A Bedhampton Miscellany Compiled by Ralph Cousins
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A Bedhampton Miscellany Compiled by Ralph Cousins Bedhampton Road circa 1910. Borough of Havant History Booklet No. 50 March 2019 £6 Contents Timeline of Bedhampton – John Pile The Landscape Setting and Early History – John Pile Medieval Bedhampton – John Pile Bedhampton's Royal Visitors Remembered – John Pile Some Notes on the History of Bedhampton – Graham R. Eeles A Brief History of Bedhampton – Mavis Smith Hidden Bedhampton – Alan Palmer A Remarkable Episode in the History of Bedhampton – John Pile Havant Police Court – John Pile Notes on a Medieval Deer Park at Bedhampton – John Pile Belmont Camp – Bob Hind and John Pile Smugglers – Charles G. Harper Three Bedhampton Ghosts – John Pile The Portsdown Shutter Telegraph – Bob Hunt The Portsdown Semaphore – Bob Hunt View all booklets at: thespring.co.uk/heritage/local-history-booklets/ 2 Time Line of Bedhampton The springs between Havant and Bedhampton attracted early settlement 4200-3000 BC Bevis’s Grave Neolithic long barrow on Portsdown c.1100 Bedhampton Deer Park enclosed from the Forest of Bere c.1140 Chancel arch, the earliest architectural feature of St Thomas’s Church built c. AD 600-900 Anglo-Saxon cemetery on Portsdown 1208 and 1213 King John visited 1297 King Edward I visited 1320-21 Hugh le Despenser the elder’s manor of Bedhampton laid waste by his enemies 1325 King Edward II visited 1338 Fulling mill at Bedhampton mentioned 1496 Documentary evidence for Hermitage Chapel of St James c.1536 Sir Richard Cotton (c.1497-1556) rewarded by Henry VIII with stewardship of Bedhampton Park 1592 Queen Elizabeth I visited ‘Mr Carrells house’ c.1600 Bedhampton Deer Park disparked 1632 Watermills in Bedhampton: a malt mill, fulling mill, paper mill and a wheat mill 1688 St Thomas’s Church parish registers began 1730s Belmont House built 1778 William Haines, engraver and painter, born 1789 Charles Wentworth Dilke, newspaper editor and writer, born c.1790 Belvedere erected on Portsdown in the grounds of Belmont House. Later enlarged as Belmont Castle 1800 Customs officers, with the assistance of the Havant Volunteers, seized contraband spirits and tobacco from smugglers near Bedhampton 1819 John Keats wrote his poem The Eve of St Agnes at the Old Mill House 1822 Admiralty semaphore telegraph station on Camp Down commissioned 3 1846-1860 Sir James Stirling, first Governor of Western Australia from 1829- 1839, owned Belmont House 1847 Camp Down semaphore station decommissioned owing to the introduction of the electric telegraph 1854-6 Biscuits baked for the Crimean War 1859 Customs officials seized contraband spirits at the Shepherds Hut 1860 Havant pumping station opened by Borough of Portsmouth Waterworks Company 1868 Construction of Fort Purbrook completed. Farlington Redoubt, to which it was connected, was probably completed shortly afterwards 1868 Bedhampton National School, designed by Richard William Drew, opened 1872 Cosham, Havant and Emsworth Water Order empowered Portsmouth Waterworks Company to supply water to Bedhampton, Havant and Warblington, et alibi 1875 Catholic Church of St Joseph opened in West Street 1878 Primitive Methodist Church opened in West Street 1881 Hulbert Road opened, linking Havant and Bedhampton with Waterlooville 1906 Bedhampton Halt opened 1910 Havant Gas Company gained public lighting contract with Bedhampton Parish Council 1911 Fred T Jane, founder of Jane’s Fighting Ships, moved to Hill House, Bedhampton Hill Road c.1913 Fred T Jane started a Scout Troop 1950 Former sick-bay of Belmont Naval Camp bought by Bedhampton Parish Church Council for use as parish rooms 1957 St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School opened in Hooks Lane 1973 Queen Elizabeth II passed through Bedhampton on her way to Portsmouth Dockyard 1985 Bedhampton County Infants’ School closed 4 The Landscape Setting and Early History John Pile In geological terms, Bedhampton is situated in the extreme south-eastern corner of the Hampshire Basin, a depression formed by folding after the chalk had been laid down under deep sea conditions and subsequently filled with sand and clay sediments beneath much shallower waters. The Portsdown ridge, which rises to a height of a little under 400 feet at Fort Southwick, is an upward fold or anticline and it is this ridge that deflects the southerly flow of underground water towards 5 the village of Bedhampton that is responsible for the numerous springs that are such an important feature of the area. The lower southern slopes of Portsdown and the coastal plain are covered with Coombe deposits and Brickearth, the latter producing a particularly fertile soil. The Coombe deposits are a mixture of small chalk rubble and flints derived from the former chalk surface under freeze and thaw conditions. The Brickearth consists of flood deposits and, possibly, fine wind-blown material formed in a very cold and dry climate. The parish church, the manor house and Belmont Park House were all built on the Reading Beds of sands and clays, and they are slightly raised above the immediately surrounding area on a low but clearly defined ridge. Abundant water supply, the chalk ridge facilitating east to west communications, the light and fertile soils of the coastal plain, the resources of the forest to the north and the sea to the south, combined to form a very attractive environment from the earliest times, and there is abundant evidence for the presence of man in this area from the Stone Age onwards. 6 Sir Barry Cunliffe, who directed the first excavations on the site of the Roman palace at Fishbourne, suggested that the Chichester to Bitterne Roman road was built during the early stages of the Claudian invasion. Its route westward is defined by the modern Bedhampton Road as far as its junction with Hulbert Road from where it continues through the Belmont Estate on the same alignment to Purbrook where Purbrook Heath Road takes up the route. A section of the road was seen in a builder’s trench in May 1938 when the site of Belmont Park was being prepared for a new housing development and another section was uncovered in 1953 when building recommenced after World War Two.The Roman road was clearly the focus for subsequent settlement as Roman pottery, tile, tesserae and a Greek coin were found in the garden of a house in Roman Way and a little further west, near South Downs College, a villa and a tile-works have been excavated. The Saxon period is represented by the cemetery which was deliberately sited on the Bevis’s Grave Neolithic long barrow on Portsdown, a little to the west of Belmont Castle. Two or three of the earliest Saxon graves were probably pagan, but the 71 burials uncovered by David Rudkin between 1974 and 1976 were Christian, being aligned west to east. It is likely that the 8th or early 9th century settlement served by the cemetery was nearby, also on the Portsdown ridge, but this remains unlocated. It was probably later in the 9th century that the Christianised population moved down to the site of the present village where a cross or a wooden church – the precursor of the present parish church – would have been erected. Very little can be said with certainty about Belmont in the Middle Ages, except that the estate, which was later to bear this name, did not yet exist. The site of the future Belmont House and park were demesne lands of the manor of Behampton and a few acres of church glebe land. An aerial photograph taken shortly after World War Two shows what is unmistakably medieval ‘ridge and furrow’, formed by the action of the ox-plough, on the northern edge of Bidbury Mead, adjacent to Bedhampton Road. As this road did not exist in the Middle Ages – being an early 19th century turnpike road – the medieval ploughland would have extended over at least part of what later became the parkland surrounding Belmont House. Extract from: Belmont Park, Bedhampton the Estate, the House and its People – John Pile, June 2012 7 Medieval Bedhampton John Pile – May 2011 The medieval manor of Bedhampton comprised the whole of the parish, a strip of land and sea that extended six miles from north to south and about a mile and a half from east to west. At the extreme north of the parish, within the Forest of Bere, lay Padnell Common, accessible to the tenants of the manor through a fenced and gated deer park that occupied half the land area of the parish. The deer park provided the lord of the manor with venison and contained fishponds, a rabbit warren and a keeper's lodge. The best agricultural land was on the coastal plain where the lord's demesne and his tenants' plough-lands formed strips in the open fields, sown in rotation and thrown open to be grazed in common after harvest. Here too were the enclosed pastures, the pasture by the sea and the valuable meadows that provided the hay essential for over-wintering livestock. Bidbury Mead where the Summer Show takes place was largely hay-meadow as its name suggests. The eastern flank of Portsdown was sheepwalk and Langstone Harbour with its mudlands and islands, covering one-third of the area of the parish, provided fish and wildfowl in season. Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records two watermills in Bedhampton for the use of 'the hall' and these continued to grind corn for the next 800 years. A fulling mill is recorded in 1286 and this suggests that cloth-making was an important activity. Domesday Book also records two salt-houses where seawater was evaporated to produce salt. Together with the copious springs of excellent water these resources combined to provide an estate of considerable value to its lords.