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Aucher Villas, 41–46 London Road Canterbury
When Sarah Ann Vlieland moved here on the death of her husband in 1877, the almshouses were 10 years’ old, but the new Hospital is as full of interest as John Cogan’s house, where the charity began. Clearly the upkeep of an 1860s’ newbuild would be a lot less than that of a dilapidated sixteenth-century town house but, as we can see from the pictures already posted, care and beauty were lavished on Aucher Villas, making them a worthy successor. The three semi-detached houses around a central courtyard were built by John Greene Hall, Canterbury’s surveyor, and are now part of the city’s most significant Grade II listed heritage.
John’s academic architectural training would have been in the mid-Victorian ‘Gothic Revival’ style of Augustus Pugin (who designed the interior of the Houses of Parliament after they had burned down in 1834), referencing medieval craftsmanship and ornate decoration. But Aucher Villas show more modern influences as well, looking towards the Arts & Crafts movement later in the century. John would have known the Red House in Kent, built by Philip Webb for William Morris, using local materials and drawing on traditional farmhouse design and ‘honest’ craftsmanship.
Aucher Villas are built of pale cream Kentish rubble* with stone facings round the windows, ‘gothic’ gables and a striking contrast of the red fishscale roof tiles with the dark bargeboards, decorated with a trefoil and quatrefoil cutout imitating leaves or rose petals, a standard motif in Arts & Crafts textiles and homeware. This was almost certainly influenced by the work of Pugin’s contemporary William Butterfield, who pioneered what he called ‘structural polychromy’, contrasting the colours on the facing of a house, such as the bands of black brick on a red brick façade in his master work, Keble College in the University of Oxford.
The quatrefoil pattern is repeated in Aucher Villas’ beautiful lead light mullioned windows, ‘mullions’ being the stone bars supporting the window frames. Large panes of plate glass only became possible when glass itself became less expensive early in the twentieth century, so small pieces of glass in a geometric pattern were held together by lead strips to make ‘leaded lights’, above all in the downstairs’ canted bay windows (‘canted’ because they opened on three sides, with the two side panels set at an angle to the centre one).
When one of the villas was recently for sale, it was marketed as ‘an enchanting ... house’, as Sarah Ann must have found it in her declining years.
*Also known as ragstone or Kentish rag, a stone still quarried today in nearby Maidstone.
Remembering the Cogan Hospital in Canterbury
The reminiscences about the Hospital on the Historic Canterbury site give a fascinating insight into its work and history (see quote (1)), and show clearly how having to rely on bequests (money or the income from land left in a will) often put its finances under severe strain.
The Aucher family ((2), (5), (6)), who we know from Otterden House and Aucher Villas (the new ‘handsome villa-like semi-detached houses on the London Road’, where Sarah Ann Vlieland lived from 1877 to 1902) were clearly important benefactors, but there were rarely enough funds to keep up the building itself, which was one reason for the move to London Road in 1870.
The Hospital was also left in a precarious position on John Cogan’s death in 1657 ((2)). Under the Puritan government following the execution of King Charles I in 1649, John had been in charge of sequestrating (forcibly repossessing) the lands of royalist gentry and clergy in East Kent. The estate in Littlebourn he bequeathed to endow the Hospital had belonged to the Archbishops of Canterbury, and when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, all such sequestered lands had to be returned to their former owners. Their income was lost to the Hospital, which remained badly under-funded until the Barling, Lovejoy and Aucher bequests ((2), (3), (4)).
It is hard to tell how much income was derived from the marshland bequeathed by Aucher and Barling ((3), (6)). If it was land reclaimed from the sea, it would have been very fertile pasture, but it could also be land from which salt was mined, barrelled up and sold for premium prices as a very precious commodity for preserving meat, even after the government tax on it was paid. Burmarsh, in the Aucher bequest, was a centre of the Roman trade, from where salt was exported all over the Empire.
The Masters’ bequest ((7)) in fact became worthless in 1720, on the collapse of the South Sea Company in which she was invested – caught up in the ‘bubble’ in its shares caused by frenzied buying of stock when there was no realistic prospect of any profit being made. Her heir and executor, Sir Harcourt Masters, a Director of the Company, had already contested her will in 1718, maintaining it was unclear which Canterbury hospital she had intended to endow, but his estates were forfeited when the Company went down, and it was not until 1737 that any monies were paid out.
(1) ‘Cogan’s Hospital ... was founded in 1199 for six poor widows of clergymen; within the old buildings are the remains of a dwelling belonging to the Grey or Franciscan Friars, who were settled here in 1224 by Henry III.’
(2) ‘Mr. Cogan, of the city of Canterbury, gave by his will, dated July 27, 1657, his mansion house in St. Peter’s ... in trust to the mayor and corporation, for the habitation of six poor widows of clergymen ..., and endowed it with the lands of the late archbishop ... in Littlebourn:* but these being resumed at the restoration, the house ... remained unendowed ... [I]n 1696, [this was] in some measure compensated by the benefaction of Dr. [John] Aucher, a prebendary [administrator] of ... [Canterbury] Cathedral, who invested an estate ... for the payment of ten pounds a year.’
(3) ’Mr. [Walter] Barling, by his will proved in 1670, devised one annuity or yearly rent of three pounds to be paid ... for ever, on September 1 yearly: one moiety [half] to the six poor widows inhabiting this house, and the other moiety towards the repair of the house ... to be paid out of his lands in Dering March [Marsh].’
(4) ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Lovejoy, by her will in 1694, ... gave out of her personal estate, four pounds per annum, to be paid to Cogan’s hospital.’
(5) ‘Dr. John Aucher, Prebendary of Canterbury, who died March 12, 1701, left an Estate of abt. 90£ a year for 6 poor widows of Clergymen in the Diocese. Each hath constantly 10 Guineas a year and commonly 2 [guineas] more and sometimes [an allowance] of Coals.’
(6) ’Dr. Aucher’s deed is dated [1701]. The revenues consist of the rent of a messuage or farm-house, with 55 acres in Worde, and 32 acres of marsh land in Burmarsh and Eastchurch, in Romney Marsh.’
(7) ‘[T]he poor in Cogan’s hospital are entitled to receive from Mrs. [Mary] Masters’s legacy, who died in 1716, the sixth part of the interest due from one hundred and sixty-three pounds sixteen shillings and three pence, old South-sea annuities.’
Some words in the original quotations have been edited, shown in [], to make their meaning clearer.
* The modern village is known as Littlebourne.
The dates and sources for the quotations can be found on the Historic Canterbury site: http://machadoink.com/Cogan’s%20Hospital.htm; thanks are due to Tina Machado for permission to use them.
Thanks Barbara !
William Lewin of Otterden Place
We have already seen that the striking alabaster memorial to William Lewin in Otterden Church was moved into the north aisle when the new church was built, and William Paxton would have seen it every day he when worshipped there. But Lewin’s own family, and that of the Auchers (after whom Aucher Villas’ almshouses in Canterbury are named), from whom he inherited Otterden Place, has its own fascinating story.
The Aucher family had a very long pedigree, and were connected with Otterden Place from at least the 1430s. Many were in government service: Anthony Aucher, Marshal of Calais, died of wounds sustained in the siege of the town in January 1558 when a surprise artillery attack caused the fall of the last English-held territory in France. John Aucher’s daughter Anne married Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1570 and brought him Otterden Place as part of her dowry, and it was Gilbert from whom William Lewin bought the house around 1578, sold to finance Gilbert’s voyages of exploration that ended when his ship , the Squirrel, was wrecked off Newfoundland in September 1583.
Otterden Place then still had many of the features, such as the bright red brick courses around the corners of the east and west faces and octagonal chimney stacks, dating from its first Tudor building in the early 1500s, although William remodelled it as a two-winged and two-storey courtyard house. He cannot have spent much time in Kent, however as, after a glittering career at Cambridge University, he became a prominent church and chancery lawyer in the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, sitting in Parliament as the member for Rochester.
William’s wife Anne bore him 7 daughters and 4 sons, although the eldest son Thomas seems to have predeceased him; I think one can count only 3 sons at the head of the mourning group kneeling beside the cenotaph that Epiphanius Evesham built for him in 1599, with his achievements as lawyer and statesman written on the stonework. William’s second son Justinian became his heir and Evesham built him an equally striking alabaster and black marble memorial in the church in 1620. William had wished to be buried in Otterden but was in fact interred in St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch in East London in April 1598: plague was rampant in London in the 1590s and it may be that his body could not be moved to the country for fear of infection.
Otterden Place then passed through the Curteis’ and Wheler families, the farm and estate becoming part of the Wheler Foundation trust in 2004. The other Aucher estates in Bishopsbourne and Bourne Park near Canterbury provided enough income for John Aucher to endow in 1701 a home for 6 poor widows in the Cogan Hospital, thus neatly linking Otterden and Canterbury in our Vlieland story.
Thanks to Amicia de Moubray and Faversham Life for the photograph of the
Lewin tomb in Otterden Church.And to Barbara !!
St Lawrence the Martyr, Otterden: William Paxton’s church
St Lawrence Church, in the ancient parkland of Otterden House on the North Downs, is now a private chapel but was as we know, from 1850 to 1882, William Paxton’s living: the parish church for the village is now St Mary’s Stalisfield, Jerome Nicholas’ church.
The church is dedicated to St Lawrence (or Laurence). St Lawrence was executed in the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Valerian in 258; another Lawrence was sent by Rome to convert the Anglo-Saxons of Kent to Christianity; arriving in Thanet in 597 or 601, he was Archbishop of Canterbury from 604 to 619, the year of his death.
In a countryside described by Edward Hasted* in 1798 as ‘poor and barren’ with steep flint roads ‘unsafe to travellers’, it was surprising to find a sophisticated classical Georgian church in austere red brick, built in1753–4 on the footings of the original flint thatched 13th-century foundation. The bricks were probably made in the estate for both Otterden House and the church, as transporting bricks imported from Holland and landed on Faversham Quay was impossible over the existing roads.
The 1750s’ rebuild was financed by the Reverend Granville Wheler, £400 of the cost coming from the will of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Granville’s sister-in-law. The elegance of the ‘Chinese Chippendale’ fretwork benches, painted to look as if they were of grained wood, and the monuments to previous owners of Otterden House, made William’s church a very special space. Sir William Lewin’s seven daughters are lined up in identical ruffs and bonnets under his tomb; his son Justinian lies in full armour, with his widow and daughter kneeling beside him, both moved from the old church into a recess in the north wall of the new one.
These were almost certainly sculpted by Epiphanius Evesham, a pupil of the Anglo-Dutch master Richard Stephens: Evesham was noted for ‘the gift of grouping’ and also made monuments to the Roper family in Lynsted Church and the Hawkins’ in Boughton-under-Blean (home of Phoebe and George Coulson). They were both recusant (Catholic) families, who trusted Evesham, who passed as an Anglican but had Catholic sympathies, to memorialise their dead in ways that looked Anglican but had secret images within the sculpture that a Catholic would understand.
*Edward Hasted wrote a topographical history of Kent in 12 volumes (1779–99), with such details as being attacked by ‘biting flies’ as he surveyed an apple orchard!
Thanks are due to Faversham Life (favershamlife@gmail.com) for some of the material in this post, taken from their post of 19 April 2019,and to Barbara !
Cogan Hospital (later St Aucher’s Charity) was the foundation that gave a home
to the indigent widows of the clergy, including Sarah Johnston in 1877.
But the house itself, the oldest non-ecclesiastical house in Canterbury, has a long tale of
its own to tell before the Hospital was even thought of.
Luke the Moneyer (an authorised coiner of the currency) built the on the site in
1200, one of the few stone houses in Canterbury to survive, and it then passed to
William Cokyn, who bequeathed it in his estate at his death in 1203 to be used as
a hospital, and a large hall was added. After serving as a residence for the mayors
and bailiffs of the town, it became the home of John Bygg in 1473, mercer (silk-
worker) and Mayor, who added a beamed medieval hall.
It was the Tudor mansion of John Thomas in 1528 and then the Jacobean one of
Ralph Bawden around 1600, with a jettied (overhanging) frontage, a parlour
downstairs and a bedchamber above. In 1626, John Cogan, who may have been a
descendant of William Cokyn, lived there until 1657; his estates were in
Littlebourne, 4 miles from Canterbury, and their proceeds founded the Hospital
in his name that remained at 53 St Peter’s Street until 1870.
Some of the endowments, however, came from lands taken from their Royalist
owners during the Puritan rule in England in the 1650s: in 1660, when the
monarchy was restored and these lands had to be returned, the Hospital was left
in a poor financial position, saved only by John Aucher’s bequests 40 years later.
John Bygg’s hall had a moulded oak ceiling, and the Tudor wood panelling John
Thomas installed showed his pastimes of hunting and bear baiting and the
implements of his hosier’s (stocking-maker’s) trade, with his own face hidden in
the carvings; images of vines and grapes and his wife’s face still survived on the
staircase in John Cogan’s house. Ralph Bawden, a glove-maker who was Mayor in
1584 and 1603, installed fantastic lime plaster work on the ceilings of the
parlour and bedchamber, including a Tudor rose frieze and geometric and
foliage designs. A pelican in piety (feeding her young with the blood drawn from
her own breast which she had speared with her beak) and a griffin, a symbol of
divine power, were carved corbels (supporting brackets) on the front of the
house.
In 1870, when the inmates of the hospital moved to Aucher Villas in London
Road, Cogan House was sold to Thomas Wells, ‘tailer and outfitter’, who removed
the jettied overhang, installed a red-brick frontage and large glass windows on
the street and turned the parlour into his shop. He moved the pelican and griffin
into his new entrance hall and made stabling for his horse, which pulled a
delivery van around the city and countryside for many years. From the later
1930s, it became a private house again and is now an Italian restaurant with
some of the historic fabric displayed in its modern decor.
Thanks Barbara!
William Archibald Paxton, 1818–1882
One of 8 children, he was ordained a Deacon in Oxford in 1843 and awarded an MA from Trinity College Oxford the next year; he became rector of St Lawrence’s 7 years later, holding the incumbency until his death in 1882. He was 55 when in 1873 he married Mary Payne, 31 years his junior, whose family had sent her to America for a year in an unsuccessful the hope of getting her to break off the affair and who did not attend her London wedding. They had no children but made a home for at least three of Mary’s nieces. Otterden was a very wealthy parish, with an income twice that of Stalisfield 2 miles away and an annual gift from the London Leathersellers’ Company towards the upkeep of the church and the support of the poor of the parish. William had a Parish Rooms built and an album compiled with photographs of every dwelling in the district. Mary survived William by 38 years, and they are buried in Otterden churchyard under the inscription ‘Love conquers all things’.
When Charles James and Alice Edith Vlieland moved to Barnfield Road in Exeter, around 1905, they named their new home ‘Otterden’, which shows what the village, William and Mary meant to them.
Alice Stevens, née Vlieland: A Victorian daughter, mother and wife
All three daughters of Jerome NicholasVlieland, Jr, were strong-featured, but Alice’s beauty was enhanced by the
determination in her face, which carried her through the sorrows of her life
from childhood to widowhood. Her daughter Marjorie says that ‘she could have
run the nation single-handed ... had she been given the opportunity’, and
Alice’s early life seems to have given her the resilience she showed at every
turn of fortune.
After his marriage to Frances Elizabeth Samworth in 1852, Alice’s father was firstly a curate at Great Ilford in Essex,
where her eldest sister Frances Elizabeth was born the following year. In 1854,
Jerome was appointed vicar of Christ Church, George Gilbert Scott’s striking
flint-faced newbuild on Turnham Green in West London; Alice’s elder sister Mary Heath was born there in 1854, she was born in 1856 and her brother Charles James in 1857. In 1858, Jerome became
the incumbent of St Mary’s Church in Stalisfield in Kent, but in August 1859 Alice’s
next brother was stillborn, and her sister Margaret lived only for one day in
January 1860. Two more brothers, Arthur Heath and Herbert Bloomfield, were born
in May 1861 and November 1862.
So by the time she was 4, Alice had lost
two siblings, and when she was 8, in August 1864, her mother died of a haemorrhage, aged 38, giving
birth to a stillborn sister. Frances and Mary were then 11 and 10, Charles 7,
Arthur 3 and Herbert 2. Until Jerome married Sarah Johnson in 1866, the
children seem to have been cared for by William and Phoebe Millen in nearby
Syndale, and perhaps also the Shove family in Queen Court Ospringe and the
Paxtons in Otterden: William Paxton, rector of St Lawrence the Martyr Church from 1851 to
1882, had no children of his own but Alice seems to have been very close to
both him and his new wife Mary. The Millen’s eldest daughter, Helena, born on
Christmas Day in 1858, lived only 18 months, leaving Alice Millen as the eldest
child and here may lie the roots of the edgy relationship between Alice and her
sister-in-law (as Alice Millen became when she married Charles James Vlielandin 1883): Alice Millen saw herself as superior
to the impoverished vicarage children, and later may have shared her husband’s
distaste at having a prosperous brewer as a brother-in-law.
On 27 January 1877, Jerome died of lung
congestion and liver disease, aged only 51. The vicarage passed to the new
incumbent, the furniture was sold, and the children scattered, Sarah going to
live in Aucher Villas in Canterbury, a charitable foundation for the widows of
the clergy. Mary then seems to have become the heart of the family, marrying
the eminent doctor Richard Shillitoe that November, from whose home in Hitchen,
Hertfordshire, first Frances in 1880 and
then Alice in 1887, were married (the 1881 census also briefly places Arthur there
as a medical student). Alice who, like
her grandmother Sarah Heath, may have
been a governess or a teacher after her father’s death, met Thomas PearmanStevens in Exeter in the mid-1880s. Beginning as an assistant brewer in the Swan
Brewery in St Thomas’ in the 1870s, he became as we know a partner in the Well
Park Brewery with his first wife’s two brothers, Hayward Gould and Thomas Gould
Pidsley. Their sister Ellen married Thomas in August 1874 and at her death in
May 1883, a fortnight after giving birth to her daughter Ellen Mary, left five children aged between 8 and a
newborn.
So when Alice married Thomas in March 1887 aged
31, she became stepmother to Mabel Marion, aged 12, Reginald Gould, 6 and
Violet Maud, 5; Allan Randolph, aged 7 and Ellen Mary, were later sent to live
with Herbert Vlieland in Wisconsin and then relatives in Alberta Canada, but
Alice still had to make a home for them and her own three children, Thomas,
Paul and Marjorie, born in 1888, 1889 and 1892, when she was 36. Marjorie tells
of a fulfilled family life until her father’s death in 1907, but Alice lived to
see the boys settled in their careers and Marjorie turned 21 before she died
aged 58 in early 1914.
