The History of Claremont
Sidmouth, about 1826. On a slope above the sea, men put their spades into the red earth and began to dig. Nobody wrote down their names. Nobody wrote down who paid them, who drew the plan, or the year the house was finished. Everything points to 1826 or 1827, so the house they raised, Claremont, celebrates its bicentenary in 2027.
They came, and stayed, and went. A colonel who held the Victoria Cross. A baronet. Two daughters of an Earl. A Portland cement manufacturer and his family. And below stairs, the cooks and maids who kept it all running, remembered, if at all, by a line in the census. In 1964 it became three homes. The fields around it are gone. The house is very much as it was.
When, and by whom +
Ask when Claremont was built and you will be given a date, though not always the same one: 1815; 1825; about 1830; c.1837. They cannot all be right.
The parish books, still to be seen at the Devon Heritage Centre, are said to give a William Barrett an uninhabited "New House" from 1827 to 1831, and Claremont among a string of his houses in 1833. The tithe map of 1839 I have seen: it shows Claremont beside the road, opposite Thomas Fish's Knowle, a cottage orné whose house and grounds he opened to visitors on Mondays, apparently sharing a carriage drive with Mrs Mackie's, and gives William Barrett as its owner and occupier. The house has no front door on its south and west sides: the way in, and the main staircase, are by the porch on the north-east.
Mr Barrett is not a simple witness: in March 1836 a William Barrett, "formerly of Sidmouth", wine merchant and "Lodging House Proprietor", was among the insolvent debtors. Probably the same man; not proved.
The first witness I can call with confidence is Mogridge's Descriptive Sketch of Sidmouth, a guide whose text dates itself to 1836:
Nearly opposite Knowle, and overlooking the Deer Park, is Claremont, lately the delightful residence of F. Barker, esq: and above it, entering by the same carriage drive, a handsome and well built house, situated on the summit of a beautiful rising ground, the property of Mrs. Mackie.
"Lately." So by 1836 the house had its name, and its first named resident had already come and gone. Mrs Mackie's house, the tithe bears out, was almost certainly Sidmount, next door. A house cannot be the late residence of anybody a year before it is built, and so c.1837 will not do.
Claremont was listed, Grade II, on 12 November 1973. The listing calls it "Circa 1830, large stucco villa", and adds that it is "possibly enlargement of earlier structure as rear wall is of stone rubble and brick." The house may not be all of one date.
The verdict, then. Claremont was standing by 1836, and had been lived in. We have searched high and low, and the records will not yield an exact year; but everything points the same way, and nothing against it. In all likelihood Claremont was built in 1826 or 1827, perhaps by William Barrett, and it celebrates its bicentenary in 2027. It looks a substantial stucco villa; but above its stone basement, the present owner says, it is lightly built, which guests may notice in winter. It was well planned, its best rooms facing south to the sea and west to the Knowle.
The Earl who did not build it +
Every house of any age has a story told about it, and Claremont's is a good one. It was built, they say, by an Earl, for his daughters: in 1815 by one version, in 1825 by another.
The sixth Earl of Buckinghamshire was the Reverend Augustus Edward Hobart, and he came into the title only in 1849. The two daughters who did, in the end, live here, Charlotte Augusta and Louisa Selina, were baptised in Leicestershire in 1833 and 1834. The house is older than his earldom, and very probably older than both of them. As it stands, the story cannot be true.
And yet stories of this kind are rarely made from nothing. I first find the Earl in Sidmouth in August 1850, when a house called Richmond Lodge was advertised for sale as his residence. On census night in 1861 he was there, sixty-seven, a "Clergyman without cure of souls", with the Countess, five unmarried daughters, Charlotte and Louisa among them, and seven servants. He died in October 1885, and was brought back by rail to the family vault in Sidmouth churchyard. The following spring two of his daughters came to Claremont.
So the legend is not so much false as mislaid. It has taken the Earl from the house where he lived, set him down in his daughters' later one, and pushed the whole affair back before any of them came. Every piece of it is in the records, except the piece that would make it true.
Three flats +
Every census that finds Claremont finds one household in it. In 1964 that changed. Planning permission was sought, first for four flats and then for three, and the deed that bound the new flats together, a large folded document tied with green ribbon, begins with the fact itself:
The Vendor has converted the building known as Claremont situate at Station Road Sidmouth in the County of Devon … into three self-contained flats
The Vendor was Mrs Hilda Constance Murphy, a widow. She sold the first flat on 22 December 1964, and the other two in 1965.
A typed sheet kept at the house, written for visitors to the garden, tells how the floors were shared out. Flat 1 had been the reception rooms and the butler's pantry, Flat 2 the family bedrooms, and Flat 3, in the attic, the servants' quarters; the old kitchen, scullery, laundry, fuel and wine stores in the basement are now garages. The garden went three ways. The top third, with the stables, coach house and kitchen garden, became Claremont Cottage, and the bottom third, the old pleasure ground, is now "a wilderness of Rhododendrons"; both were sold off from 1965 onwards. The middle third, the flower garden and lawn, stayed with Flat 1. The same sheet records foxes, badgers and muntjac, a breeding colony of Lesser Horseshoe Bats, and "a terrestrial shrimp from the southern hemisphere".
The deed's rules are of their time. The outside was to be painted every fifth September "with the same colours as were last used". And no owner was to play "any piano pianola gramophone wireless loudspeaker or mechanical or other musical instrument of any kind" so as to annoy the others, nor so as to be heard outside "between the hours of 11 p.m. and 9 a.m." I pass that on to you without comment.
The Colonel and the Cross, 1876–1886 +
On 1 August 1876 the list reads "Claremont, Colonel Cafe", and from the next summer "Colonel and Miss Cafe". A directory of 1878 put two letters after his name: "Col Cafe V.C."
In 1881 the household was four: William M. Cafe, fifty-five, unmarried, "Colonel, H.M. Indian Forces"; his sister Isabella, also unmarried; and two housemaids, but no cook. The probate calendar of 1906 settles who he was: William Martin Cafe, V.C. The Cross was announced in The London Gazette in February 1860, when he was a Captain of the 56th Bengal Native Infantry, for an act of 15 April 1858. In the Gazette's machine-read text the citation runs:
For bearing away, under a heavy fire, with the assistance of Privates Thompson, Crowie, Spence, and Cook, the body of Lieutenant Willoughby, lying near the ditch of the Fort of Ruhya, and for running to the rescue of Private Spence, who had been severely wounded in the attempt.
You will want to know more of Lieutenant Willoughby, and of the Fort of Ruhya. So should I. The citation gives a name and a place, and nothing more.
By 1883 the lists were calling him General. Why the Cafes left, in the winter of 1885–86, the record does not say. He died in 1906 leaving a widow, so the bachelor of 1881 married; when, I have not found. Of Isabella I can tell you nothing more.
The ladies on the balcony +
Everything else on this page rests on a record. This section rests on a photograph, and a photograph does not give its sitters' names. What follows is speculation, and I label it as such.
It is a view of the garden front, with a slate roof and a light iron balcony. On the balcony stand three ladies in dark dresses with very wide skirts, one well apart and two together. The one nearer the centre has a pale head; a white cap, perhaps, or she may simply have moved. In the open doorway is a dark mass that might be someone sitting just inside, or might be furniture. Below, in the garden, a man in light clothes holds a rake or a hoe.
There is no date on it and no photographer's name. By the dress it has been put at about 1856 to 1864, a working estimate, not the opinion of a historian of dress. Those years belong wholly to the Brines, and it has been said that the photograph shows that family. Nobody knows where the story came from; but the costume and the story point the same way.
If it is the Brines, and this is a guess, I should pick the lady with the pale head for Mrs Gramina Brine; a pale cap would suit a lady of sixty or so. The dark-haired lady beside her might be her daughter-in-law Susan, and the lady apart her daughter Eleanor Clarke, home on a visit. All three are in dark dress, and the cap may be a widow's. That looks very like mourning, and if it is mourning for the Major, the photograph was taken after July 1859. But dark is not the same as black: photographs of that time showed reds, browns and greens as dark, and a lady in a good brown silk may look as if she were in mourning and be nothing of the kind.
What is wrong with the guess is plain. Nothing shows these three are mother, daughter and daughter-in-law rather than a lady and two friends; and the faces are too small to recognise, even if we had another likeness to compare. We have none.
It is not a studio portrait; it has the air of a picture taken for the pleasure of it, by someone who seems to have had the run of a private garden. Captain Frederic Brine was an officer of the Royal Engineers, and the Royal Engineers had begun to teach photography in the 1850s. I have found nothing to show that he learned it. But if he did, it would explain neatly why no gentleman of the family is in the picture.
In fairness, the Stuarts of 1871 also had three ladies in the house. But they came seven years after the end of the estimate; if the dress is rightly dated, they are too late. So the Brines are first, and the Stuarts second. The ladies have kept their secret for more than a hundred and fifty years. It would be a poor sort of detective who could not let them keep it a little longer, while she looks for the proof.
The full story, with every source, is in Claremont — Through the Ages, by James Ogilvy Leacock, available on Amazon, ISBN 9798160026183.
Version 1, October 2026. This is a working edition: it will be updated as further records come to light.