Nobody famous ever lived at Millbury Cottage. No great events of history were shaped here. Its Victorian heritage is long covered over. The fireplaces in the bedrooms boarded up. The oil lamps extinguished, replaced by electric lights. The well is filled in, the south-facing scullery now a spare bedroom, the kitchen a modern extension to the rear. The wide hearth in the living room now houses a wood stove. Only the date stone and the one-foot-thick flint walls are as they were 160 years ago. It is a simple workers’ cottage, although its size implies its occupants were well placed in the rural hierarchy.
Millbury Cottage is in Chelsham. We are high up here, almost the highest point in Surrey. We look across sheep-filled fields to the chalk hills of the North Downs in Kent to the southeast. If you turn to face northeast, you can pick out the great metal and steel forms of central London. A hundred and sixty years ago, you might have seen the Victoria Tower, the tallest in the Palace of Westminster, built in 1860.
Surrey is in the southeast of England, one of the ‘home counties’ that surround London. A quarter of it is designated a nationally important Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. We are at the very eastern tip, close to the border with Kent. Surrey is divided by the North Downs, a huge ridge of chalk hills running from the west of Surrey all the way to the sea at the White Cliffs of Dover. This provides a rough division, with the more densely populated areas of the county to the northwest and the quieter, rural areas to the southeast where Chelsham lies. It is sparsely settled with isolated farms. This much has changed little since the house was built.
The women who walked these floors before me
Living here, I am consumed by thoughts of the women who have walked these floors before me. I wonder about how they spent their days, what songs they sang, what meals they cooked. We don’t know exactly who built Millbury Cottage. Tracing the history of the cottage has been complicated by a lack of documentary records and the fact that its name is spelled differently everywhere it is written. When the house was built, Colonel Wigsell owned the estate. You can spot a bit of the Atwood family crest on the cottage’s date stone – an armoured arm holding a medieval battle-axe, possibly a nod to his ancestors.
Gamekeeping and hunting
The 1871 census shows Robert Willsdon, gamekeeper, living at ‘Mill Berry’. In 1891, records show John Barton, gamekeeper, and his wife, Roseana, living at ‘Millbury Pond’. Given that two of its earliest inhabitants were gamekeepers, it is not too far a leap to surmise that Colonel Wigsell may have built Millbury Cottage for this purpose. We know from its size that it would have been built for someone relatively senior. In Victorian Britain, a gamekeeper was seen as quite an important figure. They sat somewhere in the middle of the social ladder, respected for their skills and knowledge but still considered part of the servant class. Employed by wealthy landowners, gamekeepers oversaw managing game and wildlife, making sure hunting grounds were well stocked and keeping poachers at bay.
Game hunting has been popular in Surrey for centuries, dating back to medieval times. However, the popularity of game hunting in Surrey increased notably during the 18th and 19th centuries, coinciding with the rise of the landed aristocracy and the establishment of formal hunting clubs and estates. Game hunting became not only something to do for fun, but a social activity associated with status and prestige. It was also an important source of income for local farmers. Wealthy customers from London paid handsomely for the privilege of shooting rights in Chelsham. The ‘bag’ would have included ‘pheasant, partridges, hares, rabbits and larks’, as Solomon Windross, a nearby Victorian farmer, wrote in his diary.
These days you can still shoot clay pigeons in Chelsham. And the presence of Percy the pheasant and his two lady friends, Prosecco and Petronella, familiar on our glamping site, suggests that local farmers still breed pheasants to hunt.
Changing times
By 1891, the Bartons were still living at Millbury Cottage, but Solomon’s daughter, Emma, and her family had moved in. Emma had married a local farmer’s son, Joseph. It is noted in the census that year as ‘Milbery Cottage’ or ‘Emma’s’. They had four children, Margaret, Sidney, Joseph and Annie. It must have been a little crowded with five adults and four children in a three-bedroomed house. By 1901, they had moved on, Joe taking a job as farm bailiff in Kent. A widower lived here, Thomas Pickering, a domestic coachman. He had a boarder, Joseph Hambrook, a farm manager. By 1911, they had gone, and farm foreman Thomas Martin and his wife Elizabeth had moved in. Of their five children, only two survived, hinting at the hardships of Victorian life.
There are a few more inhabitants, but one family stands out for me. A war memorial at nearby St Leonard’s Church reveals that Robert Matthews, son of Mrs Rosina Matthews of ‘Millbury Cottage’, was killed in action in 1916. Robert, a carter by profession, enlisted on 11 October 1915, aged 21. He joined the Queens Royal West Surrey Regiment; 6th Battalion and by the following summer had died on the fields of France and Flanders.
The house they all lived in
But what of the house they all lived in? Millbury Cottage is built of brick and flint. Flint is tough, long-lasting and versatile. Its uneven shape makes it a great choice for building walls when used with lime mortar for the pointing. Victorian houses used porous building materials that allowed condensation to evaporate through the walls. When we moved in, an enterprising previous owner had rendered the gable end in cement, which does not breathe. The wall was wet to the touch inside. The cement had to be chipped off by hand and replaced with a lime-based mortar more sympathetic to the building’s origins.
On stripping the wallpaper in the master bedroom, we found that one wall consisted of horizontal planks of timber with hessian stretched over the wood. This technique was used for interior walls and partitions, often in more modest homes. Ours had been covered with many layers of wallpaper of varying colour schemes.
Original tiles?
The roof is steep pitched and slate, possibly thatch originally. The cottage is simple in its design. But there were decorative elements, like the fireplace floor, surrounded by Minton China Works tiles, a couple of which survive. They are square, slightly larger than a Post-it note and about as wide as my little finger. They are mustard yellow in colour, featuring a raised design in cream. The central motif is a diamond square with a 12-pointed star surrounded by daisies in each corner.
The tiles are made of white clay and have a reassuring heft, despite their small size. If you look closely, you can see tiny cracks, like the veins of a leaf held against the sun. One has fared better than the other, but even on the most resilient tile the raised pattern is worn, the writing on the back that tells us their origin indistinct. There is no way of knowing for sure, but I’m certain they would have been original to the house when it was built, given the prominence of Minton tiles in Victorian homes.
Before modern conveniences
Electricity first came to Chelsham in 1924. Prior to this, the house would have been heated by wood or coal fire. Emma’s father notes on 3 January 1893, “Men carting wood from Green Hill Shaw brought [a] load to Emma”. This kindness was prompted by terrible weather the day before: “Snowy and intensely cold with heavy snowstorm.”
It is unlikely the house would have been built with indoor plumbing. We know there was a Chelsham and Woldingham Water Company by 1884, but its origins are difficult to trace. The house was probably fed by the well in the front garden, a pipe from which into the scullery meant water could be pumped directly in. The scullery in a Victorian home was primarily used for household chores that used water. Cooking would have taken place in the main living room, over the central fireplace. In some cottages, especially as the 19th century progressed, a coal-fired range or stove might be present. Over time, a small extension to the rear of our cottage was added, providing a kitchen with modern conveniences.
Embodied heritage
Millbury Cottage is a microcosm of English country life in the 19th and 20th centuries. It embodies the everyday experiences of working families and the evolution of domestic architecture and rural society. Understanding the history of homes like ours enriches our appreciation of local heritage by revealing the lived experiences of ordinary people. These homes tell stories of social and economic change, community life, and the enduring connection between architecture and daily life, deepening our connection to the past. Look around your own house with new eyes. What will you find?
