Victorian Chesham Bois and Liberty
October 25, 2024
Even by 1830, the population in the parish of Chesham Bois had not risen above 160 people and focussed mostly on the Common and the Moor, with small groups of families in the cottages on the farms or at the mills. By 1841, there were only 43 dwellings in the parish, housing 218 people. There were 55 children of ten and under in the parish, none of whom were being educated, although a fair proportion of them were working as straw plaiters, even at such a young age (the youngest found was eight years old). Straw plaiting was a cottage industry that required no special premises or even equipment, and so could be carried out at home by the wives and children (usually daughters) of agricultural labouring men. Plaiters made up the single biggest proportion of the working population in the parish, followed by agricultural labourers and servants. There were also 9 people working at Elliot’s papermill.
A school was founded in 1846, in a purpose-built property on the corner of Bois Lane and what was then Red Lion Lane (now Chestnut Lane), by public subscription. There was no rush for education, as the 1851 census shows only 11 children as scholars, with another 36 aged ten and under not receiving schooling. At the same time, the population in the parish declined to only 185 people, again focussed around the Common and Moor, with a growing population around Amy Mill.
By 1861, Chesham Bois was on a trajectory of growth that would continue well into the twentieth century. The greatest concentration of people were on the Moor, as Chesham began to grow its industries, although Bois Farm was supporting 19 people and there were still 52 living on or around the common (compared with 72 twenty years earlier). Education had become a major focus for the parish, with 19 children educated at the school on the Common and a further 9 in private education at the Rectory under the watchful eye of the vicar.
In 1865, Benjamin Fuller also found Chesham Bois surplus to his requirements and sold the Warren and Chesham Bois House and the land they stood on to the Rt Hon. Charles Compton William Cavendish, heir to the 2nd Baron Chesham.
As the population of Chesham Bois continued to rise, it also moved geographically. People moved away from the Common, and the farms became less populous as Bois Mill was abandoned as a centre of economic activity, although Amy Mill remained in use. The biggest shift in population was towards the Moor, again, as the number of people living there roughly doubled every decade between 1851 and 1881. By 1891, there were 552 people in the parish, half of whom were living on the Moor. Additionally, more than a quarter of the population was living on Bois Lane or in named houses around the Common, as the development of Chesham Bois as a post-agricultural society, and an outpost of London for professional families, grew. The railway arrived in Chesham in 1889 and Amersham in 1892, making Chesham Bois more attractive to families needing proximity to London.
In 1897, the Hon. Charles Cavendish (by then the 3rd Baron Chesham) sold the central manor again, to Francis Joseph Butcher and Alfred Gee. These were two local men – Francis Butcher was a cousin of the cousin of John William Garrett-Pegge, who went on to purchase the lordship of the manor of Chesham Bois from the Duke of Bedford in 1903; Alfred Gee was a rich farmer of 200 acres at Hill Farm in Chesham. Mr Butcher, a banker, moved into The Warren shortly thereafter.[1]
John Garrett-Pegge had grown up at Germains in Chesham, just outside Chesham Bois, and built the splendid Chesham House at the bottom of the New Road down to Amy Mill in 1879. When he purchased the Lordship of the Manor in 1903, he renamed the house Chesham Bois Manor, causing great confusing with Chesham Bois House next to The Warren on Bois Lane.
In 1896 John Hailey Morton (himself a third cousin of John William Garrett-Pegge) had sold Manor Farm in Chesham Bois. Initially intending to sell it to Alfred Gee, he was persuaded instead to sell it to Arthur Lasenby Liberty.
Liberty was born in Chesham on 13 August 1843 to Arthur Liberty and his wife, Rebecca (née Lasenby). His father was a draper on Chesham High Street (next to the George and Dragon hotel) and Arthur was the eldest of their seven children, named for both his father and his mother. Rebecca’s family farmed 400 acres at Chartridge, and Arthur Liberty Snr’s mother (Margaret Edwards) was also from Chesham, so the family connections to the town were strong and on both sides of the tree. In 1852, the family moved to Nottingham to join the lace trade, where the youngest two children were born. Arthur Snr’s brother George was a lace manufacturer there; Arthur Lasenby Liberty is reported to have worked for him from about 1859.
By 1861, Arthur had removed himself again to London, to work with another uncle, the wine merchant John Edwards Liberty. Shortly after that, he took a post managing the Oriental Warehouse for Farmer and Rogers, Regent Street. He married Martha Cottam (known as Ellen) in 1865 when they were both 22. She was an actress with a colourful past, who had already had one marriage (at the age of 18) annulled by her own father-in-law on the grounds that her first husband had used his middle name to marry before he had achieved his majority, to conceal what they had done. The Liberty marriage lasted less than four years, when Liberty sued her for adultery with her fellow-actor, Augustus Glover (the stage name of one Sidney de Fivas who was later summonsed for beating his wife in 1877 and went spectacularly bankrupt thereafter).
Liberty never referred to this period of his life again and instead, in 1875, started his own shop of Regent Street. To do this, he had borrowed £2,000 from a master tailor with a Brook Street business, named Henry Blackmore; Liberty repaid the loan and married Blackmore’s daughter Emma in 1875, and this is the only marriage that is referred to in Liberty’s Who’s Who entry.
Liberty had cemented his place among the well-heeled merchants of London and so sought to return to Buckinghamshire. He ultimately purchased Lee Manor in 1902 and is now forever connected to that village; but the purchase of Manor Farm in Chesham Bois was a more important business transaction for him. He divided the land into 60 lots and sold them for building. The lots were designed to create an “instant village”, offering plots with frontages of 30 feet (aimed at “artisans and persons of limited means”) along Bois Lane from Anne’s Corner to where Hollow Way Lane joins the road, as well as six-acre plots “suitable for the erection of first class residences”[2]. Many of the lots were bought in speculative clutches by individuals who built upon them then sold the houses on. Part of this phase of construction included Long Park, infill houses along the line of the Manor Farm buildings along what is now North Road, and further housing down Bois Lane from Ann’s Corner to the driveway to Chesham Bois House and The Warren.
In 1906, Bois Farm was also sold for building plots to the wider public by Mary Pegge (née Garrett, whose mother was a Morten), her son JW Garrett-Pegge and Frederick Butcher, widower of Mary’s sister Ann[3]. Building began very shortly thereafter, although the farm remained a working enterprise until 1933 when it was converted to The Beacon School. Early school photographs show the initial pupils working to turn farm buildings into useable classrooms.
As the village of Chesham Bois expanded, development also took place down Copperkins Lane and Bois Moor Road and more filling in between the railway line to Chesham and Bois & Hollow Way Lanes. Dr Challoner’s Grammar School moved up to Amersham on the Hill and became co-educational in 1905-6. James Ramsay MacDonald, later three-time Prime Minister of the UK, took a weekend house at Linfield, on Bois Lane, where they enjoyed family life and bracing countryside walks[4]. He and his wife and children became involved with the local Independent Labour Party, the Cestreham Athletic Club and the Chesham Co-operative Women’s Guild. Misses Harrison and Walters founded Heatherton House School in 1912, only a few years after that. The fields between Amersham on the Hill, Amersham Common and Amersham Woodside were rapidly filled-in with building and South Buckinghamshire became a desirable location to live – close to London, and the countryside.
[1] He remained at The Warren in the 1901 census. In the 1911 census, he and his wife were visiting friends in Tavistock, but the house is still noted as his although it was in the charge of parlourmaid, Alice Clifford (25), in their absence.
[2] Marketing brochure for the 1896 sale of the Manor Estate.
[3] Also the uncle of Francis Joseph Butcher
[4] MacDonald, James Ramsay, in Margaret Ethel MacDonald (1912), his biography of his late wife written only a year after she died from blood poisoning at 41.