The history of Tony Blair's London home in Connaught Square

June, 2004

As Tony and Cherie Blair prepare to move into their Georgian home in London, Claudia Joseph reveals the bizarre range of people who have lived there since the house was built - and how the building has been touched by tragedy

1831-1837 When the rates were just £11
Landowner Richard Smith was the first recorded resident of the Blairs' Connaught Square house, which was built in 1830.
The freehold and the land that the property stood on was owned by the Bishop of London and later the Church Commissioners, which leased the property to various tenants until 1999.
Smith lived there for six years, before leasing it to other tenants.
His rates, including £8 8s poor rate, £2 6s highway rate and 7s 11d watching and lighting rates, would be equivalent to £771.89 today ? just under half the £1,363.36 that Westminster Council is charging this year for Band H houses such as this.

1838-1850
Mrs G. Dewing, 1838-1839; Francis Abbott, 1840-1845; George Pemberton, 1846-1848; Warren Peacock, 1849-1850

1851-1852 An upper-class colonel
In Victorian times, Connaught Square reflected the affluence of the upper classes with their cooks and domestic servants. Colonel Charles Unwin, 36, leased the house when he worked at the India Board overseeing the trading practices of the East India Company.
He lived with his wife Mary, 32, their five children and five servants. The servants were Charles Artif, Mary Mann, Mary Allcock, Mary Bryan and Elizabeth Hemings.

1853-1855 The Mersey money
Samuel West Strickland was a Custom House official in Liverpool who moved to London during the 1840s. He took up property-developing and built five houses in Kensington Palace Gardens.

Home improvements: Tarpaulin protects building work linking the house to a mews property behind

He leased the Connaught Square house in his 14-year-old son Sefton's name for tax purposes. Sefton was called to the Bar aged 27. When Sefton died aged 71 in 1910, he left an inheritance of £33,705 ? equivalent to about £2.4million today ? to his nephew George.

1856-1887 A captain's treasure
Captain William King was 51 when he bought the lease for the property from Richard Smith after he retired from the Navy. He moved in his wife Sarah, 43. They employed four servants: a ladies' maid, cook, housekeeper and footman.
King died in the house on October 27, 1887, aged 82, after suffering from gangrene. Like Sefton Strickland, he was a wealthy man, leaving £38,292 ? worth about £2.9million today ? and his house in Connaught Square to his niece Emma Bullmore.
However, William's great-great-great-nephew, George Bullmore, 95, said: "I don't know where William got his money from."

1888-1905 A home fit for a hero
Admiral and Arctic explorer Sir Erasmus Ommanney moved into the house aged 74 with his wife, Lady Mary. He joined the Navy at 12 in 1826, and the following October took part in the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino, later serving in the Balkans and West Indies.

In 1838 he received a special commendation from the Admiralty for an Arctic expedition in search of missing whalers. He died in 1904.

1907-1909 A brief stay
Robert Bayly, son of a timber merchant from Plymouth, Devon, moved into Connaught Square aged 29 when he became a barrister in Lincoln's Inn, London. While living there, he married his wife, Eleanor, before the couple moved to Chelsea, where their sons Robert, John and Edward were born.
They later moved back to Devon, where Robert died, aged 34, leaving his widow with three children under the age of four. A "gentleman of independent means", he left £166,494 in his will: £11.2million today.

1909-1913 Minnie Lewis Milles
1914-1934 The rover's return
Bachelor Frederick Ratcliff, the only son of a safe manufacturer, moved into the house when he was 41 and the First World War was about to start. He lived there with his unmarried sister, Lotty, who was seven years his senior.
A keen traveller who visited Iceland, Algeria and New Zealand, Frederick suffered from tuberculosis in his 20s and died aged 61 from acute myocarditis and fibrosis of the left lung. He left £33,111 ? £1.6million ? in his will. After his death, Lotty moved to nearby George Street with their cook Josephine.

1929-1973
Audrey Winifred Webb, Josephine Bellin and Louis Gibbons lived at the house between 1929 and 1940. During the Second World War, the property was requisitioned by the War Office.
After 1945 the area became less gentrified and the property was divided into a variety of flats until 1973 when it was bought by Roger Enever. 1947-1952 The newlyweds
Albert Ferrer, 23, a hospital X-ray technician, and his wife Rosina, 21, moved into the ground-floor flat shortly after they married in Paddington in June 1946. Albert died of lung cancer in 1993. His widow Rosina now lives in Woking.

Albert Ferrer, 23, and his wife Rosina moved into the ground-floor flat after they married in Paddington in June 1946

She recalled: "My second daughter Geraldine was born in the sitting room. It was a lovely large room with high ceilings and a huge marble fireplace.
"We had another smaller room behind it and shared the bathroom with the family upstairs. There was a lovely black-and-white tiled marble floor in the hallway."

1947-1955 Family tragedy
Donald Paterson, 26, an import and export agent, and his wife Dorothy, also 26, lived in the upstairs flat at the same time as the Ferrers. Their baby Donald died in the spring of 1947 after his carrycot fell off a chair and he was smothered.
The couple had another son, Bruce, who was born in Connaught Square in 1949, but their marriage crumbled and Donald moved out before his son's first birthday. Dorothy married Gerard Williams in 1952 and he moved into the house.

1945-1960 Nine in a flat
Percy and Violet Priest moved with their seven children "below stairs" shortly after their 30th wedding anniversary. Percy was a chauffeur and drove for an Army officer based at the house. The couple's grandson Grahame, 51, from Bristol, remembers their Golden Wedding anniversary: "They had a proper East End knees-up in a pub with Pearly Kings and Queens and a singsong."

1949-50 Dorothy Hughes

1952-1955 Business and boxing
Entrepreneur Reginald Ewart from County Antrim, Northern Ireland, rented the ground-floor flat for a couple of years after the Ferrers left. He then moved to Coventry, where he set up Ewart &£038; Son Removals and met his second wife Carolyn, a nurse.
The couple had five children. They later divorced. Reginald died of cancer on April 10, 1991. His son Steve said: "He was a real character. He boxed during his school days in Ireland and he wrote a book called The Greatest Heavyweight Boxers.
"He once ran a taxi service and he was also a theatrical agent and used to tell us how he picked up Cliff Richard from Coventry station to take him to a local theatre."

1953-1954 Angela and James Walshe

1958-1960 Restoration period
Actress Vanessa Redgrave's cousin Joan Dale renovated the house with husband Frank and sons Ivor and John. John's wife Madeleine said:
"It had been requisitioned by the War Office and had breeze blocks dividing all the rooms. It was sold for something ridiculous like £5,000."

1961-1966 House of fun
Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert Baines won the Distinguished Service Order twice during the First World War. On retirement he bought the lease on the house in 1961 and let the top two floors. His daughter, Diana Shaw, 60, said: "When my father went away, we used to have wild parties."

1961-1963 Love in a cold climate
Newly-weds Christopher Newsom, 24, and his wife Lerona, 22, lived on the top floor of the Baines' house in the early Sixties when they were saving for their first home.
Christopher's boss Jocelyn Baines and his wife Claire lived on the floor below. Lerona Newsom Perkins, 68, a former journalist, said: "We were there in 1963 during the deep freeze. When the ice began to defrost, it ran the entire length of our bed and we had to have a line of buckets to catch it."
Christopher died of a heart attack in 2003, aged 66.

1970-1973 Derek Rayner and Kenneth Robinson

1973-1978 Shattered dreams
Racing driver Roger Enever, who was in the first English team to finish at Le Mans, bought the house as an investment in 1973 with a business partner, but the bottom fell out of the market and it reverted to the Church Commissioners at the end of their lease.
The windows of the house were blown out by an IRA bomb on November 3, 1975.

1991-1994 A winning bet
Property developer Graham Balfour-Lynn, 36, and his wife Sandra, 27, took a gamble when they bought the rundown house for about £180,000 on a short lease.
After the Church Commissioners extended the lease, the couple sold the renovated house for just under £1million.
Graham said they moved because the number of stairs made it impractical to live there with their two babies, adding: "It's a pity because I saw myself living there for the rest of my life."

1994-2004 The art of money-making
After art historian Roger Bevan bought the house, he led a residents' campaign to buy the freehold of the property and others in the square from the Church Commissioners.
The Old Etonian and Cambridge graduate, who has been a Turner Prize judge, also encouraged the residents to restore the square and reinstate the original railings, which had been destroyed by the IRA bomb attack in the Seventies. Mr Bevan sold the house to Tony and Cherie Blair in 2004 for £3.6million.

How the Blairs built resentment
This extraordinary photograph of the back of the Blairs' new home shows the transformation taking place in Connaught Square. A huge tarpaulin covers scaffolding used by workmen linking the three-storey house with a mews cottage behind the property.
The entire rear of the Grade II listed building, which the Blairs bought in 2004 for £3.6million, has been ripped off so the two houses can be joined, providing a massive living area for the former Prime Minister and his family.

A bulging skip stands outside, and the west side of the square is now little more than an eyesore. A vast new kitchen is being built, as well as accommodation for security staff and a suite of offices from which Mr Blair will run his new career. There will also be a sun terrace and four solar panels to provide green energy.


The project is being overseen by Martha Greene, the American restaurateur who has a central role in managing the Blairs' life outside Downing Street.
The once-peaceful square, just north of Hyde Park, has never seen anything like it. Tony and Cherie recently attended a residents' garden party to try to soothe ruffled feelings, but there is still resentment at the disruption the new neighbours are causing.

Police have drawn up plans to seal off the area in the event of demonstrations and have asked residents to consider carrying utility bills to prove their identity to officers manning security cordons around the square.

A petition circulated among residents has suggested that to protect the Blairs, part of the square could be turned into "a gated community policed by armed guards [with] a police helicopter hovering above". It added that if the risk to the family was so great, they should not be living in a residential square.

A community police officer told worried neighbours last week: "We are in a new situation and we are not going to know how it will affect everyone until the family is here.

Source: the Dailymail