Miss Northway and her boarding house at 52 and 53 Marina

I bought in an old town Hastings shop an old postcard for its view of Marina, looking westward, which states it was taken from St Leonards Pier. This was opposite 53 Marina. The image side states ‘32424. ST LEONARDS: WEST MARINA, FROM PIER.’ A plaque giving information on the pier (which was removed in 1952) is placed next to the where a slope leads down from the upper to the lower promenade, close to the Royal Victoria Hotel. Here it is.

It was only when I got home that I saw, on the other side, the following in red:

High Class Apartment House; opposite the Pier; finest position. Facing Sea. Miss Northway, Hertford House, 53, Marina, St Leonards-on-Sea.

The postcard was in the Celesque Series, published by the Photochrom Co. Ltd. of London and Detroit. I guessed that the postcard had already existed, and that the landlady ordered a number of them which would have that wording. Ironically, the postcard does not show her house ! Presumably they did not have a postcard including her part of Marina.

I wanted to date it, and to identify Miss Northway. I found rather more than I expected, although interpretation is difficult. The Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 6 November 1909, reported on a planning application:

Alterations at Nos. 52 and 53, Marina; Miss M. Northway, owner; Mr H. Ward, architect.

Henry Ward was based in Hastings, and is perhaps best known for the Gothic style former town hall in the centre of Hastings and the Plummer and Roddis department store, later Debenhams. The planning application is at The Keep, Falmer, as DH/C/6/1/7826, which is catalogued as ‘Conway Court, 52/53, MARINA. Alterations. Note: WAS NO. 52 MARINA. SEE 53 MARINA. (Cromwell Hotel late).’ So it seems that no. 53 had previously been the Cromwell Hotel, and together the two houses were called Conway Court.

The weekly issues of the Hastings and St Leonards Advertiser for 1907 and 1908 list the occupants of Hertford House, mostly women. Sometimes we are even told which towns they came from. In the 12 December 1907 issue, for example, we are told that seven adults, all except one from London (the exception being from Hove) were staying, together with ‘Master Anthony.’ Besides Anthony, Mr Milton was the only male guest. Another one picked at random listed guests from Paris, Edinburgh, Croydon and London. An unnamed maid was accompanying a Mrs Charles Reynolds and her two sons, of Cheadle-Hulme, Lancashire.

Occasionally Hertford House advertised. Below is a small advert from the 31 October 1907 issue of the Advertiser. It is reassuring to know that the sanitary arrangements were perfect !

The Hastings Observer, 14 May 1910, stated that Northway and Walker at 53 Marina were new telephone subscribers, no. 954 on the local exchange.

The Hastings Observer, 14 March 1914, has an account of an examination for bankruptcy, titled ‘UNFORTUNATE BOARDING-HOUSE KEEPERS’. Here is the full story:

Mary Drew Northway, Frank Ernest Walker, and Mary Margaret Walker, trading as Northway and Walker, boarding-house keepers, of 52 and 53 Marina, St Leonards-on-Sea, appeared to their public examination.

The chief evidence was given by Miss Northway. The liabilities amounted to £957 13s 11d, and the assets were estimated to produce £672 1s 7d, a deficiency of £285 12s 4d. The business was established in 1907, when one house was taken. In October, 1909, the adjoining house was taken. The business did not prove very successful, and for two years two of the debtors had borrowed from moneylenders without the knowledge of Mary Margaret Walker, in order to keep the business going. In January last execution was levied by a moneylender, and this led to the filing of the petition. There was £342 owing to eight moneylenders. Recently considerable expense had been entailed by repairs. The reasons given for the insolvency was interest on borrowed money, lack of working capital, and expenses of repairs to the premises which they were bound to do under the terms of the lease. The other debtors formally confirmed the evidence of Miss Northway.

The examination was adjourned for formal closing.

So what was the date of the postcard ? I already had some idea of the date. Postcards with a vertical line down the middle between the message and the address could only be used from 1902. This postcard was never posted, but within a printed outline box is “Affix 1/2d Stamp Inland/ 1d Stamp Foreign”, and the inland rate went up in 1918 to a penny.

The information in the newspaper account meant that the postcard dated from 1907 to 1909, as the original house, no. 53, was joined then by no. 52.  A notice in the London Gazette stated that the two women were spinsters, while a later notice, in the 18 September 1914 issue, stated that 3s in the £ in had been paid out to creditors as ‘first or final dividends’: 15% of their debts. I wanted to know more, such as how the Northways and the Walkers were connected.

I looked in the April 1911 census for 52 and 53 Marina. There was a single entry for what was stated to be a 32-room property, with 31 occupants. It began with:

Mary Northway, head, 58, single, boarding house keeper, employer, born Devon, Tavistock

Mary Walker, niece, 26, single, boarding house keeper, born Devon, Exeter

Frank Walker, boarder, 63, married 28 years, 3 children, all still alive, private means, born Staffs Wolverhampton

Ann Walker, boarder, 56, married, born Devon, Tavistock

So Mary Northway, her niece, and her brother in law were running the business, and the niece had been kept in ignorance that the business was in a bad way.

Next in the census were the seven members of the Inskipp family, apparently occupying their own apartment, as Arthur Russell Inskipp, 60, Clerk to the Board of Guardians [which included the workhouse], was another household ‘head’. This was followed by 16 boarders (all single or widowed, suggesting small rooms with single beds), all living on private means, or no occupation, except for a publican and a musical composer. Then there was the cook, the housemaid, and two waiters, these being young men from Austria and Switzerland.

Mary Drew Northway was the daughter of William Northway, an innkeeper. In the 1861 census in Tavistock, when she was 8, her mother Mary Williams Northway was a 37-year-old widow running the Queen’s Head. The 1881 census shows the mother still running the Queens Head Hotel, with daughters Mary D., 28, and Ann, 26, and visitor J.E. Walker, 32, merchant, born Staffordshire Wolverhampton. J.E. was an error for F.E., and he married Ann Northway a year later at the parish church. Mary was still with her mother in the 1891 census, and her mother died in 1897. I’m not sure what she was doing until her arrival in St Leonards a decade later.

The 1914 electoral register for lodgers on Marina lists a little detail on the Walker household. Miss Northway of 53 Marina was letting to her brother in law one furnished room at the back of the third floor. Not much space for the couple, and puzzling, unless it was a legal trick to enable him to have the vote.

By 1915 they had moved on, as the Hastings Observer, 6 November 1915, reported on another planning application for alterations at nos. 52 and 53 Marina, with the owners Sir Henry S. Lunn and Mr W. Holdsworth Lunn and Messrs. G. Corderoy and Co. the surveyors. This application, DH/C/6/1/8466, is also indexed as Conway Court in The Keep’s catalogue.

The Hastings Observer, 25 March 1916, stated that Sir Henry Lunn was taking over the Sussex Hotel at 110 Marina, and already owned the Cromwell on the Marina, and the Albany at Robertson Terrace. He was advertising St Leonards and Hastings as the English Biarritz. It did not work out well – opening resort hotels in wartime rarely does. Lunn was the founder of what is now Lunn Poly, the travel agency.

In the 1921 census at 12a Royal Terrace, stated to have 6 rooms, we have Frank E. Walker, 73, hardware merchant retired, his wife Anne, 65, boarder Frances R. Thompson, 45, confectioner, an employer at 7 Royal Victoria Buildings, and sister in law Mary Northway, 68, performing home duties. Therefore in the 1911 census Ann, Frank Walker’s wife, was sister to Mary Northway. Royal Terrace is now Terrace Road, to the north of Warrior Square.

Frank Walker died in 1922, with his widow executrix to his £626 estate. In the 1931 electoral register for St Mary Magdalen ward, occupying the 1^st and 2^nd floors of 12 Royal Terrace, was Mary Margaret Walker, Anne Walker and Mary Drew Northway. A separate household was listed for the ground floor. Anne the widow died in 1937.

Northway died in 1939 at Hastings, with, in September 1939, the niece living at 12a as an apartment house keeper. She died in 1963 at a nursing home in Dunclutha Road.  As for nos. 52 and 53, planning applications on the Hastings council portal show that it’s still called Conway Court, formerly the Cromwell Hotel, and has been divided into flats, as The Colonnade, 51-53 Marina.