A Short History of 12 Albany Road

A short history of No 12 Albany Road

by Volunteer Derek Turner

Part 2: Octavia’s House 1919-2026

As 'Octavia', Mabel’s life significantly changed, as did the house and its inhabitants. In the first year, 1919, the only significant change was the conversion of the former designated servant’s bedroom into the ‘Upper Room’ where Octavia presided over a form of eucharist along wth her closest ‘disciples’ from Whitsun 1919 . At this point the ‘dressing room’ became the servant’s room for Agnes Martha Hood Wilson, though she is described in the 1921 census as Servant, Lady-Help’. It is slighty odd that Octavia chose the former servant’s room as the first chapel in preference to the dressng room which was close by her bedroom in the adult family’s part of the house. Most lilkely this was for greater privacy. The dressing room widow looked out on to the street whereas what became the Upper Room was tucked away out of sight.

The following year,1920, saw the arrival of the Society’s first male, Danish Australian Peter Rasmussen, a retired builder described in the census as ‘boarder, paying guest’, an inaccurate desciption for someone who remained for the rest of his life in the house, and ‘paid’ by using his building skills to good effect as the Society’s handyman. At that time, the fledgeling Panacean Society owned no other properties and there were no spare rooms left in Number 12 where Rasmussen could sleep, other than the attic, but he needed some daylight, so a small window, quite possibly installed by himself, given his skills as a builder, was inserted in the hitherto blank southern wall.

Even more important in 1920, though not obviously so at the time, was the arrival of Emily Goodwin to nurse the by now ageing and ill Aunt Fanny. With the creation of the Uper Room and the move of the servant’s room to the dressng room, there was no bedroom for Emily, but she agreed to share Fanny’s bedroom. In the short-term an inconvenience but in the not-so-long term after Fanny died in 1923, a major improvement not only in her living conditions but, being next door to Mabel, a strong position quite soon to become effectively Mabel’s eventual successor, an extraordinary change of status for a fifty-year-old working class widow in a middle-class community.

1921 was to prove a major turning point in the history of the house’s owners. For obvious reasons, the housing market had been pretty much dead during the war. After the war there was likeliy to be a pent-up demand and a consequent rise in house prices. Whatever the reason Cecil Richards, the current owner, decided to sell, not just Number 12, but all four houses in the block. In mid-December, an odd time of year for a house sale, Numbers 12 to 18 changed hands for a total of £2,800, notionally £700 for each house. Considering that Number 12 had been valued at £550 not long before, Cecil must have felt he had got a good deal, a £27% profit, a handsome Chritmas present to himself, but his pleasure may have been short-lived. Within a week the buyer, George Tansley, a market gardener, sold on Number 14 for £800 to Frank Gamman, and Number 12 to Octavia for a cool £1000, a further 30% hike, retaining Number 16 and moving to live Number 18 fom Castle Road round the corner.

Octavia had paid well over the odds. An intelligent woman, she must have been aware of this, but probably she didn’t care. For someone who fervently believed that the Second Coming was imminent, an extra £200 was neither here nor there. Her main concern, presumably, was to have somewhere for the returning Jesus to come to. Another owner might have ended her tenancy and deprived the Panacea Socilety of its base. If avoiding that meant paying over the odds, so be it. But how did she come to have a thousand pounds available? Two possibilities present themselves. From 1912 she had taken on freelance editorial work to raise funds to send Adrian to university. In the event that never happened so her savings would have grown. Alternatively, or additionally, the m oney came from Aunt Fanny. Though she had lived to a great age ‘on her own means’ she still had over £3,000 to pass on to Mabel in her Will.

For most of the next decade, little of note happened in the history of the house. Emily took over the front bedroom after Fanny died in 1923. During the 1920s Ivan and Adrian made brief visits and presumably stayed in the house. Dilys was often living somewhere else. Othersise the residents remained unchanged.

The next period of activity, for the house more than than its residents, began in 1927 and lasted for about four years. It started with the purchase in January 1928 of Number 14, followed two months late by buying Number 16 from George Tansley [do we know for how much?] Thos was just part of a much larger spending spree on properties that included the two larger houses, The Haven in 1929 and Castleside in 1930.

Once Numbers 14 and 16 had been acquired, considerable extensions were made to them and minor additions to Number 12, including the creation of a door from Emily’s bedroom into Number 14, where she set up an office for herself, further increasing her position and authority as the ‘Voice of the Mother of God’. Further changes were made in 1931 after Castleside garden was added to what now became a campus around ‘The Garden of Eden’. The effects of these changes for Number 12, can be best understood by describing the exterior.

In the original design there were hree entrances, a front door facing Albany Road, a back door on the western, and a side door on the northern wall, plus a French window giving access from the dining room to the garden. During the period of redevelopment, three more doors were added. One of these leads into Number 12’s garden from a small, covered porch added to the end of the passage from the scullery. This, as an exterior door, is essentially a replacement for the original back door and is probably contemporary with the extensions to Numbers 14 and 16, the plans for which were dated November 1928 and likely implemented during 1929. The second and third doors date from around 1931 after Castleside was acquired. One door was created in the south wall of the kitchen to give direct access to Castleside garden. The purpose of the other door, a seemingly superfluous second door from the porch on the southern side, is unclear but is perhaps related to a maid’s room extension that was later demolished.

Side door

French window

Porch door 1

Porch Door 2

Kitchen door

A possible former maid’s room is only one of a series of outbuildings, some of which have survived. A detailed inventory of the house and its contents in 1936 lists a significant number of additional buildings, including what today look like rather unsightly sheds added on the south side after 1930 as they extend beyond the original boundary between the house and Castleside’s gardens. Photographic and other evidence reveal that these were probably a living room and store for Peter Rasmussen, and that there were other buildings now demolished in the same area.

Peter Rasmussen’s living room

and store

The purpose of a planned ‘temporary’ covered way over the back passageway with three months notice being applicable for its demolition is not known. Dated 18 Jun 1929, there is no evidence that it was actually built, and if so, why it was erected and when it was demolished. Possibly, it was used to bring in and temporarily store materials for the extensions of Numbers 13 and 16 and was demolished once these had been installed. Any other ‘improvement’ to the backallywey way would seem pointless once the acquisition of Castleside’s garden finally allowed access to the servant’s area from Albany Road.

The final additions to the exterior were the creation of a series of elegant wooden arches between the three constituent gardens of the Garden of Eden, and ‘Mock-Tudorisation’ facing on the western walls of Numbers 12 to 16. After the acquisition of Castleside the extensive and attractive ‘Garden of Eden’ would have offered Octavia a much widee choice of places to relax or contemplate, but she would only have been able to enjoy these for her last four years.

Mock Tudor was all the rage in the provinces in the 1930s, most comspicuously the Brewery Tudor facades added to Victorian or Edwardan pubs such as the Embankment Hotel, but it was the back not the front walls of Number 12 to16 that had their Mock Tudor facades added, presumaby for the benefit of the resident members of the Society. To the outside world the Society continued to present an unremarkable and anonymous face. Even though by the 1930s it had become well-known ln England and had a worldwide healing ministry, it still guarded the privacy of its founder and leader.

The death of Octavia 1934 marked the beginning of the end for the Society and for the house as an occupied residence before it became part of the Panacea Museum, though that end was still nearly eighty decades away. Mabel left the house to her children. The two surviving sons had no need of it nor interest in retaining it, Dilys probably likewise. By now she would do whatever Emily Goodwin wanted, regardless of her own wishes, but on this occasion their wishes coincided as Dilys preferred to live in The Haven or one of the other many properties in the neighbourhood, which the Society was still in the process of acquiring, Number 18 bought in 1953, one of the last. For Emily Goodwin, now the head of the household at Number 12, it was her home and still the spiritual centre of the Society. She and Peter Rasmussen as trustees, on behalf of the charitable trust which had been established in 1926, bought the house for £1000, by 1935 a fair price, and the trust continued to own it

For the next eight years, little changed. Unsurprisingly, Octavia’s room remained untouched as a kind of shrine. Emily stayed in the front room. The 1939 Register records that Hilda Green was living there, probably sleeping in the back bedroom. Peter Rasmussen was also still there, as was Octavia’s last servant Harriett Moss.

After Emily died in 1943, the house went into a long, slow decline, an ever-deteriorating memorial to Mabel/Octavia until restored by the Panacea Charitable Trust. When author Jane Shaw visited the Panacean Society early in the 21^st century its last remaining member, Ruth Klein, lived at Number 14, not Number 12. At the start of the new millennium (but not the kind that Octavia envisaged) the charity was reorganised and given new aims.

After Ruth’s death in 2012, Number 12 was resurrected as part of a museum. Not the kind of resurrection that Panacean members hoped would happen with Octavia, but a more realistic reminder and commemoration of her life and work as leader of the Society.