Place Name
Sir John Fellowes (1670 – 1724) was the owner of Carshalton House having purchased it from the Crown in 1715 in lieu of a debt from a previous owner who died owing £16,000 in tobacco taxes. Sir John had been born into a rich merchant family, but it was his involvement as a founder of the South Sea Company that saw this personal wealth increase considerably. Although the business had a monopoly on selling slaves to South America it become more interested in financing Government debt, and within a short time saw its shares soar more than ten-fold. In any case it was enough that when he needed to pay off the Crown to secure ownership of the property, he had enough to stump up the £500 needed. Fellowes wasted no time on his new purchase, and immediately pulled the house down to build a new one. A E Jones in his history From Medieval Manor to London Suburb: An Obituary of Carlshalton writes: “He enclosed extensive grounds with a high brick wall and installed some fine, wrought iron entrance gates bearing his crest and initial. A tall, red brick water tower was put up to carry a large cistern which provided the house with a piped supply of water by gravity feed. The outfall of one of the fishponds, harnessed to a water wheel, powered the pumping machinery required to raise the water to the cistern. At the base of the water tower there was an orangery, with a marble and tiled bath, and a dressing room. An extensive range of stables was also constructed. The mansion itself (called ‘Carshalton House’ and still standing) was a g00d example of the contemporary architectural style. The interior decorations were very elaborate and included an ‘Italian’ room (now erroneously called the ‘Adam’ room) and a panelled chamber whose walls were painted all over with various scenes, including a representation of the house itself. Finally, in the current fashion, a grotto was built in the grounds. This was called The Hermitage and consisted of an arched stone building from which a passage opened into a circular bricked vault with niches round it. The stone building was covered with lead, earth was heaped on it and yew trees planted in the soil. Sir John was not to enjoy his baronetcy and Carshalton House free from financial worries. In the second decade of eighteenth century a mad bull market developed in the shares of joint stock companies a recently invented gambling device. Some of the companies were nothing but barefaced swindles. The initial success of the South Sea Company had been, to some extent, responsible for the sudden popularity of Stock Exchange speculation; and the Company’s prospects soon became a particularly vivid hallucination of the public fever. By 1720 its £100 shares were selling for £1,100. The the most blatant of the fraudulent companies began to be found out, and the inevitable market reaction set in. Before the end of 1720 the price of the South Sea Company’s shares was down to £150 and a lot of people were ruined. The directors had profited considerably while the boom was on by issuing new shares at the inflated market prices. The government had to step in, and, in the end, two million pounds were recovered from the personal property of the Company’s directors and others who had benefited by the public’s gullibility. Sir John Fellowes, as a Sub Governor, had to take a share of the blame. He was imprisoned for a time in the Tower, but it could not have been for long, because he missed only one meeting of the Carshalton vestry between December 1719 and January 1722. In the course of the official investigations he had to file an inventory of his assets. Their total value was given as £277,905 4s. 9d., with debts of £38,309 4s. 5d., but the assets included £125,658 8s. 5d. of South Sea Company’s stock. Certainly, like many a financier whose schemes have gone awry, he did not end his days a poor man. While he lived he was a great figure in Carshalton and spent lavishly. Sir John died at the age of 54 in 1724 not very long after the South Sea Bubble had burst.” With no children, his estate passed to his brother Edward.
