WILLIAM PAWLEY (1840-1907), my great-grandfather, owned the Calverley Hotel (now the Hotel du Vin) in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Formerly called Calverley House or Lushington House, it had been built as a private home in 1762. It was a favourite summer residence of the Duchess of Kent and her daughter Victoria, before the latter acceded to the throne.

The facade is almost the same as it was in 1837 (below right) when it was converted into a hotel by Decimus Burton, architect of the huge triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner, London.

In 1849, Queen Victoria, with Prince Albert, the Duchess of Kent, and the ex-King and Queen of the French, came to the Calverley Hotel on a visit to Adelaide, the Queen Dowager.

One of the building's most attractive features, the long verandah at the rear overlooking Calverley Park (lower right), was added by Decimus Burton in 1829

	Click for more pictures courtesy Telephone House Neighbours Association

Pawley's father, also named William (1803-89), was the seventh child of nine born to Edward Pawley (1762-1836) and Mary, née Corke, who died aged 88 in 1855. From at least 1828 until 1851 the elder William and his wife Charlotte (1813-73) ran at the White Hart Inn, High Street, Bromley, Kent, where young William was born.

In 1861 he was still living with his mother and father (who had become a farmer and maltster) but within ten years he became proprietor of the Calverley, French chef and all.

How did William get the money to buy such a fine hotel?

The English 1871 Census holds a clue which suggests that he was financed by his future father-in-law, Henry K. Howard, a brewer born about 1821 in Kent who by 1850 was living in New York with his wife Jane and daughter Angeline. The census mistakenly lists William, aged 29, as having three sisters staying at the Calverley: Maria Pawley, 30, who really was his sister, and two girls who were not, Lucy Budd, 23, and Jane Howard, 13. Perhaps Lucy Budd was chaperoning Angeline Howard, who actually was 13.

In 1873 William married Angeline, still a minor, at St George's Church, Hanover Square, a venue of high society weddings. Two years later their daughter Ethel (my grandmother) was born at the Calverley.

There the family remained, although by 1891 they also had a flat in Belgrave Mansions (left), a good address, as the 1895 map shows, but long since demolished.

After Ethel's marriage (also at at St. George's) in 1899, William and Angeline went to live at the Berkeley Hotel, which in those days was located at the corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
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