After his talk, Richard continued his research into the history of Southdown Estate.

Several people provided more information.

Richard has summarised his original talk and his new findings in a series of articles for the Compton & Shawford Parish Magazine.

 

The Origins of the Shawford South Down Estate – Part 1

from the Compton & Shawford Parish Magazine June 2026

In 1899 a company called the Shawford South Down Estate Limited acquired for development, 135 acres of farmland and copse between the railway and the Otterbourne Road to the south of what is now Shawford Down. The Down was to be protected from development. The cost was £12,500 – equivalent to £3 million in today’s money. Some roads were laid out and a residential development begun – although seemingly in a haphazard manner. Building has continued intermittently over the last century and a quarter and goes on today.

Who was responsible and what did they intend? Why did it turn out like it did?

The land had been owned by the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral and farmed by Edward Lyne of Compton Manor Farm. Perhaps the project was the Church’s idea. Documents show the Dean saw development as being to the ‘permanent advantage’ of the Church estate – the same owners had transferred 10 acres of land now known locally as ‘the Island’ in Shawford (just up the hill from the new railway station) for development in the 1880s.

Approximately 24 dwellings had been erected here within a few years. It may not be a coincidence that two of the ‘promoters’ of the South Down estate served the Cathedral in their professional capacities.

The small riverside hamlet of Shawford with an inn, a mill and a few dwellings along the Itchen Navigation had been transformed when the railway station opened in 1882 : the parish of Compton & Shawford had at least doubled in size since, with most of the new population in Shawford, many with work on the railway or – facilitated by the new station – in Winchester or Southampton. The Parish Council established in 1895 had built the first Parochial Hall in the county, with the local architect giving his services free. The Island was fully built and occupied. A golf club had been started on the Down. New houses were already springing up on Compton Down. Labour – including live in domestic help – was cheap and there appeared to be a ready market for large new houses, from investors and potential owner-occupiers.

Who then were the ‘promoters’ of the South Down scheme?

The Company was incorporated in August 1899 by Morgan Price and Mewburn of 33 Old Broad St in the City of London. It seems that a Thomas Morgan had contracted to buy the land in the summer of 1899. The Company was then assigned the right to acquire it, on condition that Morgan could acquire three acres of land from the Company for a ‘peppercorn’ ie. for free.

There appear to have been three prominent players, all of whom were already connected with Shawford. Thomas Morgan, 53, a timber merchant then living with his parents and sisters in Bridge Lane and who had entered into the original contract was one. John Barnes Colson, 48, the architect of the new Parish Hall and of his own house on the Island then known as Redlayne, who had a practice in Winchester, made two.

Both Morgan and Colson are commemorated by plaques in the parish church: both were churchwardens and parish councillors.  Morgan was the first Chairman):  Morgan was also the church organist and a JP. Colson would go on to co-design and superintend the construction of the ‘new’ church at Compton completed in 1905. Colson’s father (also John, a noted local architect responsible for many churches and schools in Hampshire and the designer of the building at West Downs which was the original King Alfred’s College) had acquired and apparently developed the Island land with his son. Colson junior had succeeded his father as architect to the Dean and Chapter.

The third ‘promoter’ was the solicitor Alfred Bowker, 29, recently the mayor of Winchester and now the owner of the Malms Farm on the other side of the railway from South Down. Bowker had also succeeded his father – as chapter clerk ie. solicitor – to the Dean and Chapter.

To be continued

Richard Croker

The Origins of the Southdown Estate 2

From the July 2026 Compton & Shawford Parish Magazine, the second of a series of articles based on Richard’s talk to the Local History Society

Alfred Bowker

Alfred Bowker (in mayoral robes behind speaker)
at unveiling of Alfred’s statue 1901

One of the three ‘promoters’ of the Estate, Alfred Bowker was said to move like an actor: he was tall and strongly built, and well connected (his father Frederick had been solicitor to the Tichborne family and acted on the famous case of the Tichborne claimant, a wapping butcher and fraudster by the name of Orton) and something of a polymath.

He was a sportsman – reputed to have skated from Basingstoke to the Thames on a frozen canal while a teenager – a prize winning dog breeder, and was later to become an author, artist and sculptor as well as the creator of a notable ‘Chinese’ garden at the Malms. In 1899 he had recently become a driving force behind the commission for Alfred the Great’s ‘millenary’ of the famous statue in Winchester by Hamo Thorneycroft . He was also behind the purchase of what is now River Park for the city – a public subscription paid for it, although the vendor was Alfred’s brother in law, the former local MP William Barrow Symonds. The land was – perhaps affectionately – known locally as ‘Bowker’s Bog’ : certainly extensive drainage work had to be carried out to make it fit for purpose. Bowker would go on to become mayor for a second time in 1901 and posthumously the grandfather of the actress Judy Bowker, at 18 the star of Black Beauty. She is one of the few film stars to have been born in Shawford!

The Morgan Family

It was not clear to me when I did the talk where the purchase monies for the estate had come from, but thanks to enquiries made by my neighbour Leigh Salkeld, I now know that Morgan, Colson and Bowker put up their own money as shareholders, along with Harry Merrill Colebrook , a corn merchant then living in Shawford , John James Burnett an elderly stockbroker and JP of Southampton, probably father to the surveyor and architect A A Burnett who then lived in Shawford and a further investor, the eminence grise of our story, William Carey Morgan. He was a solicitor with business in London and Calcutta and elder brother to Thomas. The Morgan family has an interesting history.

Both W C and Thomas were the grandsons of the Rev Thomas Morgan (1776-1857) a Welsh born dissenting minister who was pastor of two leading Baptist churches in Birmingham in the first half of the 19th century. He also ran a school and published tracts. He was a founder member in 1826 of the Birmingham Anti Slavery Society and a follower of the Christian missionary William Carey, the ‘Father of Modern Missions’ who had travelled to Calcutta, India in 1793 to proselytise , defying the ban on missionary activity imposed by the East India Company before 1813. Carey spent the next 40 years living in India, translating the Bible into various Indian languages and becoming Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali at Fort William College.

William Morgan (1815-1893), son of the Rev. Thomas, became a Birmingham solicitor, deputy Clerk of the Peace and following in his father’s footsteps, a prominent anti slavery activist.

Although slavery in the Empire was gradually abolished from 1834, it continued elsewhere despite opposition, much of which was led by dissenters.

William attended the Anti Slavery Convention in London in 1840 and visited Jamaica in 1866 as a representative of the British & Foreign Anti- Slavery Society. His eldest son William Carey Morgan was clearly named after the missionary – following his father into the law. Surely inspired by his namesake, he took up a partnership in Calcutta in 1872 and practised there for the next 17 years before returning to England to run the London branch of his Indian law firm. While in India he married Katharine Fowler, also from a prominent Birmingham dissenting family, and had four children, two sons who followed him into his Calcutta law firm and two daughters who would later live in Shawford.

W C Morgan – who at this time lived with his wife and children at St Albans – put up the largest share of the subscription monies for shares in Shawford South Down Estate Limited , with the Morgan family thus being the majority owners of the Company with 7,600 shares of £1 each out of £13,601. The subscription paid for the acquisition, but left little to spare. The land was duly acquired in December 1899.

By 1900 three houses were being built on numbered plots of an acre or so – Southdown House, Fairfield and Kenwyn (now the flats known as Bishop’s Retreat) although none of these was occupied by the time of the 1901 census. The enumerator simply noted there was ‘a lot of building going on’. Thomas Morgan had his three acres plus – plots 9,10 and 11 – conveyed to him, but did not build any house: the conveyance stipulated he could not build more than one house per acre.

Richard Croker

The Origins of the Shawford South Down Estate – part 3

from the Compton & Shawford Parish Magazine for August 2026

This is the third episode of a series on the History of the Shawford South Down Estate based on Richard’s talk to the Local History Society.

By 1900 the first three houses were being built on the Shawford South Down Estate.

Southdown House, a handsome ‘villa’ property, was built and financed by Francis Bascomb, a Winchester builder, who seems to have sold it when completed to C J Flight, a military tailor who had inherited a large family business on Winchester High Street. Flight’s father Frederick was at this time living in Twyford. Bascomb would go on in the next five years to build three more houses on the estate in Fairfield Road: Abbot’s Lodge, Highcroft and Hill House. 

Kenwyn was commissioned by the Revd James T. H. Du Boulay a former housemaster at Winchester College who had reputedly financed and founded the college boarding house in Edgar Road which still bears his name. Kenwyn was named for his wife’s native village in Cornwall. This house is now the flats known as Bishop’s Retreat – although Du Boulay was an ordained clergyman he never seems to have had any parish to minister too, let alone a bishopric! The Du Boulay family are another Southdown family connected with India – the Reverend’s son James became private secretary to Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy from 1910-1916.

Fairfield seems to have been built as an investment for a Mr. Stephens from Southampton. It was later extended and acquired by the Fenwick sisters who were the first occupants of Abbot’s Lodge.

We don’t yet know the terms on which any of these plots of land were sold. If the deeds can be found, these might tell us.

In 1902 the imposing house now known as Southdown Court was built for a Mr. Hepherd, a Southampton solicitor who was one of the name partners in Hepherd, Winstanley & Pugh (the family firm of Nigel Pugh of this parish) which firm became part of Bond Pearce in 1998.

In 1903 there appears to have been an auction on the Estate – something similar had happened at the Bridge Hotel in Shawford in 1887 shortly after the Island development commenced. Such auctions were typically advertised as the last chance to acquire development plots on advantageous terms! A document produced to support it shows all the numbered plots of an acre or so to the north and east of Southdown Road down to what is now Avonmore as having been ‘sold’. This shows buildings only at Southdown Court, Southdown House and Kenwyn. None of these then empty plots saw any building activity in the next decade – some were still empty after WW2 – and it must be doubted whether they had truly been ‘sold’, or were simply being retained by the Company. Another plot is marked as ‘reserved’.

By 1908 Alfred Bowker’s sister Edith had built Colleton (now Sparrowgrove) – adjacent to her brother’s Malms property across the railway – for her own occupation following her fathers death and the sale of his estate at Lankhills. Her brother Alfred had built a house on the Main Road – now Silkstead Cottage – around the same time but, having no suitable accommodation at the Malms, seems to have lived with his sister henceforward. Miss Bowker had no made up road by which to access her property, as the then gravelled Southdown Road stopped well before Crossway.

With the exception of the houses in Fairfield Road developed by Bascomb immediately following the auction the only activity on the estate was further building on the east side of the Otterbourne Road and in what would become Grove Road. These houses included a series of semis designed by Colson which seem to have been buy to let properties commissioned by miscellaneous investors – including the Bowker family. No more houses than those already mentioned in the ‘interior’ of the estate were constructed until 1909, which means only 8 houses in total were constructed on Southdown and Fairfield Roads in the first 10 years of the project, on perhaps 8 -10 acres of land. It remains a puzzle why development was so slow, compared for example with the Island or the smaller area developed on Compton Down at the eastern end of Hurdle Way around the turn of the century. Based on what we know of other transactions locally the land for these houses would make no more than £250 an acre. Assuming that only any land really sold was built on, and even taking into account a number of successful sales adjoining the Otterbourne Road, it seems unlikely that these in total would give the original investors any profit – let alone their money back – on their £12,500! Perhaps they were playing a longer game?

As ever, researches continue. Please get in touch [via the contact form] if you have any information you think might be of interest.

Richard Croker