Viva Brighton Issue #58 December 2017

BITS AND BOBS
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SECRETS OF THE PAVILION:
AN 18 TH CENTURY ‘BABY HOUSE’
The house is called ‘Scadbury Manor’ and it
was made some time between 1730 and 1740.
It stands five feet five inches high. Unfortunately,
we’ve no idea where it was made, but when it
came to be called Scadbury Manor it was living
in the Scadbury Manor, a listed medieval manor
house which still exists in Kent.
We found it in the stores, but we needed to
find provenance. There is a collection which
Brighton Museum took over trusteeship of in
the 1970s, called The National Toy Museum.
It was started by a group of people who
were interested in preserving the history of
childhood. They started collecting in the early
50s with a view to exhibiting them, which never
happened. So, Brighton Museum took on a very
large collection of toys which are still being
catalogued. It’s not unusual to find amazing
things that we don’t have provenance for, and
go on to do more research.
All I had was a piece of paper that said
‘Scadbury Manor’ and I knew from the
archive that it had been mentioned in a book by
Vivien Greene [the estranged wife of the writer
Graham]. She travelled around the country in the
early 1950s visiting private homes and museums
and, in 1955, published English Doll Houses of the
18th and 19th Centuries. Fortunately for us she
visited Mrs Andrus, who owned Scadbury Manor.
Vivien photographed the house and quoted from
family correspondence about it. Immediately we
could tell that in 1955 it was in the ownership
of the Andrus family and, from the various
references in the correspondence, we were able
to make a family tree of four generations.
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