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Chap. EL] A Tour round Old East-Bourne. 15
of two ladies the widows of two men who had at the middle of the 19th Century occupied very prominent positions in the public eye, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and Sir John Franklin. The former had been Secretary to the Committee of the Privy Council on Education, and the latter was the celebrated Arctic voyager. Lady Franklin's brave and untiring efforts to ascertain the fate of her husband are recorded in Sir Leopold McClintock's Voyage of the Fox and, with further details, in the more recently published Life of McClintock. Sir J. Kay-Shuttleworth's youthful son Ughtred (the present Lord Shuttleworth) was there occasionally, and I first made Ms acquaintance when he crawled out from under the dining-room table on a day that I happened to be there. By the way, is not "Ughtred" a most extraordinary Christian name ? I have never known anybody else who bore it. Mrs. Holmes afterwards went to live in Norfolk, and died there in 1885. Her son, Mr. J. S. Holmes, is a landed proprietor in Norfolk, living at Gawdy Hall, near Harleston.
The Gilberts of the present line were not originally a Sussex family, but came into the county from Cornwall by the marriage of a Mr. Davies Giddy with Mary Ann Gilbert, an heiress descended from certain Gildredges and Eversfields. Mr. Giddy took his wife's name in 1817 and so founded or re-founded the Sussex family of Gilbert.
The large house nearly opposite the Manor House pulled down in 1910, was long known as The Grays, and was the family house of the Willards, an old Sussex family. It passed out of the possession of the present head of that family, Mr. A. R. Hood, in 1909 under circumstances which I prefer not to explain in print. In my younger days its owner was Major Nicholas Willard who was, in a certain sense, the Parish of East-Bourne, for he was the chief Resident Magistrate, Parish Churchwarden, and Surveyor of Highways, As Magistrate he was an autocrat of the first water. At his death in 1852 he left a widow and two daughters. At his own request he was buried at 4.0 a.m. in the morning, a fine summer's morning. His daughters were Harriet |
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