ODD MAN’S WEEK Value can be added to property if its past is revealed
DOES who lived in your house before you matter to you? And will it matter when you sell it? No, this isn’t a questionnaire. But it may well be useful to you to know the answers to these questions –especially the last one.
Why? Well, estate agents reckon that providing your house with a history and a tally of interesting previous occupants, could enhance its value. It’s called creating a provenance.
As we walk our roads we walk past history and in the company of ghosts, people unrecorded, and quite forgotten. Sometimes the streets tell of a vanished past – the various St Mary’s gates, the selection of “abbey” roads and so on. Sometimes, too, people’s sur
Alderman Frank Barrett had a home in Augusta Street. names have been immortalised.
We may stroll past houses once homes to the wealthiest men of the town’s Edwardian heyday … Marmaduke Wilkin (1833-1909) for instance who owned hundreds of houses in the Borough and died leaving £117,626, and that in 1909! His house stands yet in Welholme Road.
Not far away in Augusta Street stands the home of that poor orphaned postman Frank Barrett who, in 1941, left £323,000, one of the town’s most generous trawler owners of which there were many.
Both rubbed shoulders with Sir Alec Black (1878-1942) who had, in turn several houses in the area, notably Field House. A ladies’ man who named one of his trawlers after one of his famous conquests, his generosity lives on in Grimsby and is still administered. And his homes stand too.
I can drive past the old home of the only members of the Royal Entomological Society whose collection of bugs is a mainstay of Bangor University, the home of the only local man to have been chairman of the most famous maker of motor cars in the world, and the home of distinguished soldier who brought electricity to Grimsby.
But it’s not just large houses in the smarter parts of Grimsby which have a pedigree. Take a terrace house in Convamore Road for example … Here lived one of the town’s most highly respected men, Alderman Charles Wilkinson. His 1914-18 War record in Bulgaria, Egypt, Macedonia, Turkey and Serbia was remarkable.
In civilian life he achieved every schoolboy’s dream, driving express engines and between 1939 and 1945 was one of the most important men in town and was decorated.
A magistrate, he was held not only in high regard but in genuine affection by all classes and was given the Freedom of the Borough. But his house echoes his modesty. Here in People’s Park is the erstwhile home of a one time Grimsby shop assistant, Sir James Blindell, who became an MP and Junior Lord of the Treasury and was killed when his Daimler crashed at Stickford; and at Cleethorpes in Seacroft Road is the house where lived another ex-shop assistant who also became an MP and a member of Churchill’s wartime Cabinet. And he became High Steward of Grimsby.
There are, of course, houses with a history best swept under the carpet of time. I recall writing of a murder in one also in Cleethorpes – which seemed innocuous until the then occupant who had her house for sale felt my tale had not helped.
I also remember being told by a solicitor friend (now, sad to say, no longer with us) of a conversation he had with his small daughter to whom he apologised for failing, one night, to read her bedtime story.
It was all right, she said, for “the lady in grey” would come and sit on her bed and speak to her. The house was haunted. The solicitor and his family decamped. There are houses which were once shops, houses named after trawlers, hoses once vicarages, houses which replace others bombed flat during the war, houses with the Star of David in their gable ends. Few houses fail to have any sort of history. Grimsby has not gone in for Blue Plaques. And as memory fades and generations come and go, so the past and former owners fade and disappear.
Now, at last, estate agents are taking an interest and, with the help of title deeds and directories suggest that value can be added to property if its past is revealed. We live among history and it’s going to be worth your while to enquire within.