Bath House and Bath House Hotel by Wendy Cope

On the corner of Mumbles Road and Norton Road is a terrace of three houses which were built as gentlemen’s residences and were let on a 99 year lease from November 1855.  In June 1856 William Jordan opened one of them as a lodging house offering warm and cold sea water baths.  Warm baths cost 1s 6d., cold water baths and showers cost 6d.  Tax assessment for 1856-57 showed that William owned a horse, kept no doubt in the stable building at the bottom of the garden that has now been tuned into a small house with a garage.  Two years later during an evening in the Beaufort Arms, he fell out with the Pike brothers accusing them of not paying their rent, probably as the result of too much drink.

In September 1860 The Cambrian carried an advertisement for the sale of Bath House.  It had 4 living rooms, 9 bedrooms, 2 dressing rooms, water closet and 2 bath rooms, with boilers and tanks, servants’ hall, kitchen and conservatory.  William Jordan moved to the Caswell Bay Hotel.

In August 1860 the wife of Captain James G. Elliott of the Royal Navy gave birth to a daughter in one of the houses, but their son who was not more than 18 months older than his sister was born elsewhere, possibly in Devon so they had not been there very long.  They were at Bath house for the census in 1861.  Also at Bath House then was Charles Fuller with his wife and grown up daughter.  He was a cabinet maker.

In September 1861 Edward Morgan Douglas an insolvent auctioneer and innkeeper was in Lewes gaol.  He had been at Bath House before moving to the Ship Hotel, Brighton.  Whether he ran the hotel for a short time or was a lodger, we know not.

In September 1862 there was a furniture sale.

At an auction in August 1865 all three houses were offered for sale.  Mr Francis occupied the Bath House which was described in a similar way to the previous advertisement and had a rental value of £50.  The other two houses were said to be occupied by Mr Clarke.  The middle one had 3 living rooms, kitchen, 3 bedrooms and the usual offices and had a rental value of £30.  The third house had accommodation similar to the first house, and also had a rental value of £50 but this house also had the stable and coach house.  As well as the houses, a building plot alongside was for sale.  There is now a smaller house between the Bath House properties and the later tall houses in Alexandra Terrace.  It is possibly at this time that Charles Fuller bought the houses.

The lessee of the hotel was anxious to restart business as a licensed hotel, for a drinks licence was sought the following month.  However, exactly two years later the furniture, including a billiard table, and the stock in trade of the hotel were auctioned and a Miss Eliza Jones then took on the hotel.  She advertised that she was prepared to accept gentlemen boarders and lodgers at a nominal charge and that she could supply plain teas at 1s. 3d. per person.  She advertised her business in The Cambrian in 1869 offering board and lodging for 5 or 6 gentlemen for £1 per week and including a free rail ticket to Swansea in the price.  She would cater for private dinner parties and encouraged societies such as the Pre-Adamites to meet there for their social and discussion evenings.  She was still there in 1871.  The census records her establishment as being at Cambrian House which is the present name of the middle house but dividing lines on the return suggest she was using two houses.  She had six lady boarders and one man and two live-in servants.  Thomas Kyle Clarke, cabinet maker, and his family were at Bath House.  He was first mentioned in 1865, 4 years after Charles Fuller, also a cabinet maker, is known to have been there.  Had he bought the business?     

Miss Jones had gone by 1875 when George William Whittaker was proprietor.  He left around March 1880 as there was an auction sale of his furniture and bar fittings on his departure. From 1874 to 1879 George Grant Francis, the Swansea antiquarian, was giving Bath House as his address.  Thomas Kyle Clarke and his family were also still there and were recorded there in 1881, with a female lodger, Miss Lewes aged 60.

It would seem that by 1888 two of the houses were being run as hotels, one licensed and the other a boarding house.  The landlord of the licensed hotel was John Martin and he found himself appearing in the police court in April that year.  He was accused of serving drink to a man who was already drunk and was fined 40 shillings, while in November a man named Lewis Ridge was convicted of drinking there on a Sunday when he was not a bona fide traveller living more than 3 miles away. The other proprietor was Alfred Price who was summoned by Mary Jane Watkins, who had worked there, with being the father of her child born that summer.  1888 was not a good year for the hotels.

In August 1888 the owner of all three houses and much more property was C. Fuller.  He sold his estate and moved away.  Two houses were sold together as one lot, the Bath House Hotel, but the third house, the corner one, was sold separately under the name Bath House and was then tenanted by W. Franklin Bull who had replaced Alfred Price.  The leases of all the properties were bought by G. J. Thomas, the owner of the West End Brewery.  He had plans to incorporate all the houses into the licensed hotel, improve the accommodation, erect a balcony and transfer the license to the corner house.  There was opposition from neighbouring residents who feared more noise and disruption.  Thomas Milward of Norton Lodge was one of them and he also complained of noise from the skittle alley out the back.  On the other hand, Superintendent Howlett declared that the Bath Hotel had always been well conducted especially by the present landlord, James Chambers.  The change in the license was refused but in August 1889 James Chambers announced ‘entirely new arrangements with first class accommodation for families and gentlemen.’ 

By 1891 the landlord had changed again.  A. Ellerman was now the licensee. He had come from the Esplanade Hotel in Porthcawl but his youngest child, 2 year old Fernand, had been born in Manchester, so he had not been there for long.  He did not stay long in Norton either.  He advertised 70 private rooms which seems an excessive number even though this must have been the time when all three houses were part of the hotel.  The places where the walls had been knocked through can still be seen in the middle house.

In October 1894 the rate book names W. J. Chambers as tenant after crossing out Mumbles Workmen’s Club, while in 1897 Bath House Hotel was crossed out and Ty-Isaf pencilled in.

A guide book from 1900 lists Captain Solheim Noerup, a Norwegian, in Bath House, the corner house. Herbert Watson was at Cambrian Cottage, the middle house, and Miss Trotter was at Beach House, the third house.    A deed of 1910 names this as being formerly Bath House Hotel and shows that its bar area had moved into the smaller fourth house next door.  This deed was the conveyance of Bath House from Mrs M. J, Frances Watkins, who was then living there, to Edgar G. Evans of Somerset Place, physician and surgeon.  Edgar, together with his wife Adelaide and their three children, Adelaide, Violet and Guy, was in residence in the 12 room house for the 1911 census.  Next door in the 7 roomed Cambrian House was the Saunders family, Anne aged 67, with her son Christopher, his wife Peggy and their small child, while still at the 14 roomed Beach House were Miss Emily Trotter and her two unmarried sisters Florence and Fanny.

By 1925, Charles Dillwyn Moggridge, had become owner of Bath House and Cambrian Cottage and in that year he sold them to Mrs E. M. Musgrave.  

At this time the fourth house had become independent of Beach House and was called Ingledene and it had taken a chunk out of Beach House leaving that property with just a corridor between its front and back sections.

In 1947 when Miss G. V. Musgrave sold the Bath House, that property had been divided in two, the rear end of the house now being Bath Cottage.  Cambrian Cottage was separately owned and Ingledene still owned part of Beach House.  That part has now been returned.

Between 1936 and 1939 Ethel and Mary Ross lived with their mother at Cambrian Cottage.  Ethel was an important member of Swansea Little Theatre which was then based at the old schoolroom in Southend.  Mary later married Fred Janes [sic] the artist, a friend of Dylan Thomas.

Cambrian Cottage was last sold in 1982, by Captain John Henry Kenneth Griffin, who had been born there and had inherited it from his father who had kept a shop at 11 Newton Road.  At the end of World War Two he purchased a small cargo ship, the MV Farringay, one of 25 ships that had been built to take supplies to the allied forces in Normandy.  For 20 years his wife sailed with him as cook and he is reputed to have carried the last cargo of coal from Cardiff.

The third house in the row continues as a guest house.  It changed its name again, now being known as Tides Reach.  The smaller house, Ingledene, also changed its name and became Quaintways.

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