Sundridge Village

An inscription on the pencil and grey wash artwork reads, “Coombank. Ordered to be peint [sic] by the Lord Frederick Campbell, the 14^th June 93”, but it is the later inscription in another hand that tells the rest of the story – “Burnt down in the Fire in July 1807 in which Lady Campbell lost her life”. Lady Frederick Campbell had seen more than her fair share of difficulty and tragedy before she married the Scottish nobleman and politician in 1769. Born Mary Meredith, she married Laurence Shirley, 4^th Earl of Ferrers in 1752 but the couple legally separated just six years later with Mary citing her husband’s cruelty as the cause. Two years later, in 1760, he was found guilty of the murder of one of his servants and hanged at Tyburn, the last peer of England to be hanged for murder. He chose to wear his wedding suit for the execution blaming his conduct on his unhappy marriage to Mary and it is said that he cursed his former wife to a death even more painful than his own death.

Mary’s marriage to Lord Frederick Campbell was a much happier affair, and the couple had two daughters. However, an element of mystery surrounds her death in the fire at Combe Bank in 1807. Despite the inscription on the back of the painting, the Palladian mansion was far from destroyed in the fire, with only one room being badly affected by the blaze. A visitor to the house just three months after the fire described how only “three or four feet of the floor near the sitting room door” were actually burnt and opined that Lady Campbell, “having been thus actually burnt to ashes… can only be accounted for by her having fallen into a fit with her head in the candle”.

It was said that all that remained of Lady Campbell after the fire was a single thumb, which was buried on the estate. The fire was centred around the unfortunate lady’s dressing room and theories at the time included the unlikely scenario of spontaneous combustion, to the likelihood that she had fallen asleep while reading beside a candle. Kentish folklore claims that the ghost of Lady Campbell still haunts Combe Bank, now an independent girls’ school,

The painting of the Campbell’s tragic family home has come from the collection of Lord Astor of Hever, was by Woolley and Wallis on 4^th September.

Lord Frederick did however make some alterations to the house, John Adam was commissioned between 1775 and 1777 to prepare plans for altering the house, but these were not executed until the 19^th century, He died in 1816 without a male heir and his daughter sold the estate to William Manning who, in 1830, became bankrupt and was forced to sell Combe Bank. It was purchased by Arthur Chichester who became first Lord Templemore in 1831. Chichester died in 1837 and his son only four years later, which led to the estate being put back on the market. It was purchased in 1845 by the Rev Augustus Clayton who lived at Combe Bank until 1864 when he sold it to William Spottiswode, President of the Royal Society. During his ownership some of John Adam’s designs for internal decorations to the house were carried out. Although Spottiswode undertook some minor plantings, the structure of the grounds remained little changed from the mid 18th Century. In 1883 William Spottiswode died and for a while his son Hugh tenanted Combe Bank before selling it in 1906 to Ludwig Mond, a German-Jewish chemist and industrialist who settled in London in 1862, where he became a prominent businessman, philanthropist and art collector. Mond, and his son Robert who inherited in 1909, carried out extensive alterations to the gardens, building a rockery and a formal rose garden. Following the First World War Robert Mond put Combe Bank up for auction in 1921, divided into lots. The house and gardens did not find a buyer in the auction but in 1924 were purchased by the Society of the Holy Jesus Christ who founded Combe Bank School for Girls.

Sundridge Public Houses