Pond Cottage
Pond Cottage was built in 1848 as two rented homes under one roof, it replaced Pond Tree House, an older house that stood farther back behind the pond. Pond Tree House and the land on which the Victorian cottages were built belonged to property managed for Loxwood Chapel.
Loxwood’s local place of worship began with a licence issued in 1404 by Robert Rede, Bishop of Chichester. A chapel of ease allowed villagers to attend services closer to home while remaining part of the parish of Wisborough Green. The chapel trustees later held houses and land whose rents helped pay for the chapel and its minister. By 1531 their property included a holding called Cokkes.
A lease of 1698 describes Cokkes as a house and garden of about half an acre beside Loxwood Common, with two additional small pieces of enclosed land. Cokkes was the name of the holding; the house behind the pond is recorded much later as Pond Tree House. Pond Tree House is believed to have dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
From Cokkes to Pond Tree House
When Loxwood Common was enclosed in 1830, old rights to use the common were exchanged for fixed plots of land. The chapel trustees received an allotment for rights attached to their two houses and three acres in Loxwood Street. Henry Frederick Napper, from a family long associated with the chapel trust, described what happened in a newspaper account published in 1883: the old houses on Cokkes stood behind the pond, were pulled down, and two new cottages were built nearer the water on part of the allotted land.
The 1841 census supplies the name Pond Tree House for the older property. Within a few years the trustees were considering its replacement. On 7 July 1845 they ordered an estimate for taking down the occupied cottage and building another to an agreed plan. The tenants were to be given notice, and timber from the chapel property was offered to W. Child of Slinfold while useful material from the old premises was kept for the rebuilding project.
Building Pond Cottage
On 13 April 1846 the trustees asked Jesse Hawkins, a local builder, to estimate the cost of two cottages on the chapel property and to allow for suitable old materials. A further meeting on 16 April 1847 asked Hawkins to compare the cost of a single dwelling with a cottage divided into two tenements. In these records a tenement meant one rented home within the building.
The decisive meeting took place on 31 August 1847 at the house of John Hemming in Loxwood. Dr Thornton, Vicar of Wisborough Green, attended and stated his intention, with the trustees’ sanction, to build ‘a Cottage with two tenements’ in the field adjoining the Chapel Pond. The trustees gave their full consent and allowed the materials lying on the old premises to be used in the work. Construction followed around 1848, and some material from Pond Tree House may have been reused in the new cottages.
The first households at Pond House
By census night on 30 March 1851 the new building was occupied and recorded as Pond House, Loxwood, with a first and second tenement. Benjamin Foster, aged seventy-two, lived in the first with his wife Susan, aged sixty-seven. The census described Benjamin as a ‘pauper agricultural labourer’, the official wording used for someone receiving poor relief after a working life in agriculture. Susan worked as a charwoman, taking paid cleaning and domestic work. Benjamin had been born at Wisborough Green and Susan at Storrington.
Robert Hunt occupied the second tenement with his wife Anne and their six-month-old son Henry. Robert, aged forty-two, was a gentleman’s servant and had been born at Shere in Surrey. Anne, aged forty-one, came from Chelsea, and their baby Henry had been born locally at Wisborough Green.
On 14 December 1877 the chapel trustees ordered a well to be dug at the cottages then occupied by the Hunt and Tickner households. They also authorised repairs to the shed and gatepost at Tickner’s cottage. The accounts approved on 12 April 1878 recorded £20 18s 3d for the well and associated work. Drinking, cooking, washing and laundry still began with water raised and carried by hand.
The Cokelers
John Sirgood, a Gloucestershire shoemaker and preacher, had arrived in Loxwood with his wife Harriet in 1850. His followers called themselves the Dependant Brethren; their neighbours commonly called them the Cokelers. Later local writers connected that nickname with the old place-name Cokkes beside the pond.
The Brethren developed cooperative businesses in which women took prominent roles as shop managers, and by 1885 the Combination Stores stood beside the pond. A photograph dated 1909 catches a quieter moment: a group of children sit together on the grassy bank of the pond below the stores.
The Brethren later used Aylward, Smith & Co to manage their commercial interests. In March 1916 the chapel trustees sold their remaining property by auction, and Aylward, Smith & Co bought the pond, Cokkes and Pond Cottages for £375.
Pond Cottages in 1923
A newspaper sale notice from October 1923 gives an unusually detailed glimpse inside Pond Cottages. Mrs S. Lipscombe was giving up housekeeping, and John Churchman & Sons advertised her furniture and effects for sale on the premises. The rooms held chair bedsteads, a chest of drawers, tables, Windsor chairs, a substantial oak corner cupboard, a couch, a sewing machine, a copper warming pan, a mangle and a Valor Perfection cooking stove.
Outside stood a spring van and four-wheel chaise with a corn bin, carpenters’ tools and garden tools. The auction began at one o’clock on Monday 22 October 1923.
Burnleigh Guest House & Pond Cottages
The pond also served as a livestock watering place. The main photograph of this article dated around 1939, records cattle standing in the shallow water at its edge. Behind them are Pond Cottages, and beside the road is a sign reading ‘Burnleigh Guest House’, with what appears to be an arrow beneath the wording. The sign directed visitors farther along Station Road. Burnleigh Guest House stood at the junction of Station Road and Spy Lane, the property is now known as Chapel House.
There was a connection between the two properties through the Dependant Brethren. Aylward, Smith & Co the owners of Pond Cottages. Bessie Hempstead worked for the company and became company secretary and a director in 1939. A telephone notice dated 25 April 1931 lists B. W. Hempstead at Burnleigh with the number Loxwood 55, and by 1938 Kelly’s Directory advertised ‘Burnleigh Guest House (Mrs Hempstead)’ as a private hotel, then using telephone number 255.
The national 1939 Register was taken on 29 September, less than a month after Britain entered the Second World War. Burnleigh Guest House is recorded separately from Pond Cottages as schedule 120 on Station Road. Among those staying there were Sarah Palmer, her granddaughter Annie Mackie, Annie’s daughter Doris Cox, and Doris’s sons Michael and Graham Cox. Annie Kennard was also living at Burnleigh and was managing the guest house. Michael Cox later recalled his family’s time there during the war; his father, Edward Cox, remained at the family home in London because of his work.
The two Pond Cottages remained private homes. In the 1939 Register No. 11 was occupied by Matilda and Arthur Walters, while Ephraim and Harriet Boxall lived at No. 12. Harriet Boxall was probably the woman standing in the doorway in the photograph.
Vera Wait, born in 1927, later recalled working at Burnleigh. She entered domestic service at fourteen in 1942, first as an under-housemaid at Lakers Lodge for four shillings a week. After eighteen months she moved to Burnleigh to work for Mrs Kennard, again living in the house, and her weekly wage rose to £1.
The pond itself reached the newspapers after the war. On 11 April 1947 the West Sussex County Times carried the headline ‘Money in the Village Pond’. Small goldfish had been kept in the water for years and had multiplied until, according to the report, hundreds of different sizes were swimming there. Londoners discovered the stock and began arriving by car with nets for what the newspaper called ‘a day’s profitable fishing’.
The attraction was the price of goldfish in post-war London. Common varieties were selling for 7s 6d to 30s each, while before the war a bowl containing fish could be bought for sixpence. Special varieties could command six to ten guineas a pair.
Swimming and skating
By the 1950s villagers were using the pond for swimming. The Francis Frith photographic archive catalogues a Loxwood image from about 1955 simply as Swimming Pool. Its description identifies the pond beside the shops and records changing tents for bathers, with geese on the bank. Another photograph of the Combination Stores from about 1950 describes a woman waiting beside the pond after returning from the swimming area.
Winter could bring an entirely different scene. A later memory preserved in the Francis Frith Collection recalls villagers skating when the pond froze, while children gathered at the edge and watched the ice carefully for cracks. In summer there were swimmers and changing tents; when a hard winter froze the pond, there were skates on the ice. Beside them through it all stood Pond Cottage.
