By John Mills, Lindfield History Project Group

From 1680 or earlier, three generations of the Neale family were innkeepers of the White Lion inn in Lindfield; later renamed the Bent Arms.

In 1752, victualler (person licensed to sell alcohol) George Neale, aged 63, made his Will, leaving the freehold of the White Lion not to his relatives but to his ‘late servant, Sarah Bashford of Lindfield’. Sarah, who never married, remained owner and innkeeper, and died in April 1791, aged 60 or more. In her own Will - made in 1790 - she asked to be buried within the parish church of Lindfield, ‘in the same grave with my late Master George Neale which is properly prepared to the purpose’.

Sarah’s origins are not known; possibly she was one of the Bashfords who had settled in Cuckfield in the early 1700s. The White Lion that George Neale and Sarah knew no longer exists, replaced (or largely rebuilt) in Victorian times by the right-hand house of the two houses that make up today’s Bent Arms, 98 High Street.

Sarah the innkeeper was also a businesswoman, loaning money at interest as a mortgagee to several Lindfield house owners, and in the 1780s rebuilding two old houses on Lindfield High Street that she had bought, Tinkers and Brushes.

In 1783, Sarah pulled down Tinkers and replaced it. ‘Sarah Bashford for her new house’, as entered in local taxation records. The new house was not today’s Tinkers, High Street (built in 1933), but the front range of Wickham House and Romany Cottage, 129 and 131 High Street, under their distinctive new-style gambrel roof, designed as a cheap way to achieve good headroom in the attic

In 1785, Sarah demolished Brushes, building another new house on the corner of Brushes Lane, now the lefthand building of the Bent Arms. In addition, a cottage, named Pebble Cottage in the 1920s, behind the new house and with its roof gable end-on to the lane, was built around that time.

The first floor of the new house was a single spacious, high-ceilinged room with a fireplace, large front windows overlooking the High Street, and an elegant Venetian window overlooking the lane. It was opened by Sarah in January 1786 as an Assembly Room, with a notice in the Sussex Advertiser: ‘The LINDFIELD and CUCKFIELD ASSEMBLY, To be at the NEW-ROOM, WHITE-LION, LINDFIELD, on the 10th of January. There will be a Supper.’ Further monthly assemblies (by subscription) were to be held at the Ball Room or at the King’s Head, Cuckfield.

In the 18th century, assembly rooms were amongst the few public places where gentlemen and gentlewomen could meet respectably outside the home, to converse, drink tea, have supper, play cards or dance. The Lindfield Assembly Room became better known locally as the Ball Room.

In her Will, Sarah made only one brief reference to a deceased relative, instead bequeathing Wickham/Romany as a life ownership only to Joseph Muggeridge, an elderly man living with her, and the White Lion and the Ball Room to him outright. After Joseph’s decease, Sarah required that Wickham/ Romany should be bequeathed, in the language of her time, ‘unto Richard Gordon son of George Gordon, a Negro now living with me, his Heirs and Assigns for ever’.

Richard Gordon, probably in his teens, was also to have £20 to pay for a 7-year apprenticeship, in an occupation of his choice, within six months of her death, and £100 (at least £12,700 today). This sum was to be invested by trustees on his behalf until he had successfully finished his Apprenticeship, and then paid to him to set him up in trade. The interest from investing the £100 was to pay for his clothing.

Joseph Muggeridge and Richard Gordon, in Sarah’s household, may have been her servants at the inn, Richard perhaps a kitchen boy or pot boy (drinks waiter). Guardians were appointed for Richard until he was 21 years old: Sarah’s great friends Richard Harland, a tailor and shopkeeper, and Edward Colbran, a blacksmith - both Lindfield men, who were also to be Trustees of her Will. Joseph, her executor, was to pay the £20 and £100 to the Trustees.

Where was Richard from? There were hundreds of Afro-Caribbean Gordons on the British colonial slave plantations in the West Indies, especially in Jamaica. Neither Richard nor his father George are found in surviving Sussex parish registers, but a George Gordon, ‘a native of Jamaica said to be 18 years of age’ and conceivably Afro-Caribbean, was baptised at Holborn, next to the City of London, in 1773, and would have been old enough to have had an adolescent son Richard living in 1790.

In October 1791, just over the stipulated six months after Sarah’s death, a certain Richard Gordon was newly apprenticed for seven years and for £25 to John Middleton of St Sepulchre’s parish, London, pencil maker. Might he have been Richard Gordon of Lindfield? Turning to Joseph Muggeridge, when he died in 1803, Wickham/Romany was still in his possession. The property is not mentioned in Joseph’s own Will of 1802, but that would have been quite usual for a lifetime ownership only, as it was not his to bequeath. Besides money bequests to relatives, Joseph left all the residue of his estate to his nephew Richard Muggeridge, a carpenter in Sutton, Surrey.

Taxation and other records from the early 1800s show Richard Muggeridge to be the new owner of Wickham/ Romany, not Richard Gordon. When Richard Muggeridge died in 1817, by his Will he left Wickham/Romany to his wife; she died in 1836 and the property was then sold at public auction. No mention in available records is made of Richard Gordon having held ownership, as bequeathed by Sarah Bashford.

Edward Colbran, still living in 1803, might by then no longer have been Richard’s guardian, if Richard were now of age. He would still have been Trustee of Sarah’s Will, and responsible until the end of Richard’s apprenticeship for continued investment of the £100.

What happened to Richard Gordon in later life? Had he died before 1803? Whether he ever became owner of Wickham/Romany in 1803 as Sarah Bashford intended, remains a puzzle to be solved.

Returning to the White Lion and the Ball Room, these were inherited by Joseph Muggeridge on Sarah’s death in 1791. By 1793 he had sold them to a Brighton brewer, Richard Lemmon Whichelo. Visitor numbers may have declined after then, for in 1802 Whichelo decided to sell the Ball Room, whilst keeping the White Lion.

In 1805, John Shelley became the new owner of the Ball Room, letting the ground floor rooms as a shop to a chair maker, James Murrell. In 1810, Shelley obtained a certificate to use the Ball Room as a nonconformist Christian place of worship. For three years, the early flock of what was later the Lindfield Congregational church used the Ball Room as a meeting house, before moving to a newly converted chapel next to Ryecroft, High Street. This chapel was replaced in 1857 by today’s Congregational Church building.

The Ball Room was still used as a Meeting House in 1825, perhaps by another congregation, before it was bought by John Bent, new owner of the White Lion, and re-opened in 1829 as an Assembly Room, this time permanently, ‘having undergone very important and expensive alterations. The party assembled on the occasion were of the most genteel order, including several families from Brighton, among whom were noticed some French Ladies of most fashionable manners and appearance,’ as reported by the Sussex Advertiser.

Today the Ball Room remains a single large room, serving as the Bent Arms Function Room.

Contact via https://lindfieldhistoryproject.group/ or 01444 482136.

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