From open ground to two new houses
The first Ordnance Survey mapping of the 1870s records the site before Jubilee Villas were built. Weavers, later called Rose Cottage, stood nearer the pond, and another building occupied part of the adjoining property. The ground where the villas now stand was open.
The Ordnance Survey revision published in 1896 records a new road frontage. Jubilee Villas had been built at the northern end of the property, each with an outbuilding behind it. Farther south, the shop buildings beside the pond had also increased as the Combination Stores expanded.
The pair soon acquired the name Jubilee Villas, also recorded as Jubilee Cottages. The name commemorated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, marking sixty years of her reign. The matching gables and tile-hung upper floors gave the houses a distinctly late-Victorian appearance on the main road through Loxwood.
Homes for the Dependant community
Roger Nash, author of Dependant Brethren of Sussex and Surrey: A History of the Cokelers, identifies Jubilee Villas as housing used by older members of the community. Many Dependants continued working in later life, and the occupations recorded at the villas include agricultural labour, bootmaking, coal work, drapery and general labour.
The arrangement suited the organisation of the Loxwood community. The Stores offered employment in grocery, drapery, baking, delivery work and other trades. The Spy Lane chapel provided the centre for worship. Farms and houses owned or used by members lay around the village. The villas formed part of this compact group of community property.
An outbuilding stood behind each house on the 1896 map. The houses themselves were arranged as separate homes with their own entrances and domestic plots. The census returns then give the story names and occupations, beginning with families already established among the Loxwood Dependants.
The 1891 census records several of those families before the move into the new villas. George Standen was living in the group of households around Weavers and working as a shoemaker or bootmaker. Carpenter James Pannell lived nearby. Owen and Mary Puttick were at Black Hall with their daughter Amy. Within the next decade the new pair on Guildford Road brought the Putticks and Standens together as neighbours.
The 1901 census used the older place-name Weavers across several households in this immediate group. The map and the later Jubilee addresses place Owen and Mary Puttick and George and Elizabeth Standen in the two new houses, while James Pannell and James Etherington occupied the neighbouring Rose Cottage property. The entries give a close picture of the people living around the Stores at the turn of the century: an agricultural labourer, a bootmaker, a carpenter and families connected through the Dependant congregation.
Owen and Mary Puttick
Owen Puttick had spent much of his working life as an agricultural labourer. In 1881 he was lodging at Black Hall with the Foster family. Felix Foster, the head of that household, was one of the early Loxwood Dependants and had kept a shop at Blackwool farther north on Guildford Road.
Mary Foster, Felix’s daughter, had followed a different working path. She entered domestic service and spent time in Lambeth before returning to Loxwood. Trade directories in 1878 and 1882 record Mary as a draper. The 1881 census places her with Hannah Osborne, another draper, close to the centre of the village. Country drapery covered cloth, haberdashery, clothing and household textiles and required regular dealings with customers, stock and accounts.
Owen and Mary married in 1885. By 1891 they were living at Black Hall with their daughter Amy. Their move to Jubilee Villas brought them back to the section of Guildford Road where members of Mary’s family and other Dependants had been involved in shopkeeping for years.
The 1901 census places Owen and Mary among the households associated with Weavers and the newly built villas. By 1911 the address was written as Jubilee Cottages. Owen was sixty-seven and still gave his occupation as farm labourer. Mary was sixty. The census counted five rooms in their house, giving a rare measure of the accommodation inside the late-Victorian villa.
Five rooms gave the couple a compact home on two floors beside the main road. Water, heating and cooking still depended on the domestic arrangements of the period: coal fires and kitchen ranges remained part of daily life, while household work required far more carrying, heating and washing by hand than later generations would experience. The census entry places Owen and Mary in that setting at the end of more than two decades of married life.
Owen died later in 1911. Mary remained within the Loxwood Dependant community until her death in 1922.
George and Elizabeth Standen
George and Elizabeth Standen occupied the neighbouring villa. George was a bootmaker, a skilled village trade recorded against his name in the 1881 census. Heavy boots were part of daily working life for agricultural labourers, carters and tradesmen, and a bootmaker kept expensive footwear in service by replacing soles and heels, repairing uppers and stitching worn leather.
Before the villas were built, George and Elizabeth lived among the households around Weavers. By 1901 the Standens and the Putticks occupied the new pair side by side. George continued to be recorded by his trade as a bootmaker.
The Standens remained at Jubilee Villas into the first years of the twentieth century. Their deaths came at Christmas 1904. George Standen died on 24 December, Christmas Eve. Elizabeth Standen died the following day, Christmas Day. Their joint funeral followed a few days later.
The Standens had lived in Loxwood for many years, and George’s bootmaking served a rural community in which working footwear needed regular repair. Their neighbours included agricultural labourers, shop workers and craftsmen from the same Dependant congregation.
The Cole family in 1911
The second Jubilee household had changed by the 1911 census. William Cole, aged forty-five, lived there with his wife Emma, aged thirty-seven, and their children. William worked as a coal porter. Their daughter Charlotte was fifteen and worked as a draper’s assistant. Irene Winifred, aged nine, was at home. Emma’s brother William Aylward, aged thirty-two, also lived in the house and worked as a general labourer. The census counted five rooms.
The ages and occupations make the house especially vivid in 1911. William and Emma were raising children while two adults in the household earned wages and Charlotte had already begun work at fifteen. Irene was still of school age. Emma’s brother William Aylward added another working adult to the five-room household, so the villa accommodated both family life and the changing pattern of village employment around the Stores.
Coal was one of the heaviest everyday goods moving through a village. It arrived in sacks and supplied domestic fires, kitchen ranges and wash coppers. A coal porter loaded, carried, stacked and delivered those sacks. The neighbouring Combination Stores traded as coal merchants during this period, while other coal yards also operated in and around Loxwood.
Emma Cole was the sister of Henry Aylward, the baker who had become managing director of Aylward, Smith & Co at the Combination Stores. Charlotte Cole’s occupation connected the household directly with the adjoining business: she worked as a draper’s assistant for Aylward, Smith & Co. At fifteen she had already entered the retail trade followed by several women within the Dependant community.
William and Emma later moved farther north along Guildford Road to Hazelwood, where William continued in the coal trade. Their former household at Jubilee Cottages had recorded a family working across coal, drapery and general labour in 1911.
The villas beside a growing business
The 1912 Ordnance Survey records Jubilee Villas in the same position on Guildford Road while the buildings beside them continued to grow. The Combination Stores had enlarged its shop and bakery, and later development added a substantial garage to the commercial property.
The villas retained their matching road frontage through these changes. Census and register entries continued to record domestic households at the address. Their residents worked in occupations that belonged to the everyday economy of the village: farming, bootmaking, coal handling, drapery and domestic work.
The proximity of the Stores shaped several of those working lives. Mary Puttick had earlier worked as a draper. Charlotte Cole entered the drapery department of Aylward, Smith & Co. Emma Cole belonged to the Aylward family. The houses carried the domestic side of a community whose shops and workplaces occupied the adjoining land.
Jubilee Villas in the twentieth century
Owen Puttick’s death in 1911 and Mary Puttick’s death in 1922 closed the long Puttick association with one of the houses. Other residents followed as the villas continued in domestic use.
The 1939 Register records Sally Mann at Jubilee Villas. She had been born in 1861 and her occupation was entered as unpaid domestic duties. The register places her in one of the same houses first shown on the 1896 Ordnance Survey, more than forty years after the pair appeared on the map. Sally Mann died in 1941.
