THE ‘MANOR HOUSE’ TOMBSTONES
This article follows up some of the characters involved in the 'Strange Events of 1793', published in the last edition of the Link.
When the church was rebuilt around 1860, the tombstones to its south were removed to make way for the extended building and replaced in the tidy lines we see today. In fact most of them were reset facing the wrong way; the inscriptions should face towards the east but have been placed to be legible from the footpath leading to the porch so that most of them now face west. And today few of them are legible at all due to weathering, so it is very useful that a complete record of the inscriptions was made in the 1960s when far more was visible.
The head stones themselves are typical of the early 1700s when reminders of death such as skulls and crossbones and hourglasses were standard designs. It must be remembered that such churchyard gravestones became fashionable for the rich at this period, but that all previous generations would have been buried in graves that were not marked permanently and which would be re-used after a suitable time had elapsed. With the typed records in hand, or perhaps in low sunlight when the inscriptions are thrown into relief, it is remarkable to see how many times the same few surnames are repeated. Thirty individuals who share twenty graves and five surnames are commemorated here, and some of them may have spent their lives in the Manor House on the other side of the Green.
The first of the tombstones are those of Adrian Aldridge, buried in 1694, and his wife Mary in 1693. Adrian's marriage to Mary Mathew was a profitable alliance as she was heir to much of the Mathew family's property which they had owned for at least the previous 150 years. It included Church Cottage and a big old house near the site of Datchet Cottage at the Horton and Holmlea Road corner, at Datchet Common. The present house replaced the original one in 1795 and is now in very poor shape. There are five Aldridges recorded on three gravestones from 1693 to 1743, but the parish registers recorded eighteen Aldridge family burials from 1669 to 1759. This indicates how few, even among the wealthy, had a lasting grave marker. In the next generation Adrian's daughter Elizabeth married James Barringer, and her name was included on her father's gravestone while her husband and son share another.
The marriage of Adrian's other daughter Martha to John Marsh created a powerful new family line, with eleven Marshes recorded on seven gravestones. Several belonged to the City craftsman guilds which accorded them the title Citizen of London, while the farming interests of the family in Datchet expanded to include the leases of both St George's and Eton College's estates.
After John Marsh's death his widow Martha married Thomas Bristow, of whom little is known except what he wrote in his will in 1759. As well as bequests to John Marsh's sons, he gave his daughter Elizabeth (married to David Ogilvy) the right 'to dwell in the house where I now live', and daughter Mary Perryman was to live 'in the house of her Aunt Aldridge' (one of several possible aunts by that name). We know from a 1793 rental list that David Ogilvy occupied two tenements of the Manor House in Datchet, renting from the Duchess of Buccleuch as Lady of the Manor, but this 1759 will takes the family's interest in the Manor House much further back. Since Thomas Bristow was living there while married to John Marsh's widow, with an Aldridge relative next door, the suspicion is that the Marshes and Aldridges may already have been tenants in previous generations.
No other high status house has yet been identified for this prolific family apart from the one on Datchet Common, as Church Cottage had passed by will out of the family until it was bought back by Daniel Marsh in 1769. It is likely that they also owned Goodwin House, in the High Street, before it was bought and rebuilt by the Goodwins, but so far it has not been possible to prove this. No documents are available to prove the earlier Manor House connection either, but evidence does survive from the 1800s which shows that tenancies remained in the same family for many years and through generations, so the present suggestion is at least plausible.
With John Marsh's son Daniel (buried 1777), the family reached the peak of its agricultural power and influence in Datchet. But he and his wife Ellen Style, daughter of another long-established local farming family, had only one son – John Fleetwood Marsh – who would take the family fortunes in a very different direction. He became a convinced Baptist and in 1794 emigrated to America where Protestant dissenters had a great deal more religious freedom, but before he went he sold off all the family property which he had inherited. He sold the house on the Common, which was rebuilt soon after, and Church Cottage, which his father Daniel Marsh had bought back, as well as plots of land and cottages, and relinquished the leases of the estates which his father and grandfather had farmed. He did extremely well in America and left a huge amount to the American Bible Society, as well a bequest to the Baptists in Datchet, but his will was lost after members of his family over there tore it up during a dispute.
John Fleetwood's decision brought huge changes of land ownership in Datchet (largely to the benefit of the Goodwin family), but at the Manor House tenancies were not disrupted. David and Elizabeth Ogilvy had thirteen children there, of whom only five survived to be named in David's will of 1793. The family's status can be judged from the fact that there are two separate gravestones commemorating three of their young children as well as the one for the parents. Their daughter Sarah married her cousin Thomas Marsh and these two were added to David and Elizabeth's tombstone in the 1840s. In David's will he left his two houses (two separate dwellings within the Manor House) to his daughter Mary Hughes who also received a bequest from her cousin John Fleetwood Marsh. This was probably because she and her husband William Hughes were Baptists and their part of the Manor House was licensed in 1801 to be used for dissenters' services. In the neighbouring tenancy (though it is now impossible to tell which part of the Manor House was which), Francis Willday and James Philby, both shoemakers, were also signatories to this licence.
'The widow Hughes' continued to occupy one of the Manor House tenancies up to her death in 1832, when her daughter Ann, married to the carpenter John Hunt, took over the lease. From 1851 they ran the village Post Office from (probably) the east end of the Manor House as well as John's builder's business. In 1871 Ann Hunt was still the village postmistress as a widow and aged seventy-five, but within a few years the whole building was remodelled by the Montagu family and let to higher status tenants. Her son George continued to run his builder's business from one of the Church Cottage tenancies (before its restoration to one whole house) and it looks as if the Hunt family took their chance to buy part of the Manor House range when the Montagus sold off their manorial property in the 1890s. A photo from about 1912 shows Hunt the builder at Manor Cottage, next to the Manor Hotel, and this house is still owned by the Hunt family. Thus there is an almost unbroken link back to at least the 1750s, through the Marsh, Ogilvy, Hughes and Hunt families. So when, in 1894, John Hunt claimed insider knowledge of village events, he certainly had a very long oral tradition on which to draw.
The internet has played a part in this modern research story, as I was contacted through the website by Violet Ainscow asking about her Ogilvy ancestors. Her great great grandmother was Elizabeth, daughter of Mary Hughes and a grand daughter of David and Elizabeth Ogilvy. It was her query that prompted the present article. This being a small world, it came no surprise to find that Violet lives just along the coast from me, in Worthing, and another descendant who inherited David Ogilvy's bible is here in Brighton.
Janet Kennish 01273 204330 janet@datchet.com