Where I'm living

Fromefield House, Frome

Since November I've been living in this rather grand house: Fromefield House. The house is now broken up into some fifteen flats. Down in the common entrance hall I noticed a couple of historical pictures, one showing the house entirely surrounded by countryside (very different from today, when it's embedded fairly centrally in modern Frome, opposite the big Co-op on the main road to Bath). The other picture is a portrait of a former occupant, Mary Sneade Brown (1780 - 1858). 

Mary wasn't really an occupant.  Her later years were mostly spent in Hertfordshire with her eldest daughter Ellen, but she also spent time here with another of her daughters, Emma (b. 1814), who unlike Ellen gave her lots of grandchildren. Emma was married to George Sheppard and they in turn had moved to Fromefield House to look after his aged father, as described below. The Sheppards were a local family of clothiers. Emma was a good guitarist and singer, so I hope to inherit some of her spirit while I'm here. 

I know all this because the portrait is also the frontispiece of Carola Oman's Ayot Rectory (1965), a biography of Mary Sneade Brown and her family based on Ellen's incomplete memoir, part written and part archive. The memoir was brought to Carola Oman's attention, herself a long-time resident of Ayot St Lawrence (Herts). Ellen had moved there in 1831 when she married the vicar John Olive.

[There's apparently no connection between this John Olive and the Olive family of Frome, whose tomb stands in splendid isolation on the north side of St John's church.]

It's a quietly seductive book: we join this sprawling Romantic-era family (Sneades, Browns, Olives), an ordinary comfortable family, devout and dedicated but without the distractions of fame or genius, and we soon become entangled in the fragile web of their lives. It's freely borrowable on the Internet Archive. [I already knew the name Carola Oman: in 1973 she published a biography of Walter Scott, Wizard of the North.]

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Mary Brown, née Sneade, had been brought up in Shrophire; she was "the Belle of Ludlow".

She met Joseph Thomas Brown in December 1805 -- he was seeking a new wife and had been tipped off about Mary's qualities by his father. 

Mary reported the ball thus: "I was not well, father, and did not dance. And I was followed about the room by a great big Nabob, Mr Brown's eldest son, just come from India. My head ached and his voice was loud. I was glad to come home" (p. 34). Brown Senior was a merchant, at 157 Cheapside. Joseph and the other Brown sons made their fortunes in the East India Company: this was colonialism. But Joseph himself drew distinctions, e.g. commenting on the new gentlemen's houses in the Lake District that these were "Liverpool merchants who made their fortunes in the Africa trade and are retired from dealing in human blood" (p. 48). The couple lived happily at Winifred House in Bath. They had five children (one born posthumously), but the amiable Nabob collapsed and died, aged fifty, in 1817. 

Here's a longer extract, to give a flavour of the book's style and content. (The Hannah of this extract, who had become very attached to Mary, was one of Joseph's children by his first marriage. She had gone to India where she almost immediately met and married Monier Williams.) 

The home-coming of Hannah was the leading event of 1822. Uncle Charles at Whitestone Rectory took the first shock. Colonel Williams had bestowed his residence (Umjat Bagh at Broach in the province of Gujerat) on his parsee butler, Cowajee Nasawanjee, and taken passages for himself and household in the Ogle Castle (500 tons burthen). The ship was old, the captain sick, the mate a drunkard. At Penzance, after a painful passage, they left her to proceed up Channel, and made for Exeter. After causing a sensation in Devonshire, they came to Bath. Ellen never forgot the arrival of the Monier Williams at Winifred House. It was highly picturesque. A train of Indian servants in turbans and tunics carried in four little dark-eyed boys -- George, Charles, Monier, Alfred -- and one little girl, Mary. Hannah had grown quite tall and was a fine woman of thirty, collected and serious, with much sympathy and natural grace. She wore a blue satin bonnet with white feathers. But her composure left her when she saw the assembled family in the familiar room unaccompanied by the noble figure of her father. Laughing with joy to be home, and crying for him in the same moment, she had to be laid on the sofa, hysterical. Her husband stood by her sadly. Colonel Williams, who had left India perfectly well, had been ill on the voyage, and felt himself a wreck. He foresaw a greater sorrow than the loss of her father might be appointed to his wife. In truth, he had left joy and health behind him, at the age of four and forty. 

After the birth of their last child, little Hannah, the restlessness of his malady, which was atrophy, led the family to Naples for which they embarked from Marseilles in November 1823. Again they had a fearful passage. The crew of the Neapolitan brig became paralysed with fright. Colonel Williams' coolness and knowledge of navigation helped the Captain to make the port of Toulon. A further fortnight elapsed before they entered Naples Bay, and Colonel Williams, who had risen from a mattress to assist the Captain, was prostrated by the fatigues of the journey. He died the day after they landed. The bereaved family were obliged to stay in Naples for the next six months. 

Hannah found herself in a strange country with five young children and a sixth at her breast. Her melancholy journey home became quite a family legend. With the aid of the British Consul, she engaged a large roomy calèche, and a contract was made on her behalf with a Swiss courier, a vetturino, to convey her and her little troupe the whole way from Naples to London, for a stated sum. The contract provided that the man should find horses and provide and pay for all hotel and other expenses throughout the journey, and that the accommodation should be of the best. The Pontine marshes between Naples and Rome were a nest of brigands, so a mounted escort was hired for that part of the route. The Simplon was blocked with snow, necessitating sledges. The vetturino not only performed his contract faithfully but saw the widow and fatherless deposited at their own front door. Hannah said that the name of Louis Mignard should be written in letters of gold. 

(Ayot Rectory, pp. 78-79)

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From a poem by Sam, Mary's eldest son, parting from Winifred House in Bath (1824): 

I gained a little eminence, and took

   One long last glance of spots to me so dear.

'Twas then, that as the lightning's dazzling ray

   Which sudden darts the earth and heaven o'er

Illumes the brightened universe like day

   And scarcely is created ere no more,

Or as those transient moments of delight

   Which reason gives to soothe the maniac's pain

When scenes long past flash on the waken'd sight

   And Memory opes her treasures once again,

To my young mind there rushed a mighty tide,

   Of scenes long steeped in dark oblivion's stream

And as I gazed, and sorrowfully sighed

   O'er fleeting infancy's delusive dream,

With sadden'd heart I viewed in that bright hour

   The spot endeared by childhood . . .

(p. 83)

*

At Hot Wells in 1830, John Olive "handed Ellen into dinner, and they were soon conversing with all the freedom of a long-established acquaintance. Emma also had admiration. Charles Olive from the West Indies decidedly flirted with her, leaning over her, requesting her to sing, etc. and there was another young man with a squeaky voice who followed her about the room agreeableeing with all his might" (p. 109). 

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The same October, in Bath.

Ellen was touched with her book. For with all his perfections she had to confess J.O. was not literary. He had been adrift when the Browns alluded to Anne of Geierstein, Rashleigh or Lucy Grey as if they were neighbours who might walk in at any moment. But he had noticed she liked to read. He had given her a book. "Still," wrote Mary to India, "He has not yet said 'Will you marry me?'." Mary walked up to call on Mrs Oates and saw "Winifred House School" on the gateposts of her old kingdom.  It distressed her, but it was better than having the place empty, and running to seed. She had been in to look at it in June. The rose trees had been blooming profusely, but the long grass had reminded her of the works of Ossian. She had mounted to the nursery, and sat a moment in her beautiful bedroom where her six had been born, and felt she ought to ring for tea and remain there. She never meant to go again.  (p. 114)

*

As for Emma, she can be introduced in her own words (in a letter to elder brother Sam, now living in India):

Emma's Picture of Herself, May 1831.

Shall I, dear Sam, describe myself? I should be pretty if my skin were clear and teeth good, which they are not. My hair is nicer, and I dress it well. My figure is naturally good, but I stoop. My hands are large, but my fingers, since I left off biting my nails, are not ugly. I am about half an inch shorter than Ellen. 

My mental accomplishments are not very brilliant. I do not take to accomplishments; yet I pursue them, and can play Handel's and Mozart's music and sing tolerably well. I can draw, but in no decided style. But I can sit all day sans ennui with a book, and when the work is valuable I make notes. When at Clifton I was allowed to read some novels, and in one week devoured Richelieu, Darnley, Inheritence, Marriage, Thaddeus of Warsaw, Marie Antoinette, Romances of History, Highways and Byways -- and for the present I am satisfied. Now I am reading with interest the Family Library. Sir Walter Scott is ill and I fear will add no more to my twenty-four volumes . . . (p. 121)

*

Within the family Mary Brown was known as Minnie (it was John Olive's pet-name for her).

There is actually not very much about Fromefield House in Ayot Rectory. 

It was built in 1797 by George Sheppard senior (1773 - 1855), the Frome clothier and proprietor of a factory at Spring Gardens.

At this time [c. 1830], and for many years after, the most unbounded hospitality prevailed at Fromefield House, and every stranger, and especially clergymen, were ever welcomed there, the Reverend Mr. Phillot, then vicar of Frome, but generally a non-resident, always had a room kept specially for him, and such was the style of the house, that a merchant of Frome said that the grocer's bill there was larger than Lord Cork's, [at Marston House] of that day, and a banker informed me that at the time of the one pound notes, the firm had out of the bank every Saturday morning, one thousand one pound notes for wages and weekly expenses ...

(John Webb Singer in The Somerset Standard, 25th March, 1893. Quoted in Frome Through The Ages: An Anthology in Prose and Verse (1982), ed. Michael McGarvie.)

There's an interesting Wikipedia entry on the Sheppard family of Frome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheppard_family_(clothiers) 

This is from around 1850:

Emma and George Sheppard had left Berkeley Court and gone to live with George's old father. Fromefield House, embowered amongst woods and hills and meadows, was a charming home, a regular comfortable old family gathering-place. As Emma had always been remarkably tactful and guileless the new arrangement was a perfect success. The only drawback from Minnie's point of view was that the greys had to be ordered out whenever she wanted to go to church. It was too far for her to walk nowadays. (p. 193)

Oman's "Berkeley Park" or "Berkeley Court" is Berkley House, a couple of miles NE of Frome. Minnie often stayed there with Emma and her growing family between 1834 and 1850. 

Emma became interested in workhouse reform and a year after her mother's death she published a book about it.  One of her abiding beliefs was in keeping the aged out of workhouses, e.g. by subsidizing families to look after their old folk. Perhaps that was the thinking behind Frome's new dementia day-care centre being named the Emma Sheppard Centre. 

Fromefield House in the late nineteenth century.

Facing p. 216 there is the sketch of Fromefield House I mentioned earlier, by Grace Sheppard, Mary Sneade Brown's great-granddaughter. So I suppose it dates from the late nineteenth century. Her vantage point was the large field that gives Fromefield its name: for many years the site of Frome's annual cheese show, and now partly occupied by Frome hospital.

In her last letter to Ellen "Minnie wrote that the view from her window at Fromefield House was all road-colour, lawns and fields alike, no verdure at all." (p. 217).

She died while staying here, on August 10th, 1858. 

Central hall of Fromefield House, Frome.

The roof lantern above the central staircase of Fromefield House, Frome.