How Peter found the home of WAA

“W.A.A. HOUSE. RUSPER. SUSSEX”

I drove on from Betsham to Rusper. The album contains four photographs of houses in this village. From an internet picture search I had already realised that two, simply labelled “RUSPER. SUSSEX”, both showed the front of a building that is now a hotel called Ghyll Manor.

Of the remaining two, one was also just labelled “RUSPER. SUSSEX” but the other was “W.A.A. HOUSE. RUSPER. SUSSEX”. Both had signs of work being undertaken outside.

When I arrived in Rusper my first port of call was Ghyll Manor. A manager was very helpful and after carefully examining these two photographs we eventually realized that they were, in fact, also views of the same house, from the back and from the side. The house had been extended and very thoroughly restored but the long roof and chimneys at the back are evident in the following comparison:

Having established that all the photographs were of the same house, we still had to discover who W.A.A. was. In the 1930s the house had been known as Rusper House Farm but no’one at the hotel knew the name of the owner. It was a little later that Sandra Miller-Long googled a web-site and found that in 1925 the owner was Wilfred Ansell Argent and that in 1935 the house was owned by his “widow”, Beatrice Argent. As with the LVC house, it seemed strange that the photographer had not posed the owner of the house in any of the shots. In one there is, in fact, an imposing-looking man standing near the back door, surveying the building work. A blow-up is not a great deal of help in identifying the person and he appears to be a good deal taller than Argent, who in ships’ manifests we later found to be recorded as being 5’6”. Perhaps this was the man in charge of the building work.

Sandra’s access to ships’ manifests was very useful, because she was able to track Argent in frequent travel backwards and forwards to China via North America in the 1920s. Suddenly much to our surprise, Sandra also found a record of Argent selling a river steamer named the Loong Mow in Shanghai in 1923. This ship was built in 1919 for Mackenzie & Co, Shanghai, for work on the Upper Yangtse. Argent owned it in 1921 and it seems to have been well-known for its unusually luxurious passenger accommodation. He does not seem to have made a profit, however and in 1923 sold the ship to the China Navigation Co. It was renamed Wanliu and went on to have a long and eventful life in the hands of both the Chinese and Japanese. It was eventually scrapped in 1969. After selling the Loong Mow, Argent continued to travel backwards and forwards to China and was still traveling across the Atlantic on the in January 1929, recorded in the ship’s manifests as both a “merchant” and as a manager of the Hotel Cecil, London, a hugely celebrated London hotel on the Strand whose proprietor was bankrupted and imprisoned shortly after. The Times newspaper between 1927 and 1930 also show that Wilfred was running a prize herd of Guernsey cattle at the farm in Rusper.

Wilfred Ansell Argent seems to have been born in West Ham, London, in the third quarter of 1877. A man by the same name appears in the 1901 census as a railway clerk living in Prittlewell, Essex. His family seem not to have used the “Argent” and are to be found living as Ansells in Wanstead in the censuses of 1881 and 1891 and in Prittlewell (Southend-on-Sea) in 1901.  If this is the same person, how he came to acquire sufficient wealth to travel to China and buy a river steamship remains a mystery, but he provides a possible link to the many photographs of the Yangtze gorges river journey in the album. In 1930 Wilfred seems to disappear from the scene and indeed his wife, Beatrice, is recorded as a widow in 1935. However, the couple reappear towards the end of the decade in Cornwall. They seem to have built a house named “Trevalsa” at Mevagissey in 1937. Beatrice died there in 1953 and on 11 Feb 1954 Wilfred went on to marry Edith Harriette Jacomb (1889-1970) in St Peter’s Church, Mevagissey. Wilfred died on November 27 1957 at Trevalsa and was cremated on November 30 in Truro.

Sources: Ancestry.com, census, BMD & telephone directories