HIGH LEE (continued)

Style - Characteristically High Victorian in massing and polychromy of slating and in the use of quatrefoils punched into one of the bays. However, the avant garde school of Goths would not have gone for the elaborate tracery instead they would have used plate-tracery, and though elaborate bargeboards are a feature of the time, they were here so elaborate perhaps because the long-time owner was a timber merchant displaying his wares?

Owners and Occupiers - the two houses apparently both called High Lee present problems, we have called the larger one High Lee and the smaller, near Druids Cross, Higher Lee. Reference to "Messieurs Thos. & John Vernon" in a Beaconsfield deed of 1859 indicates that land to the left of Beaconsfield and behind Abbots Lee was owned by the Vernons who, we suggest, built first High Lee and then Higher Lee.

The 1861 census shows that High Lee lodge was occupied but that High Lee had just 3 servants living there - all born in Shropshire. Consulting the Childwall census we find Thomas Vernon and his wife - who was born in Shropshire - staying at Childwall Abbey Hotel. Thomas, aged 62 was an iron shipbuilder and engineer (Thos. Vernon & Son, Tranmere & Brunswick Dock), born Davenham, Cheshire. John Vernon here (?) -in 1864.

The census shows 1 house building which could be Higher Lee and 1 house unoccupied which, we suggest is John Okill's cottage, named High Lee on the 1816 map (!) which survived to the 1881 map whose story has so far defeated us.

By 1868 David Jardine (c.1828-1911) was living here. Born in New Brunswick, he joined a firm of timber brokers (Dempsey) at 14, rising to become senior partner of Farnworth & Jardine, world famous for their mahogany auctions. He was for some years Chairman of the Finance Committee of the M.D.H.B. and from the early years of the Cunard Steamship Co. (Reg. 1880) was chief director in Liverpool and on the death of Lord Inverclyde he became the company's Chairman. He held many other directorships and tributes have been paid to his ability, his courtesy and "courtly bearing". He and his wife Margaret appear to have had no children as in the 1871 census a niece, Elizabeth Rankin, is living with them aged 6 and she is still there in 1881 now 16 as well as 6 servants including a butler and a ladies maid. Jardine died in 1911 but his widow went on living at the house until 1916. House was empty 1917-1920.

continued . . .