Robert B Todd

When Leonard and Virginia Woolf returned to Bloomsbury in 1924 they let Hogarth House to a friend for three years. This article takes a close look at this event and at the people involved.

IN MARCH 1924 Leonard and Virginia Woolf left Hogarth House, 285 Paradise Road SW,¹ their home for the previous nine years, and forsook Richmond’s “soft suburban beauty”² for 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. Virginia felt “grateful to both Richmond & Hogarth”, saying that “nothing could have suited better”.³ She had in mind the flight from London in the wake of her attempted suicide in September 1913 and the move to Hogarth House in March 1915. After initially leasing that property they bought it and the adjacent Suffield House in January 1920 for ₤1,950. In 1924 they sold Suffield for ₤1,400, but before selling Hogarth rented it between 1924 and 1927 to a friend.⁴

He was Saxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner (1880–1962), a surgeon’s son, brought up in Gloucester and Hove, and a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster School (1893–99).⁵ At Trinity College, Cambridge (1899–1903) he shared rooms with Leonard Woolf and, like him and their mutual friend Lytton Strachey, became a member of the exclusive society, the Apostles.⁶ But his subsequent career in the upper echelons of the civil service was undistinguished,⁷ and he is remembered only for his association with the Woolfs and others in the so-called Bloomsbury Group. By 1924 he was no stranger to Hogarth House, having frequently visited Richmond from his furnished rooms in a lodging-house at 37 Great Ormond Street, on the fringe of Bloomsbury.⁸ In his early forties, he was a confirmed bachelor, afflicted with rheumatism and sciatica, well known as an obsessive opera-goer, and a rather withdrawn individual capable of spending hours sitting in silence like a “phantom”.⁹

Leasing Hogarth House allowed him to bring his widowed mother from Hove to somewhere closer to central London, from where he could visit her on weekends.¹⁰ He probably went down to Richmond by a route Virginia Woolf knew well, going first to Waterloo, where the trains went “at all the 8s –7.8-7.18-1.28- etc. every 10 minutes”,¹¹ then alighting at Richmond¹² and walking up Eton Street to Paradise Road, to the house “2nd on the left at the join … only 5 minutes from the station”.¹³

Saxon’s mother, Mary Sophia Sydney-Turner (1849–1926), was the daughter of a Dublin-trained surgeon, Ryves William Graves (1819–82), who had moved to Gloucester in the 1860s. Her parents, both children of Church of Ireland ministers, were from Limerick. In 1879 she had married Dr Alfred Moxon Sydney-Turner (1848–1922) (Merchant Taylor’s School and Guy’s Hospital), also a surgeon and at the time in partnership with her father. Saxon was their first child, followed by his more robust younger brother, Cuthbert Gambier Ryves Sydney Turner (1883–1950) (“six feet 1 … very handsome”),¹⁴ a serving army officer, married since 1907 with a son, and in an itinerant career that left Saxon responsible for his widowed mother’s welfare.

On 9 January 1924, the Woolfs signed a ten-year lease on 52 Tavistock Square, and when Saxon dined with them that evening he was invited to move into Hogarth House at Easter.¹⁵ On 20 January he confirmed the arrangement in a letter to Leonard Woolf.¹⁶

Dear Leonard

The cook approved of the house and my Mother and I have decided that we should like to take it. Will you instruct your solicitors¹⁷ to draw a lease on the lines that we discussed: ₤150 rent, no premium, fair wear and tear, seven years term. I don’t think that we definitely decided about a break at the end of three years, but I think that you wanted an option then: we should be willing to have an option to either party subject to notice. Our solicitors would be Sharon Turner and Mann of Lincoln’s Inn Fields: I don’t remember the number at the moment.¹⁸ If this suits, could you let me have measurements of the rooms so that we can decide about carpets etc.

What about lunch on Tuesday?

Yours
Saxon ST

As Virginia rephrased it, “Saxon’s cook has apparently taken Hogarth; & says the garden will be very nice for her little girl, & if Mrs Turner may bring the gas stove which was the Dr’s present, they’ll come in March”.¹⁹

The Woolfs might have let Hogarth House anyway given the challenge of moving the burgeoning Hogarth Press (twenty-seven titles in 1920–23),²⁰ but were happy to help this particular friend. Virginia had always had a soft spot for Saxon,²¹ describing him once as “strictly true, genuine, unalloyed”, never found “callous, insincere, or grudging the last farthing of his possessions”. Two years earlier, she had promised to find him a house in Richmond for his then recently widowed mother,²² and in November 1923 while exploring 35 Woburn Square as a possible London residence she had thought he might live on one of its floors.²³

If the ₤150 mentioned in Saxon’s letter represented his annual rent, it would have been three times what the Woolfs paid when leasing the property between 1915 and 1919,²⁴ and £10 more than their annual rent for 52 Tavistock Square on a ten-year lease from the Bedford Estate.²⁵ So when Virginia acknowledged Saxon’s half-yearly instalments in December 1925 and August 1926,²⁶ she probably received £25 rather than £75, half the same £50 annual rent she and Leonard had paid earlier. The £150 specified in his letter is, despite the vagueness, best taken as the cumulative total (3 x £50) for the three years up to 1927 when the lease could be terminated.

On 2 February 1924, Mary Sophia Sydney-Turner and her daughter-in-law, Edith Mary (b. Bartram) (1880–1954), came to Richmond to “measure the alcoves” and to see “whether Mrs Turner’s father’s bureau could stand in the study”. When Edith reminded her mother-in-law not to forget “the piano & the pianola”, Virginia pilloried her for fussing, calling her one of those “wearisome women… who compose the middle-classes”, people who, as she claimed elsewhere, were “cut so thick, & ring so coarse”.²⁷

On 13 March the Woolfs, with Virginia in the midst of writing Mrs Dalloway, left Hogarth House for Tavistock Square.²⁸ Since 25 February Vanessa Bell and her partner Duncan Grant had for a fee of £25 been decorating one of the rooms with “vast panels of moonrises and prima donna’s bouquets”.²⁹ (In 1940 Virginia would see them “suspended over the rubble” following a night of the Blitz.)³⁰ On 15 March or soon thereafter she wrote her new address “52 Tavistock Sq re ” in the margin of the notebook in which she was drafting her novel.³¹

By Easter (20 April was Easter Sunday in 1924) Mrs Sydney-Turner, along with the cook and the cook’s daughter,³² whose names we never learn, were in Richmond. Virginia had imagined Saxon moving in “with his troupe of lunatics… four lunatics and a toothless mother”,³³ since she knew that Saxon’s father had in the final decades of his life cared for mental patients, sad withdrawn souls rather than “lunatics”, in a fifteen-room house at 42 Ventnor Villas, Hove, which she had visited in 1910. But Virgina was joking. The first floor of Hogarth House had two main bedrooms (for Saxon and his mother) and its top floor four small ones (two for the cook and her child; two presumably for guests, or visits by Cuthbert and his wife, along with their teenaged son). The idea of an ailing seventy-five-year-old widow running a mental home in the space available on Paradise Road was sheer whimsy.

On 25 June 1926 Mary Sophia died at Hogarth House, a month after undergoing a stroke. Virginia had predicted in the diary entry of 12 March 1924 that formed “the very last pages” to be written at the Richmond house that “Old Mrs Turner will die in two years’ time”, expiring, she imagined, “among her china, her linen, & her great flowering wall papers, her father’s bureau, & several enormous wardrobes”.³⁴ How she had spent her time in Richmond is unknown. There are no letters to match those that illuminate Virginia’s decade in the district.³⁵ Declining health (the death certificate cited prolonged arteriosclerosis) may have restricted her movements, but she probably attended services at the nearby St Mary Magdalene. Her stay had been trouble free, except for a collapsing ceiling in the main bedroom in its early months, and a lark nesting in the kitchen boiler from where, according to Virginia, it “rained out its song” to greet the cook as she came down to the basement in the morning.³⁶

On 30 June 1926 Mary Sophia’s body was transported north from Richmond for cremation at Golders Green, and then south to Reigate to be interred beside
her husband after the “quiet and simple” funeral she had requested in her will.³⁷ The Turner family were all buried near Redhill, where Saxon’s distinguished paternal grandfather, Rev. Sydney Turner (1814-79) had overseen the Philanthropic Society’s reformatory and farm school in the 1850s.³⁸

In October 1926 Saxon complained to Lytton Strachey about Hogarth House still being on his hands.³⁹ It is not clear when it was sold. One source has 1926,⁴⁰ but the Woolfs may have waited until Saxon formally exercised the option to “break” the lease in March 1927.⁴¹ For the rest of their marriage Virginia and Leonard Woolf divided their time between Bloomsbury and Rodmell, in East Sussex, where Virginia drowned herself on 28 March 1941 in the River Ouse, which ran near her home, Monk’s House. Saxon left Great Ormond Street in 1927, lived in flats in Holborn and Fitzrovia, and died on 26 October 1962 in a care facility in Hendon. For Virginia, leaving Hogarth House marked the beginning of her most productive years as a novelist. For Saxon Sydney-Turner, leasing it was just a minor episode in an unexceptionable life.

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1 Hogarth and the conjoined Suffield House were renumbered 32 and 34 only in 1937 (Evans, 57).
2 V. Woolf, Letters, 3: 96 (the prefix “V. Woolf” omitted hereafter, and also for her Diary).
3 Diary, 2:283 (9 January 1924)
4 Lee, 813n63 has these figures, except for the rental for Hogarth House 1915–19, where £50 per annum (Glendinning, 176 and Carey/Hall, II:27) is a more plausible figure than £150 (Lee, 352).
5 On him see Hall, ch. 4, and Todd (1)-(3).
6 See L. Woolf (1), 115, 103–07 and 115–19. “Apostle”’ was the informal name for a member of an exclusive Cambridge undergraduate society founded in 1820, officially the Cambridge Conversazione Society, to which members remained attached long after they had gone down.
7 See Todd (2), 28–30.
8 See Todd (3) . In 1918, for example, he dined at Hogarth three times and lunched once (Diary, 1:105, 129, 164, 221) .9 Letters, 3:93.
10 Barbara Bagenal to Anne Olivier Bell, 10 August 1977 (Papers of Anne Olivier Bell. University of Sussex, The Keep, Brighton. SxMs-70/1/15).
11 Letters, 2:397.
12 The train journey from Richmond to Waterloo formed the basis of her essay Character in Fiction’ (1924) (Essays, 3:420-38).
13 Letters, 2: 414.
14 Letters, 1:444.
15 Diary, 2:282-4.
16 Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex: The Keep, Brighton. SxMs-13/2/H/2/D.
17 The Woolfs’ solicitors were Halsey, Lightly and Helmsley (Diary 2: 288n1), 32 St. James’s Place in the City of London.
18 In 1924 the solicitors Rashleigh, Turner, Mann and Rosher were at 63 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Sharon Grote Turner (1843-1930) was Saxon’s uncle, but at 81 years old cannot by then have been an active partner.19 Diary, 2: 287.
20 “This printing business… has outgrown us entirely” (Uncollected Letters, 140).
21 Diary, 1:242.
22 Letters, 2:508. Curiously this letter (no. 1221) to Clive Bell, written shortly after the death of Saxon’s father, and previously owned by Quentin Bell, is now in the Richmond Local Studies Library and Archive (ref. D2434), which has no record of its donation.
23 Diary, 2:272-3.
24 Lee, 813n63 has Saxon paying an annual rent of £150, which she thinks that the Woolfs paid when they leased Hogarth between 1915 and 1920 (see n4 above).
25 The figure of £140 is given by Glendinning, 230.
26 Letters, 3: 225 and 286.
27 Diary, 2:15.
28 L. Woolf (2), 64 and V. Woolf, Diary, 2: 297. The move extended over 13-14 March. The Woolfs stayed overnight on 13 March at 50 Gordon Square where Virginia’s Brother-in-law and Leonard’s Cambridge friend Clive Bell had a flat in a house occupied by Virginia’s brother Adrian and his wife.
29 Letters, 3:97.
30 Diary, 2:293 (cf. Letters, 3:95), and Letters, 6:449.
31 Wussow, 126.
32 Lee, 814n63 oddly describes this ménage as ‘Sydney-Turner’s family’.
33 Diary, 2:283 and Letters, 6:504.
34 Diary, 2:297.
35 See Fullagar.
36 Letters, 3:122.
37 Richmond Herald, 3 July 1926, 12. The undertakers were the Richmond firm of T H Saunders & Sons, then still run by the founder, Thomas Henry Saunders (1848–1928).
38 See further Thomas, and the article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Saxon’s father had adopted the hyphenated name “Sydney-Turner” at the time of his marriage as a tribute to Rev. Sydney.
39 Sydney-Turner to Strachey (14 October 1926: British Library, Add. MS 60732). By then Mary Sophia’s will, of which Saxon was the sole executor, had gone through probate (7 September 1926: £1,552.9s gross, £1,440.18s net).
40 Lee, 814n63, and Glendinning, 230 who has its sale (for £1,350) occurring “after two years” of being rented to Saxon.
41 Only a title search could settle the matter. The file in the Richmond Local Studies Library and Archive, “Paradise Rd., 32-34 Hogarth House (Formerly Suffield House)”, has no material on the Woolfs’ time there and their financial affairs.

Bibliography

Brooks, Helen. “Hogarth House’” Richmond History, 22 (2001), 58-63.
Carey, Jonathan (ed. Sarah M. Hall). “A History of Hogarth House, Part I”. Virginia Woolf Bulletin No. 60
(January 2019): 28-38; “A History of Hogarth House, Part II”. Virginia Woolf Bulletin No. 61 (May 2019): 25-35.
Evans, Margaret. “Hogarth House, Richmond’. Richmond History, 13 (1992), 52-7.
Fullagar, Peter. Virginia Woolf in Richmond. Richmond: Aurora Metro Books, 2018.
Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. [2006]: Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008.
Hall, Sarah M. Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf. London: Peter Owen, 2006.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.
Pearce, Brian Louis. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in Twickenham. Twickenham: Borough of Twickenham Local History Society: Paper No. 87, 2007. Thomas, D H “The Rev. Sydney Turner: A Redhill Social Worker”. Surrey History 5:2 (1995): 66-75.
Todd, Robert B.
(1) “Hove, Boxing Day 1910: Virginia Woolf and the Sydney-Turner Family”. Virginia Woolf Bulletin 64 (May 2020): 36-43.
(2) “A Triptych from Letters to Ka Cox”. Virginia Woolf Bulletin 64 (May 2020): 26-35. (3) “The Landlady and the Lodger: Mary Jane Stagg, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Bloomsbury”. Camden History Review 46 (2024): 12-19. Woolf, Leonard.
(1) Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904. London: Hogarth Press, 1960.
(2) Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. London: Hogarth Press, 1967. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (5-6). London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-80.
The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
Wussow, Helen M. Virginia Woolf “The Hours”: The British Museum Manuscript of “Mrs. Dalloway”. New York: Pace University Press, 2010.

Robert B Todd is Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada, now retired and living in Toronto. Born in England, he has
had had a long-standing interest in the Bloomsbury Group, has published several
articles in recent issues of the Camden History Review, and is currently preparing
a biography of Saxon Sydney-Turner.