seems already to have been both owner and occupier, G. Mandy & Son, auctioneers and estate agents of Farningham, were offering for sale by auction at the Portobello Inn, Kingsdown, ‘The Crooked Billet Farm’, comprising the newly erected dwelling-house, four cottages and twenty-three acres of land.¹³ Whether or not the auction found a purchaser, Parsons was still in occupation and farming the land two years later. He died during the following decade and his wife removed to Hartley Cottage, now called Hartley House, where her mother had gone to live when William Bensted died in 1836. Mary Parsons lived there many years.
   In the meantime, the Mandy family had taken over the Billet. George Mandy was the occupier in 1847 and David Mandy was there four years later, with his widowed mother and his sister, Mary Ann; he

was farming twenty-four acres and employing two men
   David Mandy seems to have been the last to farm the Billet as an independent unit. In 1853, it was put on the market, Mr George Mandy being described as the ‘Sale agents’ in the Particulars of Sale. The farm then consisted of the house, five cottages and ¹⁴ twenty-five acres of land in Ash and Kingsdown.
   Whatever happened at that time, David Mandy’s mother was still living in the house in 1861, but David himself and his sister were gone. Six or seven years later, the Billet became the centre of a new enterprise. This followed the arrival there of Henry Glover a native of the Kentish Shoreham, with his