Home is the Sailor part 2 : More of homes of Edward Pellew - on his birthday !
Happy Birthday Sir Edward - 256 and as esmerelda_tsaid yesterday still doesn't look a day over 185.
In my previous post, at http://following-sea.livejournal.com/366410.html I looked at Dover at the packet service which were the first part of Pellew's childhood and then at the farm cottage in Penzance which was the second.
I was delighted to see that this encouraged volgivagant to post some homes of Cuthbert Collingwood in her entry at her lj :http://volgivagant.livejournal.com/15455.html
Indeed we have realised that one of those houses = the lush surroundings of the official residence of the C in C Mediterranean was home to both Collingwood and Pellew as they followed one another in the post (with just a year inbetween)
Today's birthday post,though,celebrates the home Ned shared with Susan when first married and where all their children were born and during his time as captain of the Indefatigable and by contrast the exotic and enormous home that was his as C in C East Indies.
Packet boat in a squall links last times post with this one, as Falmouth was a very important packet station and the captains of the packet boats were among the leading citizens of the town.
This is one of the splendid series of caricatures which were recently part of an exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and are now on their website. It gives an idea of the passenger accommodation which was an important part of the packet's business.
As mentioned before,Pellew was the son of a packet service captain and familiar with that often dangerous life. When he moved to Falmouth with Susan to set up home in the village of Flushing, a small community across the estuary from the main Falmouth harbour they found themselves neighbours on Church Hill to a packet commander, Captain Kempthorne and his wife Elizabeth.Both families grew rapidly (Ned was on the beach at the time, it being peacetime of sorts!) and got on so well together that it was said that they made a door between the two houses to make all the endless coming and going between the two families easier. More of that in a moment.
Both houses still stand,though the road is now called St Peter's Hill. No 4,the Kempthorne House, now offers bed and breakfast to holiday makers.It retains its elegant frontage :
A corner of it may just be glimpsed on the next picture which shows the Pellew family home, now divided into two properties,numbers 5 and 6 St Peters Hill.It is another handsome house but with a shingled front- and in this picture appropriately has a rowing boat drawn up in the front pathway - just as if a son or daughter of the house were just about to come out for a jaunt to the harbour...
and in the closer view of the front we can see that the house today is called after its most famous residents though sadly without blue plaque of commemoration.
Fortunately one of the properties made out of the Pellew home is or was a holiday home to rent and so there are available pictures of inside including the view that the family would have had of the harbour.
Imagine yourself looking down from here at the Indy in the harbour...
This is a home from a very happy stage of Ned and Susan's life -they were parents to an increasing family of healthy children, they were among good friends and neighbours. Tragedy struck next door to them though when Captain Kempthorne was captured after heroically defending his packet ship and died in prison of his wounds.The Pellews did everything they could for ELizabeth, left with 6 children and a tiny post office pension and very little other income. For Sir Edward the reminders of his own bereavement must have been very sharp.He took the elder son, William to sea with him from the age of 11 and remained his protector, friend and defender all the rest of his years,and it was Will who sailed home from Algiers by his mentor's side having been made post captain and Captain of Ned's flagship the Queen Charlotte.
I mentioned earlier we would return to the connecting door between the two houses - and it is by way of a piece of gratuitous snobbery on the part of Pellew's biographer Cecil Northcote Parkinson.It was of course while he was living in this house,that Sir Edward was knighted in 1794, and then in 1796 created a baronet for his heroic rescue of the crew and passengers of the Dutton.He was created First baronet of Treverry which was the name of a fairly run down small estate which was in the family.Parkinson, turning up his nose at the suburban spread of the 1930s but also at his subject, gives himself away by remarking that one could hardly become a baronet from what was virtually a semi detached house.
Lastly a picture of a much grander house indeed.This is the official residence of His Excellency the Commander in Chief of HM ships and vessels in the East Indies:
which just about says it all -it was the C in C's house, but it was never 'home' to Ned Pellew .He lived here in the sense that he entertained here, transacted business here etc but he hated being so far from home and so long apart from his family, to say nothing of the politics that followed him out to India. The house was in Madras/Chennai and may well still be there but I have not been able to be certain.
Certainly the returns of April 19th will have been far less happy there than back in Falmouth.
In part three- the last part- we shall be looking at the grand house Ned and Susan had built - and never lived in-and at the house they spent 16 years of well earned retirement in.
In my previous post, at http://following-sea.livejournal.com/366410.html I looked at Dover at the packet service which were the first part of Pellew's childhood and then at the farm cottage in Penzance which was the second.
I was delighted to see that this encouraged volgivagant to post some homes of Cuthbert Collingwood in her entry at her lj :http://volgivagant.livejournal.com/15455.html
Indeed we have realised that one of those houses = the lush surroundings of the official residence of the C in C Mediterranean was home to both Collingwood and Pellew as they followed one another in the post (with just a year inbetween)
Today's birthday post,though,celebrates the home Ned shared with Susan when first married and where all their children were born and during his time as captain of the Indefatigable and by contrast the exotic and enormous home that was his as C in C East Indies.
Packet boat in a squall links last times post with this one, as Falmouth was a very important packet station and the captains of the packet boats were among the leading citizens of the town.
This is one of the splendid series of caricatures which were recently part of an exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and are now on their website. It gives an idea of the passenger accommodation which was an important part of the packet's business.
As mentioned before,Pellew was the son of a packet service captain and familiar with that often dangerous life. When he moved to Falmouth with Susan to set up home in the village of Flushing, a small community across the estuary from the main Falmouth harbour they found themselves neighbours on Church Hill to a packet commander, Captain Kempthorne and his wife Elizabeth.Both families grew rapidly (Ned was on the beach at the time, it being peacetime of sorts!) and got on so well together that it was said that they made a door between the two houses to make all the endless coming and going between the two families easier. More of that in a moment.
Both houses still stand,though the road is now called St Peter's Hill. No 4,the Kempthorne House, now offers bed and breakfast to holiday makers.It retains its elegant frontage :
A corner of it may just be glimpsed on the next picture which shows the Pellew family home, now divided into two properties,numbers 5 and 6 St Peters Hill.It is another handsome house but with a shingled front- and in this picture appropriately has a rowing boat drawn up in the front pathway - just as if a son or daughter of the house were just about to come out for a jaunt to the harbour...
and in the closer view of the front we can see that the house today is called after its most famous residents though sadly without blue plaque of commemoration.
Fortunately one of the properties made out of the Pellew home is or was a holiday home to rent and so there are available pictures of inside including the view that the family would have had of the harbour.
Imagine yourself looking down from here at the Indy in the harbour...
This is a home from a very happy stage of Ned and Susan's life -they were parents to an increasing family of healthy children, they were among good friends and neighbours. Tragedy struck next door to them though when Captain Kempthorne was captured after heroically defending his packet ship and died in prison of his wounds.The Pellews did everything they could for ELizabeth, left with 6 children and a tiny post office pension and very little other income. For Sir Edward the reminders of his own bereavement must have been very sharp.He took the elder son, William to sea with him from the age of 11 and remained his protector, friend and defender all the rest of his years,and it was Will who sailed home from Algiers by his mentor's side having been made post captain and Captain of Ned's flagship the Queen Charlotte.
I mentioned earlier we would return to the connecting door between the two houses - and it is by way of a piece of gratuitous snobbery on the part of Pellew's biographer Cecil Northcote Parkinson.It was of course while he was living in this house,that Sir Edward was knighted in 1794, and then in 1796 created a baronet for his heroic rescue of the crew and passengers of the Dutton.He was created First baronet of Treverry which was the name of a fairly run down small estate which was in the family.Parkinson, turning up his nose at the suburban spread of the 1930s but also at his subject, gives himself away by remarking that one could hardly become a baronet from what was virtually a semi detached house.
Lastly a picture of a much grander house indeed.This is the official residence of His Excellency the Commander in Chief of HM ships and vessels in the East Indies:
which just about says it all -it was the C in C's house, but it was never 'home' to Ned Pellew .He lived here in the sense that he entertained here, transacted business here etc but he hated being so far from home and so long apart from his family, to say nothing of the politics that followed him out to India. The house was in Madras/Chennai and may well still be there but I have not been able to be certain.
Certainly the returns of April 19th will have been far less happy there than back in Falmouth.
In part three- the last part- we shall be looking at the grand house Ned and Susan had built - and never lived in-and at the house they spent 16 years of well earned retirement in.