The Caswalls at Minley Manor

Contributed by Valerie Kerslake for St Peter's Church Millennium Festival, 2000

Little Edward could have had no memory of Glebe House as before he was more than a few months old his father moved to the parish of Chigwell in Essex. When Edward was six, Revd Caswall returned with his family to Minley to live. In later life, Edward certainly visited Yateley where he continued to have family connections, once writing a poem about "the room where I was born." His elder brother, Alfred, a barrister who lived at Binfield Place and died in his forties, was buried in Yateley with his wife and children.

Edward‘s mother's family came from the locality. She was the grand-daughter of a respected Odiham grocer who eloped with a sixteen-year-old heiress. Of their three sons, the first inherited his mother's property and settled down as a country gentleman. The youngest son, Thomas Burgess, became Bishop of Salisbury in 1825. However the second son, John Burgess, went into business, invented anchovy sauce and made a fortune. He bought Brooke House, near Fleet, and, about 1814, the neighbouring Minley estate. John Burgess died in 1820 bequeathing all his property to his son, William Robert Burgess, who then sold Minley Manor to his brother-in-law, the Revd R. C. Caswall.

Edward would thus have returned to Yateley when his father lived at Minley Manor from 1820 until Revd Caswall became vicar of West Lavington, to the north of the Salisbury Plain, when Edward was 14.

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