Sunday 2 September 2018

Thomas Evans Rees and his lease from the Bush Estate

As I mentioned at the end of the last posting, Thomas Rees Evans was a shipwright, which meant he was very skilled in the use and working of wood, so when he took on the lease of one of the first building plots on the eastern extension of North Street, he had access to the materials, the connections and skills to undertake his own home build.

The lease (number 247 in the estate rental book), was dated 8th August 1864 and was to run from Lady Day 1864, for 60 years, expiring on Lady Day 1924. Lady Day was one of the rental quarter days and was also known as the feast of the Annunciation. It is the 25 March.

The plot that he had leased was one of the first sites let on an extension to North Street. It was on the south side of the road, immediately east of the point where the road kinked slightly towards the north. The plot was 30 feet wide (east to west) and 120 feet long (north to south). The tenant had to build a house on the north end of the plot, facing the road, to a plan provided by the lessor (the Bush Estate). The annual rent was to be £1/10/-, payable quarterly.

The cottage had to be built to a single storey, four room design, with the front door only slightly recessed from the pavement.
Fig.1

There was a gap between No. 30 and the house next west on the south side of the street, No. 28. This was to provide space for a road - to be known as Water Street - that would have linked North Street to Albany Street, to the south. 

In Fig.1, the gap between No. 28 and No. 30 was intended to be this road. This land was later divided between the two properties and, as if giving a nod to the origins of the vacant plots, a public footpath was established on the land between, running down to Albany Terrace.

Thomas Evans Rees built his house according to the Bush Estate's recommended plan. This was four roughly equal, squarish rooms, with a corridor or passage running from the front door, through the single-storey cottage, to the door leading to the long garden with its stone built privy at the bottom. An approximate plan of the house is shown in Fig. 2


House Plan
Fig. 2
During the same year, 1864, Thomas's neighbours were George Cundi, a rigger, who was granted a similar lease for No. 28, to the west of Water Street and to the east of Thomas,  Robert Chittock, a messenger in the dockyard, had a lease for No. 32.

The house at No. 30 benefited from a high standard of workmanship and this is likely to have been the work of Thomas and his work colleagues. Much of the timber within the house came from the dockyard and good use was made of it!

The lease that Thomas had taken on was very specific in what the landlord required of the tenant.


  • The lease was for a term of sixty years and at the end of this period, the tenant would be responsible for leaving the premise in good repair.
  • A house, to a specific design and of good quality had to be built on the plot within six months of the lease being signed. The landlord's agent would check that the building was built to a good standard.
  • If the lessee wished to alter or add to the buildings on the plot, then he first had to seek the approval, in writing, of the agent.
  • Once every three years the lessee had to paint, in oil paint,  and with two coats, all the exterior woodwork and metal work to a good standard and at his own cost.
  • Likewise, every seven years, internal walls etc had to be painted (with two coats of oil paint) or papered, to a good standard.
  • The agent would check on the condition and maintenance of the house by visiting the premises twice each year. The agent could ask for works to be carried out to rectify any deficiencies in maintenance at the lessee's expense.
  • The landlord or his workers had a right of access over the property to make repairs to a neighbouring property.
  • Any soil or gravel dug up at the premises had to be removed to a location of the landlord's choice.
  • The tenant had to make sure that the property was insured against fire each year.
  • The lessee was not allowed to engage in any noisy or disturbing activity on the premises.
  • The lessee could not assign the tenancy within five years of the end of the term of the tenancy. Any assignment that was made prior to this had to be documented to the landlord within three months of the assignment.
Many of the above conditions were standard terms but nowadays some seem rather heavy-handed, particularly those relating to the building of the house on the plot leased.

When a lessee assigned a tenancy to another person this meant that he  passed the property to the ownership of the new person under the same terms as agreed when the tenancy was first taken out. This meant that the tenancy could be "sold" on to another party or left as part of the lessees estate in a will, provided that the terms of the tenancy were met and that the landlord received all documentation showing what had occurred. This information was then written into the landlord's book of leases.

Thomas built his house, and in one of those rare serendipitous occasions a later buyer, peeling flaking paint from just inside the front door noticed a signature beneath what seemed to be old wallpaper paste. It seemed to be Thomas Evans Rees's signature. As was the custom among painters and decorators, he had signed the plastered wall before papering it. A tangible link to the man who first built the house in about 1864/5, over a century and a half ago.

Fig. 3 - Thomas's signature from the lease.


Fig. 4 - Signature on wall inside front door - with and without enhancement


In the next installment, I will reveal what became of Thomas and his family, but right now I must give thank the archivists at Pembrokeshire Archives who care for the wonderful Bush Estate documents and manuscripts. A true gem of a collection that has been little explored by the public.











Friday 13 July 2018

Thomas Evans Rees and the The Little Place in PD






In the context of the parish of St. Mary’s, Pembroke, in West Wales, 30 North Street, Bufferland, Pembroke Dock is not a particularly old house. Nonetheless it encapsulates part of the story of the new town of Pater, or Pembroke Dock as it soon became known, from the middle of the 19th Century until today.
On 8 August 1864, Thomas Evans Rees, shipwright, of Pembroke Dock took out a 60 year lease on a plot of land on the south side of North Street, Bufferland, a new suburb of the burgeoning town.
Ordnance Survey map for Bufferland, Pembroke Dock laid over an extract from  Bush Estate Map book c1830now in Pembrokeshire Archives.

A closer view of Bufferland, Pembroke Dock, in about 1850
The western end of North Street had been laid out across some of the fields of Hill Farm from about 1840, and from 1864 The Bush Estate leased out further plots of land in what had formally been  a field on the land of  Hill Farm overlooking the Pembroke River.
Who was Thomas Evans Rees? First, let us look at his father.

His father was Daniel Rees, a master watchmaker, born in about 1806 in Narberth. Daniel’s wife was Jane Evans, of Haverfordwest, and it is likely that Thomas gained his middle name of Evans from his mother’s maiden name – a tradition that persisted amongst many families at this time.

In 1841 Daniel Rees and his family lived in a house at the southern end of Pembroke Street, number 22. He appears in the Pigot and Co. directory for 1844 as a watchmaker. In 1851, Daniel is still in Pembroke Street, but by 1861 he seems to have moved his home to the street parallel and next west to Pembroke Street  – Market Street. In the directory he is referred to as David Rees, but the 1861 census for the town shows him occupying premises next to the Farmers Arms in Market Street, living with his wife, daughter and grand-daughter. In 1868 Daniel (aka Daniel M Rees) was still practising his trade as a watchmaker,  but, according to Slater’s directory for that year, he had returned to Pembroke Street. He died in the summer of 1870 and was buried on 20 June. His grave is recorded as that of David Morgan Rees, watchmaker.

Daniel, as a clock and watchmaker,  was involved in the installation of the Clock in the tower of St John’s Church in Pembroke Dock in March 1865. The local press announced the plans in October 1864 saying that the clock “when completed will be a very great boon to the inhabitants of the town.”

St John's Church, Pembroke Dock showing the clock installed in 1865 by Daniel Rees.

The installation of the clock was reported in the Pembrokeshire Herald and General Advertiser for 17 March 1865.

Thomas Evans Rees was Daniel and Jane’s second child. The oldest child was William Humphreys Rees, born in Narberth in 1829, who disappears from the family home after 1841, probably joining the Royal Engineers in 1850. Another brother of Thomas Evans was James Valentine Rees, born in Milford in 1833. The youngest of his siblings was a sister, Arabella Esther Rees, born in Pembroke Dock in about 1836.  Thomas Evans Rees was baptised in Tenby on 23 March 1831.

By 1851, still living in the family home, Thomas Evans was an apprentice shipwright, working in The Royal Dockyard Pembroke. On the 13 March 1858 he married Bridget Day. Bridget had been born in Ireland in about 1833. They were married in St John’s Church, Pembroke Dock. When the census enumerator called,  for the census of 1861, they were visiting their friends, George and Jane Sutton in Laws Street, Pembroke Dock. George, like Thomas Evans, was a shipwright, but much older than both his Irish wife Jane and her friend Bridget. Thomas George Rees - Thomas Evans’ and Bridget’s first child - was 1 year of age and Bridget and Thomas Evans may well have been showing him off to their friends for the first time. 
It seems as though the relationship between these two families developed further as one of Thomas Evans' later children’s mother seems to have had the surname Sutton, not Day.
The dockyard at Pembroke Dock, in the 1860’s, had for a while, an uncertain future. The era of the wooden sailing ship as a vessel of war was ending, and as Pembroke was distant from other centres of production, some in high office wished to see the place closed. However, in the end, it was decided to modernise the dockyard to build the new iron, steam powered ships. 

Consequently, new steam mills and forges had to be built and working techniques adapted to metal. A by-product of this was that large stocks of timber, intended for wooden ships, lay surplus to requirements over most of the area of the yard. There were concerns at government level that all the dockyards were being run inefficiently with much wastage of materials, and indeed in some places the stockpiles of wood were just left to rot in the open.

One way of reducing the stockpile of timber was for the dockyards to sell it off at auction. This happened on a regular basis at Pembroke, starting from about 1870.

However, there must have been “unofficial” sales or disposal of timber before this date, as was witnessed by the quality of timber used in the building of the houses of Pembroke Dock. Local lore has it that timber was dropped surreptitiously into the waters of the haven and then collected later from wherever the tide (or a rowing boat!) might take it. It is highly likely that much use was made of dockyard facilities for the making of wooden (and metal) items for the households of local craftsmen.

What does this have to do with a little end of terrace cottage in North Street, Pembroke Dock? The answer is, of course, plenty! The men who worked in the dockyard included many with highly developed and – in modern parlance – “transferable” skills. These were applied to the building of houses, particularly the flooring and “fitting out” of these houses.
Thomas Rees Evans was a shipwright, which meant he was very skilled in the use and working of wood, so when he took on the lease of one of the first building plots on the eastern extension of North Street, he had access to the materials, the connections and skills to undertake his own home build.

In the next post I will talk about the terms of the lease that Thomas Evans....and many like him ... took on in the summer of 1864.


An abstract of the lease for Thomas Evans Rees' building plot in North Street, Pembroke Dock, from a Bush Estate lease book held by Pembrokeshire Archives.






Wednesday 25 April 2018

A Little Place in PD...........

There was very little at Pembroke Dock before 1814. In fact, the place did not exist. Admittedly there were a few scattered cottages, a ruinous, but formerly grand, late medieval house and the scant remains of a chapel. It was probably an idyllic spot....level, well drained land at the foot of the Old Red Sandstone mass of St Patricks Hill. There was good access to the deep waters of Milford Haven via some muddy pills and rock strewn beaches.

In 1814 that all changed. Like Dire Strait's song "Telegraph Road", the Admiralty decided to put down its pack on the shore to build fighting ships and in the words of the song.....


The new town grew quickly and its residents were a highly skilled and hard working community. Shipwright, joiners, carpenters, metal workers, stonemasons  - all brought there skills to bear on the building of their own houses and the local land owner made a killing from, initially, selling off plots, to the Admiralty and latterly issuing leases to townspeople for strips of land with a 30 feet street frontage........with conditions attached.


For some streets in the town, in particular those built in the mid-nineteenth century, these plots accommodated single storey cottages, with large, long gardens. I have just bought one such house. Why??

My next series of postings will include an explanation about why I chose to do this and the story behind this "Little Place in PD".