Hove in the Past: Highdown Road, Hove.

Judy Middleton & D. Sharp. 2002 (revised 2024)

Background

Highdown Road was built on land that once belonged to the Goldsmid Estate, formerly the Wick Estate, and it was developed by J. Eede Butt & Sons, timber merchants. Plans for a new road were drawn up G. Burstow, and approved by the Hove Commissioners on 3 October 1895.

At the same time plans for four other new roads by George Burstow for J. Eede Butt & Sons were also approved. They were Cissbury, Chanctonbury, Wolstonbury, and Caburn Roads.

George Burstow & Sons

George Burstow is a somewhat forgotten figure in the building of Brighton & Hove’s housing stock in the annals of local history. Wilds and Busby seem to get all the plaudits for their seafront properties, but it was George Burstow who was the most prolific builder of residential properties throughout the whole of Brighton & Hove. In the early 1900s alone, Burstow built over 1,800 properties, which was more than half of the new housing stock for that period of history.

George Burstow was actually born with the name of George Buster in Portslade in 1847, the son of William Buster, a master bricklayer. George’s father, William, was from Broadwater, Worthing and his mother Charlotte was from Brede in the Rother District of East Sussex. It would seem the Buster family lived in Portslade for nearly 10 years, as George’s first sibling, Sarah, was born in 1840, followed by William in 1841, Charlotte in 1844 and George himself in 1847. Sadly, in the same year of his birth, George’s sister Charlotte died and her large ornate memorial stone is still visible today in St Nicolas churchyard, Portslade.

By 1850 the Buster family had moved to Brighton, where his brother Abraham was born in Over Street.

The 1881 census shows George Buster living at 15 Wakefield Road, Brighton with his young family. His profession was listed as a master contractor, employing 23 men and two boys.

In 1894 George changed his family name from Buster to Burstow by deed poll. His brother Abraham, the owner of the Star Foundry in Brighton, had already changed his surname to Burstow a few years earlier.

By the end of 1900 the firm was called Burstow & Sons. George’s two elder sons, George Herbert and William John, had both trained as surveyors and land agents and joined their father in the family business.

Road Development

In 1898 Hove Council received a letter from Messrs Eede Butt stating that they were in the process of erecting four electric lamps in the road, and requesting that the Council would light them.

It seems the road was developed at some speed. For example, there were no less than twelve planning approvals in 1897, and six more in 1899.

The road was re-numbered in 1901, and declared a public highway in 1903; in November 1911 it was decided to spend £44 on planting street trees.

Highdown Road's Bronze Age Hoard

A rather shocking newspaper report of the destruction of a
very large quantity of Bronze Age artefacts found in
Highdown Road in 1930.
(1 cwt is equal to 112 lbs or 50.8 kilograms)

Charles Knight (1901-1990)

This famous artist was born at 20 Highdown Road on 27 August 1901, but he actually grew up in Brighton – first at 78 Ditchling Road and later at 61 Stanford Road. His father came from Sussex farming stock but he earned his living by working for a Brighton publisher. He was also a keen amateur artist, and his son was only four years old when he took him out sketching for the first time.

Charles Knight was the second child born to Charles Knight, senior, and his wife Evelyn Nash. The eldest child, Margaret, later became a nurse at the House of Bethany, Hindhead, Surrey, while his younger brother, John Boughton Knight, became a priest.

Charles Knight was educated at Stanford Road Junior School, and then at Varndean School in Ditchling Road. At Varndean his art teacher was Clarence Mackenzie who had studied under Louis Ginnett at Brighton School of Art. Knight accepted a special scholarship to the same institution, and his teachers were Louis Ginnett and John Denman, both of whom became friends and colleagues in later years.

Knight’s first solo exhibition was held at Hove Library in December 1924 when there were 52 works on display. Meanwhile, in 1923 Knight gained his Art Teacher’s Diploma, and then spent two years studying at the Royal Academy Schools. Among his teachers were Sir George Clausen (1852-1954) and Glyn Philpot (1884-1937). Knight also studied sketching at the Royal College of Art where one of the distinguished visiting teachers was Walter Sickert (1860-1924).

Knight won the Turner Medal and the Landseer Scholarship. Sir Joseph Duveen purchased Knight’s painting Llangollen, which won the prize, for the Tate Gallery. The work of the artist John Sell Cotman was a major inspiration for Knight who first saw Cotman’s paintings at the British Museum in 1924.

In 1925 Knight took a post at Brighton College of Art where he taught for sixty years, and in addition he was vice-principal of the establishment from 1959 to 1967. One of his pupils was another well-know local artist, Juliet Pannett (1911-2005) who was also born at Hove.

In 1931 a collection of British art left the country to be exhibited in Japan. Amongst them was Knight’s painting Evening in the Malvern Hills.

When Knight lived at Brighton, he used to attend St Bartholomew’s Church, but when he moved to Ditchling he became a server and a churchwarden at St Margaret’s Church.

In 1934 he married Leonora Vasey who was an illustrator, and the couple had known each other since student days at Brighton; they settled at Ditchling and had one son.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Knight very much wanted to enlist in the RAF but his colleagues insisted he should stay at college, and so he served part-time in the Home Guard and Civil Defence.

In the event, Knight’s staying-put enabled him to embark in 1940 on the Recording Britain Project on behalf of the Pilgrim Trust. The idea was to record buildings and landscapes that might be devastated during the war. It is amusing to note that his activities aroused suspicion, and once he was mistaken for a German spy. Knight produced forty magnificent watercolours for the project, some of which were painted locally.

Quite a different venture was the watercolour lessons he gave to Princess Margaret and a few companions from 1944 to 1947.

Knight’s range of work was wide. He made a long series of perspective drawings for the architect J. L. Denman, and he also painted pub signs for Kemp Town Brewery. He designed stained glass windows for the parish churches of Ditchling, Seaford and St Leonard’s, as well as numerous murals.

He painted the Stations of the Cross for St Patrick’s Church, Hove, from the designs by his friend Louis Ginnett who had died before he could paint them himself. Knight also designed the head of Minerva cared in stone still to be seen above the front door of BHASVIC. Knight died on 15 May 1990.

copyright © J.Middleton
Knight designed the head of Minerva above the entrance to
Brighton Hove & Sussex Grammar School

A special exhibition entitled Brighton Revealed was held at Brighton Museum from November 1995 to January 1996, which included four of Knight’s works from the Recording Britain project, now owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum. They were as follows:

Regency Brighton: Houses in Russell Square, 1940

23 and 24 New Road, Brighton, 1940

House and Shop in Pool Valley, Brighton, 1940

Fish Market, Brighton, 1940

In July 1997 there was an exhibition of Knight’s works at Hove Museum. Pride of place went to his beautiful Ditchling Beacon, which was painted in 1938, and was one of the last of his major oil paintings. The painting became very popular the following year when the Medici Society published it as a print, and it remains his best-known work.

The exhibition also included a handwritten letter from a lady-in-waiting dated 1944 confirming the arrangement for art lessons with Princess Margaret, and stating that the governess, Marion Crawford, would confirm term-time dates.

House Notes

Highdown House

Highdown House was the home of Arthur Edward Antill, born in 1869, a member of the Antill & Company family who were well known photographers in Brighton. He traded as a carver, gilder and picture-frame maker at 77 Western Road, Hove from 1899 until 1919.

Number 9

Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period there was a sizeable French and German expatriate community living in Brighton & Hove working in education, music, domestic service and the hospitality industry. In 1871 there were almost 450 French Nationals and 230 German Nationals employed in Brighton and Hove, by 1911 the German Nationals working locally had increased to about 370 and the French Nationals decreased to 230 employees.

The Revd Cesar Antoine Pascal de Menadier (b.1838, Nimes, France) lived at Number 9 from 1908 until 1911 with his second wife Anne Elise, and their two children, Anna (b. 1894 in France) and Elise Antoinette (b.1907 in France).

This was not the first time that the Revd Cesar Pascal (the name he was known by locally) had lived in the Brighton & Hove area.

In 1863 after graduating from the Theological Faculty of Montauban in southern France, he was appointed as Minister of the French Protestant Church in Brighton. The French Protestants held their services at the Chapel Royal in North Street with the kind permission of the Bishop of Chichester. A few years later the congregation moved to the Union Street Chapel.

In 1865 the Revd Pascal published Abraham Lincoln: Sa Vie, Son Caractere, Son Administration, with all profits from the sale of his book sent to the USA for the welfare of freed slaves. Also in 1865 Pascal briefly left his congregation for four months to tour North America on behalf of the French Bible Society. He recorded an account of this tour in the 1870 publication, A Travers l'Atlantique et dans le Nouveau-Monde. Both these books were written while he lived in Brighton.

The Revd Cesar Pascal lived at 18, Buckingham Road, Brighton with his young family. Sadly his first wife Josephine Julie Nathalie died in 1867, 3 weeks after the birth of their third child.

In 1868 the Revd Pascal established La Societé de la Literature Francaise’, for the benefit of Brighton & Hove’s teachers of French and any other local residents who wished to expand their knowledge of French Literature and Language. This Society held their meetings in the Banqueting Room of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion.

As a socialist the Revd Cesar Pascal considered himself an exile from the ‘Second Empire of France’. This was the period of French history when Napoleon Bonaparte III dissolved the Nation Assembly and set up a virtual dictatorship of the country. In 1873 Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, had moved from London to Ventnor Villas and sought the help of the Revd Pascal in finding employment in Brighton and Hove. Jenny Marx secured an appointment as a teacher at Misses Hall's School in Sussex Square, Brighton.

In 1877 there was a change in the local laws in Paris that allowed Protestant Theology to be taught in educational establishments. The Revd Cesar Pascal duly left Brighton with his children to take up a lectureship at the Association Philotechnique de Boulogne Billancourt in Paris.

Throughout the 1880s, Revd Pascal made many trips back to England to make speeches at the Annual Meetings of the Huguenot Society in London.

Around 1908 the Revd Cesar Pascal returned to England to live at 9, Highdown Road. By this time the local French Protestant residents had established their own dedicated French Protestant Church (L'Eglise Française Réformée) in Queensbury Mews, next to Brighton’s Hotel Metropole.

In the Hove Public Library's Annual Report for 1910, it was recorded that the Revd Cesar Pascal donated copies of his following publications to the Library:-

La Revocation de L'Edit de Nantes (1885).

De Glacier Englacier en Suisse et en Savoie.

A Travers I'Antlantique et dans lo Nouveau Monde (1870).

Souvenirs et Nouvelles.

La Fiancee du Proscrit (1879).

Revue Anglo-Francaise

and the Miscellaneous papers of Cesar and his son, Dr Paul Pascal.

Revd Cesar Pascal de Menadier died on the 31^st December aged 73 in the Randell & Bligh Nursing Home at 7 Wilbury Road, Hove.

Number 19 - Henry Shakespeare Stephens Salt (1851 – 1939) lived at this address in the 1920s, he was an influential English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions and the treatment of animals, he was a noted anti-vivisectionist and pacifist. He was also well-known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist.

Image from the 1907 German publication
of Animals' Rights

The son of an army colonel, Salt was born in India in 1851. He studied at Eton College, then graduated from Cambridge University in 1875, and returned to Eton as a schoolmaster to teach classics.

Inspired by the ideals of the classics and disgusted by his fellow masters' meat-eating habits and their reliance on servants, he left Eton in 1884. Salt moved to a small cottage at Tilford, Surrey with his wife Kate to concentrate on his writings, during his lifetime Salt wrote 39 books.

In 1894 Henry Salt published Richard Jefferies; his life and ideals, Richard Jefferies lived in Lorna Road, Hove from 1883 until 1884.

On November 20, 1931, Mahatma Gandhi made an appearance at the meeting of the Vegetarian Society in London. Gandhi said in his speech, "It was Mr. Salt's book, A Plea for Vegetarianism, which showed me why, apart from my adherence to a vow administered to me by my mother, it was right to be a vegetarian. He showed me why it was a moral duty incumbent on vegetarians not to live upon fellow-animals”.

Salt's Animals' Rights was reissued in 1980; in the preface, philosopher Peter Singer described the work as the best book of the 18^th and 19^th centuries on animal rights.

Number 31 - Claude Landi lived at this address in 1915. He was the Choirmaster and Organist at St Patrick’s Church in Cambridge Road.

Number 32

Number 35 - David George Fenwick lived at this address in the Edwardian period. His company Fenwick & Son of 10 Western Road, Hove, and later of 128 Western Road, Hove, printed and published a series of postcards entitled Brighton Celebrities (Past and Present), which they began to sell in 1904. It is as well they used the term ‘Past and Present’ because one of their subjects Brandy Balls had been dead for over twenty years. There were six in the series: Blind Harry, Brandy Balls, Old Charlie, The Beach Orator, The Brighton Jester, The Wheeler Band. For more information see the Brighton & Hove Characters page.

copyright © J.Middleton
Brighton Celebrities (Past & Present)

Number 50 - Revd W. L. Bretton lived at this address in the early 1900s. He was on the staff of St Patrick’s Church from 9 November 1901 until November 1907 and then moved to St Thomas’s Church in Davigdor Road.

copyright © Church Jubilee Booklet 1965
From 1901 until 1993 Highdown Road was within the Parish of St Thomas the Apostle, Hove, when the church closed the Parish boundaries were re-drawn,
Highdown Road is now within the Parish of St Luke's Prestonville, Brighton.

Number 43 - Joseph Edward Macmanus lived at this address in the 1920s. Macmanus was a newspaper editor and author.

During the First World War he was editor of Blighty. He was a member of the editorial staff of the Daily Mail, a former chief leader writer on the Daily Express and a former assistant editor for the Great Britain section of Le Figaro. J. E. Macmanus was the author of The Man Who Wouldn't and In Her White Innocence.

Number 51 – Mrs Greenhill moved to this house due to the tragic death of her sailor husband because she could not tolerate being near the sea – a constant reminder of her grief. Previously, the couple had lived at 18 Seafield Road, Hove. Lieutenant Benjamin Pelham Knowle Greenhill was born at Knowle Hall, Bridgwater, Somerset, in 1881. He did not need to earn a living because he had private means. But he loved the sea, and was already a member of the RNVR before the war. On 4 August 1914 he joined the Royal Navy as a sub-lieutenant. He died when HMS Hampshire went down on 5 June 1916 in appalling weather, having just sailed into a mine-field of 22 devices recently planted by a German submarine. It became one of the most notorious incidents of the war because the formidable Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener also died. There had been around 655 men aboard but only a few survived.

Number 72 – During the First World War Mr and Mrs E. H. Clarke lived at this address. Their son, Reginald Clarke, enlisted in London and became a private in the London Regiment, 2/15 Battalion. He was only aged 21 when he died on 2 November 1918, and was buried in the Terlincthun British Cemetery, Wimille.

Number 82 - Captain John Frederick Boyd Vandeleur lived at this address in 1915. His father, Lieutenant Colonel W. R. Vandeleur, lived at 18 Salisbury Road along with John’s brother, Captain William. Mountcharles Crotton Vandeleur (1870-1914) served in the 2^nd Battalion, Essex Regiment, and was 44 years old when he was killed in action at the Battle of Le Cateau near Eznes on 26 August 1914.

Number 96 – On 13 September 1932 the Sussex Daily News reported an ‘amusing diversion at Hove’. A brown pet monkey belonging to the children living at 96 Highdown Road, managed to escape, and spent two days at large. The monkey retreated to the wooded bank overlooking the railway, and found plenty of fruit in adjacent gardens. On Monday evening the monkey was spotted sitting squarely on the headstone of the gable above the Highdown Bakery. According to the Street Directory Thomas George D’Arcy was the occupant of the house.

Number 106 - George Aitchison, a former pupil of the Brighton Hove & Sussex Grammar School, lived at this address in 1912. He joined Brighton & Hove Herald in 1894 and was connected with the editorial side for over 47 years; he was associate editor for many years, became a director in 1933 and editor in 1934, retiring in 1940. He generally wrote on the theatre, music and the arts.

He wrote a popular and charming book entitled Unknown Brighton illustrated with atmospheric aquatints by Stella Langdale; the volume was published in 1926. In later years Aitchison lived at 8 Adelaide Crescent, where, he told Jack Dove, Hove’s Librarian, it was rumoured that some of Queen Adelaide’s ladies stayed there. Aitchison died in 1954.

Prize Model Maker

In December 1999 it was stated that Chris Chandler, who worked as a printer for the Evening Argus, was a model maker in his spare time. He had just been voted British Miniaturist of the Year for his model of Ightham Mote, a manor house in Kent.

Hove Planning Approvals

1896 – G. Burstow for G. Fabian, six houses in Highdown Road and Montefiore Road

1897 – T. H. Scutt for Messrs F. S. & R. Smith, a house and a bakehouse, south side

1897 – T. Garrett for E. Cornwell& Sons, eight houses

1897 – T. Taverner, two pairs of houses

1897 – C. Botham for F. Parsons, one pair semi-detached villas, north side

1897 – Messrs Miller & Selmes, four houses

1897 – G. Burstow for S. Fabina, two pairs semi-detached houses, south side

1897 – R. W. Pollard for J. J. Wright, four houses, north side

1897 – G. Burstow for Messrs Hallett & Duke, four terraced houses, north side

1897 – Messrs Anthony & Dixon for H. Reason, a shop and house, south side

1897 – T. H. Scutt for Messrs F. S. and R. Smith, addition to Bakery

1897 – T. H. Scutt for A. Parsons, four terraced houses

1897 – T. H. Scutt for F. Parsons, three houses, south side

1898 – Messrs Miller & Selmes, two houses and shops

1898 – T. H. Scutt for F. Parsons, stable and coach house, south side

1898 – T. H. Scutt for Mr Cook, two houses, south side

1898 – Messrs Miller & Selmes, five houses

1898 – G. Burstow for S. Fabian, six semi-detached villas, south side

1898 – T. H. Scutt for Mr Cook, one house, south side

1899 – G. Burstow for S. Fabian, three houses, south side

1901 – T. H. Buckwell for Dr Tulk Hart, one house, south side

1901 – G. Burstow & Sons for Mr Munday, two houses, north side

1901 – Messrs Miller & Selmes, two houses, south side

copyright © Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove
Brighton Herald 26 June 1909
For Sale in 1909 - £600 for a property in Highdown Road

copyright © Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove
Brighton Herald 19 October 1912
A house could be rented for £38 per annum in 1912

1925 – C. Scott a pair of semi-detached houses, south side

Sources

J E Denison, Eton Fives Association Annual Report (2005/06)

Darla Sue Dollman, Blessed Little Creatures (2011)

Rosalind Eyben, French and German Immigrants to Brighton, 1860 – 1914: A Study of a Trilateral Relationship (2017)

David Fisher of Brighton History

Encyclopaedia of Hove & Portslade

Hove Council Minutes

Middleton, J. Hove and Portslade in the Great War (2014)

Mr G Osborne

Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Henry S. Salt Society

Street Directories

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

page design by D. Sharp

20 November 2024

Highdown Road, Hove.