Holmhurst St Mary

50°53′15″N 0°33′44″E / 50.887613°N 0.562087°E / 50.887613; 0.562087

Holmhurst St Mary is a historic house in Baldslow, East Sussex, England. The house is a Grade II listed building;[1] a statue of Queen Anne in the grounds is Grade II* listed.

Hare family

In 1860 Maria Hare, mother of Augustus Hare, purchased the house, then named "Little Ridge", to which they moved from Herstmonceux.[2] it was small, and could at that point be considered by Augustus Hare not much more than a 'cottage'.[3] They renamed it as Holmhurst St Mary. It came with an estate of 36 acres (15 ha).[2]

Holmhurst St Mary was then over the road (now the B2063) from the Hastings Cemetery. It was described in 1894 as being at Beaulieu, near Ore.[4] An 1875 Ordnance Survey book for the parish of St Mary in the Castle mentions Holmhurst, Beaulieu and Little Ridge Farm.[5] The area was considered an "outlying part" of the parish, this being the reason that a chapel of ease, the Iron Church, was erected on the other side of the road.[6]

Augustus Hare described the house's location as "situated on the high narrow ridge of hill which divides the seaboard near Hastings from the richly-wooded undulations of the Weald".[3] He spent heavily on the house and grounds, as well as his books and art collection there.[7]

In his will Hare, who died in 1903, left the house to the family of Edward Penrhyn MP (died 1861, né Leycester), brother of Maria Hare, with use of Holmhurst St Mary for life to the daughter Emma Leycester Penrhyn.[8][9][10]

Statue of Queen Anne

Main article: Statue of Queen Anne, St Paul's Churchyard

The statue of Queen Anne is a 1712 sculpture by Francis Bird in Carrara marble which stood outside St Paul's Cathedral. When it was badly weathered, it was removed in 1885, and replaced by a replica by Richard Belt in 1886. Bird's original statue was bought by Hare and brought to Holmhurst, with its four supporting pieces, representing England, Ireland, France and America.[11][12][13]

Visitors to Holmhurst St Mary

At the end of Maria Hare's life, from summer 1870, she was visited often at Holmhurst by Elizabeth Grove (1792–1883) of Oakhurst, Hastings. Augustus Hare described her "primitive-looking hat and apron", with a basket on her arm.[14][15] She was the daughter of Jeremiah Hill and the widowed second wife of Thomas Grove (1783–1845), who was owner of a large estate in Radnorshire, and the eldest brother of the diarists Charlotte Grove and Harriet Grove.[16][17]

Lady Knightley came to lunch at Holmhurst in December 1896. Writing in her diary about the Queen Anne statue, she said that Hare "has put it up in the middle of a field where it looks very funny and at the same time very imposing."[18]

The biography of Somerset Maugham by Ted Morgan mentions that Hare, whom he refers to as "the last Victorian," befriended Maugham, who became a frequent guest at Holmhurst.[19] He commented that "The property was small, rather less than forty acres [40 acres (16 ha)], but by planning and planting he had given it something of the air of a park in a great country house."[20]

Later history

The Hastings Road (1906) by Charles George Harper described Holmhurst in the context of an area that was becoming built up:

Here the tramway poles and wires are insistently ugly, and the village or hamlet of Baldslow itself is scarce prepossessing. A roadside public-house, a gaunt windmill, a few ugly cottages, and a tin tabernacle church are its component parts. But immediately beyond that corrugated and galvanised ecclesiastical horror the road grows beautiful, overhung with trees. Here, at the entrance to a country house in the domestic-gothic sort, are two very fine clipped yew-trees. It is Holmhurst, and the trees are those christened by Mr. Hare "Huz and Buz."[21]

After Hare's death, the house was occupied by Admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont from 1904;[22] and then in 1908 Sir John Gordon Kennedy bought it.[23][24] Emma Leycester Penrhyn, to whom the house had been left with a lifetime interest, died in 1909.[25]

In 1913 the estate was purchased by the Community of the Holy Family.[26] They were an Anglican order of teaching nuns, with a focus on art and scholarship. Their mother foundress, Agnes Mason, who had formed the community in London in 1896 and later brought it to Sussex, recognised the house and gardens as a piece of Italy – specifically Florence – in England.[27] St Mary's Convent School was run by the nuns, from the 1930s to 1981.[1][28] Its best-known pupil was Joanna Lumley, an "army brat" who boarded in the 1960s: "I especially loved my second boarding school, an Anglo-Catholic convent in the hills behind Hastings. The nuns wore blue stockings and were brainy and lovely. There were 70 boarders and I was happy as a clam."[29]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Historic England. "Holmhurst St Mary's School (Grade II) (1043422)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 9 December 2025.
  2. ^ a b Barnes, Malcolm (1985). Augustus Hare: Victorian Gentleman. London: Allen & Unwin. p. 96. ISBN 004920100X.
  3. ^ a b Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert (1877). Memorials of a Quiet Life. Vol. II. London: Daldy. p. 397.
  4. ^ Marshall, Edward H. (7 April 1894). "Francis Bird". Notes and Queries. 8th series. No. 119. Oxford University Press. p. 272.
  5. ^ Book of Reference to the Plan of the Parish of St-Mary-in-the-Castle, 1875.
  6. ^ Howard, Mary Matilda (1864). The Hand-Book of Hastings, St. Leonard's and Their Neighbourhood. p. 114.
  7. ^ Baigent, Elizabeth. "Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert (1834–1903)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33710. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  8. ^ "Penrhyn, Edward (1794-1861), of The Cedars, East Sheen, Surr". History of Parliament Online.
  9. ^ "An Author's Estate". Tewkesbury Register. 25 April 1903. p. 2 – via British Newspaper Archive.
  10. ^ Hare, Augustus (1903). Last Will and Testament of Augustus Hare  – via Wikisource.
  11. ^ Gunnis, Rupert (1968). Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851 (Revised ed.). pp. 53–54.
  12. ^ Historic England. "Statue of Queen Anne South East of Holmhurst St Mary's School (Grade II*) (1192060)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 9 December 2025.
  13. ^ Pevsner, Nikolaus; Metcalf, Priscilla (1985). The Cathedrals of England: Southern England. Viking. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-670-80124-4.
  14. ^ Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert (1896). The Story of My Life. Vol. 2. Dodd, Mead. p. 532.
  15. ^ Lane, John; Kay, Valerie Lane (2009). The Diaries of Charlotte Downes. Vol. I (2nd ed.). Claret Jug Publications. p. xv. ISBN 9780955722660.
  16. ^ Grove, Charlotte (6 December 2009). Lane, John (ed.). The Diaries of Charlotte Downes. Vol. 1: 1828, 1829, 1831–1837. Lulu.com. p. xv. ISBN 978-0-9557226-3-9.
  17. ^ Cameron, Kenneth Neill, ed. (1961). Shelley and His Circle 1772-1833. Vol. II. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 497–499.
  18. ^ Gordon, Peter (16 February 2006). Politics and Society: The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley 1885-1913. Routledge. p. 116. ISBN 978-1-134-26904-4.
  19. ^ Morgan, Ted (1980). Maugham. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 74.
  20. ^ Maugham, W. Somerset (1922). The Vagrant Mood. London: William Heinemann Ltd. p. 4.
  21. ^ Harper, Charles George (1906). The Hastings Road and the "happy Springs of Tunbridge,". Chapman & Hall. p. 238.
  22. ^ "House Property in Demand". Hastings & St. Leonards Advertiser. 16 June 1904. p. 5.
  23. ^ "Baldslow, East Sussex". Baldslow, East Sussex. Retrieved 4 July 2020. The webpage quotes several newspaper articles from the early C20, with dates and titles.
  24. ^ "Historic Holmhurst". Hastings & St. Leonards Advertiser. 8 October 1908. p. 11.
  25. ^ "Re Emma Catherine Leycester Penrhyn Deceased". Richmond and Twickenham Times. 18 December 1909. p. 4.
  26. ^ Holloway, Julia Bolton. "Mason, (Frances) Agnes (1849–1941)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/58485. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  27. ^ "Holmhurst St Mary II". www.umilta.net. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  28. ^ Lumley, Joanna (27 February 2015). "Miss Hortin-Smith". Times Educational Supplement. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  29. ^ Lobb, Adrian (4 July 2016). "Joanna Lumley: 'I have always loved getting older, so being 70 is fabulous'". The Big Issue. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Holmhurst St Mary.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.