|
Swaisland turns up on the record in 1830 as both
owner and occupier of of Idley (as the name was most usually then
rendered). He long continued as such.
By the middle of the century, when the Swaislands were
eventually gone from Idleigh Court, the house seems to have been little
more than a hostel for farm servants. They were mostly unmarried men,
but with the considerable exception of a certain James Peacock, who had
come from Ridley and was now at Idleigh with a young and second wife and
seven children. He had been there a year or two when, in 1852, the
estate was bought by Francis Andrus.17
Peacock was promoted by Mr Andrus to be farm bailiff and
remained such for many years. He and his wife were still at Idleigh in
1871, in company with eight of their children and four farm servants.
The family was not yet complete and, in all, Peacock fathered some
twenty children, only one or two of whom died in infancy. It is to be
feared that in his day there were always too many children for the good
of so elegant an house, albeit that any damage then done cannot have
compared with the |
|
consequences of the calamitous fire that was to
overtake it one winter’s night a hundred or so years later.
During the eighteen-sixties, the ownership of Idleigh had
passed from Francis Andrus to Miss Maria Andrus of Scadbury and then to
Captain Thomas Andrus. The Andrus connection ended in 1890, when the
estate was bought at auction by Martha Stoneham, of Erith.18 In
1901, when Idleigh was being farmed by Mr Fred R. Stoneham, the North
Kent Agricultural Association held their ploughing match there. One
hundred teams participated, rather fewer than usual as several ploughmen
who normally competed had volunteered for service in the Boer War.19
That, however, was not a Victorian occasion. Didele, Idley or
Idleigh had passed into a new reign as well as into a new century.
The farm at West Yoke belonging to the Cox family, which
about 1812 had been occupied by one of their number, came five years
later into the tenure of the Crowhurst family, with whom it remained a
good many years. Early in Victoria’s reign, when the landlords |