A Short History of Broadditch Farm alias Wastdale in Southfleet

Located at NGR TQ 6205 7072. Part of a series on Southfleet Historic Houses by R. A. C. Cockett.

The hamlet of Broadditch was a creation of the 19th century census enumerators, who found that they needed to list rural dwellings within named groups. We know of no estate surveys of the Broadditch area and the earliest detailed maps are the Ordnance Survey's manuscript drawing of the Dartford area of 1799 and the Tithe Survey map of 1843. These maps show a cluster of houses around the junction of New Barn Road and Red Street. The 1799 map applies the name Broadditch, probably to the farmhouse of those days. It must at one time have been two words, but in most documentary sources they are joined or hyphenated.

Earliest maps of Broadditch

The 1843 Tithe map shows the house we know as Manor Farm and its garden on the north side of Red Street with its barns and outbuildings extending further north, much as at present. The Tithe schedule shows that they comprised parcel 242, which was owned by the absentee lord of Southfleet manor, one Uvedale Price, but occupied by a local man, Benjamin Venner. South of Red Street are a pair of cottages roughly where Proctors is now, parcel 247; an unoccupied building reputed to be an oasthouse where Rosedale is now; and a house and a cottage where Wastdale and the ruins of The Cottage are now, parcel 246. Benjamin Venner owned and occupied 5 cottages and gardens at 246, though by 1841 he had let them to tenants. Mrs Sarah Morris was owner and occupier of 2 cottages and a plantation at 247 though she probably lived at Chapter Farmhouse, further down Red Street. Venner also had a plantation at parcel 247. The 1799 map shows a very different situation, as on the site of Manor Farm house there are only farm buildings. Clearly that house had not yet been built and the only house of any size at Broadditch was what we know as Wastdale.

The buildings

Wastdale, which fronts onto Red Street, was apparently the original Broadditch farm or small holding. It was converted into 3 cottages in the 1830s and reconverted back into a single house by H G H Whiting in 1925-6. It was probably he who gave the house that name.

The Kent Historic Environment Record TQ 67 SW 1174 quotes the Listed Building designation:

Early C17 timber-framed building now faced with roughcast and red brick. Tiled roof. C17 brick chimney stack. Two storeys. Three casement windows. The westernmost window bay projects and is wholly faced with red brick with a gable end. Modern porch to the east of this with a pentice roof. Chimney breast of flints and brick on the east wall. Two inglenook fireplaces inside.

This is not entirely correct. The eastern part is a two storey timber building of 4 frames, with 2 wide bays and a narrow west bay. 2 chimneys are sited in the narrow bay and a late, external porch lies to the north. The wide central bay was the hall and has an inglenook fireplace. The east bay had an external eastern chimney, demolished by 1968, which masked earlier first floor and attic windows; possibly it provided the second inglenook noted in the HER. This part of the building had a gable ended side purlin roof, the purlins being notched into the collars. The roof has no traces of sooting as from an open fire and there is no indication that the hall beneath was originally open. The central and east bays are spanned at floor and ceiling levels by chamfered and stopped binding joists. The north wall plate and the roof purlins are roughly cut off some 10cm beyond the west frame (no other lengthways timbers being visible) indicating that the timber building once extended further west before the construction of the brick cross-wing.

The western part of the building is a two storey cross-wing with a hipped side purlin roof, set at right angles to the eastern part and projecting to its north.  Its external walls are built of, but not faced with, brick. There is a chimney in its north wall. The internal wall which abuts the eastern part of the building is of timber, but separately framed from it. The rafters of the eastern part have been continued over the roof slope of the cross-wing. Wastdale does not appear to be medieval but is most likely early 17th century, with an 18th century brick cross-wing.

The Cottage was a 2 storey timber framed house to the south-east of Wastdale in what is now its garden. It had a thatched roof and hipped gables. It was used as a pair of cottages in the 19th century and by 1925 was owned by one Atkins, who lived at Rosedale, in Red Street. It had become ruinous by the 1950s and but photographs, drawings and the foundations, now remain. On its east side, fronting New Barn Road, was a massive external brick chimney, suggesting an early 16th century date. On the west side was a single storey outshut and a late chimney.

The earliest owners and occupiers

The first person that we can find at Broadditch in the Southfleet parish registers is "Thomas Betts of Bradage". He was raising a family from 1628 to 1640, which may be the time that Wastdale was built. Thomas Betts died in October 1640, just as the Civil War was beginning, but a John Betts, perhaps his son, was baptising children in Southfleet in 1653 and 1658. Wastdale is described in a conveyance of 1682 (document 3 of the H. Whiting collection) as "two messuages & three acres of land in Southfleet which abut on the Queen's highway leading from Reddishe Street to Bradishe Pond towards the north and the lands of Daniel Hill Clark towards the South West...) which matches the description of parcel 246 in the Tithe Schedule 160 years later. Whiting's notes indicate that Wastdale had earlier been owned by Thomas Wayte and afterwards by Margaret Wayte, then by her son Thomas Lomas and that Lomas sold it to John Venner in 1699. The tenant at that time was Thomas Todman. In those days, Wastdale alias Broadditch was evidently some kind of small-holding, but not yet a farm.

The Venner family

One Richard Venner and his family appear in the Southfleet parish registers from 1684 to 1688. The first of 4 successive John Venners of Southfleet, then appears in the registers with his wife Sarah, baptising 9 children from 1695 to 1710. Possibly John I was a brother of Richard Venner. John Venner II, born in 1695 married an Elizabeth and in the registers he styled himself "John Venner of Bradditch Yeoman". The title suggests that it was he who began to acquire additional farmland in the area. John II and Elizabeth baptised 7 children from 1724 to 1735. It was probably John II who built the brick wing at the west end of the house, replacing an earlier timber one. Coins of George II and George III were found sealed in a fireplace in the brick wing.

John and Elizabeth’s son, John III, married Elizabeth Woodin, daughter of a brewer from Dartford in 1757 and they baptised 6 children in Southfleet from 1656 to 1666. Their eldest son John IV married another Sarah and they baptised 4 children from 1790 to 1798, this last being the same year that John IV died. Their 3rd son born in 1795 was the Benjamin Venner mentioned above in the Tithe survey.

The rebuilding of Broadditch Farm

In 1799 the present yellow brick farm house is not visible but it appears on the Tithe map of 1843, indicating that it must have been built in Benjamin Venner's time. But when his father John IV died, Benjamin was only 3 years old. He would not have come of age until 1816 and he may not have acquired enough money to build a new farmhouse for some years to come. However we know from the census that by 1841 it had been built and his old farmhouse converted into three cottages, all of which had tenants. The new farmhouse now took over the name Broad-ditch Farm and this appeared in local Directories as late as 1903, but by 1911 it had become Manor Farm, Broad Ditch.

The last of the Venners

Benjamin Venner was 46 years old by the time of the 1841 census. His wife had died and he was left with 5 sons and a daughter. He kept 4 servants to run the house and he employed 4 men to help run the farm, which (by 1851) had 260 acres. Over the next 30 years his children either moved away or died and by 1871 he was left with only his youngest son William Henry Venner then 38 and a house servant and with 5 men & 4 boys on the farm. Benjamin Venner died that year in Dartford. By 1881, Benjamin P Harris, whose family had for some years been farming only a couple of fields away in Northfleet Green, took over the farm and he had evidently brought all the lands together and was now farming 400 acres with 22 men, 5 boys & 11 women. William Henry Venner died in 1881 in Hackney. By 1891 Benjamin Venner’s eldest son John Venner V, now 73, had returned to one of the Red Street cottages with his wife Jane and they were running a fruit growing business. John V died here in 1895 and he was the last of the Venners in Southfleet.

The tenants of the three cottages, now Wastdale

The censuses do not name cottages or smaller houses, but the principal farm houses are identifiable. Usually the census enumerators made their circuit of the other dwellings in the same order each year. Only 2 censuses out of the 8 recorded from 1841 to 1911 did not do so. Also some families, the Russells, Scudders and Stonehams remained in a cottage for 30 to 50 years. From this we have been able to locate each family in each cottage in each census year, as set out in the table.

By 1911, Proctor House, now called Proctors, had been built close to the site of the 2 cottages in Red Street for Frank Harris of the farming family.  Cammesreinach, which must be the house now called Rosedale, was built on the site of the oast house just west of Wastdale for James B Aim, a fruit grower.

Purchase of the old house by H.G.H. Whiting

In 1925, Henry George Hodgson Whiting, one of the managers of the Northfleet chalk quarries realised that the 3 cottages comprising what is now Wastdale,  had once been a single farm house and he acquired them and converted them back into their original form. This required considerable work, including removal of several later staircases and unblocking of an inglenook fireplace. Whiting also added some single storey rooms at the south side of the house (away from the road). This, he noted, required removal of “an old brick and flint building which had been used as a bake-oven and also at some time as a blacksmith’s forge. This building lay just south of the house but at an angle of 17º. Its site is now covered by the 1925 additions. A large number of old horse shoes were buried under it. In the wall was a brick marked before burning “WB 1714”. Henry Whiting and his wife Gertrude named the converted house Wastdale and lived there until her death in 1938 and his own in 1943.

Inheritance by Frederick and Ivy Resker

Whiting’s will, proved in October 1943, left Wastdale to his wife’s nephew, Frederick Alfred William Resker, of 16 Rectory Road, Walthamstow, at that time a special constable. Fred was then 32 and his wife Ivy was 35. Their son John would be born in 1950. For whatever reason, it was not until 1955 that the Resker family finally moved into the Southfleet house. John Resker eventually inherited Wastdale himself and he was to live there for 60 years, until his death in 2015.

R A C COCKETT
8th January 2016

Sources

Census returns 1841 to 1911 (from Ancestry website);      Broadditch hamlet in the Censuses
Southfleet parish registers (from Medway Archives website);
Familysearch website;
Probate records (UK National Probate Service);
Tithe map and schedule (Kent Arch. Society website);
H G H Whiting collection - a descriptive list of deeds (which so far have not themselves been located);
4 page note by Whiting on his building work at Wastdale in 1925.

Note

H G H Whiting wrote a very useful note about his building work at Wastdale. However some of his historical conjectures, particularly its one-time existence as the Boot Inn, lack documentary backing. We must also point out that Scadbury was never a manor in the medieval sense, despite the desires of the Sedley and Andrus families. We simply do not know if Broadditch existed as a separate farm before the 17th century or if it formed part of the lands of Scadbury farm to the north or New Barn farm to the south. In any case, all of them were subordinate to the manor of Southfleet, which was, in the 16th century and before, based upon the manor house at Court Lodge near Southfleet church.