Place Name
In 1835 Jane Seymour Colman married Admiral Sir William Hotham, a Royal Navy officer who had seen service during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was a second marriage for both of them, having outlived their first spouses. Lady Hotham, as she became following her second marriage, had been married to Roger Pettiward, Master of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, whose family held large swathes of land in south west London. This included land in Putney which had come into the family after inheriting a “copyhold estate at Putney consisting of three tenements” in 1778. When Roger died in 1833, Jane became the beneficiary of this vast and valuable estate trust, which as well as the land in Putney, also consisted of the family estate in Suffolk and a large part of West Brompton. Following Jane’s death in 1856, the new beneficiary was a cousin, Robert John Bussell who changed his name to Pettiward as per the will, since Roger and Jane had no surviving male heirs. Shortly before he died in 1908, he began developing his Putney interests. In 1893 on the agricultural land immediately east of Erpingham Road he built an athletic track and concrete cycling velodrome, the first of its type in the United Kingdom. In 1904 houses were built on the land, as to these key streets Earldom Road, Landford Road, Clarendon Drive and Hotham Road, clearly maintaining a fondness for his aunt nearly four decades after her death.
