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For generations No.8 Bedford Place has been
home to people from all walks of life, from a serjeant-at-law, to a
retired commander of the Royal Navy. We take pride in our hotel and
its history and hope that for however long you're in London, the
Thanet will be somewhere you too can call home. |
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Number 8 Bedford
Place occupies in part the site of old Southampton House, laid out
in the early 1660's for Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of
Southampton. It was renamed Bedford House in 1734 when it was
acquired by the Duke of Bedford, who owned vast tracks of land
hereabouts. In 1765 the weavers of Spitalfield attacked Bedford
House after the Duke criticised a bill on imported silks. |
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Bedford House was demolished in 1800
and No.8 Bedford Place constructed over part of the site in
1802-03. The first occupant was Serjeant Eric Parker. A serjeant-at-law
was a superior type of barrister appointed by Royal Writ. The order
dated form the very early Middle Ages. One is mentioned in the
Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Serjeants were
originally few in number and were allocated a pillar in old St.
Pauls Cathedral, where they met their clients. The name derives
from the Latin, servientes ad legem, as they were originally
viewed as servants. They were also known as 'the Order of the Coif'
from the rounded patch of black and white cloth worn on the top of
their wigs. By the 14th Century they had secured virtually complete
control of the legal profession in England. On appointment as
serjeant, a barrister left his Inn of Court and joined Serjeants'
Inn, his arrival being marked by lavish feasting and ceremonial.
Until 1846 serjeants enjoyed a monopoly of advocacy in the Court of
Common Pleas, and until 1875 they alone could be appointed superior
court judges. In Chapter XXIV of The Pickwick Papers Dickens
immortalised the names of Serjeants Buzfuz and Snubbin, leading
counsel in the celebrated breach of promise action. After 1868
appointments were confined to those about to be created judges. The
last appointment of a serjeant was in 1875. |
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About 1815 - the year of the
battle of Waterloo - No.8 Bedford place was acquired as their
London town-house by William Courtenay, a prosperous City
mercer (or draper) and his wife, Lady Henrietta, a daughter of
the 10th Earl of Devon. In William Courtenay's day, this
house boasted a staff of twelve, including a butler, two
footmen, a housekeeper, three parlourmaids, a cook, an
undercook, and a 'tweeny' - or between-stairs-maid. The
latter's duties lay chiefly in the kitchen, although she would
have been sufficiently presentable to be seen upstairs
silently cleaning or carrying coal. If she was typical of her
kind, she was ignorant and commonly spoken. No right-minded
master or mistress ever spoke to tweenys. When Lord
Brocklehurst was forced to do so in The Admirable Chrichton,
he found that he had so little in common with the girl
that he could only ask: 'And what sort of weather have you and
the other servants been having in the kitchen?'.
Before 1828 William Courtenay
sold this house to Thomas Stooks, a partner with James Elmslie
in the firm of Elmslie and Stooks, East India merchants. Tom
Stooks commuted each working day by private carriage between
Bedford Place and his offices at No.2 Abchurch Lane, City. He
was extremely wealthy, not least because this was an era when
the world was making a financial killing in Asia - from
the Court of Directors of the East India Company sitting in
their ornate offices in Leadenhall Street, to the company's
network of military and civil servants out East. One might
add to this every member of the army (regardless of rank) the
numerous independent merchants living in the three British
Presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay - and the whole
array of native Indian rulers ranging from Moslem sultans and
Hindu rajas, to hordes of freebooters scouring the villages. |
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In April 1841 Tom Stooks was
sixty years of age. He shared No.8 with his wife, Eliza 50
and with his four daughters: Louisa 25, Eliza 20, Emily 15 and
Ellen 10. By 1861 he had died and the house was in the
occupation of his widow, Eliza. Of her daughters Emily,
Ellen and Louisa had all found husbands and only Eliza, now
aged 29, was still living at home with her mother. The
'downstairs' staff consisted of a butler, who came in by day,
and three resident domestics: the 21 year-old footman, George
Cox, a housemaid, Sarah Ashley 29 and the cook, Elizabeth
Clark 39, who when asked her place of birth by the census
enumerator in April 1851 replied that she did not know. |
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This
is indicative of the confusion which arose in people's
minds about the most basic facts of life before
the dawn of the age of universal literacy. The labouring
and servant classes of the Victorian era frequently
only knew their ages by having them handed down
in an oral tradition by their parents or relatives.
Once forgotten - and they frequently were - people
simply guessed. Similarly, unless folk had lived
in the same place all their lives, they were frequently
unaware of their exact place of birth. In the column
reserved for this on the census returns the words
'not known' or the initials 'N.K.' are commonplace.
Wherever she may have been born, one hopes that
Elizabeth Clark was good at her job because a cook
could make or mar the tranquillity of a household
such as this. 'Mrs' Clark - she would have been
known by this title whether married or not - would
have needed to be a good all-rounder - as capable
of sending up a dinner of six or eight courses as
a plain roast or a covey of partridges. She would
have had complete domination over the kitchen. Its
door was one to be knocked on, even by her betters.
'Cook's Perks' were numerous. Elizabeth Clark would
have been entitled to sell the household dripping
to dealers and to extract hefty commissions from
local tradesmen in exchange for her patronage. Whether
she suffered from the two vocational failing of
cooks - insobriety and dishonesty - we do not know.
Provided she did not, she would have been worth
her weight in gold. Many a mistress was prepared
to put up with a great deal provided she could be
confident that the cook would not be found dead
drunk and hour before dinner or was not giving away
joints of meat to the itinerant woman who made a
living by cleaning steps for cooks with hangovers.
In 1858 No.8 Bedford Place was acquired by William
Meredith Browne, the Secretary of the Westminster
Fire Insurance Office at Nos.27-28 King Street,
Covent Garden, and the Chief Actuary to the Westminster
General Life Insurance Company. An actuary compiled
tables of mortality on which premiums could be based.
In 1861 Browne was living at No.8 Bedford Place
with his wife, Sarah, his son, William and his daughter,
Susan, and four servants. His immediate neighbours
included a manufacturer of cattle food (at Nos.6-7)
a phyiscian (at No.9) a surgeon (at No.10) and an
architect and surveyor (at No.11).
Before 1871 No.8 Bedford Place had been acquired
by Timothy Carew, a 78-year-old retired commander
in the Royal Navy. Carew was not well-off and his
unmarried stepdaughter, Lydia Collis, supplemented
the family income by letting rooms. To that degree
she began the process which saw this property gradually
converted to a commercial lodging-house and then
to a hotel. In 1881 the proprietor of this was a
42-year-old widow lady named Amy Bower, a native
of Canterbury. Although both Mrs Bower and her residents
were eminently respectable, one suspects that at
this date No.8 was rather a gloomy sort of establishment.
In 1891 the proprietor of the lodging-house here
was Thomas Claxton. Among those who resided here
on a semi-permanent basis were two merchants, a
salesman and a stockbroker. Claxton sold the property
about 1893 to a Mrs Catherine Clarke who in turn
sold on before 1920 to a Miss Clara Wood. By 1925
it had acquired its first commercial name: the Delmonico
Private Hotel. It has been known as the Thanet Hotel
since about 1940. Those who come through its doors
today are in a long tradition of owners and occupiers
of this distinguished property spanning the best
part of two hundred years - from that day in 1803
when Eric Parker, an eminent serjeant-at-law, rode
into Bedford Place to turn the key in the door for
the first time.
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