Kempton Park – home to this month’s Family History Show (see box) – has a long history that can be traced back further than you may think, and in this article I am going to use various online records and maps to unearth a long-lost mansion and the manor house that it had replaced. The Kempton Park Racecourse built in its grounds was the idea of a 19th-century accountant and businessman called Samuel H. Hyde. The story of how it came to be that the racecourse was laid out here comes down to Hyde and his wife having been out in the country in June 1870, taking a carriage drive, when they came across Kempton Manor and Park. The estate was up for sale at the time and soon Hyde had leased the grounds in 1872 as a tenant. Having formed a company with some other shareholders, six years later in July 1878 Kempton Park opened its gates as a racecourse while Hyde and his family lived in the mansion on the estate.

According to an online article, ‘Kempton’s early history is interesting reading’(), some details about the setting up of the Kempton racecourse are held in the Herefordshire Archives. This is surprising as Herefordshire is many miles away from the racecourse’s location in Middlesex. The reason, as the article reveals, was because the founders were using Hereford-based solicitors James & Bodenham at the time on account of one of the other shareholder’s connections in Herefordshire. The Kempton Park Race Course Company Ltd, having been incorporated in January 1878, then went on to acquire a 63-year lease on 303 acres of the estate and in the summer they held their first horse racing meeting at Kempton. This event received a favourable write-up in the Illustrated London News for 27 July 1878, which can be found by searching for Kempton Park within the Newspapers & Magazines Collection on TheGenealogist; though the writer was not prepared to endorse the exuberance of one supporter who had claimed it to be ‘the best course in England’.

In fact in the First World War Kempton Park Racecourse had already been used as a transport depot for military vehicles. In the Second World War, however, it began to be used as a transit camp for internees until, in 1940, it became the location of a camp to process prisoners of war captured by the British. With its own railway station, Kempton was well located to accept the men brought up from Southampton by train. Reports tell of the POWs finding it in somewhat of a mess. The racecourse had been divided into small compounds with miles and miles of barbed wire. Round tents, floored with boards, were erected in these compounds and dirty, slimy mud was everywhere.

Within Kempton Park, there was established a POW Interrogation Section and here the British carried out initial interrogations and screening of the captured enemy soldiers and some selected POWs were then sent on for further interrogation at Lingfield or at the London District Cage.

Discovering the lost house
A visitor to Kempton Park today will be hard pressed to find the old Kempton Park House, where Samuel Hyde and his family had taken up residence in the late 1870s, as there is no sign of it on the ground. Even searching a modern map is futile as the mansion house has been demolished completely and its footprint has now been reclaimed by nature. To find its location, however, is a simple matter for a researcher with a Diamond or Gold subscription to TheGenealogist. All we need to do is to search for Samuel Hyde in the 1891 census as this record set has a link to the powerful Map Explorer, which drops a pin onto the place where the house had once stood.

Samuel Hyde was recorded as an accountant in this census and his death can be found in the Deaths and Burials records for 1898 on TheGenealogist, so we know that he had about 20 years at Kempton. His widow, Mary Ann Priscilla Hyde, continued to be resident at Kempton Park and her son Walter, who had been born in Bath in 1876, appears in both 1901 and 1911 censuses as the secretary of the Kempton Park Racecourse Company.

Walter appears to have taken on this post in the business from his father and records on TheGenealogist show us that he held it at least into the 1940s and the period that saw the racecourse become a POW camp. Walter can be found in The Directory of Directors 1936 within TheGenealogist’s Occupational Records, listed as a director of Kempton Park Freehold Land Company Limited of 9 George Street, Hanover Square W1, and also on the board of the Kempton Park Racecourse Company Limited. Another search reveals him in the Trade, Residential and Telephone Directories collection, still in the position of secretary of the later company in 1940 with an address in the classy district of St James Street, SW1. At the time of the 1939 Register, taken as war broke out, the Hydes still lived at Kempton Park House.

History repeats itself
Mr Samuel Hyde had bought Kempton Park from Thomas Barnett, the previous owner. It would appear that in 1864 the manor on which it stands had been acquired by Thomas Barnett and Peregrine Birch, according to the Victoria County History for Middlesex (see here). These men had intended to build houses on part of the estate, but only constructed a few along Hampton Road. It was not the full development that they had intended, according to the website villagematters.co.uk, and history then repeated itself in recent years when there were plans by the current owners, The Jockey Club, to close the racecourse and sell its land for housing – though this proposal has since been dropped.

While the accounts that can be found online point to Barnett and Birch purchasing the manor in 1864, it would seem from checking the 1861 census on TheGenealogist that Thomas Barnett had already taken up residence with his family at Kempton Park House before that census was taken. Scanning the list of people living in Kempton Park House in this record, we are able to note that it also includes a Robert Barnett, who is listed as Thomas’s brother, and both of them provided the census enumerator with their occupation as being ‘landed proprietors’.

Thomas Barnett may well have been a tenant of the previous owner, Edward Raphael, before he had acquired Kempton Park in 1864 with his partner. Raphael appears to have been a major landowner and is often to be found in records as being of Ditton Lodge, Thames Ditton in Surrey, an estate which is just over the River Thames from Kempton Park. Searching for Edward Raphael in the records on TheGenealogist allows us to discover him in two poll books as a person entitled to vote in both the districts of Mid as well as in West Surrey (his entitlement to cast his vote was as a result of property he held in these areas). Another record on TheGenealogist also reveals his name in the Essex Landowners records where he had a holding of over 203 acres in that county and thus revealing that he had interests further afield from Surrey.

The Conqueror’s half-brother
While the house at Kempton Park that we have found to have been occupied by the Hydes, Barnetts and Raphaels, the manor on which Kempton Park had been built had an even longer history back over time. The manor of Kempton consisted of the eastern part of the parish of Sunbury and was the smaller neighbour of Sunbury manor that, somewhat confusingly, had the same name as the parish. The manor of Kempton, or Kenton, had also been known as Chenetone as well as the variant of Chennestone because of Middle English pronouncing Ch as a K. It adjoins Sunbury manor at a line that approximately mirrors the course taken by the modern road called The Avenue.

The manor was in existence at the time of the Norman Conquest and so features in the Domesday Book of 1086. This being so, we are able to take a look at it using TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer and selecting the record set top layer to be Domesday Book 1086. This allows us to see a pin on the map for Kempton in the Hundred of Spelthorne. The lord of the manor before 1066 was Wulfward White (the Noble) but in 1086 it had changed to be the Count of Mortain. Even before the Conquest Kempton was a royal manor with the overlord being King Edward. From the details recorded it is possible to learn that there were 14 villagers (villeins), three smallholders and two male slaves!

This gallop through the history of the manor and grounds, which would become Kempton Park Racecourse in Victorian times, has been able to use records provided by TheGenealogist. We have traced back the people who once lived in the lost mansion to the east side of today’s racecourse and then seen on Map Explorer where it had once stood by virtue of this resource’s georeferenced maps. The house has long since made way for a return to a more natural environment as its footprint has disappeared under part of the Kempton Nature Reserve.

TheGenealogist has also allowed us to go back farther still to the Norman Conquest and discover that the manor that once had its manor house situated in the same modern-day conservation area had been a royal manor with the king (Edward the Confessor, 1042–1066) as its overlord and a nobleman named Wulfward White as its lord before 1066. With the conquest of England the manor was then given to the Count of Mortain as the tenant in chief. He held the land directly from the Crown and a little bit of research finds that Robert, Count of Mortain, 2nd Earl of Cornwall (c.1031–c.1095) had been a Norman nobleman and actually the half-brother (on their mother’s side) of King William the Conqueror. Today Kempton Park is associated in most minds with horse racing, which is also known as the Sport of Kings! {