Parkfield Heritage

Parkfield House was built about 1820 as indicated in a report from Historic England and is shown on the tithe map of 1840. It was built as a large house at the north end of Paignton seafront with up to 101/2 acres of land with lawns, a walled kitchen garden, garden house, pasturage, stables, carriage room and other outbuildings. The earliest owner found is Richard Hunt, a cider merchant, who is listed on the tithes as the owner of over forty plots of land and houses, including Parkfield although there is no evidence he ever lived there. Richard Hunt placed a number of newspaper adverts in the 1830’s for two large cottages to let a few minutes from the sea which would probably have been Parkfield. Hunt’s cider business is still trading at Stoke Gabriel today. The second house, where you now enter the building was probably built as a major extension to the original. Proof is hard to find – the Land Registry does not have records that old!

The last private residents to live at Parkfield were Walter Johnson Cooper, the inventor of slipway (Portland) cement, who moved into Parkfield about 1925 with his wife Mary Ann Cooper and their two daughters Annie Marjorie Ellen Cooper and Doris Joan Cooper from their home in South Wales.

An extract from the Vale of Glamorgan website – History of Cosmeston includes an account relating to Walter Johnson Cooper owner of the Portland (later Blue Circle) cement works. He named three of the works’ steam engines Annie, Marjorie and Doris after his wife and two daughters. After the quarry closed in 1969 two of the engines were refurbished and sold to two local light railway tourist companies. They were later bought by Whipsnade Safari Park where they were renamed Victor and Hector. (Source is Paignton History Group website.)

In 1928 the Coopers got a telephone with the number 5620. Walter Cooper died at Parkfield in 1928 only three years after moving there. At this point Miss Marjorie (as she was known to later generations) gave up her teaching job in The Royal School for Girls in Bath (qualified by her Mathematics Degree at Cambridge University in 1916-18) at the end of the Christmas term and returned to live with her mother and sister. Mrs Mary Ann Cooper died in 1942. Doris died at Parkfield in 1965 and Miss Marjorie in the Mount Olivet, Paignton, nursing home in 1991 aged 96, and are buried in Paignton cemetery.

During WW2, American troops were billeted at Parkfield and a war department broad arrow can still be seen in the Esplanade Road wall. While the Americans were billeted in Parkfield, the Cooper sisters became a bit fed up of their boasting about everything in America was bigger & better. So for breakfast one morning they recovered an ostrich egg from the display cabinets in the Library (the cabinets are still there) & warmed it up and then served it up to the Americans in WW2 – “we have big eggs here too!”

A small look at their life at Parkfield from people that knew Miss Marjorie. (Stephen Leach was requested by the Bishop of Exeter to become Vicar of Paignton, St John’s, St Andrew’s and St. Boniface – St. Michael’s Church having recently been closed.

At the beginning of our time here Stephen remembers Miss Cooper making her Sunday Communion at the 8 o’clock service to which we are told she drove in an Austin 7! Later on he took the Sacrament to her at home and Boris, by then her general factotum, would open the big gates in Lower Polsham Road. Her previous gardener and handyman was Edward Wills who by then was living at Hydrina, opposite the gates.

I (Susan, the Vicar’s wife) began to visit Miss Cooper around 1983, but I ‘popped in’ regularly, cycling down and always entering by a gate, now blocked, from the seafront and always going to the unlocked kitchen door. The kitchen was basic with huge black range (still in situ) and a ‘safe’ with metal mesh sides for perishables! I once offered to take around a Christmas meal which she politely declined as she had a tin of corned beef!

If she wasn’t in the kitchen I found her in the vegetable patch, with Boris, in the oldest Burberry raincoat ever. Or, to her huge delight in the Parks department greenhouses the Council had built there. She was such a country woman, with great horticultural knowledge. How proud she was of Torbay’s wins at the Chelsea Flower Show. I would presume Torbay Council’s small purchase price for such an estate was due to this. To hear that Miss Cooper left the estate for children is nonsense! The grounds were also well managed in her day plus regular building maintenance.

My only photograph of her is around 1985 with my young children, who she isn’t looking at! We had visited, after school to see the weaver birds’ nests and the ostrich eggs, brought back by her Father when he was working abroad as one of the founders of Blue Circle Cement. They enjoyed their visit

Miss Cooper didn’t talk much about herself but I did know that she obtained a degree in Mathematics from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1916 (unconfirmed), which was quite something for a young woman in the early 1900s.

One day, when I was visiting, she gave me the stoneware containers from when she and her late sister, Doris, kept hens! I’ve since returned them to the house! I needed a bird cage in 1987 for Hannah’s fancy dress and knew where I would find one! “Of course my dear” Miss Cooper said and we found one in the stable block. She was thrilled Hannah won, when Barbara Windsor came to open the Parish Church Fayre.

Eventually living alone, although with regular, non-residential care, became too much and Miss Cooper moved to Mount Olivet, where my husband took her communion, I still biked there, and where she died peacefully. Before the days of glossy funeral brochures I actually typed the skin for her service sheet!

Summing A. Marjorie Cooper up, I would say she was a lovely, interested and interesting Christian gentlewoman whom I looked forward to seeing although, as I told her, I found the huge carved bear in the entrance very scary!! She didn’t! I wonder what happened to it!?”)

Many current and previous Paignton residents remember Miss Cooper – driving her car into town, fighting to stop Parkfield House being demolished and rebuilt as a conference centre, being a regular worshipper at St. John’s Parish Church, who were the recipient of a significant gift in her will.

In 1921 Margaret Annie Huxley a 71 year old widow of London was living there with two of her daughters Mildred and Enid and two of the grandchildren were with them. They had one general servant, Emma Cook aged 60. She had earlier lived in Torquay where her husband, James Usher Huxley, worked as a doctor and a surgeon. The 1901 census shows them living there with five of their children and their servants being a governess, a nurse, an under nurse, a cook, a housemaid, a kitchen maid, a footman and a butler. In July 1922 Mrs Huxley held a garden fete at Parkfield that was opened by Lady Churston in aid of the Cripple’s Home of the Waifs and Strays Society. There were stalls, a concert, a palmist and maypole dancing.

In September 1913 Hannah Cooke, wife of the late Alfred Cooke, came from Leeds to Paignton for health reasons and lived in Parkfield but was only there a short time as she died the following year. Uncertain who lived there next but the 1919 Devon and Cornwall street directory names Chas Whitley of Parkfield, Paignton.

W A Pritchard (somewhat speculative)

The 1911 census shows just three people at Parkfield: Sarah Coney a housekeeper, her husband Samuel Coney a caretaker and Ethel Foot a parlour maid. Samuel Coney had joined the Royal Navy in 1883 at the age of 15 with his previous occupation given as errand boy.
Mr. Pritchard is identified as the “owner” in 1911/12 Directory of Torbay – not yet proven. He is also on the Torbay Register of Electors for 1913. Initial searches suggest that he was born in September 1876 in Newport, Monmouthshire. In the 1911 census he was living as Head of Household in Marylebone, aged 34, married but with no wife living with him.
The first 20th century residents of Parkfield were Thomas Moore, a 44 year old barrister from Burnley, his wife Lillian Margaret and their 10 year old son John who moved there in the late 1890’s. Their servants were Livinia Campion a parlour maid, Lucy Sharp a housemaid, Alice Dare a maid and Fanny Knapman a cook. By 1910 Lilian had moved to Clifton and in October she came by train on a visit to Paignton. She went up Breakneck Hill to pick blackberries on the clifftop when she slipped and fell down the cliffs onto Goodrington beach, sustaining serious injuries from which she eventually recovered. Shortly after they all moved to Bournemouth.

The previous family to live at Parkfield was that of Robert Sorton Parry, a London businessman who moved there in 1888. The 1891 census shows him living at Parkfield with his sister Mary and three servants: a cook and two domestic servants. In September 1890 he opened Parkfield to the YMCA for an all-day event for 150 members with tea being served in a large tent. At Christmas in 1881 he gave toys and fruit to every child in the Totnes Union Workhouse. Robert died at Parkfield in December 1895.

Somewhere around the mid 1870’s the well-known businessman Arthur Hyde Dendy moved into Parkfield with his wife Eliza and two servants. In 1877 he added two stone gate pillars to the new Esplanade Road entrance that had come from the old Torbay Alehouse that stood on the seafront. He had many business interests including building Paignton and Teignmouth piers, renting out bathing machines, owned two conservative newspapers, owned Gerston and Esplanade hotels, the Bijou Theatre, cycle track, steam launches plying between Torquay and Paignton pier, buses running between Paignton and Torquay, several other businesses and properties.

In 1884 he was summoned to court in Torquay on a charge of overcrowding his steam launch, Kelpie, that had 31 passengers on board when it was only licensed for 12. In defence it was stated that there was a long queue of visitors on Torquay pier that just pushed past the young person seeing them on and the ship’s master got going as soon as he was able to stop more getting on. Mr. Dendy was fined £10 and the ship’s master was fined 10/-.

He died at Parkfield House in 1886 at the age of 65. The funeral procession of 30 carriages left Parkfield for Torquay cemetery for his remains to be put into the same vault as his only daughter who had died a few years earlier. Mrs. Dendy died the following year.

The previous resident of Parkfield was Janet Belfield, the wife of the Reverend Finney Belfield who died in 1858. She had moved to Parkfield by 1856 from their family home of Primley House which was later the home of Herbert Whitley who founded Paignton Zoo. Janet Belfield lived at Parkfield with five servants: a housemaid, a lady’s maid, a cook, a groom and a general servant. In the early 1870’s she moved to Middle Park, which is a smaller property just behind Parkfield, where she lived until her death in 1879.

The earliest resident of Parkfield that has been found is Shepheard Scarbrough, a solicitor, who was living there with his wife and young family before 1850. They had two servants; a housemaid Eliza Hall age 21 and a general servant Elizabeth Baker age 33. As a solicitor he was instrumental in getting a bill through Parliament for the building of the new Paignton harbour in 1839.

He died in September 1852, age 45, in a boating accident as detailed in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette under the heading MELANCHOLY OCCURRENCE which stated that he went out in a boat from Paignton harbour with the deputy harbour-master, Mr. Cawley, and two friends in another boat to sail to Dartmouth. Later Mr. Scarbrough and Mr. Cawley sailed back to Paignton but they never made it. The following day some boards from Mr. Cawley’s boat were found on Paignton beach and a search found several other pieces of the boat and a boot belonging to Mr. Scarbrough but no bodies were found.

An extract from the local paper in 1853 summarised:

To be sold at Public Auction by Mr. John R.K. Tozer at Hearder’s Hotel, in Torquay, on Monday 23rd May 1853 at Three o’Clock in the afternoon. PARKFIELD, situated at Paignton, about 2 ½ miles from Torquay Railway Station. Lately the residence of Shepeard Scarbrough, deceased. It consist of an excellent Family House, beautifully situated near the Beach, commanding extensive sea & land views. It contains 3 sitting-rooms, 7 bed-rooms, 2 kitchens, and all convenient and necessary domestic offices. The Grounds include a spacious lawn, fruit & kitchen gardens, a green-house, a hot-house, a coach house and stables, and convenient enclosures of pasturage & tillage land, about 10 ½ acres and abundantly supplied with water.