News has been coming in from Palmers Green Community this week of a manuscript found during works to Southgate Town Hall. Apparently it was discovered by workmen when an internal wall was demolished.
The manuscript is believed to date from before the town hall was built. The find has been reported to Enfield Council, but there is no news so far about what the document contains.
Guest writer Jason Hollis tells how a childhood visit to Palmers Green inspired a life long interest in ghostly goings on – and a book about the spooky side of Enfield
In 1981 I went on a school trip to Broomfield House. This was a few years before the first of the fires that sadly reduced the once fine building to the shell it is today and had I known its fate that day I might have paid more attention, for I don’t remember much about the visit.
One recollection I do have however was that our guide led my class down into the cellars, which were accessed via an exterior door at the front of the house. Once we had all filed down the narrow steps and into the corridor at the bottom, our guide proceeded to tell us a story.
Many years ago, we were told, sheep grazed in the fields around the house and on one occasion a stray lamb found its way into the cellars and was accidentally locked in. Its lifeless body was discovered some days later and it is said that sometimes you can still hear its sad bleating, calling for its mother.
That was the end of the tour and we all turned around to file back along the corridor towards the bright sunlight awaiting us at the top of the stairs. As we did so the desperate call of a lost, lonely sheep began to call out from somewhere behind us, causing a stampede of suddenly worried children running up the stairs. I was close enough to our guide to realise that he had one of those toys that make an animal noise when turned upside down. It was a marvellous moment although I was somewhat disappointed that the ghost story was not genuine, for that’s what made me tick… and it still does.
I live in Hertfordshire but was born and lived in Enfield for over thirty years. The Borough is full of locations said to be haunted but few have ever been featured in books and it always annoyed me that I couldn’t read about those places in any of the books I had collected about ghosts. I eventually decided that the only way I would get to read about Enfield’s ghosts would be to write the book myself and I started my research in 2000, never thinking that it would take thirteen years to complete it. That’s not to say I spent thirteen years writing my book. I gave up a number of times and life had a habit of taking precedence. In that time I courted and married my lovely wife, faced the uncertainty of redundancy and re-employment and became a father to two beautiful children.
Haunted Enfield was published in October 2013 and I have been very pleased by its positive reception over the past year. I believe it will appeal to people with an interest in Enfield’s history, even if they have no interest in ghosts, as I have included a lot of little known historical information throughout. Featured locations include Trent Park, Forty Hall, Myddelton House, Capel Manor and Salisbury House. There are a collection of pubs, a couple of grisly murders, an examination of ghost stories from around Edmonton and tales of witchcraft and devil worship in Winchmore Hill. Sadly, I could not find any real ghost stories connected to Broomfield House, except for a vague report of strange lights in the park and stories from the rest of Palmers Green were also thin on the ground. The only story I did include was of the Intimate Theatre, where a dressing room is said to be haunted by an actor who suffered a fatal heart attack in the 1930’s.
Stories that didn’t make it into the book include the man who was tapped on the shoulder in the theatre behind The Fox pub when there was nobody sitting close enough to do so in the row behind him. Another story tells of the apparitions of a woman and boy seen in a house somewhere in Palmers Green. According to an Enfield Gazette article from 1998, the tenants of the house went to the council’s Local History Officer who confirmed to them that a widow and her teenage son had been killed in an air raid during the Second World War. If I ever have enough material for a second volume I may well include these stories and would therefore welcome any further information about them or any other hauntings.
Haunted Enfield is published by The History Press and may be ordered from them direct or via all the usual book stores and on-line sites.
If you are thinking of a winter’s Sunday walk, you could do worse than spend a few moments on the tube to Cockfosters, and take a wander around the beautiful undulating and Repton designed grounds of Trent Park, once part of the Royal Hunting Forests of Enfield Chase. Head past the café on the path that goes north of the lake and you will eventually come to the mysterious green waters of Camlet Moat, a scheduled ancient monument.
It may be centuries old but the C shaped enclosure, full of ancient trees, has a kind of unknowable life of its own, with letters carved into trees, charms and tokens wedged and tied into the branches, and tinsel and streamers laid over the limbs of the ancient trees. Druids say that it’s a spiritual place, where one can experience the earth’s energy. It’s certainly eerie as the low winter sun slowly sinks and the shadows grow longer, a place where anything might happen.
But our story begins, not in Enfield, but in Egypt in 1923 when manicured socialite Sir Philip Sassoon was invited by Lord Carnarvon and Harold Carter to witness the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Returning home, unaffected by the famous curse of King Tut but excited by the prospect of hidden treasure, Sassoon’s thoughts turned to the ancient monument on his own property, Trent Park, where he regularly entertained the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Rex Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw in tasteful opulence. Before many months had passed, Sassoon’s team had started to dig.
Camlet had for some centuries been reputed to have been the home of Sir Geoffrey Mandeville, the first Earl of Essex and Constable of the Tower of London, though some say it was first the home of King Arthur. In ancient times it was right at the centre of the Royal Forest: the moat made it capable of defence, and so Camlet was ideally placed to manage and police the forest. The earliest records show that permission was granted to crenelate an existing house on the site in 1347, but that the house was demolished 100 years later so that the materials could be sold to pay for renovations to Hertford Castle.
And so, Sassoon drained the moat while the locals watched and waited.
Within a little while, the remains of a huge drawbridge were found, and a long wall, in some places 5 feet thick, plus Roman sandals, ancient daggers and horseshoes. Remarkable though these finds were, press reports soon began to focus not so much on the finds, but of the risk of disturbing the ghost of Sir Geoffrey Mandeville, who, as legend had variously described it, had buried treasure under the paved bottom of a well on the site to keep it from his many enemies or alternatively had fallen in with his treasure and drowned, his spirit lingering to ensure its eternal protection. The remains of an ancient well were indeed found, in the north east corner of the area enclosed by the moat.
Well might the naysayers have worried.
There were no sightings during this excavations, but this may have been because Geoffrey had apparently forgotten about his treasure – perhaps his hard currency was no good in the spirit world – and flounced off. According to a local writer calling himself the Philanderer, he had moved to East Barnet, first to a stable, which was unfortunately then pulled down by the council, and then to the house of Nora O Callahan and her sister, where he set to terrorising them by knocking on the door, thumping around, rattling their letterbox and generally terrifying their normally fearless dog. Next, he was seen by persons unrecorded, in full regalia of red cloak and spurs.
The national press descended, and by all accounts, Barnet became a place of ghost hunting bedlam and police had to be brought in to regulate the traffic. One William Stutters complained of the racket that Sir Geoffrey was making and warned that local building work was waking the dead. Paranormal activity was now also bedeviling the building which is today the Prince of Wales pub. Curiously though, by 1930 the Philanderer was saying that Sir Geoffrey was back stalking around Cockfosters at Christmas time though in December 1932 he was seen in full armour in East Barnet by the members of the local psychic research society, which was lucky, because they just happened to be staking the place out at midnight. By this time, it was being said that Sir Geoffrey made an appearance on Christmas Eve every six years.
Sightings of Sir Geoffrey have continued intermittently, though they haven’t occurred at 6 year intervals as specified or even in the same place – he has been spotted in Hadley Woods and at East Barnet church. If the legend is correct, he is next due to appear at Christmas in 2016. Who knows where he will have moved to by then?
If your interest is piqued by the story of Sir Geoffrey, do read Jennie Lee Cobban’s brilliant, hilarious and entertaining Geoffrey de Mandeville and London’s Camelot. Currently out of print but available in libraries.*
This article originally appeared in the December 14 issue of Palmers Green and Southgate Life
*Addendum – new edition available at Barnet museum.
At the beginning of October we once again celebrated National Poetry Day. Now, as we know, the Palmers Green and Southgate area is a veritable wonderland of literature, with our notables including Stevie Smith, V S Pritchett, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Hood and Paul Scott to mention but a few.
But there are very few poems about the area. At least that is what Theodore Royle may have thought, when he stepped into the breach in the early 1900s with his remarkable Rambles in Rhymeland.
Little is known of Royle, except that he was born in High Holborn in 1840 and by 1901 was living with his wife Fanny at the Rowans in the southern part of the borough, roughly New Southgate – his parish was the then largely rural St Michael at Bowes. His trade was as a printer and engraver and therein might lay a clue to how he came to have the wherewithal to publish Rambles, seemingly his only book, printed for private circulation.
Royle made no great claims for its literary merit. The frontispiece bears the quote from Byron, Royle’s jovial bewhiskered face beaming out next to it:
Tis pleasant to see one’s name in print
a book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t
I think that we might have liked Royle, had we met him in The Fox or Cock Tavern or out for a walk in rural Palmers Green. Though I think that Royle might have liked Royle a bit too.
He was certainly nothing if not a sentimental fellow, for several poems tell tales of nature, love and tragic death, often in the traditional I-met-my-true-love-but-then-she-carked-it genre. One can only wonder what Fanny Royle thought of Regrets in which the poet meets his love in the summer, but she is cruelly snatched away, though her memory brings comfort in his dreams. I rather hope that Fanny and not, say, the kitchen maid, inspired the poem The Glorious Summertime, in which he meets his love, apparently covered in foliage –
The birds were singing merrily
In heavens blue vault above,
When in the glorious summer time,
I met my own sweet love;
A wreath of fairest jessamine
She’d twined around her hair,
And on her cheeks the winds rough kiss
Had left some blushes there.
Reader, he marries her.
The inspiration to finally publish may have been due to aspirations political as well as poetic – a good deal of the verse is about the comings and goings in the local administration. On the evidence of Rambles, one wonders why other poets do not decide to plough this obviously rich furrow, for Royle manages 17 pages of verse on the subject of Sir Ralph Littler and the separation of Southgate from Edmonton.
For those who do not know the story, by the 1870s the well to do of Palmers Green and Southgate had become very dissatisfied with the local board’s neglect of the western part of the borough. The final straw had been when Sir Ralph Littler, then resident of Broomfield House, had woken to find the fish in the lake in front of the house dead, the casualties of sewerage from a cracked and ill fitting pipe. He sued the authorities, and efforts were stepped up to separate the borough into two. Of course, the other motivation may have been that rich and well to do Palmers Greeners in their rural idyll didn’t much fancy paying rates for the needs of working class Edmonton, something not entirely disguised in Royle’s doggerel.
Events culminated with a public meeting to vote on the issue of separation in early 1881, coinciding with a great snowstorm, which prevented most of the Edmonton anti separatists from attending. History was, as they say, made, and Southgate Local Board was established. In 1894 Southgate become an Urban District.
In 1882 Royle, delighted with the outcome, apparently got up at a meeting in the village hall in Southgate and sang a ditty, in honour of the good deeds of Sir Ralph Littler and Southgate’s other valiant heroes, sung in swashbuckling terms and packed liberally with in-jokes. The full text is reprinted in the book, and alas, the space I have here cannot do full justice to it, so you are going to have to check it out for yourself.
Enough of that. My favourite poem leaves the travails of Southgate independence behind, and turns to the subject of Royle’s bicycle
My bike! My bike! I gaze on thee now
With quickening breath and a joyous brow…
And who can honestly say they haven’t felt like that?
You can read Theodore Royle’s Rambles in Rhymeland in full at https://archive.org/details/ramblesinrhymela00royl
Picture of T Royle by kind permission of Enfield Local Studies and Archive Team.
(c) Sue Beard 2014. This article first appeared in Palmers Green and Southgate Life.
One of the most frequent enquiries to the Palmers Green Jewel in the North website relates to Truro House, the building which stands on the corner of Oakthorpe Lane and Green Lanes. It seems like Truro House has always invited curiosity and like all good stories, it is shrouded in mystery.
No one seems to know exactly when Truro House was first built, but we do know that in 1673 the triangle of land between Green Lanes, the New River and what is now Oakthorpe Lane was occupied by a public house. Owned by Enfield brewers Beckett and Ostliffe, the pub was at various times known as the Three Nightingales, the Rose, and finally the Kings Arms. The last publican to be granted a licence at the Kings Arms was George Airs in 1817 and in 1828 the property was put up for auction.
Around this time it seems likely that the land came into the possession of Sir Thomas Wilde (1782-1858), the first Baron Truro, who lived at Bowes Manor to the south and was Lord Chancellor 1850 to 1852. (There is a blue plaque to Wilde at 2 Kelvin Avenue marking the location of Bowes Manor). If so, Alderman Thomas Sidney (1805-1899) – Whig politician, tea merchant and Mayor of London from 1853-4 – was the next owner. Sidney was responsible for laying out Palmerston Lane in the 1870s, which at the time was on the western edge of the Bowes Manor estate.
However, even though the building seems to have been named after Baron Truro, there is little or no evidence of either Wilde or Sidney actually living there. The reason? Apart from having perfectly acceptable accommodation at the Manor, Truro Cottage, as it was then, was probably simply too humble an abode for your Big-Whig-about-town.
Records of a Truro Cottage begin appearing in directories and post office books in 1861, when Elizabeth Ward is known to have lived there, followed by Charles Foster in 1867 and William Morris, a stockbroker, who occupied the building for much of the 1870s and early 1880s. The first mention of a Truro House comes with the occupancy of Thomas Reynold Roberts, a draper from Islington who had a shop at 222 Upper Street and is known to have lived at the Palmers Green site from at least 1886. It seems possible that he remodelled the building on a grander scale, resulting in its rebranding from cottage to house.
Sometime in the 1890s the house came into the possession of Frederick Penberthy Colliver who lived there with his wife, three sons, and four servants – a nurse, housemaid, cook and coachman. According to Colliver’s grandson who wrote to us recently, two of the sons may have been born in the house and all three of the Colliver boys went on to be mentioned in dispatches in World War One. They moved to Chaudon house in Hemel Hempstead late in the 1890s and the property was for a short time occupied by George H Frank.
1898 saw the beginning of the most definitive and certainly the most stable period in Truro House’s history, a notable one hundred year occupancy by a single family, the Davises. George Davis was a civil engineer. His wife Marie Henrietta Charlotte Davies was French and Davis’s own middle name was Emile; perhaps this gives us a clue as to why the apparently already ‘French’ appearance of the house appealed to the family and the style of the renovations they undertook in the years that followed. George was a founder of Davis and Timmins screw manufacturers, who continued to trade until the 1960s, with works in Brook and Clarendon Road in Wood Green and premises in Kings Cross and Walthamstow.
Davis died of a stroke in 1922 and when his wife also passed away in 1936, the property passed to their daughter Charlotte Davis. She lived at Truro House in the company of her French housekeeper, Mlle Florence Zanotti until she died in 1995 at the grand old age of 98. In 1973 Charlotte sold the eastern part of the land for the building of Honeysuckle House – up until that point the freehold still spanned the full triangle formed by Green Lanes, Oakthorpe Lane and the New River. In 1975 Truro House was given a Grade 2 listing by English Heritage.
I have heard people say that Miss Davis liked to keep herself to herself. Perhaps there will be people reading this article who remember her? Graham Dalling used to tell the story of how, when the Enfield Local Studies Team were based in Palmers Green Library, he and David Pam went knocking on the door, only to be sent away with a flea in their ear.
In April 1999 the freehold of the house and land was sold to Rainbow Properties. It could have been the end of Truro House, but instead this is where things get particularly interesting.
When in 2000 Rainbow applied to build a number of 3 story villas to replace the stable block, English Heritage investigated the history of the house and gardens. What they found and recorded in their report is remarkable: A sitting hall. A panelled drawing room with hidden drawers and cupboards. Stained glass with chivalric motifs and mottos. A rare early use of concrete mouldings.
The alterations of the 1900s, said English Heritage, “can be compared favourably with other interiors of the Arts and Crafts movement.” There was also a ‘near-unaltered scheme of interior decoration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’ including a Toile de Jouy wall in the north west bedroom (toile is a decorating pattern in which a complex scene, usually with a pastoral theme, is printed on a white or off white linen background)
The original gardens had changed little since the ordnance survey map of 1867. “Traces of curved terrace to the south of the building can still be clearly seen, as can most of the formal paths shown [in 1867].
The most exciting discovery was that “elements of timber framing and brick noggin, more commonly associated with eighteenth century form of construction, have been exposed in the upper floor landing and in the cellar” which may have been part of the old Kings Arms structure from its last rebuilding in 1775. So parts of Truro House are nearly 250 years old. The overall conclusion: Truro House is a building from the 1830s, built in an uncluttered ‘old French’ style, enlarged and remodelled in the 1890s, and modernised in the early part of the twentieth century, since when it has been largely untouched. The interior, say English Heritage, is “a rare and important survival, worthy of further study.”
And so we come to Truro House in 2014. Overgrown, looking a bit sorry for itself. But this week we hear that conditional planning permission has been granted for the restoration of the house as a single dwelling, the development of the old coach house, also as a single dwelling, and the erection of 25 flats in two blocks.
Currently the site is a rare haven of greenery in PG, leading down to the New River, Palmers Green’s other forgotten wonder. I hope that some of the character of that rare amenity can also be preserved in whatever comes next.
Do also read yesterday’s post, featuring Lindsay Barnfield’s account of visiting the house and meeting Miss David
A version of this article appeared in Palmers Green and Southgate Life in January 2014
News comes this week via the ever hardworking Palmers Green Community website that planning permission has finally been granted for Truro House and grounds. This comes after a long hiatus in which no one seemed to know what was happening, and Palmers Green residents watched in dismay as the building became more and more neglected and surrounded in mystery.
Apparently Truro House is to be saved and restored as a single dwelling and the old coach house will also become a single dwelling. Two blocks of flats will be built, one of two stories and the other of 3 and 4 at various points. There will be lower ground floor and roof level accommodation in the new buildings.
I have not been able to establish whether the formal grounds on the Green Lanes side of the building will be retained – there is a frightening number of documents on Enfield Council’s website – but one of the drawings from 2009 indicates that the intention may be that they could be retained.
Coincidentally, my favourite message in my inbox this week was from the creator of the Finchley website Greenacre Times‘ creator Lindsay Barnfield, who told us about the time she visited Truro House and met the legendary Miss Davie, whose family occupied the building for one hundred years. Incidentally, I wrote a complete article on the history of Truro back in January, but forgot to post it, so stand by for that shortly.
Lindsay says
Like many others, I found Truro House fascinating when I passed y on the bus. I have always liked doors in walls. So you can imagine how pleased I was to being going through that door when I had reason to visit Miss Davies.
This was in 1990 when she was 92. I was greeted by her housekeeper and led in through a kitchen that dated from the early part of the (last) century complete with range, then through another kitchen with more modern appliances then in to the main hall. This was a room in itself, with a grand fireplace. At the top of the stairs there hung a beautiful full length portrait of a gowned Miss Davies, dating I should imagine, around 1920.
She held court in a vast room, that acted as a sitting room and bedroom on the first floor overlooking the garden. There was a fascinating little staircase that led up out of the room – how I wanted to explore! Opposite Miss Davies’ room was another grand panelled room, barely used, looking as if little had changed during Miss Davies’ lifetime (apart from electricity!). How I would have loved a guided tour! She told me she has lived in the house her entire life.
I always felt that this should have been left as a museum – as Miss Davies had no children to inherit her amazing home.
For more information on the plans for the house which have now received conditional approval from Enfield Council, click here.