David Howard has kindly lent me some papers on the sale in nine lots of the Wolversdene estate in 1872.
Lot 1 (coloured green) was the main house (bottom left on the map), together with the central agricultural buildings, and cottages to the north.
The largest plots of vacant land are occupied today by the housing between Old Winton Road, Bere Hill and the Ladies Walk.
READ MORE: History of No 14 Andover High Street
The map shows that the house itself was accessed via a driveway from what later became Wolversdene Road, while today’s Dene Road was then called Short Lane.
Since 1948, the estate house has been the Wolversdene Club, now much extended, and a popular local venue.
For hundreds of years, this entire area was farmland.
One of the earliest Andover court rolls of 1283 mentions a Thomas Wolvel, while John Wolfel was a bailiff (mayor) of the town during the same period.
Although individual Wolfels disappear from medieval Andover, the area name lived on and in 1446 Wulvelysdene appears in a town rental record.
Dene or dean meant a valley, so Wolfel’s valley seems a fair translation, being surrounded by higher ground to the east and south and to some extent the west.
Spelling in those days depended much on who was writing it and how it sounded; even in the 19th century we see variations such as Woolvers Dean and Wolvers Dean, before the standardised version, Wolversdene, became universal by 1900.
A document surviving with the sale papers is a deposition by Thomas Baverstock, a master shoemaker born in Andover in 1802, who remembered the estate being owned by William Burrough Child who took down the old farmhouse and built a new ‘mansion’, as well as planting all the surrounding hedges.
Burrough Child died in 1830 and his widow continued to live in the house until her death in 1842.
The Baverstock testimony fails to pinpoint the year the house was built, except that it was built within his living memory and before 1830.
However, a notice in the Hampshire Chronicle of 3 July 1820 reveals that Burrough Child tried to sell the estate in that year and it refers to ‘a newly-erected mansion, substantially brick-built and slated’.
All the rooms are listed, together with the land, estimated at 144 acres.
He continued to live there so evidently it then failed to find a buyer.
After Mrs Childs’ death, the estate passed to daughter Elizabeth who had married Southampton surgeon Stephen Judd in 1817.
Although the Judds settled in Andover, they may never have lived in the house themselves.
An advertisement of 1862 offers Woolvers Dean to let and states that it had recently been occupied by Baron de Langen who had returned to his estates in Prussia.
From 1870 to 1875 Captain Thomas Best was in residence and there was a sale of his house contents when he moved out.
The notice advertising the house to let in 1870, besides describing its many rooms, also includes an intriguing ‘excellent underground cellar and dairy’.
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There have always been tales of tunnels beneath Wolversdene House and it is easily possible that these underground areas pre-date the present house.
The 1872 sale was prompted by the death of Elizabeth Judd, in 1871, but some of Wolversdene’s later history must wait for a future article.
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