Penfold House and the Penfold family
Penfold House dates to about 1830 or earlier. A Loxwood map of 1806 marks a building on or close to the later house plot, before construction of the Wey and Arun Junction Canal. The road was already the main north-south route through Loxwood.
Parliament authorised the Wey and Arun Junction Canal in 1813. An agreement of 18 May 1817 concerning nearby Loxwood Place records the canal cutting across the old approach to the farm and another access being arranged. The canal crossed beneath the High Street a short distance below Penfold House.
Later sale particulars for Penfold House describe a cellar, a reception hall, kitchen and breakfast room, sitting room, study, utility room and four bedrooms. The house occupies about 0.16 acre on the rising ground above the canal bridge.
By 1841 Penfold House was associated with Elijah Penfold, a farmer recorded in Loxwood in the census. Elijah was about sixty and his wife Mary was also about sixty. William, Ann, Elijah and James Penfold were in the household, together with the much younger George Penfold. The Penfold holding included agricultural ground running uphill from this part of the High Street towards Pancake Lane and the Rudgwick road. Nineteenth-century maps record fields and orchard ground around the roadside houses before the building work of 1903-04.
William Penfold later lived at Headsfoldwood Common. On 20 May 1850 the Sussex Express reported a burglary at his house. Three masked men carrying large sticks entered at about one in the morning. George Seward, who was also in the house, was present when the intruders arrived. The men demanded money and took a satinwood workbox containing a £5 Bank of England note, six sovereigns, two five-shilling pieces, a gold seal marked ‘G.S.’ and a silver hunting watch. Penfold also lost about £10 in cash and his Guildford Savings Bank passbook. Seward offered a reward for information.
William Thayre, George Batchelor and the 1903 fire
On the eastern side of the High Street, the Wharf Building plot was occupied before the present brick workshop was built. Map extracts dated 1875 and 1897 mark a small roadside building there, with orchard and open ground around it. By 1903 the building was a timber-built shed belonging to William Thayre. The site lay opposite Penfold House and immediately downhill from the ground on which Arun Cottages were later built. The canal bridge was a short distance farther down the road.
The 1901 census records William Thayre at Chapel Green with his wife Esther. William was about forty and gave his occupation as bricklayer. He owned the timber shed on the Wharf Building site and later built Canal Villa on the opposite side of the road. George Batchelor was living at Farnfold near Drungewick in 1901. He was forty-six, had been born at Dunsfold and worked as a brickmaker. His wife Caroline was forty-two; their children at home included Caroline, Nellie and Willie. Batchelor built Arun Cottages in 1904.
On 29 April 1903 the trustees of Loxwood’s chapel met at the Reading Room. The new Church of St John the Baptist had opened on Vicarage Hill in 1901, while the old chapel building remained on its High Street site. The trustees resolved that the material of the old church, together with the boundary wall, should be sold by tender. The purchaser was to pull down the chapel, remove the material and level the ground by 1 October. Tenders were to be submitted by 15 June.
Late on Sunday 14 June 1903 fire broke out in William Thayre’s timber-built shed beside the High Street. The West Sussex County Times reported that the building was completely destroyed. It was insured through John Churchman and Sons with the Liverpool and London and Globe office. The newspaper described a fierce blaze lasting about an hour and a half. Heat blistered paint on pales at Penfold House on the opposite side of the road and cracked several panes of glass in its windows. The fire occurred one day before the 15 June deadline fixed by the chapel trustees for tenders for the old church material.
The chapel trustees met again at the Reading Room on 22 June 1903. Maurice Botting chaired the meeting, with the Reverend C. H. Hildebrand and Corrall Farmer also present. They accepted William Thayre’s tender of £32 10s for the ‘Old Church material’, with payment due by 1 October. The old chapel was taken down in September 1903. Local property records for the Wharf Building state that bricks, roof tiles and windows from the chapel were used in the replacement building on Thayre’s High Street site.
The new roadside group, 1903-04
The replacement was a two-storey brick workshop with its gable facing the High Street. A photograph from about 1904 records the building soon after construction. Two large round-headed window openings occupy the road-facing gable, one at ground-floor level and a larger opening above.
Later sale particulars for the building identify the arched window frames as material from the old chapel and describe brick elevations beneath a pitched tiled roof, with weatherboarding at the gable ends and loading doors at first-floor level on the western gable. The same particulars state that the building was originally used as a builder’s workshop.
The workshop is long and narrow. Later measurements give internal dimensions of about 15 metres by 4.2 metres, with roughly 125 square metres of floor space over the two floors. The building stands close to the eastern edge of the High Street, after Arun Cottages and opposite Canal Villa.
Across the road from the Wharf Building, William Thayre built Canal Villa beside Penfold House in 1904. The name refers to the canal below the High Street. The Wey and Arun Junction Canal had been formally abandoned in 1871, more than thirty years before the house was built. By the 1911 census William and Esther Thayre were living at Canal Villa. The census names the house and records seven rooms. William, aged fifty, described himself as a farmer and employer; Esther was forty-nine and they had been married for sixteen years. Two widowed boarders shared the house. James Pannell, aged eighty, was a retired carpenter, while sixty-five-year-old George Randall worked as a farm labourer.
On the eastern side of the High Street, George Batchelor built the pair of red-brick houses known as Arun Cottages in 1904. They stand across the road from Penfold House and Canal Villa, with the Wharf Building immediately beyond them towards the canal. A central plaque on the front reads ‘ARUN COTTAGES 1904’. The 1911 census records George and Caroline Batchelor at Arun Cottage. George was fifty-six and was then working as a farm labourer. Caroline was fifty-two; they had been married for thirty-three years and had six children, all of whom were living.
Their eighteen-year-old son William was at home and worked as a domestic groom. The census recorded five rooms in the house.
The photograph from about 1904 records the new roadside group soon after the work. The Wharf Building is on the eastern side of the road, with its two arched windows from the old chapel. Penfold House and the new Canal Villa stand opposite, behind their roadside boundaries.
Later history
A newspaper report from September 1934 names Penfold House directly. Basil George Sopp, the youngest son of Mr and Mrs Gregory Sopp of Penfold House, Loxwood, married Lucy Collins at Lydlinch parish church in Dorset. The ceremony was a double wedding in which Lucy’s sister Dorothy married W. J. Peel.
The Wharf Building later had several uses after its early work as a builder’s workshop. At one stage it was used as a garage for ‘Green Goddess’ fire engines. It was also used as a paper store and as a youth club. A photograph from about 1950 records the road-facing gable with the large upper and lower arched windows prominent. The later history supplied with the property states that D. G. Clifton & Son began using the building as cabinet makers in 1955. Later photographs show the D. G. Clifton & Son name on the road gable and the long side elevation fitted with workshop windows and doorways.
Knight Frank’s 2017 particulars for Penfold House describe the house with four bedrooms, a cellar and several ground-floor rooms on a plot of about 0.16 acre. The house stands immediately beside Garton House, with Canal Villa between it and the canal bridge.
Modern particulars for No. 1 Arun Cottages record high ceilings, sash windows, panelled doors, exposed floorboards and an open fireplace. The 1904 date plaque is on the front of the pair, with the Wharf Building immediately beyond the cottages on the same side of the road.
