EAST LODGE
When the East Greenwich tide mill was
but there also seems to have been a ‘big’ built which was later called East
Lodge. It stood at the end of what was
once called Marsh Lane and later called Riverway - which is the road where the
Pilot Inn stands This road which went down to the river until 1999 when the New
Millennium Experience Co. closed off the river access. Today its site lies under the flats which have
been built between the Pilot and the River.
There is an element of mystery about this house . We have some pictures of it as it stood in
the late 19th – but was it rebuilt?
The house in these pictures doesn’t look like one built in the 1790s.
There
are also several unsubstantiated stories of an earlier structure which wa under
East Lodge. This is about vaulted cellars and a passageway which led out
towards the road. In 1932 Anne Davies, who lived there
as a girl, recalled in a letter to the Kentish Mercury cellars 'like those at
the College'. A number of ex-residents of Riverway recalled these cellars and
passages. Mr. Bridgeman, who was brought
up in a coffee shop at the end of the terrace, remembered an underground
passage which ran to where East Lodge once stood. I tried to get archaeologists to take an
interest in these stories but – of course I was ignored and it was all dug up
and built on with no one bothering to look.
The mill was built by George Russell and
what has also resisted explanation is a newspaper report from 1796 which
describes a robbery ‘at Mr. Russell’s
house …. which was entered by 12 men who bound everyone in the house with cords
and carried off furniture, wearing apparel and plate’ … they then went into a boat ‘and put off for the other shore’. In the 1820s Russell’s widow is described as
having once lived at ‘Mill Place, East Greenwich. Now there is no trace on any other part of the
Greenwich Riverside of a house owned by a Mr. Russell, or of a Mill Place and no
house is shown near the tide mill on maps so this is a complete mystery.
East Lodge was however probably the
house built as part of George Russell’s estate slightly down river of the tide
mill. It is mentioned in documents on George Russell’s estate and legacies
including a Chancery assessment which lists
two houses. One is The Mill House, where William Johnson, the mill designer, lived
and another where Thomas Taylor, the foreman, lived. A few years later when repair work was being
done John Hall’s foreman was living in ‘the big house’ on site.
However, Anne Davies, in her 1932 interview
in the Mercury, said that East Lodge had
been built by a Mr. Hewes who was apparently ‘rather a reprobate’. She
described how on Sunday evenings he sat on a window cill of the ‘upstairs
ballroom’, dangling his legs outside and blowing a horn to disturb the service held
in the Thames Church Mission. It appears
that in 1845 a house there was let to a Jamet Thomas Hewes. Did he build a new house here – or rebuild an
older one?
Jamet
Hewes was the son of a distinguished millwright and civil engineer, Thomas
Cheek Hewes. He was supposed to have
trained as a doctor in Edinburgh but somehow didn’t qualify. He had however sufficient means inherited
from his father who died when he was in his early 20s. The money was however to
be administered by trustees for his whole lifetime – which probably indicates
something of how his father viewed his level of responsibility. There are a lot
of things about Jamet Hewes which don’t make a lot of sense.
By the time Jamet Hewes moved to East
Lodge he was Commodore of the Arundel Yacht Club – undoubtedly an expensive
hobby. He was donating pieces of silver
plate to the winners of yacht races between Greenwich, Gravesend, Erith and
elsewhere. He had his own yacht and also
a ‘cutter’. In 1845 he oversaw a change
of name to the ‘London Yacht Club’ ’and East Lodge is then described both as
‘the residence of the Commodore’ and
‘Club House’. It may be from this time that some of the
fancy decorations at East Lodge originate, as noted by Ann Davies and her
sisters. ‘the hall was paved with large squares of black and white marble and its
ceiling was painted by Sir James Thornhill ….. after the style of the Painted
Hall’. Of course Thornhill had died
in 1734, so he couldn’t have been the artist but the ballroom was clearly
pretty fancy.
Janet was also working at this time as a
Professor of Animal Magnetism ‘to insure
relief to those deemed incurable’..
Jamet seems to have had a number of
liaisons during this time, with young women to whom he may or may not have been
married. For example one of them said, when asked, ‘there was a clergyman in the
room who read something out of a book but she couldn’t recall what it was that
he said. However she had concluded
she was married to him because his mother was always very nice to her. Later in
a long and tangled court case there were some accusations of forgery against
him about the registration of the birth of a child, for which someone else went
to jail. There were other children . In
another complex case ‘he had entertained the foolish idea of
substituting a boy child instead of the girl’. He had also been ‘an enormous drinker in his time’.
Well that figures!
Jamet shot himself at the age of
73. By that time his connection with East
Lodge were in the past and he was living in Camberwell with a Henrietta Pimm –
and she was quite clear that she wasn’t married to him. His death was followed
by a court case on the inheritance of his father’s fortune by one of his possible
children.
In the late 1870s East Lodge became
company housing for Frank Hills’ works manager, Thomas Davies. His three daughters wrote and circulated a
family newsletter about their lives, the family and their holidays. They remembered Christmas parties, walks down
the lane, and honey for tea, meadows with buttercups, larks and pink and white
hawthorn. They loved the garden
overlooking the river, the shrubbery, the swing, and the summer house. They never mentioned the adjacent chemical
works, or Cory’s Atlas coal transshipment hulk out i the River. As serious
young women they organised improving lectures and concerts above the local
shop. They wrote about their lives at
East Lodge when they were old ladies in the 1930s.
The house was demolished at the start of
the twentieth century, and the site became part of the Redpath Brown structural steel works. Greenwich Yacht Club had been in a number of riverside
huts and temporary buildings and when the steel works closed they moved into the
old canteen, unaware of a previous club
house which was once nearby.
In the 1990s New Millennium Experience
closed Riverway and cut it off from the River. They demolished the old buildings from the
steel works and built a super new Yacht Club downriver at Peartree Wharf. They demolished the Causeway into the river
and the Redpath Brown Jetty. (I ought
sometime to write about the jetty, and Kenny, and his stand against
demolition!).
Now it is very difficult to work out
where East Lodge stood as new flats and shops were built irrespective of the
old site boundaries.
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