Viva Brighton Issue #58 December 2017
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BITS AND BOBS<br />
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SECRETS OF THE PAVILION:<br />
AN 18 TH CENTURY ‘BABY HOUSE’<br />
The house is called ‘Scadbury Manor’ and it<br />
was made some time between 1730 and 1740.<br />
It stands five feet five inches high. Unfortunately,<br />
we’ve no idea where it was made, but when it<br />
came to be called Scadbury Manor it was living<br />
in the Scadbury Manor, a listed medieval manor<br />
house which still exists in Kent.<br />
We found it in the stores, but we needed to<br />
find provenance. There is a collection which<br />
<strong>Brighton</strong> Museum took over trusteeship of in<br />
the 1970s, called The National Toy Museum.<br />
It was started by a group of people who<br />
were interested in preserving the history of<br />
childhood. They started collecting in the early<br />
50s with a view to exhibiting them, which never<br />
happened. So, <strong>Brighton</strong> Museum took on a very<br />
large collection of toys which are still being<br />
catalogued. It’s not unusual to find amazing<br />
things that we don’t have provenance for, and<br />
go on to do more research.<br />
All I had was a piece of paper that said<br />
‘Scadbury Manor’ and I knew from the<br />
archive that it had been mentioned in a book by<br />
Vivien Greene [the estranged wife of the writer<br />
Graham]. She travelled around the country in the<br />
early 1950s visiting private homes and museums<br />
and, in 1955, published English Doll Houses of the<br />
18th and 19th Centuries. Fortunately for us she<br />
visited Mrs Andrus, who owned Scadbury Manor.<br />
Vivien photographed the house and quoted from<br />
family correspondence about it. Immediately we<br />
could tell that in 1955 it was in the ownership<br />
of the Andrus family and, from the various<br />
references in the correspondence, we were able<br />
to make a family tree of four generations.<br />
....18....