THE TIDY FAMILY

Harman Tidy was a solicitor and quiet family man who became innocently involved in a scandal surrounding the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) when he was assaulted by one of the Prince’s friends.

Harman Edgar Tidy 1831-1898

Harman Edgar Tidy was born in 1831 in St Pancras, London to Thomas and Elizabeth Tidy. Thomas was a tailor, originally from Tortington in Sussex. Harman had five brothers and all six boys made the law their profession, Harman himself studied at Clifford’s Inn. He married Selina McLean in Marylebone in June 1853, she was 19, he was 24 and they went on to have eight children. They had a penchant for grand houses. Before they moved to Bell House they lived in equal splendour in Chester Terrace, a grand neo-classical crescent in Regent’s Park designed by John Nash with Decimus Burton. Harman also had a house in Bengeo, Hertfordshire and later a house in North Stoke, Oxfordshire.

Selina died in 1875 and two years later, on 5 June 1877, Harman married Emma Sarah Robson, nee Dove. Sarah had been married to Christopher Robson (who died in 1867), a barrister at Clifford’s Inn and had lived in Regent’s Park and at Little Stoke in Oxfordshire, so it seems likely that the couples had known each other for some time. Emma was 49 when they married, Harman was 48 and they did not have children though Harman acted as stepfather to the children from Emma’s first marriage.

Assault in high places

Harman Tidy and his brother Thomas were in business together at 27 Sackville Street, Piccadilly and on 23 February 1877 at 6pm Harman was at his desk when Lord Marcus Talbot de la Poer Beresford, calling himself Mr Long, came into reception asking to see Mr Tidy. Beresford, the son of the Marquess of Waterford, ran the stables of the Prince of Wales and was described by Vanity Fair magazine as ‘a good-looking man who can make himself very agreeable’. Beresford was a member of the ‘Marlborough House Set’, the racy group surrounding the Prince of Wales. Beresford’s brother Charles’s affair with the Prince of Wales’s mistress Daisy Brooke had led to Charles manhandling the heir to the throne.

Once admitted to Harman’s chambers Beresford declared his real name and said Tidy had called him a liar. He demanded an apology or Harman ‘would not leave the room alive’, knocked Harman to the floor and started kicking him. Thomas Tidy and a clerk came in whereupon Lord Beresford assaulted them too. Beresford was arrested and in court there was an attempt to question him about the debts which had led to him losing possession of his house but curiously the magistrate disallowed this line of questioning. Beresford’s solicitor repeatedly tried to ask his own client questions but the magistrate repeatedly intervened to stop him. At this point the solicitor said he had no choice but to offer no defence. The magistrate then sent the case to the Old Bailey to be heard by the Solicitor-general.

The trial attracted a lot of publicity, ‘the place was thronged with noblemen and gentlemen’ and Beresford’s defence said he should not have to stand in the prisoner’s dock. More details of the case emerged. Having gained entry to Harman’s office, Beresford slipped the bolt on the door and said ‘Now you [expletive deleted], you don’t leave this room alive’. When Harman denied calling Beresford a liar and turned to get some papers to prove his case, Beresford said ‘Oh you [expletive deleted], you persist in calling me a liar do you?’ whereupon he seized Harman ‘by the loins’, threw him against an iron box and began kicking him. Harman exclaimed ‘Oh you beastly coward. Let a fellow get up and have a chance with you’. Harman struggled to his feet but Beresford ‘thrust him into a chair shouting ‘I’ll break every [expletive deleted] bone in your body unless you write me an apology’. Harman replied ‘You’ve the wrong man…if you think I’m going to write an apology before I know I’m in the wrong’. Thomas Tidy and a clerk ‘burst in’ and the police were called. At this point somebody recognised Beresford and said ‘Why it’s Lord Marcus Beresford’ to which Beresford replied ‘Yes you [expletive deleted], it is’ and ‘hit him a violent blow in the eye’. To the policeman who arrested him he said ‘Oh give me a charge if you like. I’ve a man outside who’ll go bail and it will only be a [expletive deleted] fiver in the morning’.

In court, under cross-examination, Harman explained that he had access to the funds of various gentleman which he then loaned out and in this way he had loaned Beresford £1,000 which had not been repaid. He said he felt acute pain after the assault and still did, though the doctor who had attended after the altercation said that while Harman ‘shrank when touched’ he could find no trace of injury. Summing up, the Solicitor-general said there could be no doubt Harman had been assaulted by Beresford but that the jury might take the view ‘this was a case in which a person who was a mere moneylender had accused a gentleman of honour and position of having told a falsehood and that the gentleman had gone there for the simple purpose of extorting an apology’. The summing up went on for two hours during which one of the jurors intervened saying ‘they did not want to hear any more about it as they had no desire to be there all night’. The jury retired to consider its verdict and after ten minutes came back: guilty of common assault. Beresford was fined £100, all costs and a £500 bail to keep the peace for one year, and to be imprisoned until these were paid. At this point a Colonel Stanley who was in the public gallery immediately offered bail and Beresford was let go. In reporting the case the Spectator pointed out that if Beresford had been an ordinary labourer he would have gone straight to prison for such a charge and recommended that magistrates be replaced by ‘a legally educated tribunal’.

Harman Tidy and the Dulwich Estate

When he was negotiating his move to Bell House in 1895, Harman drove a hard bargain with the Dulwich Estate. The Estate’s first offer was a rent of £200 pa which was refused by Harman who persuaded the Estate Governors to let him pay £100 pa for seven years. He also reversed, to his benefit, a stipulation they had made about interest payments and succeeded in getting the Estate to pay him 2.5% pa on quarterly payments.

When Harman Tidy rented Bell House it included ‘conservatory, stables, coach house, green houses and outbuildings’. The perimeter of the property was described rather idiosyncratically as having a frontage of ‘226ft 10in, depth N/NW 353ft 8in abutting Bell Cottages, further N depth 171ft 11in abutting Mr Douglas (i.e. Stella House, the first house after the park gates), S/SE depth 154ft 6in, further S depth 507ft 2in, rear depth 402ft 6in abutting Dulwich Park’.

Tidy asked for improvements to be made to the house or to pay a lower rent so that he could make the improvements himself. He wanted to: enlarge the dining room by adding an oriel window, enlarge and refit the stabling, improve the drainage (Victorian Dulwich was notorious for bad plumbing; every time someone moved into Bell House they had to repair the drains), make a bathroom, install a new kitchen range, add a hot and cold water supply and repair the conservatory and the greenhouses. The cost was estimated at £450 but such is the way of these things it finally cost £800. A further £100 had to be spent on the drains and Harman’s solicitor advised the Governors that they should bear this outlay lest Mr Tidy refuse to take the tenancy or decide to sue them. The Governors agreed.

In 1896 Harman Tidy said there was not enough room for his servants at Bell House and put up two four-roomed cottages in the garden, one for his gardener and one for his coachman. These are not Pickwick Cottage, Bell Cottage or the Lodge but additional structures: ‘of timber, covered externally with patent wire wove material lined inside with match-boarding, on the cart road at the lower end of the grounds at a cost of about £200’. There is no surviving evidence of these cottages as they are presumably under Frank Dixon Close.

A modern family

Although we have no census data for the period the Tidys lived at Bell House we can assume that Harman gathered his extended family around him as he did wherever he lived. When he lived in Chester Terrace his mother and sister lived there too and the house in Bengeo was the home of many Tidys and Robsons. On the 1891 census Emma’s daughter, also called Emma, living with them with her son. The Tidys did not describe any relative as ‘step’ but simply as son, daughter etc; a modern way of looking at their ‘blended’ family. Of the older family members, who knew each other but had not grown up together, a Robson son married a Tidy daughter and a Robson daughter married a Tidy son.

The Tidys were a family that produced sons. Harman was one of six sons and he himself had four sons: Edwin, Sidney, Frank and Edgar but he had the grief of burying two of them. Edwin, was a solicitor and died aged 32 and Sidney was a farmer and died aged 27, both were unmarried. Frank became a stockbroker and married Emma’s daughter Mary, Edgar married Rose May Berridge, fought in the Boer War and then became a solicitor; he died in 1923. Of Harman’s daughters, Ada Louise married Emma’s son, Christopher Robson while Lucie Maud married Sydney Worssell Harrington, the son of a corn merchant who lived near the Tidy’s country house in Hertforshire. While Tidys and Robsons intermarrying might seem odd to our eyes we should remember that they were not blood-related and the matches would have been considered excellent by Victorian standards: the families knew each other and lived near each other both in London and in the country and they were in the same line of business.

Harman’s son Frank had five sons, and one daughter, Mollie, having married Mary Robson in August 1884, less than two months before their first child was born. They all lived at Bell House and the boys went to Brightlands Prep. then Dulwich College. Frank Edgar Tidy died age 17. After a few years in the City, Christopher Alfred Tidy emigrated to New Zealand, where he spent time on a sheep station and playing cricket for the Old English School Boys team. He became a farmer and auctioneer, joining the ANZACs in WW1.

While at Dulwich College, Warwick Edward Tidy was a keen member of the choir and his mother donated to the organ fund in 1907. He played for the first XV rugby team and later for the old boys’. After school Warwick was a founder of the firm Bowring, Jones & Tidy, importers resin and turpentine, later part of the Bowring trading, shipping and insurance conglomerate. In WW1 Warwick was a captain in the 19th Battalion Manchester Regiment and earned the Military Cross at the Battle of the Somme. He served as the ‘A’ Company's Commander, successfully attacked Montauban-de-Picardie and then fought in an attack on Guillemont village on the night of 22 July 1916 through into the morning. It was in this battle that he was injured while trying to lead two advances in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the village, though they did successfully take the German front trench. Having been injured, Warwick retreated to the captured trench and continued giving orders to his men including ordering them to keep hold of the quarry in the village, as evidenced in the 19th Manchester’s war diary. In a letter he sent to his brother while in hospital after the battle he wrote that he had received shrapnel wounds to his left thigh and right arm. A postscript to the letter states that his Commanding Officer had just walked into his hospital room to tell Warwick he is recommending him for the Military Cross for his actions. Warwick then transferred to the 3rd Manchester in Cleethorpes where he became the captain adjutant and met his future wife, Mary Green. He died aged 35, following an operation for appendicitis.

Sydney Ernest Tidy worked in an insurance broker’s office for a year after leaving the College before joining the Canadian Bank of Commerce. He returned to England when WW1 broke out and was a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corp, was wounded twice and gassed at Loos. After the war he returned to Canada to work for Goodyear before joining the Indian Political Department (a government department in British India) and acting as guardian for rajahs before in 1929 he was appointed vice-principal of Daly College, a college for Indian princes. During this time he attended Dulwich College school reunions in Calcutta. In WW2 he was a captain in the Indian army and after the war he returned to Britain where he became a prep school teacher. He attended Dulwich College reunions in New York in the 1950s with fellow alumni PG Wodehouse and LB Agazarian. He was also chairman of the Central India Sports Committee, an author of short stories and a contributor to magazines. Lionel Bertie joined the Admiralty Registry, which heard maritime cases at the Royal Courts of Justice. He tried cases in the Admiralty Court from 1916 and in 1945 he became Admiralty Marshal, the monarch’s representative in all matters shipping, a post dating back to the 14th century. He was secretary of the College old boys club in Sussex. Mollie Joyce Tidy married Charles Crowne, who had also attended Dulwich College.

Harman died on 2 February 1898 at Bell House. His executors were his son Edgar and his brother and lifelong business partner Thomas. He left £21,000. His son Frank died a year after his father, leaving his own young sons aged between six and fifteen. Harman’s wife Emma moved to 32 Half Moon Lane where she lived with her daughter Mary, widow of Harman’s son Frank, and four of Mary’s children. Emma died in 1918, living long enough to see her and Harman’s grandson, Warwick Tidy, win the Military Cross.

With grateful thanks to Kieran Bright and the Tidy and Bright families, for the use of their family photos.