Heritage Open Days 2020: Hidden lives: botanists, buildings and bankruptcy - Cheltenham Civic Society

Heritage Open Days 2020: Hidden lives: botanists, buildings and
                             bankruptcy

The traditional focus of Heritage Open Days has been on buildings of architectural or
historical interest. This year’s theme of Hidden Nature provides an opportunity to explore, in
a virtual tour, the houses and the lives of some ‘hidden naturalists’ (and one tree), who lived
in and around Pittville. The naturalists, mostly botanists, are hidden in the sense that their
lives are not as well known now as they were.
In line with the original conception of HODS, I have tried to provide some background to the
neighbourhood they lived in. If this study had taken the form of the actual walk that was
originally planned, we would have paused at these buildings along the way.
The dates in the headings after the buildings refer to the years in which the naturalists lived
in Cheltenham.

                        ARCHIBALD MONTGOMREY (1843–1922)
                         SIRSA HOUSE, LONDON ROAD (1910-22)
Before the spa developments of the late 18th and early 19th century Cheltenham was a small
linear market town, known for having an especially long High Street. The town was not on an
important road, but was attractively placed at the foot of the Cotswolds, and was
surrounded by good farming land. Most of the Regency spa developments and residential
buildings took place at right angles to the High Street, for example on the west side the
Lansdown, Suffolk, Park and Montpellier Estates, and on the east the Pittville Estate.
We begin our tour, however, at the south end of the old High Street, now called London
Road. On the east side are lawns and the elegant Priory and Oxford Terraces, with the latter
begun in 1816 and Priory Terrace built around 1830. The houses on the west side, however,
are particularly varied: late Regency, Italianate, and Gothic Tudor. This interspersing of
styles, with terraces and houses, detached or semi-detached, seems to be a recurring theme
in the development of Regency Cheltenham.

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Sandford House today, formerly two dwellings: Horton House on the left and Sirsa House,
                                much altered, on the right
Our first ‘hidden’ naturalist is Archibald Sims Montgomrey, who lived at the house shown
above, at what is now called Sandford House. The house was built around 1820-1830 as an
unequal semi-detached building. Sirsa House, where Montgomrey lived, was the right-hand
side and Horton House was on the left. At one stage Sirsa house was a girls’ school, and
around 1946 it was extended to the right. An additional bay was added before the whole
building was converted into four flats. More recently it was used as offices, and now is being
converted back into residences. Archibald Montgomrey moved here around 1910 to join his
widowed sister Agnes West.
Archie, as his family called him, was born in Brentford, Middlesex, where his father owned a
large sawmill. At the age of sixteen his education was completed with a year at an
educational institute in Germany, in Dresden. He then entered the family business and by
1874 he was largely running the sawmill. By this time he had developed many interests
outside the sawmill business, including being a magistrate, county councillor, founder
member of The British Numismatic Society, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and
initiator of several civic projects in Brentford.
In 1910 he fell seriously ill and withdrew from public life, sold the timber mill and moved to
Cheltenham to live with Agnes. He had no children and was himself a widower for 40 years.
Another of Archie’s interests was botany, an interest he had picked up from distant relatives,
the Ronalds family, who ran a nursery near the sawmill in Brentford. In 1911, his health now
recovered, he resumed his study of plants. He became an active member of the Cotteswold
Naturalists Field Club, and The Botanical Exchange Club and Society - the forerunner of the
Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (the BSBI). His particular interest was collecting and
preserving vascular plants, producing sheets of carefully dried and laid-out specimens, each
one labelled. The inspiration for his own collecting was probably the collection of specimens
of the Ronalds family, ‘twelve leather bound volumes in their purpose–made cabinet’ ,
which had been assembled by the family over a 50-year period from the 1770s. Making
reference collections of dried pressed plants was common before good published material
became available, in the same way that taxidermists preserved animals. It was also not
uncommon for family herbaria to be passed down through generations. Today these
collections are prized not only for their undeniable beauty, but also for the information they
provide about distribution of species, taxonomy and DNA studies.

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An example of an herbarium with purpose-built cabinet:
              part of the Herbarium at The National Botanical Garden of Wales
Montgomrey gathered a large collection of plants, trees, shrubs, ferns and grasses, as well as
herbaceous plants. The core of this collection, consisting of about 1700 loose sheets, is now
in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Montgomrey bequeathed his collection and his books
to his sister Laura, who also shared his scientific interests. She subsequently gave his
‘Cabinet of British Dried Flowers’ to Cheltenham Museum Free Library, though later became
‘dissatisfied with the way they were housed’ and formally requested their return in 1924. On
the advice of local botanist John Haines, the collection was offered to Gloucester Museum,
but was later passed on to Bristol. All the Gloucestershire specimens were, however,
removed from the Bristol Collection and given to The Museum of Gloucester.
Montgomrey made several other important contributions to Gloucestershire botany. He
arranged and contributed to a herbarium for the Cheltenham College for Boys (now
Cheltenham College). This collection is now at the World Museum in Liverpool. He also
contributed many records for the future Flora of Gloucestershire.

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Badgeworth Buttercup Reserve (Photo S Jeans)
On 24 May 1912 Montgomrey rediscovered the nationally rare Adder’s Tongue Spearwort at
Badgeworth. The plant had not been seen for two decades since first being recorded in
1890. His specimen from 1912 is still maintained at the Natural History Museum in London.
In 1933 the small pond where it grew in Badgeworth was in immediate danger of being filled
in for building purposes. It was purchased out of his own pocket by G W Hedley, Senior
Science Master at Cheltenham College and knowledgeable local botanist. It then became a
nature reserve and is now Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s smallest reserve.
There is a short biography of Montgomrey in the Gloucestershire Flora; otherwise his name
has slipped away, although a recent article for The BSBI by Beverley Ronalds has helped to
rekindle interest. He died on 12 April 1922 at Hilperton, Wiltshire, at the home of his
nephew, and was buried in his native town of Brentford.

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DR DAVID LYALL (1817-95)
                              24 LONDON ROAD (1879-95)
We now cross the London Road to the east side where we find some elegant
Regency terraces.

                   The southern half of Oxford Terrace, and Oxford Street
This is Oxford Terrace, two symmetrical terraces either side of Oxford Street. Each terrace
consists of six dwellings with the two central ones projecting slightly, with supporting
balconies and canopies of delicate wrought-iron work.

The northern part of Oxford Terrace, showing the section that is Priory Terrace at the far end
The symmetry of the terrace, when viewed from London Road, is maintained by placing the
entrances to the houses to the side. The houses on the corner have their entrances on
Oxford Street itself, which enhances the entrance to the street. The southern terrace
presents a uniform appearance, while that of the northern terrace is more disjointed due to
the lack of consistency in the façade furniture.

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Priory Terrace: Lyall lived in the house on the right of the terrace; the blue plaque is just
                                             visible
On the town side of the northern terrace an additional four-house terrace was built in the
1830s. This is Priory Terrace, and Number 1, now 24 London Road, was the home of Dr David
Lyall from 1878 until his death in 1895. There are two biographies of Lyall: one by his close
friend James Hooker and a more recent one by Andrew Lyall for the Linnaean Society,
coinciding with the positioning of the blue plaque on the front.

                            1 Priory Terrace, now 24 London Road
David Lyall led a hectic life. He was born in Kincardineshire and qualified in medicine from
Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities. Shortly after qualification he joined a Greenland
whaling boat as the Ship’s Surgeon and returned to join the navy in 1839. By June 1839 he
had been appointed as Assistant Surgeon on HMS Terror, one of the ships of Sir James Ross’s

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British Antarctica Expedition of 1839-43. The Assistant Surgeon on the other ship, the later
ill-fated HMS Erebus, was Joseph Hooker, later to become a famous scientist and a life-long
friend of Lyall.
For the next four years Lyall served in various posts in the Mediterranean before, in 1847,
being appointed as Surgeon and Naturalist on a three-year expedition to survey New
Zealand. Returning in 1851 he joined the search for Sir John Franklin, whose expedition to
discover the North-West Passage in the Erebus had been lost. Returning in 1854, he spent
the following year involved in the naval campaign in the Baltic. There was then a short
period of home service between 1856 and 1857 before joining, as Surgeon and Naturalist,
The Boundary Commission’s surveying ship under Sir George Richards demarking the Pacific
boundary between Canada and the United States. In 1858 he was working with the Land
Boundary Survey, establishing the border between British Columbia and the US, from the
Pacific coast to the Rockies.
There then followed land-based postings at Pembroke Dock, West Hartlepool and Bristol. In
1866 Lyall married Frances Rowe at Haverfordwest, when he was 49 and she 28. He retired
at the age of 56 in 1873. In 1878 he moved to 1 Priory Terrace, Cheltenham.
The notable feature of Lyall’s work is that at the same time he was carrying out his duties as
a naval surgeon he was collecting and recording wildlife, particularly plants. He collected
specimens of plants on most of his trips, building up herbarium collections from each
journey. Despite having no formal training in botany (he had studied an arts-based course
for three years at Aberdeen before converting to medicine), his knowledge of plants was
deep.
During his time in North America he established a large herbarium collection and recorded
some species for the first time, several of which carry his name in their nomenclature, for
example Larix lyallii, Anemone lyallii, and Calochortus lyallii, species of larch, anemone and
lily respectively. Such was the importance of this North American collection that on his
return Sir William Hooker, The Director of Kew, arranged for Lyall’s secondment there to
provide time for him to organise and catalogue the specimens.
Lyall also made important collections from his time on the expeditions to Antarctica, where
he compiled a herbarium collection of 1500 specimens, including many algae. According to
Joseph Hooker, whilst on the expedition to the North West Passage ‘he compiled the largest
collection [of plants] of the American Polar Islands’. This collection again included many
lower plants, particularly mosses. Many of his herbarium collections and his letters are still
maintained at Kew.
David Lyall appears to have lived quietly in Cheltenham, and although he wrote many letters
he never published an account of his extraordinarily eventful life. Andrew Lyall’s recent
biography suggests that ‘the relative obscurity into which his memory has sunk is primarily
due to the fact that he was a botanical collector rather than a writer of scientific papers’,
adding that he hopes his new biography would lead to greater recognition of David Lyall’s
life and contribution to botany.
Perhaps the blue plaque, unveiled in 2010, will help ‘unhide’ the remarkable life of a former
inhabitant of 24 London Road.

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HERBERT HENRY KNIGHT (1862–1944)
                            ALL SAINTS VILLAS ROAD (1907-44)

 All Saints Church from the SW. The original plans included a tower and spire on this corner
This is All Saints Church, built between 1866 and 1868 for the growing population of Pittville
and the east side of Cheltenham. We have come north from London Road, along Hewlett
Road towards Pittville Circus.
Although a church was planned for the new Pittville Estate, it was never built, so the
population attended at Holy Trinity church, which was built around 1820 (contemporary
with the start of the building of the Pittville Estate), Prestbury Parish church or Saint Paul’s
church, built in 1829-31 by John Forbes, the architect who designed Pittville Pump Room.

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Part of the font canopy, All Saints Church
All Saints, built some thirty years later, and appearing a little severe externally, is
sumptuously appointed inside in a complex mixture of stone finishes and with suitably rich
furnishings, a fitting venue for the more wealthy inhabitants of Pittville. We have come here
because behind the church is All Saints Villas Road, and in the corner is The Lodge, a
Victorian semi-detached villa where Henry Herbert Knight lived for much of his life.

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The Lodge, All Saints Villas Road: H H Knight lived here with his mother
‘In the opinion of his fellow botanists, Knight probably had a greater knowledge of the plants
of Gloucestershire than any man has acquired at any time’. These words, published four
years after his death in the Flora of Gloucestershire of 1948 are part of an affectionate
biography: he had been one of the original collaborators on the Flora, and was a constant
member of the Botanical sub-committee of the Cotteswold Naturalists Field Club, whose
task it was to revise the whole of the typescript before publication.

   Flora of Gloucestershire. After several earlier attempts it was finally published in 1948
Knight graduated in mathematics at Cambridge, later becoming a Fellow of Clare College. In
1888 he went to Llandovery School as Mathematics Master, but botany became a major
interest, which grew into a full-time occupation when he retired and moved, in 1907, to live
with his mother in Cheltenham. Knight recorded and collected all groups of plants, but

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perhaps his major contribution to UK botany was with bryophytes - the smaller, non-
flowering, lower plants, a group which includes the mosses and liverworts and which were
very much under-recorded at the time. For twenty years Knight collected and observed
throughout the county. In1920 he presented two complete moss and liverwort herbaria to
the Cheltenham Museum. According to the entry in the Flora ‘the collections are beautifully
mounted on cards and arranged in nine fascicles, constituting 876 specimens. The
collections verge on completion’. The collection was seen in the Museum in 2016, but its
current location is uncertain.
Knight was for many years an active member of the Moss Exchange Club, the forerunner of
the British Bryological Society, and President of the Club from 1933-34. His work on the
mosses and the liverworts of Carmarthenshire was published posthumously in 1948. His
papers The Mosses of Gloucestershire (1914) and The Hepatics [liverworts] of
Gloucestershire (1920) were published by The Cotteswold Naturalist’ Field Club, and remain
important sources of information to this day.
Knight often preferred to carry out his field work alone, cycling to all parts of the county
quietly recording individual plants. In this respect he might be regarded as a ‘hidden’
naturalist, the more so as his notable bryophyte collection seems to have become
increasingly hidden and difficult to access.

   One of the 9 fascicles of Knight’s bryophyte collection, now in the custody of The Wilson

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THE ‘NAPOLEON’ WILLOW
                       AT STANBROOK HOUSE, PITTVILLE CIRCUS
We have now come around the corner from All Saints Church and into Pittville Circus.

                                 Pittville Circus looking south
The Circus was not part of Pitt’s original plans for Pittville, but was developed in 1840 by
Edward Cope. The planned buildings were never completed but several large villas were
constructed in a mixture of styles, perhaps more Victorian than Regency. Much of the
eastern part was originally occupied by Selkirk Villa, an elegant Regency-style building similar
in design to Southend House at the lower end of Albert Road. It was renamed Tresmere in
1918 and demolished in 1974 to make way for the modern Tresmere. Other vacant plots
have been infilled by modern housing rather less in keeping, but the Circus still maintains
the air of a leafy rural enclave.

                           Pittville Circus – the ‘leafy rural enclave’
On the western side is Stanbrook House and the tree we are looking at stands in the garden
behind the house. Local legend has it that this willow might be a Napoleon Willow.

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Although exiled to St Helena in October 1815 after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon’s
influence was still felt around Europe and beyond. He was remembered by some as the
finest of military leaders and by others as a republican and reformer of civic institutions.
Rumours of his escape from St Helena and return to Europe circulated from 1815 onwards.
During his time on the island his favourite place to sit was under a willow tree and he
requested to be buried under its shade when he died. After his death in May 1821 the island
and the tree became a site of pilgrimage for passing sailors, and cuttings from the tree were
distributed around the world. Such was the demand for small pieces of history that a guard
had to be placed to limit the damage. Trees which grew from these cuttings were often
termed ‘Napoleon Willows’.

          The ‘Napoleon Willow’, a little reduced by pruning, from the service road
The Napoleon willow is a type of long-leaved, ‘weeping’ willow, Salix babylonica, which
came originally from the dry areas of northern China. It was known in Europe by 1736, when
Linnaeus described and named it. Willows are generally easy to transport and propagate, as
they root readily from cuttings, but do have a tendency to hybridise, allowing
horticulturalists to produce numerous varieties. The most successful and hence most
common ‘weeping’ willow in the UK is Salix x sepulcralis, a hybrid, between the native Salix
alba and Salix babylonica.
Salix babylonica has never been a successful, or vigorous, tree in western Europe as it
became prone to disease in a climate more humid than in the parts of China where it is
native. It is also quite a short-lived tree, with a life span of around 75 years.
Napoleon willows were fashionable for a period after Napoleon’s death, probably at the
height of their popularity in the 1830s. It is tempting to imagine the first owners of this
house planting one as they laid out their garden in the 1840s. Trees planted around this
time, however, would be 190 years old now, and aerial photography and maps of the period
suggest there was no tree present in the garden in 1885 or 1946.
If this suggests that the Stanbrook Willow, which is still growing vigorously, is not an original
Napoleon willow, the possibility remains that it might be the offspring by vegetative
propagation of an original tree. A close look at the tree, however, along with measurement

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of the leaves and catkins, suggest that it is more closely allied to Salix x sepulcralis than to
Salix babylonica.

                        The putative Napoleon Willow on Pittville Circus
A tree planted in 1950s would now be 70 years old, more in line with probable age of
this tree. So in spite of the local legend, it appears unlikely that this tree is a
Napoleon Willow: if there is one in Cheltenham, the search continues.

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CHARLES JOHNSON, THE ‘MISTLETOE KING’ (1872-1940)
                            16 EVESHAM ROAD (c1920-40)
We have now come from Pittville Circus across Pittville roundabout and along the
southern end of Pittville Park to Evesham Road.

Evesham Road from the south end of the park showing numbers 2-34 Evesham Road,
formerly Pittville Parade. Johnson’s house is near the red car
This terrace of houses was the first to be built on the new Pittville estate. The estate
was the vision of Joseph Pitt, who by 1810 had acquired sufficient land on the north
side of Cheltenham to envisage a new garden suburb, separate and distinct from
Cheltenham, with villas, terraces, squares and crescents, interspersed with rides,
walkways and plantings.

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The original plans for The Pittville Estate, with the Pump Room at the top
                   and Clarence and Wellington Squares to the left.
There was to be a lake, and, the crowning glory, an impressive new Pump Room. It
was not until 1825 that Pitt began building, with the residential houses of this
terrace, then called Pittville Parade, now 2-34 Evesham Road. The terrace is notable
perhaps for its scale rather than particulars of architectural detail. The building
proceeded in stages, surviving the financial slump of late 1825 and various
bankruptcies, but was completed by 1836.

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16 Evesham Road, on the left, (doorway obscured by the large shrub) was Charles
                       Johnson’s house for nearly 20 years
We need, however, to jump forward 100 years, because from the early 1920s until
his death in 1940, the principal resident of 16 Evesham Road was Charles Phillips
Johnson. According to his obituary in The Cheltenham Chronicle, he was ‘well known
all over the country’ as a wholesale florist, largely due to his role as the principal
supplier of mistletoe to Covent Garden, from where it was exported, mainly to
France.

                      Gloucestershire Echo (7 December 1938)
Charles Johnson was born in 1872 in Peterborough, the eldest of four children. His
father was a Baptist minister and the family moved around the country - in 1881

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they were living in Stoke-on-Trent and one of the last places they lived in was
Falmouth, from where Johnson visited the Isles of Scilly and first became interested
in flowers. In 1891 he was working as a cheesemonger’s assistant, and boarding in
Plymouth. By 1901 he was living in St George’s Place, Cheltenham, and working in
the wholesale flower trade. He was now married with three daughters; two sons,
who later worked with their father in the trade, were born in 1904 and 1907.
In an interview for The Cheltenham Echo in 1938, Charles Johnson spoke of his work
as a supplier of mistletoe for more than 20 years, how his farming and fruit-growing
friends (and foraging local children) would sell the mistletoe to him in time for
export. It was important to start early enough to be able to supply the continental
trade and still leave time to supply the domestic market in December. He would start
collecting at Bishop’s Cleeve, and then work his way round the county, usually
sending, he said, more than two tons to Covent Garden each year.
As Johnson is listed in the 1939 National Register as a ‘wholesale florist’, one
assumes that he was still working at the time of his death at 67 a year later. In 1942
The Echo noted that the county had more than its usual abundance of mistletoe:
wartime conditions had led to restrictions in facilities for transporting the plant to
London.
Mistletoe is still common in Gloucestershire, for although it is found throughout
Britain its core area is still the southern Welsh Marches up to south Shropshire.
The plant continues to be valued: Jonathan Briggs has recently revived another
centre for trade in the plant, and Tenbury Wells is now recognised as the Mistletoe
Capital of England. A December Mistletoe Festival keeps alive the tradition of the
seasonal holly and mistletoe market.
Briggs notes how Johnson seems to have made mistletoe his personal specialism,
possibly leading to his ‘Mistletoe King’ accolade, although this, along with ‘the high
priest of Christmas’, may have been given by journalists who interviewed him.
Whatever the origin, Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire continues to elect a Mistletoe
Queen each December to preside over its festival.
Johnson stayed in the ‘over-roomy’ house in Evesham Road even after his children
had left home and married. He liked to accommodate the family, eventually with
nine grandchildren, at Christmas: the folding doors between the sitting-room and
front drawing-room would be open and a 12-foot (3.6m) Christmas tree reached to
the ceiling. And, of course, there would be mistletoe.
If Johnson’s star has faded in the last few decades, this cannot be said for mistletoe
itself, which is increasingly abundant in the UK, possibly as a result of climate
warming. Recent surveys have shown that mistletoe is associated with man-made
landscapes, street trees and trees in parks, gardens and orchards, and also possibly
with the blackcap, one of the few birds which regularly eats the berries and which
increasingly over-winters in southern England.

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An increasingly common sight - an urban lime tree with a heavy growth of mistletoe

                            RICHARD WARE (c1782-1832)
                            WELLINGTON SQUARE (1832)
The doughty Rector of Upper Slaughter, Francis Witts, held that post from 1808 to
1854. As a magistrate he regularly attended the quarter sessions in Gloucester, often
passing through Cheltenham on the way and was able to record in his diary the
activities and development of the town. He made several excursions to view the
growth of Pittville. On 9 May 1825 he wrote, ‘I took a walk to Pittville, the projected
new town on the north of the High Street and to the right hand of Evesham Road
opposite to Marle Hill. The walks which have been laid out and already planted,
extend from the extremity of the town on the Prestbury Road to the gentle
eminence on which the first stone of the proposed Pump room was lately laid with
great masonic ceremony.’

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Pittville Pump Room, completed in 1830
The plans for the Pittville estate had been drawn up for Pitt by John Forbes, a local
architect, but the responsibility for laying out the walks and rides and for the
plantings belonged to Richard Ware, a local nurseryman. Ware is the final ‘hidden’
botanist of this tour.
Ware was a self-made florist and nurseryman of some substance. He leased the
nursery in what is now Imperial Square from which he built a substantial business. In
1824 he began working for Pitt, and was commissioned to lay out and plant the
walks and rides of the new estate. This he did with little regard to expense but the
work seems to have been finished by 1827. His planning remains substantially intact
today, some 190 years later.

    Lebanon Cedar Cedrus libani, assumed to be one of Ware’s original plantings

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Between 1818 and 1832 eight children were born to Ware and his wife, Ann. To be
able to pass his business on to his children, Ware wanted to establish it on land of his
own. In 1828 he therefore purchased five adjacent building plots on the south-west
corner of Wellington Square. He built himself a house and turned the rest of the site
into plant nursery, at some expense walling it all round.

         The ‘empty’ corner of Wellington Square, the site of Ware’s nursery
He then purchased a plot in Pittville Street (number 12, now the site of Travelbag)
and built a shop with living quarters. Back in Wellington Square he started to build
greenhouses and a conservatory. Realising that he needed to increase the income
from his property, he began to build a larger house on the plot which could be
rented out to a wealthy family. In the middle of all this building activity Richard
became ill and died in 1832. Ann, 13 years younger than her husband, was 32 and
left to provide for the eight children.
Richard’s will stated that his property was to be put in trust to provide an income for
Ann, provided that she did not ‘re-marry or co-habit with any man whatsoever’. It
went on to say that after Ann died the nursery and shop were to be made over to
the children.
It seems that it was not only in the commission for Pitt that Ware failed to keep his
spending under control. Ware’s trustees soon found out that he was already in debt
for more than the value of the land and property. In addition they had to raise a
further mortgage in order to finish the building work in progress. The remainder of
Ann’s 17 years were hard. After a long fight to try to make the assets pay, she was
finally evicted from the property in 1839. She died in 1848. The legal issues
surrounding Ware’s debts ran on until the mid 1850s when the Ware family finally
abandoned and signed away any hope of money from the estate.

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Music at the Pump Room, August 2020
It is sobering to reflect, as we walk around the lawns and lakes and tree-lined roads,
and enjoy the music from the Pump Room, the cafes and the shady places to sit on a
hot day, that three of the main people behind the Pittville Estate all ended up in
ruinous debt. The legacy of Richard Ware, who made the original plans for the
plantings which substantially survive today, we have just seen. John Forbes, who
made the design for the Pump Room and the general layout of the estate, found
himself in financial difficulties around 1830, maybe after some speculative building
in other areas of the town. He was later found guilty of forgery and spent two years
in Gloucester Prison. Although released in 1837, his career as a developer was
finished. He seems to have lived in obscurity in Cheltenham thereafter.
And what of Pitt himself? He died in 1842 at the age of 81. By that time he had
amassed huge debts scattered amongst banks, business associates, relatives and
private individuals. The building slump of the late 1820s meant that only a fraction of
the properties were built and thus revenue from the estate was much lower than
expenses: by 1842, just after his death, the annual income was £4000, and the
annual interest on the debts £6000. Eventually all his properties were sold for the
benefit of his creditors, with the final sale, that of the Pump Room, to Cheltenham
Borough Council in 1890.

                                                                   Desmond Marshall
                                                                          August 2020

                                 Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the following people who have helped in the compilation of this
article: Stephen Blake, John Simpson and the Pittville History Works group for
historical details; Fiona Clarke and Sandy Marshall for reviewing the text; the owners
of Stanbrook House and the Vicar of All Saints’ Church.

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SOURCES

Briggs, J. (2019) Viscum album (Mistletoe) with or without hot-spots. BSBI News,
142.

Blake, S. (1988) Pittville 1824-1860. Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums.

Brooks, R. (2003) The Story of Cheltenham. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing.

Cambell, A.J. (1991) Pittville Nursery Garden and the Ware Mortgage. Cheltenham
Local History Society Journal 8 (1990-1991).

David Lyall, Surgeon Royal Navy (Online). Available from:
http://www.royalengineers.ca/lyall.html

Hart, G. (1965) A History of Cheltenham. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press.

Knight, Henry Herbert (Online). Available from: https://rbg-
web2.rbge.org.uk/bbs/Learning/Bryohistory/bryohistory.htm

Jones, A. (2010) Cheltenham: a new history. Lancaster, UK: Carnegie Publishing.

Lyall, A. (2010) David Lyall (1817–1895): Botanical explorer of Antarctica, New Zealand,
the Arctic and North America. The Linnean, 26(2).

Marshall, A. Charles Johnson (Online). Available at
http://pittvillehistory.org.uk/biographies.php

Pittville History Works (Online). Available at http://pittvillehistory.org.uk/

Riddelsdell, H.J., Hedley, G.W., Price, W.R. (1948). Flora of Gloucestershire. The
Cotteswold Naturalists’ Field Club.

Ronalds, B. (2020). Archibald Sims Montgomrey and his herbarium. BSBI News, 143.

Verey, D., and Brooks, A. (2002). The Buildings of England. Gloucestershire 2: The
Vale and the Forest of Dean. London: Yale University Press.

Photographic acknowledgements
All photographs are by D. Marshall and A. Marshall, except those listed below:
Herbarium cabinet: National Botanic Garden of Wales.
Badgeworth Buttercup Reserve: S. Jeans.

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