Out of the Long Ago

by Maud Milgate

Diss Court

The interest in the Cornwallis family history arose through Grandmother declaring she was descended from them -- no-one in the family really believed this and so far I have not been able to absolutely prove it to be true, but the more I delved into her ancestry the more convinced I became there was "something in it". When I found in Kenninghall Church register the birth in 1790 of my great grandmother Dinah Pilgrim and the entry giving her mothers maiden name as Margaret Shardelowe, I could see this gave credence to the story that the Rev. Shardelowe had married the youngest daughter of Lord Cornwallis in about 1755. I had done quite a lot of reading regarding the history of the Shardelowe family from books obtained from the library the main one being "Some materials for a history of the parish of Thompson, Norfolk". By George Crabbe, Rector of Merton 1882. Printed by Agas. H. Goose, Norwich 1892 and this proved the family of Shardelowe to be a very aristocratic one of impeccable pedigree who had held responsible positions in the law, and would therefore be equal in birth to the Cornwallises. As Mr. Blunderfield said all the evidence showed them to be a family quite able to educate a man to be a clergyman. Mr. Blunderfield had done quite a lot of research into this family. His grandmother had been Martha Shardelowe before her marriage to Captain Dyce of the East India Company and I saw her portrait in oils when I visited his home "The Willows" at Thorpe.

He had elicited quite a lot of information for me. Although originating from Thompson, Norfolk the Shardelowes had held manors in the Culford area, Hengrave, Ickworth ,Flempton etc. and a Lady Shardelowe lies in the Cathedral at Bury St. Edmunds. They held lands at Shimpling, Norfolk (there is another Shimpling in Suffolk) until 1630. This is very near Old Buckenham. They had also at one time lived at Thelveton Hall although Lady Mann wrote to Mr. Blunderfield in answer to his enquiry, that she had no knowledge of it as they had no old documents belonging to the manor. Her husband's grandfather had bought it from the mortgages of the Haver family.

However in my "Records" search in Norwich I found a certificate dated 16 May 1728 that the church bells at Thelveton were in good repair and signed- Thomas Shardelowe, Church Warden

He probably died in 1751 as there is a will listed under "Wills 1720-1763".

Again referring to old documents, Mr. Blunderfield told me of a strange letter received by his great aunt Miss E.E. Shardelow (sister of his grandmother) and he sent me a copy of the letter and I quote:

9 Benham Place
Hampstead 3

31 Dec. 1919

To Miss Shardelaw
47 London Road
Beccles, Suffolk

Dear Madam

I have in my possession ancient parchments originals concerning the Manor of Shimpling Shardelaw near Diss. The manor about the reign of Edward III passed from the old family of Shimpling to the family of Shardelaw and my originals relate to that period.

I expect to leave London about the end of March or a little earlier and want to dispose of these family things before doing so.

Do you know of any of the Shardelaw family who would care to possess such records of past history? Until I met with your name in looking through the Directory for Suffolk I thought the family was extinct.

Yours faithfully

Raundell Sanderson

End of quote.

Unfortunately Mr. Blunderfield did not know what happened to these records but it tends to show that evidence of the past is still there to be unearthed. Mr. Blunderfield also sent me a copy of a Shardelowe pedigree which had been lent to him by Colonel Sir Arthur Evans of 39 Egerton Crescent, London SW3 when he (Sir Arthur) was in Thorpe making enquiries about the Shardelow family in 1957. This pedigree shows the family down to 1613 at Shimpling, Norfolk and there is a Margaret in the last family listed.

In St.Stephens Church, Norwich there is a tomb to "Henry Shardelaw Alderman of this city - died 1712 aged 50 and shows the arms of Shardelaw -- three cross-crosslets on a silver ground with a red chevron.

In St.Peter's Mancroft, Norwich on 16 July 1546 were married Francis Shardelow, Gent and Dorothy Shelton. In an old directory lent me by Mrs. George Coleman, James Shardelow, farmer lived at Old Buckenham in 1890.

The 17th and 18th centuries were very slack times in religion. Parishes were often run by curates while the Rector lived elsewhere. This would add to the difficulty in tracing a clergyman.

Miss Rushmer thought the Skhardelows might have had Huguenot sympathies and of course the Rev. gentleman I am seeking may have been a non-conformist. After the act of nonconformity some clergy left the church of England.

There have been Shardelows at Thorpe Hall for many years. There is a private baptism recorded there on 30 Aug. 1772 of Benjamin son of Samuel and Mary Shardelow. I saw Thorpe Hall on my way to Mr. Blunderfields and visited the graves of five sisters all Shardelowes who had lived at the Hall. These were Miss Rushmer's old aunts and they were Wilfred George's great aunts.

Mr. Blunderfield had a Shardelowe grandmother and I had a Shardelowe great grandmother and there is no doubt we sprang from the same family in the dim and distant past. The spelling of the name varied slightly but it was all one family.

As with the Shardelows I also traced the Pilgrims, but I only succeeded in finding one person of that name, Maurice Pilgrim of Eccles Farm wide of Old Buckenham, and he could not help me very much.

I found a marriage in the late 1700s ofther Rev. John Pilgrim M.A. of Windsor to Keturah Bruce and in White's Directory of 1840 I found that John Pilgrim Coronor lived at Westhorpe Hall. I am not sure of its locality but it was pulled down many years ago. I read that the manor belonged to William de la Pole and afterwards to Charles Brandon, Earl of Suffolk who married Mary Tudor, sister of Henry 8th John Pilgrim married Margaret Shardelowe and Dinah was their daughter born 1790 and one of Grandma's stories was that her mother, that is Dinah, had a stepfather, so one presumes that John Pilgrim died fairly young. The story goes that Dinah was very fond of her stepfather andpreferredd to stay at home and keep him company when her mother and two sisters went to balls. According to grandmother, the stepfather was the richest man in -- and there my memory fails me. I am sure my grandmother said the name but I have never been able to recall it. I have remembered so much and yet that one name eludes me. Had I been able to recall it I should have known exactly where to start my search.

Dinah married Thomas Bilham in 1819 with her mother's consent and by licence, this would infer that her father was dead. There are a number of Pilgrim and Bilham graves in Kenninghall churchyard going back to the early 18th century. Grandmother (Adelaide Bilham) was born at Old Buckenham and her birth recorded there in 1831. Her mother wanted her called Phyllis but her father said he had given a new foal that name, so she was called Adelaide after Queen Adelaide who had recently come to the throne. I never did a search of Old Buckenham registers, but I did search some of the Bishops Transcripts in Norwich Records without discovering much but more could have been done had I the time. When I visited the round thatched roofed church of Old Buckenham, I saw on the north wall a memorial to some school charities which gave credence to my grandmother's tales "that the schoolchildren curtsied to mother when she went to church on Sundays". She also said the Cornwallis coat of arms (reputed to be a bleeding stag chained) hung over the mantle in their dining room. From this it would seem she was a woman of some importance. I never succeeded in finding where they lived in Old Buckenham. All I knew it was a farm and could of course have been very wide of the village. It was country I should dearly have loved to explored had I the time and a car, for the past truly loitered there. Of grandmother's brothers and sisters, John was the oldest and according to her a captain in the army and married to an actress who was the second most beautiful woman in London. She would have been the most beautiful had she not had a accident in childhood and dug a fork in her forehead. Some search has been done into army records, but a Captain John Pilgrim Bilham has not been traced but a David Bilham was named by the Central Library of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, Camberley, Surrey in answer to an enquiry by Ronald Pilcher and it would be interesting to know who this David Bilham was. The search for John's army record was by no means complete and as for his actress wife, Katie Reeve said she had never heard of an actress but she said John was a great gambler, sometimes being very rich and at others losing everything. Grandma said he drove a six in hand to the races. Of her second brother William little is known. He lived in London and was an inspector of some sort either police or railways, but the knowledge is vague. He had a daughter who became a Mrs . Parrot and it was she who inherited the Cornwallis coat of arms from their old home. Nothing more is known of her although Katie Reeve thought she was connected with a thriving pork butchers business in the Mile End Road. I have wondered if William could have been named after a Wm. Bilham who according to Whites Norfolk Directory of 1840 farmed West Stow Hall, a beautiful house close to the Newmarket entrance of Culford Hall. He might have been an uncle. According to Grandma, she had four sisters, Margaret , Mary Ann and Sarah older, and Harriet younger than herself.

Of Mary Ann, Katie knew nothing, said she had never heard of her. She could of course have died as a young woman, although in trying to establish when Thomas Bilham, the father, died, I found a Mary Ann Bilham had died in Swaffham in 1850, and Swaffham was a place frequently mentioned by Grandma and I think may have been where some of her relatives lived. I only visited it one very wet Sunday afternoon when I could not leave the car, But I regret I was not able to explore it more, it might have yielded results.

Margaret the oldest sister married a Mr Waters and lived in Yarmouth and while there became very friendly with a Commander Jenner of the Royal Navy. He was by then I think a middle aged man and retired but his story intrigued me. He had fallen in love with a beautiful girl of poor birth, he had had her educated and married her, but the strain of the education was too much for her and she lost her reason and spent the rest of her life in an asylum. After her husbands death, Margaret took on the duties of housekeeper and companion to the commander and at his death he left her his money and jewellery. His Will was contested by his two nephews and when the case came before the High Court they won the day. All this was told me by Katie Reeve and appealed to me because it sounded like a novel.

The middle sister Sarah married Wm Harper a farmer of Stuston, Norfolk and it is Sarah who carries on the story. Sarah and her husband left Stuston and went to live at Holly Farm, Palgrave and it was Holly Farm now called Holly House I finally had the privilege of seeing over, while I was staying on holiday at Orme Villa. This beautifully preserved Elizabethan house was the home of Sarah and Wm Harper for mane years and at their deaths they were buried in the same grave beneath a cedar tree in the churchyard opposite. Their only child Harriet Adelaide, named after Sarah's two younger sisters, married Robert Baldwin of Diss Court and when Harriet died in the spring of 1901 she was laid to rest in a grave next to her parents where her husband followed her in 1910.

These were the only family graves I was able to find. Harriet and Robert Baldwin had 6 children and Diss Court became the meeting place of members of the family for many years. It was a large square house lying well back from the main road with many additions and extensive stabling. Robert was a horse and cattle dealer in a big way, he was one of the leading figures on Castle Hill, Norwich and in a photograph which I saw in Attleborough of leading Norfolk Farmers and Cattle dealers he appears as quite a dandy -- reminiscent of a Regency Buck -- Beau Baldwin in fact.

Into this household at Diss Court came 12 year old Katie Reeve. Her mother was Robert's sister , but because she had a very large family she was glad for her brother to relieve her of Katie the eldest, who thus grew up with the Diss Court children who were only a little younger than herself.

Therefore at the time of Thos. Bilham's sudden death at Old Buckenham only Adelaide (Grandma) and Harriet were living at home . Grandma said she was about 17 at the time of her father's death and Harriet 2 years younger. On this basis his death took place in 1848, but a search at Somerset House for that year and several either side failed to give it. As Somerset House records at that time were only 11 years old there could be quite a few discrepancies. The story goes on that he died suddenly and having made no will his two sons John and William sold the home and took the money, John taking his mother and sisters Adelaide and Harriet to London to live with him where he proceeded to find the girls husbands. The story Grandmother told me was that her brother wanted to marry her to an old man, and she would not, so ran away. She came down to Margate, got a job as a ladies maid at Walters Hall (now pulled down) Monkton, Nr. Minster with a family called Collett, and eventually she married Richard Castle. Her brother wrote and told her that as she had made her bed so she must lie upon it and washed his hands of her. However, many years later when she was living at Chislet with her successful baker husband, he did come to call upon her in his carriage and pair. According to Grandma after marriage [ Adelaide's ?] Harriet also ran away and joined her. She obtained a post in the handkerchief and glove department of Rapsons in Margate and there she met the local registrar Rayner Pilcher. It was his practice to buy a new handkerchief for every wedding he performed and she served him, and that is how he came to meet and marry Harriet Bilham.

To come back to the Diss Court story, where Katie grew up to womanhood and where she spent the first 40 years of her life being the right hand of her aunt Harriet and after her death, the housekeeper. It is from Katie I got a lot of the background to my search -- she confirmed a lot of what I already knew and told me more. She knew all about the Cornwallis connection. She said Wm. And John Bilham visited the Court and she heard them discussing the subject. According to them Brome Hall and Hoxne Hall should have been theirs. How they arrived at this she did not know, but said the evidence had been "lost at sea". She said she was very young and did not pay a lot of attention to the details but she thought it true. "Because of my aunt" she said. "She was a real lady, I cannot describe her to you. She was different ,you know". Katie went on "Anybody can act like a lady but it takes something more to be a gentlewoman". Here to Diss Court John Bilham brought his wife and Katie said during her visit only French was spoken during meals, but she did not know anything about her being an actress. She could have been a second wife, I don't know. With them came their daughter Alice and about her there is a considerable mystery as to whose daughter she really was, she was their adopted daughter and was supposed to belong to one of John's sisters. Some said she was Adelaide's daughter and if this was so, it might not be surprising, as urged into marriage by her brother, what chance would a country bred girl of seventeen have against , say John's brother officers or an old Colonel. Women were only pawns in men's schemes in many old time marriages and I for one attach no blame to the women. However it was, Adelaide ran away and John and his wife brought up the little girl Alice as their own daughter. She grew up and married John Brookes and had three children. From various sources I learned she was a lovely and cultured woman. Someone described her as "a great lady" which would indicate that her father whoever he was was of good birth and probably John had his reasons for adopting the child which had nothing to do with obliging his sister. This story has no bearing on my ancestry search which is only concerned with legitimate descendants, but the story intrigued me. Especially when Florence Chase (Harriet Baldwin's only daughter) gave me , as a parting present before her return to Australia, a beautiful little miniature of the said Alice. It shows her, very like "Alice in Wonderland", a lovely mid Victorian little girl in pantaloons and side curls. Who was this little girl in a gold frame? I suppose it does not really matter, but she could have been the reason why Adelaide and Harriet ran away and so altered their social station, but why did they both run away? Some say they left John's roof together but the story I was told as a child was that Harriet waited until Adelaide married and then joined her. However it was, that was how they came to Thanet and thus put their descendants into a different way of life.

There were close ties between the Diss Court family and the Bilham's in London and according to Katie, cousin Harriet Baldwin and Alice Brooks were great friends as well as being first cousins. Harriet's only daughter Florence was named after Alice's daughter.

Alice and John Brookes lived in St, Mark's Crescent, Regents Park, London and Florence (Chase) told me she remembered staying there as a little girl. In the house was an extremely old lady whom they called "Aunt Betsy " and Florence always wondered who she was. Might she have been the aged Dinah Bilham , the mother John took from Old Buckenham, Norfolk to live with him in London? She was supposed to be in her nineties when she died. Florence said they also lived at one time in Maida Vale, but I am not clear whether she meant the Brookes or John Bilham, as far as I have been told, Adelaide (Grandma) only returned to Norfolk once and that was to visit Diss Court with Grandfather, some tome in the 1880s or 90s. I wonder if old Dinah died about that time, and they went to her funeral and afterwards went on to Norfolk? Perhaps that was when Adelaide brought back with her the tiny black dress bodice which belonged to her mother and which I now possess. It was kept because of its small waist )to show how tiny she was). My mother had holidays at Diss Court but did not care for horse riding, but Harriet Pilcher's son Alonzo visited it frequently; on one occasion buying a pony named "Kitty" and driving her back to Margate. Katie said this pony was named after her.

At Robert Balwin's death in 1910 Diss Court passed to his only daughter Florence who was married to Reginald Chase of Chase Flour Mills, which were at the rear of Diss Court. During the 1914-18 war the Court was a convalescent home for officers Cousin Florence doing the catering for them. She told me she sent her children under the care of Katie Reeve and a nurse maid to live in another house in Palgrave leaving her free to care for her wounded officers.

Later the Court was taken over by a Catholic Order who ran it as a school for girls and it was then, according to a bus driver I talked to known as "the Nunnery". When this school moved to Bath. Florence said she bought the "Court" back from them, but so highly did she regard their teaching that she allowed them to take her eldest daughter Mary with them to Bath. Apart from this et Court does not seem to have been a place for little girls. Because of the horses and the all male staff who handled them Florence as the only little girl there, was sent to a boarding school in Diss and only returned home for Sundays. Katie said she took clean clothes to the school every Wednesday.

When Florence grew older she was sent to a convent in Belgium to further her education.

But the day of the horse was over and in 1923 Florence her husband and 6 children emigrated to Australia where some of her brothers were already living.

Diss Court then passed into other hands, and by the time I first saw it it was a stark square house, denuded of the creepers on the walls, all the trees had been cut down and the lawn disappeared under a wide gravel sweep with only a large rockery in the centre to divide up the driveway. I was unlucky over this house. No-one knew who lived there , and I never got near enough to it to photograph it. When I met Florence in Diss she did not want to visit it, she was horrified to see that all the trees had been cut down that led from the main road up to the house. The last time I saw it, all the windows were boarded up and rumour had it that it was going to become a factory. It was always a disappointment to me that I did not see inside it.