their twenties. It seems highly probable that James Fletcher also adopted Thomas’ other two sons, Amos James, who was born in 1806, and the last-born of the family, Joseph Flitcroft, who was some twelve years younger than Amos. It was Amos who ultimately succeeded to Rands House, but all the indications are that Joseph was not forgotten.
   The memorial to James Fletcher on the south nave wall of Ash church bears record that ‘having served his country for several years by sea and laud’, he had ‘retired from the gay world in a bad state of health in the 47th year of his age to this place of his birth where it pleased a gracious providence to bestow upon him a comfortable state of health and all the blessings he could wish for’. The inscription makes mention, too, of the two of his adopted children who had died in the eighteen-thirties and ‘who were the most amiable of their kind’.
    A wife, it seems, was not one of the blessings that James wished for; he never married. His return to Ash can be dated to about 1809 and it could well be that he brought with him a pocket- full of prize-money - and perhaps also the ‘fine picture by Andrian Vandicot’ which is known to have adorned Rands House about twenty years later. That dwelling was then described as James’ ‘seat’ and as ‘an ancient house, but has been 

modernised and considerably improved’.¹⁷   By that time, the thirty-one acres of Giles Farm had been added to the Fletcher title,¹⁸
   In 1851 James Fletcher, now aged eighty-five, was living alone, his wants attended by four servants. There were, however, two other Fletcher households nearby, one being that of Amos James and the other that of Joseph Flitcroft, with a young and growing family. It must have been at about this time that James financed the building of the vestry at the east end of the extended south aisle of Ash church, an ‘excrescence’, it was later tartly remarked, that ‘ought to be  removed’.¹⁹  Less controversial was a benefaction to the church by his successor, Amos James, who when churchwarden in 1856 arranged the recasting at his own expense of No 2 of Ash’s fine ring of bells.
   Amos Fletcher, whom we met in connection with the trouble over the Walter charity, had in his younger days lived at Stone Cottage, near Rands House, and thence for some time had done some farming. However, fortune, or perhaps more precisely great-uncle James, had smiled upon him and he figures in the census return of 1851 as ‘Gent Landed Proprietor & Annuitant’. At that time, Amos and his wife Frances, a Mungeam from Meopham, had just completed their