Little Holland House

40 Beeches Avenue

Carshalton  SM5 3LW.

Thursday January 18 2018

Sutton borough, as opposed to Bromley, seems to have a thriving Museum department and today’s visit was an excellent example of their support and enthusiasm for the local heritage. This small gem is easily accessible and really is only a 3 minute walk from Carshalton Beeches station… and there is a bus that goes past the door. 

And quite an interesting one too.

Our visit today was part of a group and with a commentary from one of Sutton’s archivists. I did try to take some notes but my pen died, not from old age but as I later discovered from the cold … and boy was it cold as of course the materials, and the plans used to build the house long pre-date any ideas about environmental impact or insulation or heating other than a central open fire…

Little Holland House was named in honour of Frank Dickinson’s ‘hero’ George Frederic Watts, artist and sculptor, whose home was Little Holland House in the eponymous West London park.  His was the Dower House of the much grander building, some of which remains today. Watts was hero for Frank Dickinson the builder and decorator for this, which is a very personalised family home. There are elements of GF Watts throughout the house but back to Frank Dickinson:

He was born in 1874 to a poor family in Lincolnshire where he was one of seven children, needing to leave school at 13 to help with the family income. He did a variety of jobs including employment in an iron foundry, some woodworking and sessions with  Doultons Tiles'.

As an admirer of not only GF Watts but of the art critic John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement he aspired to an Arts & Crafts House but without any income to speak of or capital. Luckily he ‘won’ a co-operative guild pay-out (a bit like the lottery) and with this bought the land in Carshalton – an area he chose because of the Ruskin associations and because back in 1900 it was still very rural. When the house was built between 1902-4 there were still lavender fields and corn growing.

The exterior of the house, which does not stand out much today, would have been unusual in its day using the 'roughcast' finish beloved of the Arts & Crafts movement. Although lacking in formal training Frank, together with his wife and friends, completed the building, based on his own designs and plans, within two years. By this time Frank had married and not only did his wife give up her trousseau to buy the Cumbrian slate roof tiles but spent her honeymoon in the house sanding the floors. Though there was no mention of this we surmised that Frank was an obsessive, albeit of a harmless nature, and his completer tendencies are seen in every detail of the home, outside and in. From the front gate and letter box to the lampshades and furniture everything adheres to the spirit of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement. The furniture pieces; tables, chairs (his and hers), work boxes and chests are all wonderful, well-proportioned and timeless. Some of the wooden carvings used as friezes are attractive but do look amateurish or maybe we are just spoilt after the Grinling Gibbons magnificence of St Paul’s last week?  Mrs Dickinson – Florence – contributed equally with her embroidered curtains and perhaps the lampshades.

Other well-crafted items include the copper friezes round the fireplaces (sadly unlit) and the beds. Overall the proportions of the house are very generous – Dickinson could not abide the meanness of narrow doors so these are wide, as is the staircase round the corner off the dining area.

The front door leads through to a fairly basic kitchen, which is not really part of the tour. The remaining downstairs consists of a back, opening on the garden sitting area and towards the front of the house the dining table – this is on a raised platform and the Dickinsons used to do ‘entertainments’ with their friends. The two rooms can be curtained off but it looks like what it was designed to be: a space for a family but generous enough to be hospitable too.  The fact that millions of households have since ‘broken through’ to join their front and back rooms makes this no less revolutionary as a design in its time. There are charming occasional tables, a sewing box next to Florence’s sewing machine and two fireplaces. The Doulton tiles in the surrounds were apparently a wedding gift for them and Frank crafted copper surrounds to tie in. Over the sitting room fireplace is a triptych painted by Frank, in the spirit of GF Watts. The carving reads ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ but this is no religious picture – pride of place is given to the farm labourer tilling the soil to nurture the wheat, while to right and left are side lined Church, Law & State and Arts and Science respectively. The other downstairs pictures include local views painted at the time – which other visitors to the house recognised.  The family lived here until 1981 though Frank died in 1961 and he certainly quite resented the fact that other houses had gone up in the street. The other very charming pictures by him are of all the other family members at different stages of their life. His son tried to get a gallery to exhibit his work but by the early 20^th Century modernism had very much pushed out Dickinson’s more traditional approach to painting. Another eye-catching picture is a version of the Death of Ananias with such contemporary celebrities as Shaw, Lenin and Marx in the ‘crowd’ – you can see where Dickinson’s allegiances lay. His family are in the foreground. 

The garden is really quite large for the size of house and Sutton are using volunteers to help restore it to a more original design.

The tour continues upstairs where the back main bedroom is the attraction; there are several very beautiful pieces of furniture – wardrobe, chest of drawers and bed, hand embroidered curtains and several period pottery pieces. Over the bed hangs a copy of GF Watts’  'Hope' (who always looks more than a little depressed) and Frank took the colour scheme from there to use in the frieze round the room.

Freeze being the operative word today, we looked into the newly opened front room which had been that of their daughter Isabel, usually known as Julie. Until recently there had been a resident warden at the house and this had been their room but now Sutton are planning to use it as an ‘exhibition’ room.

On display were some plans that Frank had submitted to the council laying out his ideas for the redevelopment of Carshalton town/village centre, but his were not adopted. In the centre was the silver tea set he had made himself (after attending silversmith classes) and presented to his wife for their 25^th wedding anniversary. Theirs was a very enduring relationship; he died in the Sixties and she survived him by some 20 years and eventually moved into a local care home living until 1981.  Their son Gerard then offered the house to Sutton, who with considerable foresight took it over in 1981.

The remaining back bedroom belonged to Gerard and it is suitably modest with its bed and chest (by this time Gerard was assisting/learning woodwork from his father) and a clever use of the corner to hang clothes. The adjacent bathroom was modernised in the Sixties but retains the original copper boiler, which is why characters in period novels tend to say ‘she put on the copper’ – it is essentially an unenclosed uninsulated immersion heater…

Our tour concluded with a very welcome cup of tea and home-made cake as we badly needed to thaw – pretty tea cups on the proper dining table and settle were very welcome. What is impressive here is the love, thought and hard work that the whole family put into building and maintaining a unique family home, which we can admire and visit today.