Did Miss Marple Pass By This Way?
Places aren’t always what you expect them to be, often we form an image of what something might be like from fragments: TV, books, movies, comments we overhear, maybe even songs. Despite having lived in East Anglia for more of my life than I’ve lived anywhere else, I am still a northerner in my mind. If you’re a northerner, then Surrey is a long way away. More than that, if you were originally brought up in inner city Salford, the villages of Surrey are a world away.
You can’t help forming an impression, though, thinking you know what it’s like to be here, even if that’s only a very vague sense, one that you’ve never even consciously considered. So, I thought that I knew what a Surrey village would be like and East Horsley is precisely like that village minus only Margaret Rutherford on a bike with her cape flowing furiously behind her as she pedals. It’s a modern, vibrant village but somehow seems to manage to give the impression of being almost stuck in an earlier time.
On the Ordnance Survey map it has some farms, a big house on its estate, ponds and a lake, woods and a forest, a post office and a railway station, a square-towered church and a war memorial. The very essence of an English village. It also just so happens that it’s almost exactly twenty-five miles from central London, just as Agatha Christie’s St. Mary Mead was supposed to be. This was the home counties village I’d vaguely imagined as I grew up, the sort of place I was inexplicably nostalgic for without ever having known. There’s even a Private Investigator based here; it’s not actually Miss Marple but times move on.
I left the front gates of the hotel, opposite Bluebell Lane, and turned right towards the village centre. Immediately I passed a long parade of shops with two half-timbered and lead-windowed storeys above the commercial premises on the ground floor. My suspicion that they are far more recent than they pretend to be is confirmed by the fact that they do not appear on the 1935 Ordnance Survey map but are there by the mid-1950s. Even the buildings here seem to wish that they were in a time they never really knew. There’s an Indian takeaway; a dental surgery; a dry cleaners; the post office, trying it’s hardest to look as though it is Elizabethan; a coffee shop; an optometrist; a solicitors; a hairdressers; a charity shop; and two estate agents. I get the impression that estate agents do very well for themselves around these parts.
A little further on in my walk into the village, there is a house for sale. It’s a nice house but nothing particularly special, I reckon three bedrooms, maybe four. Where I live it would have been around £300,000. I guess that here in Surrey it might be half as much again. I am wrong. It isn’t for sale for £450,000, it is three times that, £1,350,000. I once lived in a village in Scotland which you could have bought in its entirety for that money and still had change enough to go to the pub and buy everyone a large Macallan.
There are a lot of perfectly nice houses on the walk through the village, many of them look as though they’ve grown up between the wars to fill in the gaps amongst the older flint and brick homes. There are also obviously lots of newer ones that have found some more gaps to fill in in the last fifty years. All perfectly nice but none I’d give you a million quid for.
There are lots and lots more shops at the other end of the village, near the railway station. Many of them half-timbered and they face a block of Tudorbethan flats that could date back as far as 1992. There is pretty much every kind of little shop that you could need, including three more estate agents. I imagine that you could live your life quite comfortably without ever leaving East Horsley. However, as it’s only forty-four minutes by train to Vauxhall and a further five minutes to London Waterloo, I imagine that many people leave here every morning and only get back after dark.
I retrace my steps to my hotel, Horsley Towers, a place which sounds impressive and is. I should point out that the hotel offers five types of rooms, the first three types are located within the imposing house built for banker and distiller William Currie in 1820. The other two types of rooms are situated in what is called Horsley Place which is billed as a distinctive contemporary hotel built on the Horsley estate. It looks like 1980’s red-brick university halls of residence. I am staying in room type number five of five. Not a suite or a junior suite, not a deluxe or a superior, for me it is a guest room, they couldn’t even really be bothered thinking up a name for that type of room.
“What is it?”
“It’s a room.”
“Who for?”
“Guests.”
“That’ll do.”
It is perfectly nice, though and they do let us plebs from Horsley Place have a look at the big house and walk around the grounds, both of which are marvellous. The big house really is big, very big, proper big, like they could have held fox hunts here without going outside kind of big. William Currie was not downsizing when he had it built.
To call William Currie a banker and a distiller is a bit like calling me a hydraulic and sanitary engineer simply because I own a toilet. I have nothing whatsoever to do with how the water gets into it or how to deal with what leaves it. William did nothing whatsoever at the bank and never distilled a thing.
He made his money in the best way possible, he inherited it, and left all the work with the bank and the distillery to his brother, Isaac. William married a girl called Percy, he didn’t even go far looking for her, she was a daughter of one of the partners at the bank that he had little to do with. They had a daughter, who they called Percy, and two sons who they also gave boy’s names. I get the impression that he bumbled through his life, probably a little bit pissed, being frightfully nice and pretty ineffectual. I like him. He’d bought the estate in 1784 but it was 36 years before he got round to asking someone to build the house he wanted on it. He asked for something in the Elizabethan style, as seems to be the case with a lot of the village. Two hundred years later I am faced by something more in the Disney castle style.
In 1790 William was returned as Member of Parliament for Gatton. Gatton sent two Members of Parliament to the House of Commons and had two people entitled to vote, one of them being William’s other brother, Mark. In 1796 he became Member of Parliament for Winchelsea and represented its seven voters for the next six years. I say represented, there is no proof that he ever made an actual speech in the House. He ended up buying the majority of the village of East Horsley and seems to have been quite happy to spend money refurbishing all of the houses and the church; he also paid for a school to be built.
The house at Horsley was later sold to William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace who married Ada Byron, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child. Ada Lovelace, as she became known, was a friend of Charles Babbage and was to become the world’s first computer programmer, creating an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers. In 1919 the house was bought by someone else with more than a passing connection to Bernoulli, Sir Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith. Bernoulli’s Principle regarding the decrease in pressure when a fluid speeds up is said, in part, to explain how a wing lifts an aeroplane and aeroplanes were to become what Tommy Sopwith was known for.
Tommy was already fifteen years old when the Wright Brothers flew for the first time but would still be the head of an aviation company when the vertical take-off and landing Harrier was developed. His interest in aviation started with a trip in a hot air balloon in the summer of 1906. Then, on 17th August 1910, when Sopwith was twenty-two, he witnessed American John Moisant’s sixth ever flight. What made it so memorable was that it was the first ever cross-channel flight with passengers, as Moisant took along his mechanic, Albert Fileux, and his cat, Mademoiselle Fifi — how rugged and manly is that?
Sopwith decided that he’d like to try out this new-fangled aeroplane idea so he bought himself a Howard Wright Avis monoplane and, just two months after watching Moisant, taught himself to fly. Well, in actual fact, what he did first was to teach himself to crash, his first flight covering about 300 yards. A month later, and with a new aeroplane, a Howard Wright biplane, he gained his pilot’s certificate.
After winning a £4000 prize for the longest flight from England to continental Europe just before Christmas 1910–169 miles in three hours forty minutes — he set up the Sopwith School of Flying. Eighteen months later he established the Sopwith Aviation Company and would go on to build the famous Pup, Triplane, Scout and Camel which all served during the First World War. Perhaps it was the fact that his company had been responsible for building almost twenty-thousand aeroplanes during the war that let Tommy buy Horsley Towers in 1919. However, the following year, the company and Tommy would be bankrupt; a mix of anti-profiteering taxes and unsuccessful diversification into the building of motorcycles. Not to be deterred, he set up another aircraft company and named it after his chief test pilot: Australian Harry Hawker.
They would go on to build some of the most successful and searingly beautiful aeroplanes of all time. There is an old saying in aviation that if it looks right, it will fly right. Hawker aeroplanes looked right. The names are legendary, at least amongst lovers of aviation and, often, the wider world, too: the Hart; the Nimrod; the Hind; the Fury; and, of course, the aeroplane that won the Battle of Britain, the Hawker Hurricane.
With the now knighted Sir Thomas Sopwith still at the helm, the company, now known as Hawker Siddeley, would go on to design the Kestrel — which went on to become the Harrier and the AV8B vertical take-off and landing jump jets — and the Hawker Siddeley Hawk, the type still flown by the world-famous Red Arrows aerobatic team today. Sir Tommy Sopwith died at the age of 101 after a life that had spanned the greatest developments in aviation from his first hops in hot air balloons to the Harrier jump jet.
One of the earlier types they’d built, in 1925, designed to meet Air Ministry Specification 26/23 for a two-seat, long-range, day bomber, was called the Hawker Horsley, named after Tommy Sopwith’s home.
Horsley Towers did not get its name by accident, it certainly has more than its fair share of towers. Apparently the original building was rather dull and ordinary but that cannot be said to be true for what was left after the Lovelaces had added their Victorian gothic touches to it; there’s more than a bit of the Byronic about it. As I walk around the grounds on an August evening, the last of the fiery summer sun lights the flint and brick of the old building and its square tower; this now looks like a church tower to which someone has later added turrets at two corners. Walking round the lake to the other side of the house, there are two conjoined round towers with great pointing spires on top. If Horsley Towers is short of anything, it ain’t short of towers. If you can imagine the love child of an English manor house and King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein, then you can imagine the outside of Horsley Towers. Inside it is no less grand with a wood-panelled great hall complete with massive stone fireplace and minstrels’ gallery featuring a huge pipe organ. There’s also a long cloisters with striped archways built from different colours of brick leading to a chapel, built with the same arches and colourful tiles on the walls and the floor. I am sure that the rooms are equally spectacular but I wouldn’t really know, I was in the halls of residence.
Thanks for reading Bunking Off with Adrian Bleese. You can read more of my writing right now here Above the Law.
Originally published at https://adrianbleese.substack.com.
