As covered previously, by the mid 1850s John Harmer had begun to focus his attention upon the development of the Wellington Estate, which sat (and infact still sits) to the east of the Lewes Road in Brighton.
In May 1856 the licence of The Race Hill Inn, which was situated on Lewes Road immediately opposite the Wellington Estate, was transferred from widowed Eliza Marchant to John Harman (sic) [Brighton Gazette, 8th May 1856]. The Race Hill Inn started off life as a beer-shop run by Eliza’s husband, William Marchant, and was erected around 1849. Still standing, although extensively remodelled in the 1930s, today it is in use as a medical centre. It was built when land once contigious to Ireland’s Royal Pleasure Gardens became available for purchase, and sits adjacent to the very grand ‘Park Crescent’ enclave of terraced houses to its immediate south. Here is a photograph of the inn which has been dated to around 1910:
If we ignore the tram and tramlines and St. Martin’s Church in the distance, this vista is not so different from the years during which John ran the pub, although the small houses to the north of the stable area came along around 1860. As can be observed, this once isolated part of Brighton – close to the home of the Prince Regent’s own cricket ground before the days of the pleasure gardens – was fast becoming a working class hub.
It was here that John and Mary Ann Harmer and their seven children moved to from Hove in the summer of 1856. As well as placing John within close walking distance of his new property developments, the pub provided two sources of income – the sale of alcohol, and stabling for horses.
Livery and bait stables
Situated on what is now known as the A27 – one of two main routes in and out of Brighton – The Race Hill Inn was ideally placed for the stabling of horses and the storage of carriages belonging to visitors to Brighton, including those attending the racecourse. The latter remains in situ at the top of Race Hill, now known as Elm Grove, which swiftly (owing to its steepness) gains the height of the downs from the east of the inn, on the opposite side of Lewes Road and to the right of the tram in the photograph above.
If customers did not pay for the care of their horses and carriages in a timely fashion, John was not adverse to auctioning them off, or at least threatening to – regardless of how aristocratic their owner might be, as this advertisement placed by him in the Brighton Gazette shows:
I can’t even begin to try to explain the Victorian humour inherent in this advert. You either get it or you don’t! Lord Ernest Vane Tempest clearly got the message, as although the auction went ahead, he seems to have paid his bill tout suite:
The following month John was robbed of some lead which he was storing in a loft above The Race Hill Inn. What is interesting about this newspaper report is that it mentions Frederick Sparrow as a witness, who is described as ‘a lad in the service of Mr Harmer’. Frederick may have slept in the scene of the crime – what can only have been a hayloft above the stables behind the inn. He would go on to be a rent collector for John, and – ultimately – to marry his daughter Sarah Elizabeth two years later in 1859. How Frederick’s life turned around! No more hay loft for him! John clearly hadn’t acquired too many pretensions since leaving rural Heathfield if he was happy for his 16 year old daughter (who does not appear to have been pregnant) to marry an employee who two years previously had looking after the loft above his horses. But John had very sensible reasons for allowing the marriage, when it came to pass; with plans to emmigrate to America, he wanted to ensure that his oldest daughter would be looked after in England by someone he trusted.
By the way, the outcome of this case was that Joseph Storey / Storrey was acquitted of the theft of 27lb of lead worth 7s, because John ‘could not swear as to the lead’. That was a pretty decent thing for John to do, as the theft would have resulted in a prison sentence.
In July 1858 John was still in the business of selling or hiring out fly carriages from the stables, as we learn from the the Brighton Gazette of the 29th of that month. Knowing that the price for painting, fine-lining and varnishing a fly to a decent standard was £4, he offered to pay fly driver Albert Bignall just 30 shillings. He got what he paid for – a shamefully badly-painted fly. But as a price had been agreed the court decided that John had to pay up, despite his assertation that ‘if he had known how he had been going to finish it, he would sooner have given him the money not to have touched it’.
The Harmers moved to number 3 Wellington Road – a very high-class street which he had been building just a stone’s throw away – by April 1859. Walter Tilley, John’s friend (and local entreprenuer) continued to manage the pub in the interim. In December 1859 John transferred the licence of The Race Hill Inn to Tilley.
