75 Montpelier Road

Hannah Fuller (1790 - 1866)

Between 1845 and 1880, 75 Montpelier Road – then known as Milton Hall – was home to three private schools in succession.  The first, Hannah Fuller’s ‘Establishment for Young Ladies’, had already relocated within Brighton several times since the early 1830s. The move to Milton Hall in 1845 was its last and here it stayed for over twenty years.  

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It was relatively unusual for a female private school proprietor to be married at this time. Hannah was married – at least nominally - to currier and leather seller Thomas Fuller. They’d tied the knot in 1816 in their home town of Lewes and, while the liaison may have begun felicitously, Hannah’s diaries of 1821 - 1824 reveal her soul in all its rawness: Thomas neglected her and, in one way and other, made her feel thoroughly inadequate. Not that this appeared to stop her loving him.  To add to her anguish, Thomas was irresponsible with money.  When the family firm was declared bankrupt in 1832, a substantial property portfolio in Brighton had to be sold off.  

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That same year Hannah, Thomas and their five children (two girls having died in infancy) moved from Lewes to Brighton, presumably pursued by creditors. Despite being an undischarged bankrupt, Thomas continued trading, which in due course led to a spell in prison.

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By this time there can have been no doubt that Thomas was at best an unreliable source of income for the family.  Yet someone had to provide for five children and,  having  somehow managed to put to one side the emotional bruising and financial setbacks, Hannah boldly stepped up to the role.  

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Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, a wife’s property, including any earnings, was subsumed into the husband’s estate.  It is not known how Hannah’s initiative was funded but the scenario suggests a degree of complexity in this respect!  

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Nevertheless, “Mrs Fuller’s Establishment for the Board and Education of Young Ladies” must have been up and running before the end of 1832 since, on 10th January 1833, the Brighton Gazette announces its relocation from 2 Norfolk Square to 7 Ship Street. The new premises are described as “large, airy, commodious”, thereby intentionally or unintentionally conveying the impression of an expanding clientele.  By 1840, it had moved again to the Priory (later known as Gothic House) on the corner of Western Road and Western Terrace.

The whole family are to be found here in the 1841 Census. By 1843, the Establishment had made its final move - to Milton Hall, 75 Montpelier Road.

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A fortnight’s notice of its “reopening” - probably after a holiday - is heralded in the Brighton Gazette on 17th July 1845. The same advertisement proclaims that Hannah and Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth is offering harp lessons.  Since playing a musical instrument was one of the vital ‘accomplishments’ for middle and upper class girls at this time, and the harp was particularly fashionable, such lessons were well worth mentioning. Even so, a marketing opportunity might have been overlooked:  while the advertisement refers to Elizabeth as a student of John Balsir Chatterton, it fails to highlight his position as harpist to Queen Victoria!

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I would love to know whether the main aim of Elizabeth’s enterprise was to contribute to the family’s finances. If so, who paid for the harp and her own tuition in the instrument?  Harps are pricey instruments and Chatterton's tuition fees would surely have been relatively high. Harps are also large and unwieldy so conveying one to and from private residences and schools for lessons, as appears to have been intended, would have necessitated wheeled (and horsed of course) transportation.

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The 1851 Census evidences 21 pupil boarders aged between eight and 17 at Milton Hall. While other private schools in the area were taking full advantage of the railway network to recruit pupils and staff from further afield, those at Hannah’s school were mainly Sussex born, with a handful from London and the home counties. One pupil was Hannah’s great niece, Elizabeth Moon, who went on to marry an important figure in Brighton, William Blaber. Blaber was into all kinds of good works, including a long period at the helm in establishing a much needed mains water supply for Brighton while simultaneously doing the same for several other towns both in this country and abroad.

 Another pupil was Emily Edgington, whose older sister, Helen, later married one of Hannah’s sons, Morris. Morris, too, was based at Milton Hall in 1851. More about him later.

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In addition to two governesses, there was a live-in teacher, 19 year old Sarah Glazebrook. She was a daughter of miller William Glazebrook of “Glazebrooks”, Rodmell. A dynamic and successful family, their home of 60 years had been renamed ‘Monk’s House’ by the time Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased it in 1919.   

Thomas Fuller

Thomas Fuller’s absence from both the 1851 and 1861 Censuses at Milton Hall while accruing various other addresses in Sussex and London implies that he spent little, if any, time at the family home as the years progressed.  Undoubtedly he was a complex character. Whilst he appears to have achieved a fair bit in the public realm at Brighton, it is unclear whether the motivation sprang from social conscience or a lust for power - or indeed a mixture of the two. In applying for sundry civic and political offices, as a nonconformist (despite Hannah’s early diaries indicating, to her chagrin, that religious worship ranked low on his to-do list),  he was not immediately successful. His status as an undischarged bankrupt did not always go down too well either. Nevertheless, in May 1839 he pops up as a committee member of the Brighton Conservative Association , the status of ‘high Tory’ being a prerequisite for his subsequent appointment, in 1841, as High Constable of the Hundred of Whalesbone (Brighton and West Blatchington at that time).  When he died in 1867, the death certificate defines him as a “gentleman” while the Brighton Gazette highlights his “gentlemanly habits”.  In 1901, on the death of his son – the aforementioned Morris – the Sussex Express asserts that Thomas had even been offered a knighthood (which, oddly, he had declined).  

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Like father like son - or in this case, sons! Hannah and Thomas’s youngest son, Cornelius, who was living at Milton Hall in 1851, entered the leather trade and, following the paternal lead, accumulated numerous addresses and appeared in bankruptcy courts over a long period.

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​Morris Fuller

​The peerless ‘chip off the old block’ was undoubtedly Cornelius’s older brother, Morris. 20 years old at the time of the 1851 Census, he was studying at Brighton College.  Despite (or because of?) his parents' nonconformist leanings, he steeped himself in the Oxford Movement, possibly influenced by the Vicar of Brighton’s son, Revd Arthur Douglas Wagner, who was only four years his senior and living at the Montpelier Road vicarage, a mere stone’s throw away from Milton Hall.  It is highly likely that Morris was present at the October 1848 opening service of St Paul’s in West Street, the church built for Arthur, at which Archdeacon Manning preached.  An advocate of the Oxford Movement at that time, Manning converted fully to Rome three years later.  

In 1857, Morris Fuller was ordained as an Anglican priest. An energetic achiever like his father, he wrote prolifically on church history and related themes, several of his publications being still in print today. Yet, like his father, he could equally be described as a bull-in-a-china-shop, his career as an Anglican clergyman having been frequently punctuated by vituperative arguments and counter-arguments between himself and his parishioners.

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For a start, his zeal for the ornamental trappings of Anglo-Catholicism – the "bells and smells" - along with what one parishioner described as “the bowings and turnings about and the mountebank actions of the acting minister”, were not so well received by congregations used to simpler forms of worship.  

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As incumbent in a succession of parishes, Revd Morris Fuller was publicly rebuked for sundry alleged wrongdoings - from tax evasion to extending his new rectory with a wall which narrowed the highway, to assault to dipping into the offertories to supplement his own income.  Autonomously changing service times, cutting the number of services and expecting parishioners to foot the bill for chancel alterations he had commissioned entirely off his own bat further suggest that teamwork was not his strong point!

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More than once he stood accused of abandoning his parishioners, for example by disappearing to Edinburgh to stay with his son without informing church officials about back up arrangements, also spending six months in Brighton while drawing a stipend. This latter disappearance, when Morris was Rector at Ryburgh in Norfolk, was compounded by his wife’s allegation that the village was a hotbed of immorality.  It is therefore hardly surprising that, one Saturday night in November 1888, the outraged villagers burned their Rector in effigy!

Whether or not all the allegations made against Morris during his career were entirely accurate, his lengthy defences in the newspapers and elsewhere at the time reveal that rarely did he consider himself to be at fault.  

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To return briefly to Thomas Fuller, whose presence in his wife Hannah’s life had been so erratic.  Although absent from the family home for the second successive Census - that of 1861 – Hannah, now aged 71, affirms that, not only does she classify as “Proprietor of the Establishment” but also as a “wife”. And after her death five years later, she is described on the certificate as a “widow” – which, in effect, she may well have been even though Thomas did not actually pass away until the following year at another address in Brighton!   

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Taking into account the self-loathing that permeates the diary years, it is impressive how Hannah rose to the challenge of supporting herself and her children as proprietor of a school. Although we know nothing definite about the quality of the education provided, it was unlikely to have been too basic. Why? Because Hannah's diary entries are so thoughtfully crafted and articulate that she was undoubtedly extremely intelligent and well-educated herself.  Furthermore, as the private school ‘market’ became increasingly competitive during the 1840s and 1850s, several such schools came and went. Yet Hannah’s survived for over thirty years.

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Postscript

A Mrs Brett took over management of the school shortly before Hannah died aged 76 at Milton Hall. But it did not last long after this.  

The next school to take up residence at Milton Hall was that of Joseph Dunwoody Gill. More information to follow if available! Currently I know little more than that Gill was Irish, had operated his school for many years at another property in Montpelier Road and that he is interred at Woodvale Cemetery. Since the inscription on his gravestone indicates that he was highly esteemed by his pupils, I am particularly keen to discover more.

With thanks to Peter Trent whose thorough investigation of the Fuller family, particularly Morris Fuller, has formed the basis of my article.