June Sampson: The tale of the tragic drowning at sea behind historic wall in Queen Elizabeth Road

It is, on the face of it, a dingy structure, barely worth a second glance.

Yet it fascinates me because it appears to be centuries older than its surroundings, and I have always wondered why.

It transpires I am not the only one.

For this is the boundary wall of Tiffin School, whose archive manager, John King, got in touch to tell me of the mystery that surrounds it.

He explained that when English Heritage experts gave the wall Grade II listing in 1983, they described its brickwork as “17th or 18th century”.

However, recent remedial work has revealed parts far older than that.

Indeed, some may even date back to Norman times.

The real mystery, though, is why such a large and high-quality wall was built here in the first place.

That question arose after the school realised sections of it are in such a poor state there must be a full restoration programme when funding can be found to pay for it.

Meanwhile, said Mr King, the school had called in a professional expert to survey the wall before constructing buttresses to strengthen its inner side.

He said: “Sixteenth century bricks identical to those used by Cardinal Wolsey when he began building Hampton Court Palace in 1517 were found in the lower parts of the wall, plus larger bricks such as those used by Henry VIII after he gained control of the palace in 1527.

“When the buttresses were being built, we found semi-circular brick structures from the wall concealed below the ground – we do not know what their purpose was – and a brick clearly identifiable as pre-dating Wolsey, i,e, from the Middle Ages.

“There is also a suggestion the wall may have a stone base of Norman origin that might be revealed rebuilding work.”

As yet there are no clues as to why such a palatial wall was built at a time when this part of Kingston was purely rural.

The site now covered by Tiffin School is known to have been a farm in Tudor times, and in 1738 the farmhouse was bought by a wealthy Londoner called Peregrine Fury.

His purchase also included “nine acres of land adjoining and the farmyard, lately converted into a garden, whereupon two barns latterly stood.

In 1756 Mr Fury replaced his former farmhouse with a handsome new residence known as Walnut Tree House, but later renamed Elmfield.

Over the next 164 years the mansion became home to many eminent and or fascinating people until its last owner died in 1918 and it was bought by Kingston Corporation two years later.

By then it was bounded by Queen Elizabeth Road, built in 1879 and, Birkenhead Road, built in 1882, and the corporation used it as a clinic and school for “physically defective children”, which remained until the arrival of Tiffin School in 1929 swiftly converted it into a children’s clinic.

Today Mr Fury’s fine home remains, largely unchanged, as the centrepiece of Tiffin School, but with many new buildings on the space once occupied by “barns, stables, coach houses, dovehouse, room and granary under the dovehouse, outhouses, etc.”

But will we ever know what its wall in Queen Elizabeth Road was guarding 500 years ago or more?

Another, quite different, recent discovery at Tiffin’s is that the name of a former pupil killed while on service is missing from the school’s Second World War memorial.

He was Sydney Graham Hodgson and, according to Mr King, “a chance enquiry about when he had been resulted in my discovery that, although he died in the war, his name was not on the memorial.

It is now about to be added, and will be unveiled on Remembrance Day later this year.

Sifting through the school archives, Mr King found Mr Hodgson lived in Mount Pleasant Road, New Malden, and attended Elm Road Public Elementary School before winning a Surrey County Council scholarship to Tiffin in 1912.

He left in 1915 to become a boy artificer in the Royal Navy. After service in the First World War, he spent the rest of his life in the Navy, and was commissioned as a warrant officer engineer in 1930.

He was only 40 when he died early in the Second World War while on convoy duties aboard the French destroyer, Branlebas.

Her mixed crew of English and French sailors thought it an unlucky vessel because of her tendency to roll heavily in stormy seas.

And so it proved.

On December 14, 1940, 19 miles SSW of Plymouth, the ship broke in two during a storm and sank.

Only three of the crew, an English petty officer telegraphist and two French seamen, survived. Sydney, whose name is on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, left a widow, Muriel, and an eight-year-old son.

There will be two tours of Tiffin School, including the wall, at 11.15am and 2pm on September 23, one of this year’s Heritage Open Days in Kingston.

The most tragic former resident of Elmfield was Captain Richard Pierce, who drowned at sea with his family in 1786.

They were on board the Halsewell, which was taking soldiers to the East India Company’s garrisons in Asia.

The ship sailed from Gravesend on New Year’s Day, soon met gales and snowstorms, and, in the dawn darkness of January 6, struck and broke up on the rocky coast of the Isle of Purbeck.

Of the 240-plus who had sailed in her, only 73 survived. Capt Pierce, his two daughters and two nieces were all lost, and the chief mate, Thomas Burston of Kingston, decided to die with “his cousins, the Miss Pierces, for were I to leave such dear relatives behind, I could only expect the worst of deaths, to be discarded for ever from the service”.

The captain, hearing there was no way to rescue the girls, is said to have embraced his daughters with the words “thus, my dear children, we will perish together.”

He was the oldest serving East India Company commander, and had settled in Elmfield in preparation for the retirement he was so tragically denied.

Previously he had brought back at least one service from his travels, for Kingston Parish records note the baptism in 1785 of Lucy Duncombe, “a black from Captain Pierce’s.”