Henry Peek
Henry Peek
| Hon. Sir Henry Peek | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Born | 1825 | ||||||
| Died | 1898 | ||||||
| Residence |
Wimbledon House, Wimbledon 20 Eastcheap, EC [1894] 5 Mary-at-Hill, EC [1897] | ||||||
| Occupation | merchant | ||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
proposed 1891.02.10
Death noted in report of the council for 1898
1899 Rudler's Presidential address: By the death of SIR HENRY PEEK, BART., the Anthropological Institute has lost a valued friend, who took a genuine interest in its proceedings,and who will be remembered as having been, in recent years,a frequent attendant at our meetings. The death occurred during the summer recess, but the Council on reassembling took the earliest possible opportunity of recording its sense of the loss which the Institute had suffered, and of offering its respectful sympathy with his son, Sir Cuthbert Peek, to whose services the Institute has been in many ways so signally indebted.
Notes From Elsewhere
Sir Henry Peek, Bart (1825-1898)
A leading member of a committee formed in Wimbledon ’for the preservation of Wimbledon Common and Putney Heath unenclosed, for the benefit of the neighbourhood and public’.
The committee successfully fought against potential enclosure, and against the private use of this land, and its objectives were eventually met by the passing of the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Act, 1871. He became the first chairman of the body of Conservators incorporated under the Act to hold and manage the Commons, and whose duty it was to ‘keep the Commons open, uninclosed, and unbuilt on’ and to ‘preserve, as far as maybe, the natural aspect and state of the Commons’.
He lived at Wimbledon House, Parkside – long since demolished and replaced by new roads and houses, one of the roads, Peek Crescent, bearing his name. He was a partner in a firm of colonial merchants and an MP for Mid Surrey 1865-1884.
Henry Peek – who transformed the cliff-top parish of Rousdon near Lyme Regis – was an unusual man. He held the record for exhibiting the heaviest bunch of bananas ever grown in the UK; it weighed 97lbs. He introduced school dinners, to improve children’s health and their capacity for learning, 70 years before the Government passed the School Meals Act. His private menageries of animals included Indian buffaloes, ponies from Iceland, Chilean swans and piping crows from Australia. Three emus were imported through Axmouth harbour, though the coastguards objected to plans to populate the Undercliff with kangaroos.
Henry bought the 350 acre Rousdon estate in 1869 for £11,500. In today’s money, that’s probably just over a million quid. Rousdon then had three houses, lived in by 18 people, in fairly primitive conditions. A large treadmill was used to draw water up from a well. It was powered by a 12-year-old girl called Mary Anne Ostler, helped by a dog. The church – according to various accounts – was in a ruinous state, with worm-eaten pews, a tottering pulpit, broken windows repaired with oiled paper, damaged books and religious vestments in rags. Rousdon was regarded as being “miles away from the beaten track”, in “wild and rough” country, only reachable through “almost continuous ascent”: it’s about 500ft above sea-level.
Farm labourers were poor and hungry. Nicky Campbell quotes a 10-ten-year-old Dorset boy who considered himself lucky, in the 1880s, if he had a raw turnip for his breakfast. She notes how, as late as 1913, villagers in Beer would take to eating swede-tops, snaring wild birds and cooking them in winter pies, and hanging skate-wings on blackthorn spikes outside their back doors (the fish would be cooked in margarine with lots of pepper to disguise the smell of decay). More than half the occupants of Axminster workhouse were children aged under 16.
So the news that Henry Peek had bought Rousdon caused great excitement in West Dorset, East Devon and parts of South Somerset. When Henry and his wife arrived in Lyme Regis (they stayed at The Three Cups), the church bells rang and the Volunteer Band turned out to play rousing music in front of the hotel. What’s more, the excitement turned out to be justified – for quite a while anyway.
Publications
External Publications
Nicky Campbell’s new book To Buy A Whole Parish: Rousdon and the Peek Family is about what the Peek family did in the triangle of land between Axmouth/Seaton, Axminster and Lyme Regis between 1869 and 1937, when the estate was broken up and sold.