The Lumleys of Cheam

A bit more than a week ago, BH happened to notice an item, I think in our free local newspaper, I think the Epsom Guardian from Newsquest, which drew us to the Lumley Chapel in Cheam, which apart from being heritage also had a connection with Nonsuch Park, the place where there used to be a real Nonsuch Palace and where there still is an expensive architectural model of same. For the palace see, for example, reference 1. For the chapel, one can start at reference 2 and, if there is not enough on the page for you, follow the references given there.

A rather wet afternoon, but we managed to park quite near St. Dunstan's, the large Victorian church which replaced the church of which the Lumley Chapel is the remnant, having once been its chancel. With St. Dunstan having been a political cleric in England in late Saxon times, often in trouble with the king of the day - troubles which may have provided the quality time he needed to brush up his metalworking skills, which earned him his current job description of patron saint of armorers, goldsmiths, locksmiths, and jewellers.

The plaque

The interior

The church was busy with a wedding, but we found a notice telling us that we could get the key of the chapel from the public library next door. Which turned out to be a large shed like building of the early 1960's. Rather handsome inside, although it may well be cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

The white polystyrene on the wall at the end may be an art work, may be an art project for a local school. Or it may just be some rather moth-eaten insulation panels waiting to be covered up again.

Substantial lych-gate for the Victorian church

Literally, corpse gate, from the Old English. The place where the bier containing a corpse was kept between death and the burial service, before the days of refrigeration.

Some oldish yew trees in the graveyard, none to healthy. One large cedars. Quite a lot of rather grand monuments, although not as grand as the ones in the chapel to come. Clearly bourgeois rather than noble. Maybe even the odd artisan, although many of these preferred to do their own thing in their chapels - having had quite enough of their bosses during the week.

And so in to the chapel, a very old building used to store all the better memorials from the old church, featuring a much newer decorated, white plaster roof from the late 16th century (see reference 3).

Noticed for Dubois, a name from Agatha's 'Pale Horse'

Some Lumley's portrayed in the chapel of Nonsuch Palace

A John Lumley, inherited Nonsuch Palace in 1580. I think he had to hand it on to Elizabeth I a few years later by way of a fine for being a Catholic, only semi-legal at that time.

Ring necked parakeets

These parakeets seem to have been an important part of the Lumley arms - although I have no idea how they got there. I thought that they had turned up in Ham Common quite recently, in the 1970's, presumably escaped from some pet shop. Now breeding fast and perhaps the most common of the larger birds in and around Epsom.

A chap who was keen on his family history

A lot more parakeets

The mark of the Masons

A chap who collected lots of letters after his name. Slightly confused by his being the Earl of Scarborough as I had thought that was the stamping ground of the Sitwells (Edith, Osbert and so forth). Something to check up on in an idle moment.

An untidy corner

A bit of fancy ceiling

Presumably the relatives for which the bottom half of the memorial had been designated moved away from the area and declined to come back, even in death. Perhaps the various wings of the family had quarrelled about something.

North wall, with something old, something new

Out to find that the wedding was still going on, so having returned the key, we set off to have a look round Cheam - a place I used for bread, fish, meat and greengrocery for the first few years of my retirement - until too much cycling did my back in - which I learned later was a reasonably common complaint among senior cyclists. Fortunately, the back seems to be able to cope with a modest amount of the sit-up-straight stuff on a Bullingdon.

Bread morphed into a cake shop. The man in the fish van retired. Butcher still there, although it looks as if it may have changed hands. Greengrocer still there and has not changed hands. He couldn't do me any walnuts (which I used to get from him often enough) but he could do some quite decent plums and some quite decent cherries. Although these last, coming from the market, could not match the quality control of an M&S or Waitrose and there were a few chuck outs.

It struck us that this Cheam crossroads must have been a thriving shopping district say 75 years ago. Now slowly declining, with lots of what were shops and banks now eateries and bars of one sort or another. Just like Epsom really. On the other hand, there were a lot of very old buildings to be seen there, much older as far as that went than Epsom, despite Epsom having been invented as a watering hole in the middle of the seventeenth century.

It now being 1600, we did not find tea & cake to suit and the new church was very firmly locked up. So home to take tea there.

PS: we are told that the television Lumley is some descendent of these Lumleys.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=nonsuch+palace+model.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumley_Chapel.

Reference 3: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1183440.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsuch_Palace.