Roger Wolfe commissioned a professional house historian, Sara Van Loock, to research the history of the house. I am grateful to Roger for his permission to reproduce the following extracts from Sara’s report.

In 1785 the copyhold interest in Fowlers Wells was held from the Sewell family by one Samuel Cobbett, ‘yeoman’, who installed a farm bailiff, James Blackman, to run the property on his behalf. Blackman was the son of Thomas Blackman, for many years the landlord of the Barley Mow tavern at Knaphill. James Blackman was ‘a quietly disposed man with a limited knowledge of the world and, apparently, without a desire to know anything of its doings beyond the confines of his farm and crops, excepting the current price of corn …’ Although the Blackmans never owned Fowlers Wells, as they occupied it between 1790 and 1840 as bailiffs for successive absentee copyholders, it became known as Blackmans Farm.

James Blackman’s son, John, was born in this house in 1819. As he afterwards recalled in The Story of My Life: ‘As soon as I was able to walk I was sent to a dame's school to learn, to the extent of the old lady’s abilities, the alphabet and to spell and pronounce monosyllables. She was known as ‘Old Sally Artful’, but her real name was Hartwell. Her fictitious name, however, seemed appropriate, for she had a knack of giving a sly pinch, or an unexpected prick with a pin, whenever our eyes were off the primer. I soon outgrew the limits of the dame’s knowledge and was removed to the national school in the village … The favourable reports which my village tutor frequently gave of my mental progress, induced my father to take me from school earlier than he would otherwise have done ‘for fear’, as he said, ‘you will learn too much’. At the age of nine, therefore, my school days ended, and I was marched into the fields to render my feeble assistance in the way of farm work’.

In 1820, Fowlers Wells, together with other property within the Manor of Stannards, was purchased by a prosperous Chertsey corn merchant named James Fladgate. His descendant, a Miss Fladgate, still held the principal interest in the property in the mid-1920s. There was however a sub-interest in the property, called a copyhold interest, because details of its grant by the Lord of the Manor were, literally, copied into the Court Rolls.

When Samuel Cobbett, died, his copyhold interest in Fowlers Wells was sold over the heads of the Blackman family to Thomas Wood of Windlesham, Surrey. Wood died intestate, 11 June 1824. His co-heiresses were his four daughters: Anne, Mary, Jane and Elizabeth, who married Richard Rowland, a Chobham shopkeeper. The other sisters lived together in Union Court, which still stands, a tributary of Old Broad Street, in the City of London. Their interests were afterwards united in Richard Rowland, of Stonecroft, Weybridge the son of Richard Rowland and Elizabeth [nee Wood], mentioned above, who still owned part of the copyhold interest in Fowlers Wells at the time of his death, aged eighty-one, in 1916. Other members of his family also had some interest in the property.

At the taking of the census, in April 1841 the Rowland family’s tenant farmer was Stephen Ottaway 28, who worked as the village carpenter. The youngest and tenth child of Henry Ottaway [1764-1835] by Alice his wife, Stephen was newly married, the parish registers recording that in 1840 he had wed Mary Bargent. Their son, Henry, was born in this house in 1841. By the time the census enumerator returned to the property in the spring of 1861 it was occupied by George Stevens, a 39-year-old agricultural labourer, his wife, Eliza 37, and their six children: Sarah 11, James 9, Emma 8, Alice 6, and the three-year-old twins, Frederick and George. About 1877 it was acquired on a yearly tenancy from the absentee Rowland family by Henry Whittall who in 1881 gave his age as fifty, and his place of birth as Chobham. He shared the farmhouse with his wife, Rosina 40, and with their children: Rosina 18, Ellen 12 and Henry 10. Whittall was replaced as the Rowland family’s tenant farmer by Richard Roberts, who continued here until the onset of the First World War.

By 1915 ‘Fowlers Wells Farm’ is listed in the county directories in the occupation of Frederick William Benham. At three o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday 27 November 1918, sixteen days after the guns finally fell silent in France, the farmhouse ‘and twenty-six acres of farmland attached’, came up for auction at the Albion Hotel, Woking Station, ‘by order of the trustees of Messrs. Rowland and others’. The property is referred to in the sale particulars as ‘Fowlers Wells Farm’. This coupled with the fact that it is also called Fowlers Wells Farm during the tenure of the Benham family, shows that ‘Fowlers Wells’ and ‘Fowlers Wells Farm’ were interchangeable terms. What is now Fowlers Wells Farm was not included in the sale, nor was it named on the accompanying map. In all probability it may have been a satellite, used to out-house the farm workers of Fowlers Wells and their families.

Fowlers Wells is described in the 1918 sale particulars as ‘a 6-roomed cottage and range of farm buildings’. The tenant of the farm land, but not of the house, was Alfred Hobbs who held twenty-six acres at a rent of £35 per annum. The property failed to reach its reserve price of £1,000 and was withdrawn from sale. In January 1919 the solicitors retained by the Rowlands’ trustees approached the local authority, explaining that the house formed ‘the remnant of a Trust Estate and the Trustees are most anxious to get rid of the property as the Beneficiaries are scattered all over the world. It appears that the farm is admirably suited … for either a smallholding or a soldier’s land settlement’. The County Land Agent declined the offer, because it would have meant giving ‘notice to quit to a deserving tenant [Hobbs] who is himself a Small Holder’. It transpired that the county council had considered purchasing the farm five years earlier but had declined because ‘the cost of restoring the dwelling house’ would have been ‘prohibitive’.

Fowlers Wells was ultimately purchased by another absentee owner, a Mrs Mary Ann Hawkins, who held it until 1923. In 1924 the occupant was Albert Edward Wood, ‘insurance agent and clerk to parochial charities’. The house is also shown in the directories as ‘the office of the West Surrey General Benefit Society [A.E. Wood, local secretary]’. Local knowledge attests that from about 1925 to 1931 Fowlers Wells was the home of Frederick Benham, who worked in London as Clerk to Smith’s Charity, administering the Charity’s eighty-acre estate in South Kensington. Benham was one of the few people in the village to own a car, a Swift saloon. The pathway to the front door was lined with London cobblestones which Benham had rescued when the streets were upgraded to tarmac. He kept beehives at the far end of the garden. The barn was rented to a local farmer who used it to store corn and his threshing machine.

At this date, and for many years more, Fowlers Wells was lit by paraffin, of which it must have smelled very strongly. Although petroleum was known to Herodotus, it was not until Dr. James Young patented the process of obtaining paraffin oil from bituminous coals in 1850 that the use of the fuel became widespread. It was purchased from an oilman who would have toured the district with a donkey and cart, with a barrel mounted at the rear from which containers could be filled by means of a tap. Ordinary oil cost a penny a pint. Most oilmen kept a ‘special’ at tuppence, which they represented as ‘a wonderful remedy for the killing of bedbugs’, although in reality it was the same as the oil in the barrel. Oilmen were eventually driven out of business not so much by the arrival of gas but by the penny-in-the-slot meter which enabled people to purchase it in small quantities.

Since 1999 Fowlers Wells has been the home of the family of Roger Woolfe, who says: It's a chance to live in something old and historic, and to do something to improve the appearance and the amenities of the place while maintaining its heritage. You don't really own a place like this: you simply look after it for the next generation’.

Sara Van Loock can be contacted at sara@househistories.net