The life of Edward Gray of Harringay House

Local historian John Hinshelwood on the story of the man whose estate eventually became the Harringay Ladder.

Edward Gray of Harringay House had a long life, although not quite as long as the life of Harringay House which stood for 93 years. Having commissioned it, Harringay House is where Edward lived for all his married life. The House and its park stood on a site now covered by the streets of the Harringay Ladder on the border between the parishes of Hornsey and Tottenham. He was a Linen Draper of Cornhill, London, born into a Quaker family. He was also a man of many parts, a gentleman farmer, a horticulturist, an art collector, a bibliophile and owner of many other properties in Hornsey, all of which were sold off after his death. Harringay House was a “most beautiful residence standing on the hill above the New River and commanding fine views”, according to an advertisement in The Times on 12 January 1839. Little remains to remind anyone of the building, which was pulled down in 1885, apart from a drawing by H Fancourt in Bruce Castle Museum , a couple of photographs in North Middlesex Photographic Society collection, and a plaque high up above the shop on the corner of Hewitt Road and Green Lanes that marks the position of the lodges to the park of Harringay House.

A portrait of Edward in his 50s presents the image of a wealthy cultured family man in comfortable circumstances. It is likely to have been commissioned shortly before Edward and his business partners invested in a sugar plantation in Jamaica, from which he received compensation under the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833. Edward was born on 10th August 1751 at Newgate Street, in the parish of Christ Church, London, one of nine children born to Abraham Gray, a Wine Cooper of London. There is little to tell us about Edward’s childhood but it is reasonable to assume that Abraham would have invested in the future of his boys by having them educated at home or in a Quaker School, and would have ensured his daughters were well provided for by suitable marriages. Edward gained his Freedom of the City as a Linen Draper in 1773 when he was 22 years old and began a business in London with Isaac Walker’s friend, John Freeman. By the time he was 30 years of age Edward Gray and John Freeman were listed in Bailey’s Trade Directory of 1781 as a partnership of Linen Drapers, at 71 Cornhill, London; three years later Edward got married. In 1784, Edward married Lydia, the 27-year-old daughter of Daniel Bowly, in the Nailsworth Quaker Meeting House just outside Cirencester. Bowly was a Woolstapler who sold wool to cloth manufacturers and may have had some business connections with Gray and Freeman as wholesale Linen Drapers. Three years after daughter Lydia was born, in 1789, Edward and his younger brother Walker Gray bought a number of plots of land in Hornsey known as Hill Field, Pond Field, South Field, Collier’s Field, Woodfield and Drayner’s Grove. This was the beginning of Edward’s second business activity, the acquisition and development of properties in Hornsey.

By 1792 Harringay House had been completed and was described in the Ambulator magazine of 1793 as “a capital mansion with suitable offices and other buildings and two entrance lodges adjoining the road to Southgate” [the present day Green Lanes]. Edward must have already had enough capital behind him to commission Harringay House, and that may have been provided by his wealthy father or even his benevolent uncle Isaac, who had himself already bought the mansion and estate of Arnos Grove in Southgate. Before Harringay House was finished his wife Lydia went to Bristol Hot Wells to take a cure, but The Times of 25 February 1791 announced she had died and was buried in the Bristol Quaker burial ground. Death immediately raised its ugly head again for Edward twice over in 1794; first his father died in September and then his mother, one month later. By then only two of his three aunts and none of his five uncles were still alive, and three of his six siblings had died. Young Lydia was nine years old when Edward married his second wife, Rachael Satterthwaite, in May 1794, by which time he had moved into Harringay House. Rachael was the daughter of Thomas Satterthwaite a Quaker merchant of Lancashire, and the niece of Benjamin Satterthwaite, an agent for Lancashire firms selling cloths in the West Indies in the 1740s. In his will, Abraham left £100,000 (about £7.5 m in today’s money) between his sons and daughters, besides an annuity of £1,200 for Rebecca. When Rebecca died one month later all her money would have been divided between the four surviving children and nine grandchildren. In addition Edward was left £200 in Bank Stock and one fifth of the residual estate, thus becoming a very wealthy man. The inheritance meant that he could live in Harringay House in the manner of an English Gentleman, with enough money to start an art collection and develop his house and gardens. Edward continued acquiring property to add to his real estate in Hornsey. In 1796 he owned 55 acres in Hornsey, but by 1801 he possessed at least another 85 acres. In 1802 he acquired the Queens Head Tavern and five acres of land fronting Green Lanes. By the time of the Hornsey Enclosure Act of 1813 he held 180 acres and was then awarded a further 6 acres; by 1829, he was assessed on 192 acres. After he died in 1838 the advertisements in The Times of 11 June 1839 and 14 May 1840 for the sale of his properties listed Harringay House, its offices, stabling and coach houses, together with its pleasure grounds, flower and kitchen gardens.

Edward by then had acquired a considerable amount of other land and property in Hornsey. While all this property acquisition was going on, Edward’s linen draper business with John Freeman, at Cornhill was also developing. In addition to the London retail trade it appears to have been sending cloths and materials from London to other English ports and it joined Lloyds Registry of Shipping to give them an idea of the condition of the vessels they may need to charter and to insure against loss. In 1800 the partnership had grown to become Gray, Freeman & Co occupying 71 and 72 Cornhill and by 1805 the company had moved premises to 147 Leadenhall Street. Edward, then in his early fifties, was beginning to think of things other than his business. It was about this time that he commissioned portraits of himself and young Lydia, before she was to marry John Smith Wright. In his old age Edward may well have been inclined to spend more time on his other interests. As a Fellow of the Horticultural Society, he and his gardener, George Press, had long been involved in the propagation of camellias, in particular the Camellia Japonica or 'Gray's Invincible' raised in 1824. The novel system of heating greenhouses developed at Harringay House was described in An Encyclopaedia of Gardening, published in 1825, which also described the gardens in the Gardeners' Magazine of 1830. George Press was still working as his gardener when Edward died and after his death the very valuable and rare collection plants commanded a separate auction in August 1839. Edward had other cultural interests. With the help of the art dealer William Buchanan he brought together a fine collection of paintings including the Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, by Rembrandt purchased in 1817 by Buchanan in Amsterdam, and now in the National Gallery, London. A painting by Aelbert Cuyp, View of Dordrecht in the Kenwood collection, described by the art historian Julius Bryant, identifies Edward Gray as the owner in 1834.

At the same time as William Buchanan was purchasing fine art for Edward, the three partners acquired the plantation Seaman’s Valley, producing sugar and rum in Portland, Jamaica. How and why Gray became listed as a joint owner of Seaman’s Valley in 1813 remains a matter of conjecture. By the early 1800s Britain’s annual sugar consumption had risen to 18lbs per person from only 4lbs per person in 1700 and this growth may have been an incentive to reap a financial return from the investment in Seaman’s Valley. In the absence of any accounts or records of the partnership, there is no evidence that Gray, or his partners Whitworth and Gilbee, imported any sugar or that they were engaged in any trade or activity involving an agent like Benjamin Satterthwaite, selling cloths in Jamaica. The Quaker-inspired campaign against the Slave Trade resulting in the British Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 may have given cause for thought, but to London Quaker businessmen the financial returns must have seemed overwhelmingly attractive at the same time as other Quakers were actively campaigning to mitigate the cruel treatment of slaves. Whatever the reasons, between 1813 and 1832, Seaman’s Valley was held in the custody of local Jamaican attorneys Andrew Watson, James Johnson and then Maurice Jones and operated under the control of overseers Patrick Burke and Henry Stearne. By 1830 Edward Gray had retired from the partnership, but the Jamaica Almanac continued to record Gray, Whitworth, and Co. as the proprietors of Seaman’s Valley until the first quarter of 1832, when James Johnson, on behalf of Edward Gray, listed him as sole owner. Johnson also lodged a claim in Edward’s name only, under the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833, for compensation totalling £4,624,6s 9d (about £500K in today’s money) for 255 slaves –– which was awarded in 1835. Edward’s will of 1833, with a codicil of 1835, nominated the husband of Caroline, his eldest grand-daughter, Sir Francis Mackenzie of Cowan House, Scotland, and two nephews, by his elder sister Mary, John Scandrett Harford, and Abraham Gray Harford Battersly, both of Bristol. At the time of writing his will both his wife and daughter had already died. He also left sums of money to his beailiff, butler, housekeeper and George Press, his gardener, who were all still with him. After his specific legacies the trustees were to dispose of all his real and personal estate in number of auctions and divide the proceeds a into eight equal parts - two for Sir Francis and the upbringing of his children, and the other six to be distributed amongst his surviving relatives at the discretion of the Trustees. The Trustees decided to bury him in the Winchmore Hill Quaker burial ground, where his father, his second wife and his younger brother Walker were all buried. None of their gravestones survive today. A longer version of this article appeared in the Hornsey Historical Society’s Bulletin 62