One of the long-standing gardening families of Brentford, the Swindens were first recorded in the area in the 1670s and remained for over a century.
Nathaniel Swinden was the author of The Beauties of Flora Displayed, published in 1778. The book reveals his expertise in flower garden design and as a seedsman who could supply over 200 varieties of seeds.
Swinden’s thoughtful and imaginative book demonstrates how to arrange planting for theatrical effect. In an early example of astute marketing, he simplified the implementation of his designs by selling ready-made boxes of seeds for each of them. An invoice shows him exporting specific boxes to Jamaica and there is evidence that London town gardeners were buying his boxes too. His address is given in the book as “near the 8th mile stone at Brentford End”, a short distance beyond what we know as Busch Corner in Isleworth, at the junction of the A310 and the A315 (London Road). The 1786-7 map by Sauthier (Sy_B_XIII_1e) in the Syon archives shows garden grounds on both sides of the London Road and a cluster of buildings along the road near the 8th mile stone.
Swinden’s book was favourably written up in the Monthly Review. Ralph Griffiths of Linden House, Turnham Green, that journal’s proprietor, was a trustee of the Brentford chapel and may have known the Swindens himself.
Earlier, in 1701, “a profligate and wicked youth”, the son of William Badger, was convicted of robbing a gardener called Nathaniel Swinden of a considerable quantity of fruit. Swinden took a whip and “did with great severity lash the boy” whose father soon sent him across the Atlantic to find work in Maryland. William Badger remained furiously angry with Swinden and, frequently drinking too much, behaved “with rancour and malice towards him”. The Anabaptist elders of the Brentford Meeting House intervened to persuade him to forgive Swinden and “carry himself towards him as a neighbour and a Christian”.
Nathaniel Swinden’s home in Old Brentford was registered for non-conformist meetings in 1710 and he was buried in Ealing in 1729. Nathaniel the author may have been the second of four children born to this earlier Nathaniel and his wife Ann. If so he married Jane Franklin in 1753 and had three children, of which one was also called Nathaniel.
However, Francis Swinden, the first Nathaniel’s eldest son, married Mary Piguenit, the daughter of a Huguenot émigré, and had 6 children, the oldest of which was another Nathaniel Swinden (1744-1804). The title page of the Beauties of Flora lists one of the book-shops where it could be purchased as the one in Berkeley Square run by Caesar Danby Piguenit, Mary’s brother, so this Nathaniel is the most likely author and seedsman. Huguenot gardeners in this country pioneered the trade in seeds so Nathaniel’s business may have benefited from this connection.
The will of Mary’s father, Caesar Piguenit, says he lived in Boston Lane, near Brentford Butts, as did Mary and Francis, but these names are not listed in the New Brentford rate books. Nathaniel Swinden appears as a ratepayer in the Butts over many years – perhaps several generations of Swindens lived together as an extended family?
Comfortable brick houses around the open square of The Butts, built from the 1680s onwards.
Ann Swinden’s will, made shortly before she died in 1756, describes her as a widow living in The Butts. She left property in Southwark and in Red Lion Square, London to Francis and Nathaniel but there is no mention of a garden or nursery. She mentions four children, Nathaniel and Francis and their two married sisters, Ann Bell and the late Mary Bateman. The marriages indicate the family’s status. Caesar Piguenit is “gentleman” in his will while Thomas Bell of Castle Bar House in Ealing, Ann’s husband, was a substantial man of property. The were sufficiently well off to provide for Mr Bateman and two of his children who were described as “lunatics”.
Ann Swinden’s bequests reveal a comfortable home – her son Francis received a silver pint cup, his eldest son a half-pint silver mug, Ann Bell a silver teapot and the three motherless Bateman children a brass hearth and its furniture, a “walnut tree corner cupboard” with the china inside it and “my chints bed quilt” respectively. She also provided mourning gowns for her servants, Mary Giles and Mary Dobbs.
These generous people supported their families and neighbours. The older generation of Swindens had to manage the problems which arose when their son-in-law and two grandchildren turned out to be mentally unstable, making legal provision to manage their property and oversee their care.
References
Nathaniel Swinden, The Beauties of Flora Displayed, Chiswick Local Studies Library (L B Hounslow)
London Metropolitan Archives: Acc/0828/014 Swinden pedigree, and N/C/034/1/1 Brentford Congregational Church records 1693-1867
The National Archives: Ann Swinden’s will: PROB 11/824
The Greenings were established in Brentford End by the early 1700s. Thomas Greening the elder was an innovative plantsman, and his sons followed him into the business. As well as producing plants, they obtained many aristocratic and royal contracts.
Thomas Greening (c1684-1757) and his three sons were all associated with gardens owned by the royal family. At the heart of their business was their nursery at Brentford End, whose management was a shared family undertaking. Thomas and his wife, Ann, were in Isleworth Parish by the early 1700s. There were four sons: John, Thomas, Robert and Richard, and Betsey, whose poor health is mentioned in family letters in the 1730s, was one of several daughters. Most members of the family are buried at Isleworth Parish Church.
John Rocque identified the Greenings’ house and garden on a small map of the Environs of Syon House which he used to decorate the 1743 prospectus for his ambitious map of London and Environs. Indeed, three Greenings were subscribers to this map. Their house and land were at Brentford End, west of the Brent and actually in Isleworth Parish; they lay on the north side of the road from Brentford to Hounslow, roughly opposite the old footpath from that road into Syon Park. The house was later to become a boys’ boarding school, known as Syon Park House, and survived until the early 1960s.
The Greenings house and garden is labelled near the top of the map
The Rev George Harbin visited Thomas Greening the elder’s garden on 20 August 1719. Harbin’s notes show that Greening was expert in growing dwarf apples and pears in tubs and pots, some of which he had kept this way for 14 years. He also grew peaches, nectarines and espalier apricots which he protected from frost by covering them with a “reed hedge”. Harbin also recorded a large grape vine growing against the house, called the Burlake or White Raisin grape. “The Bunches are extremely large & some of them have weighd above 7 pound”.
Greening and Harbin discussed hyacinths – large white ones with red eyes were 5s or 7s (25p or 35p) a root, the Province Rose, ranunculus (of which Greening grew a sweet-scented striped variety from Turkey), tulips, anemones (the finest included the Battersea Red), cherries, plums, almonds and sorbus. Richard Bradley reported seeing a passion flower in Greening’s garden in Brentford with more than 300 fruits.
Rocque dedicated his 1748 engraving to two Greening brothers.
Queen Caroline invested considerable sums in landscaping the gardens of Richmond Lodge, now part of Kew Gardens, during the 1920s, overseen by Charles Bridgeman and almost certainly largely implemented by Thomas Greening Snr. After Bridgeman died responsibility for their upkeep was given to Thomas Snr, assisted by his son, Robert, from 1738. Under their care, new features were created – the small wilderness and the sunken feature at the north of the garden, together with the Little Wilderness and the New Mount. During the 1730s the name Greening appears repeatedly in the records of Brentford Ferry, crossing the Thames with laden carts and returning with empty ones.
During the same period it is clear that the business combined the supply of plants and trees from the nursery with the undertaking of landscaping schemes; Thomas Snr worked at Shobdon, at Claremont, took on a commission to work on a major landscaping project at The Gnoll in Neath, Glamorgan and was supplying substantial quantities of fruit trees to Edward Gascoigne at Parlington in Yorkshire.
A set of letters from the two oldest Greening sons – Thomas jnr and Robert – to their father Thomas snr – survive in the National Archives. Robert was sent to manage his father’s farm in Aymstrey, Herefordshire, close to where they had been working on the Shobdon estate of Lord Bateman. The letters include commentary about the management of this farm, with details of the weather, the harvest and wheat prices. Plants and seeds were sent from Brentford to Aymstrey, including turnip seed, some bought in and some supplied from their own Brentford crop. They were also growing elm trees; Thomas Greening snr had been granted a royal patent in the 1720s for the grafting of English elm onto Dutch elm stock to encourage fast growth.
Richard, the youngest son, is mentioned in a letter from Robert to his father dated 26 July 1742: “it is a very great Concern to me that he has so Small a Share of Education . . . for had he been capable I could have recommended him to the Duke of Bolton for a Steward. . . . you may depend that neither my Br nor me will be wanting in our Brotherly help to him.” Robert’s letters show him caring for his sister Betsey in Herefordshire but yearning to be allowed to return to work in the Brentford End nursery.
The letters show the family were continually troubled by money problems. They coped to some extent by delaying payments themselves. The letters mention requests for payment: for example, in 1742 Mr Tunstall of Brentford ferry brought a bill which covered the Greenings’ river crossings from 1725 to 1737! At one stage their father has taken the “nurserybook” with him when he is away from home for some time. Thomas the younger writes of the embarrassment he suffers when he goes to seek payment of outstanding invoices only to be shown his father’s receipts for payments that he has failed to record, and the sums he is having to borrow in order to pay for supplies and services to keep the business going. For example, Thomas borrows from Mr Bever, probably Samuel Bever a “kinsman” of his father-in-law, Henry Marsh. The situation seems to have been made worse by the purchase of a farm in Herefordshire on which they appeared to be losing money.
Their major contracts with the royal family and with aristocratic clients were almost guaranteed to cause difficulty as such people rarely paid quickly, though being known to have a royal contract would have enabled them to obtain credit. Thomas Greening the younger wrote to his father on 9 February 1740 “The book debts are nothing at all except Ld Weymouth’s and the Duke of Marlborough which God knows when I shall receive”. He submitted a petition for payment of invoices for works at Kensington Gardens and St James’s Palace in 1752. A year passed before approval was given for payment of these though the sums involved on these contracts were substantial – £799.13s (£799.65) for Kensington and £354.5s (£354.25) for St James’s Palace.
By 1740 Thomas the elder was paying rates in Turnham Green for a house with a garden and field which he leased from Lord Burlington. This almost certainly lay near the junction of Sutton Lane South and today’s Wellesley Road and was later occupied by the Fromows. In 1746 he married again; his bride was Lucretia Abbott (c1711-1781) and he is described as “widower of Chiswick”. When he made his will two years later he was about to renew his lease and bequeathed the property, after his wife’s death, to his youngest son, Richard.
Thomas the younger (c1710-1757) married Sarah, daughter of Henry Marsh, a gentleman gardener of Hammersmith. Described in his father’s will as being “in a very thriving and prosperous way and stands in no want of anything I can give him”, he had one very large debt towards which his father left him £500. Either he or his father laid out gardens at Kirtlington in Oxfordshire, The Gnoll in Neath, Virginia Water near Windsor and Corsham Court, Wiltshire. In 1751 Thomas the Younger took on Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park, leaving Robert out of the contract and bringing his son into the business instead. He died in February 1757, only a few months before his father.
Thomas and Sarah’s son, Henry Thomas Greening (1730-1809) married Ann Hooper, the daughter of a prosperous Herefordshire lawyer. He appears to have been a gardener too until he inherited a substantial fortune on condition he changed his name to Gott, which he did in 1769. He purchased the Newlands estate in Buckinghamshire in 1770 and built himself a grand house there. Henry Thomas Gott was knighted in 1774.
John, the third son, became the Duke of Newcastle’s head gardener and steward at Claremont; he had worked there with his father as a boy on William Kent’s landscaping schemes. Later he oversaw a formal flower garden and 6 acres of walled garden and greenhouses for high quality fruits. Rocque’s 1738 plan of Claremont has small inset images of buildings on the estate including “Mr Greening’s House”, later known as White Cottage. (In 2012 this was in use as the sixth formers’ centre at the school at Claremont). Between 1758 and 1764 John was the King’s gardener at Hampton Court and was also paid for work at Windsor Great Park.
Robert not only assisted his father at Richmond Gardens but also worked with his brother Thomas there, and on some other contracts. After the brothers had fallen out and gone their separate ways, Robert became Princess Augusta’s head gardener for the pleasure grounds at Kew Gardens (and was also made responsible for her nine cows) from June 1753. He replaced John Dillman who nevertheless continued to be responsible for the 6a kitchen garden, melon ground and orangery there until 1755 when these too became Robert’s responsibility. For this contract Robert was to receive 300gns a year and have the use of 54 acres of farmland. In 1757 his contract was extended to include management of “a sufficient flock of sheep to feed the lawn” but he died in March 1758. His brother John then took on the royal contracts and spent several years sorting out Robert’s estate as executor; he did not receive payments until 1761/2 for some of Robert’s works executed in 1754 – gravelling the path to Goupy’s Chinese arch and overseeing the construction of two other Chinese garden buildings. Robert also produced designs for other estates. Those for the northern gardens at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire survive, with elaborately irregular areas interspersed with formal and symmetrical avenues and vistas.
His wife Ann is described in his will as the daughter of Priscilla Price of Lucton, providing another family connection to Herefordshire. He drafted his will in 1750 when he had recently purchased a property in Isleworth and in Lucton; after Ann’s death these were to pass to his brothers John and Richard. In December 1757 his “dear, dear wife” was dying so he amended his bequests to provide an annuity for his stepmother, Lucretia Greening. He lived only a few months more and died in March 1758.
Richard, the youngest son, seems not to have held significant posts as a gardener. Family letters indicate that he may not have been well educated and refer to sending him money. Thomas the elder made Richard his executor so he must have trusted him. However, bequests from Thomas the elder and from Robert were clearly designed to support Richard, who lived only until 1760. Lucretia, Thomas’ second wife outlived them all, surviving until 1781 when she died aged 70.
References
Michael McGarvie and John H Harvey, Revd George Harbin and his Memoirs of Gardening 1716-1723
Richard Bradley, New Improvements of Planting & Gardening 1731
Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Harvill Press, London 1995
Ferry records, Layton Collection; sample pages at www.thamespilot.org.uk
Wills, National Archives: Thomas Greening snr PROB/11/837, Robert Greening PROB/11/837
Family letters, National Archives, C 108/353
Elm tree patent, British Library Eg Ch 8108
Payments for Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park, National Archives T1.352/2, 3a, 3b, and T1.353/115
Henry Woodman, his father, his brother and his son were gardeners in Strand on the Green in the 18th century. However, the women of the family were also skilled at running a gardening business, especially Henry’s mother Esther and his long-lived wife, Eleanor.
In 1726 Nicholas Parker left the remainder of his lease on land in Sutton Field, Chiswick, and the stock growing upon it, to “my servant Henry Woodman”, who must have been a high-ranking employee, perhaps the manager of the nursery. Henry Woodman was born in 1698, one of four children of another Henry Woodman, described variously as “husbandman” and as “gardiner”, who had married Esther Durham in 1694. When Henry senior died in July 1701, Esther had three young sons to care for; she gave birth to their daughter, Mary, in September.
Esther lived on until 1784. Two of her sons, Henry and John, were described as gardeners so it is likely that she kept the nursery going. Lady Susanna Lort, who took the Chiswick mansion house which was later known as Heathfield House, employed her to weed her gardens, bequeathing her twenty shillings in her will of 1710. John Harvey thought that Henry Woodman may have inherited his garden from George Masters but both men are listed in the rate-books at the same time, rather than one as successor to the other. From 1727 Woodman’s property was assessed at £45 in the rate books; this was a far higher value than Parker’s Sutton Field alone so must have included the Woodman family nursery too. He was now sufficiently well established to marry Eleanor Compton at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1728, reuniting two of Parker’s bequests.
Henry and Eleanor’s first two children died when only a few days old in 1730 and 1732, but their third child, Henry (1732-1774), worked in partnership with his mother after his father’s death. The daughters were Elizabeth, who married John Kirk, Mary (1741-1770) and Eleanor, who married Thomas Allen in 1768. “Kirk and Allen” were paying land tax on jointly owned properties on Strand on the Green in the 1790s and the 1847 tithe apportionment lists small market gardens then held by Kirk and Allen, so gardening continued with later generations of the family.
Henry Woodman was a subscriber to Philip Miller’s Gardener’sDictionary of 1731, confirming that he was one of the prominent gardeners of his day. His surviving correspondence shows that between 1729 and 1733 he was supplying substantial quantities of plants and seeds to Henry Ellison of Gateshead Park in County Durham. The letters, mostly to Ellison’s agent, Woolley, are chatty and informative, and advise on planting and protection from frost. Woodman visited Gateshead and sends his best wishes to people he had met there. His letters apologise for delays in finding reliable boats to take the plants up the east coast to Gateshead but usually name each vessel and its master.
In October 1730 he mentions being able to supply “a new sort of pea that beats all I ever saw” and says that he has been “bussey” building a green house “a conveniency I very much wanted”. He also comments on the weather: in 1730 “We have had vast plenty of all sorts of fruit this year and Exceeding Cheap” but in 1731 “the dryness of the summer has made Standard peaches and Nectarines very scarce”.
The invoices list a variety of plants. In October 1729 Woodman sent 26 plums, 30 peaches and nectarines, 34 pears, 20 cherries, 15 apricots, 48 apples on paradise stocks, 108 gooseberries and currants, 6 berberies without stones, 200 raspberries and 400 strawberries. There were also flowering plants, damask roses, honeysuckles, anemones, polyanthus, mixed tulips, anemones, striped lilies, crown imperials, Persian iris, hepaticas, snowdrops and crocus and 50 auriculas.
The following December he fulfilled a substantial order of seeds for nearly forty different kinds of vegetables and herbs, plus 100 asparagus roots, plus carnation layers, double white rocket and another 100 strawberries. Woodman wrote in January 1730 “The Cowcumber & Mellon seed you may depend on to be as good (as) any in England haveing saved it all myselfe”, though later that year he advised Woolley to buy directly (and more cheaply) from Moses James of Lambeth, his usual seedsman.
Late in 1731 he sent trees and hedging plants (200 6 ft-tall elms and 1500 hornbeams at 2 feet) with flowering shrubs and more fruit trees. In early 1732 he wrote to advise on the growing heights of the 1000 flowering shrubs he was supplying to help with the design of the planting, an approach which Nathaniel Swinden of New Brentford was to develop in The Beauties of Flora Displayed in 1778. He continued to send plants and seeds to the end of 1733.
By then another gardener, Stephen Switzer, had convinced Ellison that Woodman was fixing his prices in league with Woolley. The latter lost his post and after indignant letters from Woodman denying that he would ever do such a thing, Ellison placed the matter in the hands of a lawyer. Harvey considered Woodman’s prices comparable to other contemporary nurserymen but no further letters survive to show how this was resolved. Switzer, however, succeeded in supplanting Woodman at Gateshead Park.
In 1755 the quality of the plants Woodman supplied was endorsed by Thomas Hitt, another distinguished gardener, in his book A Treatise of Fruit-Trees.
“I must own I have received peach-trees and nectarines from Mr Henry Woodman of Strand on the Green in the county of Middlesex which I planted for the Reverend Mr Ewer of Bottisford near Belvoir Castle; all of them lived and some bore fruit the first year after planting, tho’ they were brought above a hundred miles, and only packed up with straw and matts; they have been planted nine years and are now strong healthy trees.”
Henry Woodman was a respected member of his community and served as a churchwarden in 1739/40. When he died in 1758 he was buried at St Nicholas where the register records that they had fulfilled his request to be buried 12 feet deep. His will left over £1,000 in bank annuities to be managed in trust by his widow, Eleanor, and by William Martin, a maltster and Strand on the Green neighbour.
Of Henry and Eleanor’s five surviving children, four were under 21 when he made his will in June 1755. He added a codicil a year later, changing his bequests after his daughter, Elizabeth, had married and his son William, “who is now lame”, had died. Worried about this lame son, Henry had provided for the legacies left to his other children to go to William should they die before him.
Eleanor Woodman was a strong, resourceful and reliable woman who was deeply involved in the nursery garden for many years more. Eleanor was executor to her brother William and witness to the will of her brother Nicholas. William Compton left a New Brentford freehold and his own house “fronting the Thames” on Strand on the Green, as well as nearby garden ground, to his nephew Henry Woodman Junior, on condition that he continued to work in co-partnership with his mother, but in the event she outlived him.
Eleanor’s own will, proved in 1784, shows her astute financial management. She left £2,000 in 3½% bank stock, twice the £1,000 she had taken over in 1758 as executrix to her husband. She appointed two nephews-in- law as trustees, William Wake and Thomas Hearne, along with Charles Rubery of Sutton Court Farm. (Thomas Hearne senior, another local gardener, had married Eleanor’s sister). She left her Strand on the Green house to her daughter Elizabeth Allen, revealing in passing that she has already moved out “to Chiswick”, with her servant Mary Hoskins. There are bequests to sons in law, grandsons and nieces and nephews, but it appears that apart from Elizabeth all her other children had died.
Strand on the Green, about 1875. The Woodman home was next to the malthouse on the left – the houses, workshop and boat yard in the centre stand where Henry’s walled garden once was.
In the early 1970s Kathleen Judges, the Strand on the Green historian, identified the 6-acre plot which descended from Parker via the Comptons to the Woodmans as lying on the north east side of today’s Thames Road, and a further half acre on the Thames as being a plot which was a market garden on the Tithe Map of 1847. Later owned by the Port of London Authority, it lies immediately downstream of Picton House (which she identified as Henry and Eleanor’s most likely home) and was sold by the PLA for a housing development in 1971.
Nicholas Parker was a wealthy gardener who lived on Strand on the Green. After his death in 1726, his bequests to Henry Woodman and his future wife Eleanor Compton, and to other members of the Compton family, ensured the continuation of the garden grounds in skilled hands.
Nicholas Parker
The accounts kept by the Earl of Fauconberg’s steward, Arthur Palmer, record substantial expenditure on the Earl’s new gardens at Sutton Court, Chiswick between 1685 and 1700. The name of Nicholas Parker recurs regularly in Palmer’s account book. Parker supplied plants, sometimes in large quantities, for the Sutton Court garden. Almost all of the payments made to Nicholas Parker or Mr Parker are for the supply of “trees” with only one entry for “plants”. A few entries are more specific, listing “ew”, 300 hornbeams and 38 phillireas, and in 1685 alone Mr Parker was paid the substantial sum of £17 for fruit trees. Separately, “Goodman Parker” appears against payments of £19.2s and £50 for carpentry, with a further £17 for “digging and wharfing a new pond”. It is probable that Goodman Parker was Nicholas Senior, father to the gardener.
So far it has not been possible to identify exactly where all of the Parkers’ properties lay. Nicholas Parker Senior appears in the rate books on Strand on the Green from around 1660; he signed his name as a member of the vestry in 1675 and died in December 1714. Nicholas Parker Junior was not rated identifiably by that name until about 1690. In 1699 he served as churchwarden and in 1709 made a donation of £1 towards work on the north aisle of the parish church. By 1719 he is paying rates on property worth £38 and land in Sutton Field worth £16, almost certainly having taken over land which his father occupied.
Given the quantities of trees supplied to Fauconberg, Nicholas Parker was already a substantial nurseryman by the 1680s, though he does not appear in Harvey’s very comprehensive book, Early Nurserymen. Fortunately a will of June 1725 made by Nicholas Parker of Strand on the Green, “Gardiner”, has survived. In it he requested that he should be buried near his late father at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.
Though no reference is made in the will to a wife, he seems to have been married twice. His first wife, Elizabeth, was buried in 1688 at St Nicholas; on 11 December 1693 the marriage is recorded between Nicholas Parker, gent, widower, and Mrs Jane Goodwin, widow, by Canterbury licence.
From the lists of Chiswick burials, she may have been the widow of Henry Goodwin, buried in linen in 1687/8, or of another Henry Goodwin buried in 1690. The wealthiest of the Goodwins was living at Sutton Court in 1719. And there were Goodwins who were gardeners, who owned land north of Chiswick High Road, near today’s Chiswick roundabout. There were Brentford Goodwins as well, including a basket-maker.
In 1709 Nicholas Parker Junior is named by George Warner of Turnham Green as one of two executors “which I esteem as my loving friends”. Parker’s social status as a gentleman is further confirmed by his own “good friends” mentioned in the will. He leaves a guinea each for mourning rings for Mr Thomas and Mr George Barker and appoints another, Thomas Mawson, as executor. The Barkers had owned The Grove estate in Chiswick since the middle ages and its land adjoined Vernon Cottage. Mawson had property on the Strand and owned the brewery which was the predecessor of today’s Griffin Brewery. His family was also comfortably off, and one of his brothers was Bishop of Chichester.
Parker’s bequests reveal him to be a man of property with copyhold houses and land in Turnham Green, Little Sutton and Strand on the Green, held of the manor of Sutton Court, and two freeholds in Catherine Wheel Yard, New Brentford. The freeholds secured the right to vote, and a Nicholas Parker is listed in the 1710 Middlesex Poll Book. At this date Nicholas Parker Senior was still alive so these properties may have come to our gardener as a bequest from his father. The will also includes two properties at Strand on the Green, one with six acres and the other with half an acre of land which Parker occupied himself.
William Compton, Parker’s “kinsman” and one of his executors, inherited most of the property, including a house with five and a half acres of gardens at the downstream end of Strand on the Green, then let to Joseph Miller, the comic actor. Miller leased this house, later named Vernon Cottage, from 1686 to his death in 1738. And when Nicholas Compton died in 1760, describing himself as gardener in his will, he bequeathed a house with five and a half acres of gardens which he himself occupied, confirming that this was the house he had inherited. Vernon Cottage is clearly labelled on Leigh’s 1831 Panorama of the Thames, just downstream of the Strand, with a walled garden and at least one glasshouse. William Compton took on responsibility for his brother Nicholas’ five daughters and later left garden grounds to the oldest of them in his own will.
Along with £5 for the poor of Strand on the Green, Parker’s will provided annuities for various relatives as well as bequests of £50, £100 or £200 to a number of friends and relatives: Elizabeth Parker “now living with me”, Mary and Ellen Parker, William Goodwin of Shepperton, Thomas Goodwin of Laleham, Katharine and Eleanor Compton of Turnham Green. Parker often uses the word “kinsman” to describe these heirs, suggesting that they may have been his wives’ relations rather than his blood relatives. William Compton’s will reveals that Katharine and Eleanor were the sisters of himself and Nicholas Compton.
