. This in turn was obviously too small, and in 1862 they moved to 21 Church Row, Newington Butts, a site now occupied by the London Park Hotel. It was probably the wish to give his children a garden to play in that dictated the further move to Stockwell three years later.

Nothing is known of the Parsons? family life during their first ten years at Stockwell. No doubt they had ?quiet possession?; one can imagine them shovelling bucketfuls of coal onto their fires on 4 January 1867, the coldest night ever recorded in London with 31 degrees of frost at Kew, and sweltering through 22 July 1868, when the London temperature reached 97 degrees and 100.5 was observed at Tonbridge, the present high record for this country. No doubt also they did not relish the publicity which involved Stockwell in 1891, when Revd Selby Watson, a noted classical scholar and ex-headmaster of Stockwell Grammar School, at the age of 67 murdered his Irish-born wife at No. 28 St. Martin?s Road. His age, and the apparent lack of motive for the crime, led to his death sentence being commuted. He is probably the only murderer to have been accorded a Times obituary and a notice in the Dictionary of National Biography.

One might picture Owen Parsons as a man on the ?Clapham omnibus?, but in his time buses were infrequent, limited in accommodation and probably expensive, and though the tramway, carrying 46 passengers per car, reached Stockwell in 1890 there was no route Citywards until 1974 and even then only as far as St George?s Church. It seems probable that he walked the 4-odd miles each way to and from his work daily, a practice which may have led to his early death in October 1895, aged 55. On two days in July that year it rained continuously for 44 hours, and few adult Londoners can have escaped getting wet through at least once. In Parsons? case this may have led to pneumonia, described in his death certificate rather unscientifically as ?disease of heart and lungs?. The death was registered by Naomi, sixth of the seven Parsons? girls; Ann, following the example of her sovereign, no doubt felt too distraught to attend to such mundane matters.

In the winter of 1896-87 disaster overtook the family. Ann and Walter Owen were forced to file petitions in bankruptcy. The task of providing for seven daughters ? and let us hope marrying off some of them ? must have taxed the family finances to the utmost. Ann Parsons must have been a good mother (she brought up a large family over a City shop without, it seems, losing a single child) and probably was a good housewife, running the house with the help of a ?daily? (the family is unlikely to have been able to afford, or even accommodate, with 11 persons living in 9 rooms, a resident servant). But very likely, in attempting to carry on the tailoring, she had no head for business; Walter Owen also, though he had been working with his father since at least 1861, may not have been specially interested in tailoring as a livelihood. Perhaps also William, the youngest and almost certainly a spoilt child, had developed into an extravagant teenager.

On 2 August 1897 the lease of the house was assigned to Mary Ann Wrangham by a W.L.C. Browne and another, presumably the liquidators of the Parsons estate. She had to pay ?495, only ?5 less than the original price of the house 12 years before; this rather bad bargain on her part may have been dictated by tenderness for the possibly destitute Ann Parsons and her family.

Mrs. Wrangham had previously lived at 3 Foreign Street, Camberwell, a house which still exists. She was a widow, and was moving to a larger house than the one she had occupied. This suggests that she was acquiring it for letting rooms or possibly as an investment ? rather a comedown for a house only 12 years old. It is difficult to find out much about No.5 during Mrs.Wrangham?s tenure. As a woman, she is not of course recorded in the registers of voters, and her lodgers seem to have been too temporary to qualify under the electoral laws as then existing. The gross value of the house for rating is recorded in 1880 as ?48 (as compared with ?50 for the slightly older houses opposite and ?100 and ?85 respectively for Nos 23 and 24, the largest (and only detached) houses in St. Michael?s Road). By 1900 the rateable value had been reduced to ?40.

Houses of the size of No.5, with a maximum of one double and four single lettable rooms, seem hardly economic as lodging houses, and it is not surprising to find Mrs. Wrangham raising a mortgage of ?300 on the house from a Mrs. Jemima Taylor of Dover, perhaps a sister. This was on 30 May 1884, and at Michaelmas of that year Mrs. Wrangham and Mrs Taylor parted with the house for ?430 ? ?65 less than the former had paid for it only seven years before.

The new purchaser was William Neighbour, in the name of his wife Charlotte Cantrill Neighbour and presumably with her money. In the assignment of the lease he is described as ?gentleman?, so he may have been of independent means. His previous address was 69 Nine Elms Lane, on a site now occupied by the gas works. It was possibly this circumstance which forced him to move, and the Neighbour family form a good though late example of the tendency of middle class families to move gradually outwards from the centre of a large city. Their progress is similar to that of the Parsons family, but less hampered by a large number of children; we only know of three, two sons and one daughter. The Neighbours continued to live at 5 St. Michael?s Road till about the turn of the century, according to the electoral registers, moving between 1897 and 1902 (when George William Nurse occupied No.5) to 55 Lanercost Road, Tulse Hill. It seems possible that William Neighbour died in 1903, when Mrs. Neighbour made a will; this, and her own death (away from London) in December 1917 are mentioned in an assignment of No. 5 made, 12 July 1918, by Walter Sharman Neighbour her son to his sister Charlotte Mary Neighbour. Miss Neighbour continued to own the house until 20 February 1931, when she in turn assigned the remaining 31 years of the lease to Mrs. Alice Knight, the mother of the present owner Miss S.A. Knight. The price on this occasion was ?675, but the long tenure of the Neighbour family, the change in the value of money and the character of the locality, prevent comparison with the ?430 paid for the 1884 assignment.

The 1907 electoral register records no persons entitled to vote at No.5, so the house was probably empty at that date, but by 1912 the Neighbours? tenant was John Charles Henwood. His occupation lasted at least till 1928; from about 1918 he seems to have sub-let part of the house, first to Henry John Wood and to Fanny Heldon, and later to Henry John and Alice Wood. Henwood seems to have been a man of some standing; he was qualified as a juror, and in 1927 was distinguished as one of the few remaining ?private residents? in St. Michael?s Road, in the Post Office Directory. From about 1932 the house, judging by the number and diversity of the names in the electoral registers, has been let in floors. But the gardens front and back have been well kept up, and as late as the early 1930s the ground floor conservatory was still used for its original purpose.

The Stiff family remained ground landlords almost throughout the house?s century of existence. In the late 1950s it was represented by Revd. James Arthur Stiff, a South London clergyman, and William Frederick, director of an agricultural chemical company. The latter was the last survivor, and after his death in August 1961 at the age of 86 Miss Knight, who had inherited the house from her mother in 1956, bought out the interest of his executors. The remaining few months of the 1865 lease were thus extinguished. But the house is still not strictly her own property. No.5 St. Michael?s Road stands on land which was leases by the Rt. Hon. Anthony Viscount Montagu, K.C., lord of the manor of Stockwell, to Henry Store, woodmonger of London, for 1000 years from 25 March 22 Eliz. I (1580), for ?6 13s 4d a year. However, there is no record of any rent having been paid since the early 18^th century, so that the house is in effect freehold.

As to the future of No.5 St. Michael?s Road it would be rather rash to prophecy [sic]. It is not at present known to be the subject of any redevelopment proposals, official or otherwise. But some of the cheaper houses in St. Martin?s Road were pulled down under an L.C.C. clearance scheme when their leases expired (1962), and it may well be that some of No.5?s present inhabitants will live to see it demolished to make room for something in tune with 1965 rather than 1865. It can be taken as certain that the house will not survive to the end of the Montagu-Store lease in 2580.

Houses have as varied ?lives? as individual people, and the story of ?No.5 St. Michael?s Road? has some unusual features. The enormous family and financial failure of the first tenants, the apparent early use as a lodging house, the fact that for 90 of its 100 years it has been owned by a woman or in a woman?s name, are cases in point. We may conclude by expressing the hope that it will continue to give shelter and ?quiet possession? to a small group of Londoners for many years to come.

December 1964 (revised 1974). H.B.Wells.

Our thanks to Ken Barclay for providing the above to this web site.

Retyped, reduplicating the original, with the exception of added footnote, 16^th February 2001.