Place Name
The Leycester Penrhyn family lived at The Cedars, East Sheen, for the best part of a century. Edward Leycester was a lawyer and a cousin to the fierce Lady Penrhyn, at Penrhyn Castle, Caernarvonshire. It was she that changed his fortunes, in part thanks to a lesbian couple (or perhaps a woman and her cross-dressing partner), from North Wales. In the Memorials prepared by her husband, Edward’s sister Maria wrote how the Ladies of Llangollen may have played a part in his later wealth: “Lady Eleanor Butler was short and fat, but Miss Ponsonby was tall and thin, and used often to be supposed to be a man in disguise. They had a romantic attachment for each other, and had forsaken their own families to be more entirely together… It was they who first told Lady Penrhyn that my handsome brother Edward was like her, and it is said they thus gave her the first idea of making him her heir; but I believe that which really made her do so was her amusement when her young cousin in riding home had not enough money left to pay a turnpike gate and was obliged to leave his handkerchief in pawn with the toll collector.” Lady Penrhyn had been widowed in 1808, and despite most of her husband’s estate being left to a male relative, remained a wealthy woman in her own right. With no heirs of her own (with the possible exception of the six horses for whom she provided pensions of £45 each) she left the majority of her estate – amounting to £120,000 to her impoverished cousin. In return he took her name Penrhyn. He married a granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Derby in 1823 and settled in East Sheen. In 1826 he became the first chairman of the Richmond board of guardians of the poor, and thereafter was active in Surrey affairs. In 1830, he was selected by Robert, Earl Grosvenor, to stand as one of his two candidates in Shaftesbury, Dorset. (Grosvenor had bought the Property of Shaftesbury, with a view to ensuring that the Borough returned two Whig MPs of his choosing in 1820). He lost the election in December 1832, after proving unpopular with the new wave of voters who had won the vote as a result of the Reform Bill that he has supported. Elsewhere Penrhyn was chairman of Surrey Quarter Sessions, during which time he stopped up many of the alleyways of old Mortlake including the notorious Snake Alley (that ran off Williams Lane, across Watney Road, through Chertsey Court and the cemetery into Mortlake Road) on the grounds that: “It affords a lurking place and a place of concealments for depredators and petty thieves as well as an excuse for their trespassing upon the adjacent grounds.” He died in 1861. His son, Edward Henry Leycester Penrhyn, was also chairman of the County Bench (a magistrate) and became the first chairman of Surrey County Council from 1889. He was also a philanthropist, paying for houses to be built on the west side of Model Cottages and later on Victoria Road, both for use by working families. Charles Hailstone in Alleyways of Mortlake and East Sheen rather testily lays to bed a rumour: “It is a myth that Penrhyn built the cottages for ‘his servants and farm labourers… Former residents of Model Cottages [said] that at Christmas the head gardener of The Cedars would come down the little lane with a wheelbarrow bearing presents, such as a choice of a flannelette blanket or half a pound of tea.” This road was laid out on the grounds of the Cedars in 1931.
