{"id":11885,"date":"2025-07-04T15:05:54","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T14:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/?page_id=11885"},"modified":"2025-07-04T15:08:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T14:08:39","slug":"saxon-sydney-turner-and-hogarth-house-1924-27","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/saxon-sydney-turner-and-hogarth-house-1924-27\/","title":{"rendered":"SAXON SYDNEY-TURNER AND HOGARTH HOUSE (1924-27)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Robert B Todd<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

IN MARCH 1924 Leonard and Virginia Woolf left Hogarth House, 285 Paradise Road SW,1<\/sup> their home for the previous nine years, and forsook Richmond\u2019s \u201csoft suburban beauty\u201d2 <\/sup>for 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. Virginia felt \u201cgrateful to both Richmond & Hogarth\u201d, saying that \u201cnothing could have suited better\u201d.3<\/sup> 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 \u20a41,950. In 1924 they sold Suffield for \u20a41,400, but before selling Hogarth rented it between 1924 and 1927 to a friend.4<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was Saxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner (1880\u20131962), a surgeon\u2019s son, brought up in Gloucester and Hove, and a Queen\u2019s Scholar at Westminster School (1893\u201399).5<\/sup> At Trinity College, Cambridge (1899\u20131903) 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 <\/sup>But his subsequent career in the upper echelons of the civil service was undistinguished,7<\/sup> 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<\/sup> 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was a confirmed bachelor, afflicted with rheumatism and sciatica, well known as an obsessive opera-goer, and a rather withdrawn individual capable of spending hours sitting in silence like a \u201cphantom\u201d.9<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/sup> He probably went down to Richmond by a route Virginia Woolf knew well, going first to Waterloo, where the trains went \u201cat all the 8s \u20137.8-7.18-1.28- etc. every 10 minutes\u201d,11<\/sup> then alighting at Richmond12<\/sup> and walking up Eton Street to Paradise Road, to the house \u201c2nd on the left at the join \u2026 only 5 minutes from the station\u201d.13<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saxon\u2019s mother, Mary Sophia Sydney-Turner (1849\u20131926), was the daughter of a Dublin-trained surgeon, Ryves William Graves (1819\u201382), 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\u20131922) (Merchant Taylor\u2019s School and Guy\u2019s 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\u20131950) (\u201csix feet 1 \u2026 very handsome\u201d),14<\/sup> a serving army officer, married since 1907 with a son, and in an itinerant career that left Saxon responsible for his widowed mother\u2019s welfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/sup> On 20 January he confirmed the arrangement in a letter to Leonard Woolf.16<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/sup> to draw a lease on the lines that we discussed: \u20a4150 rent, no premium, fair wear and tear, seven years term. I don\u2019t 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\u2019s Inn Fields: I don\u2019t remember the number at the moment.18<\/sup> 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Virginia rephrased it, \u201cSaxon\u2019s 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\u2019s present, they\u2019ll come in March\u201d.19<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Woolfs might have let Hogarth House anyway given the challenge of moving the burgeoning Hogarth Press (twenty-seven titles in 1920\u201323),20<\/sup> but were happy to help this particular friend. Virginia had always had a soft spot for Saxon,21<\/sup> describing him once as \u201cstrictly true, genuine, unalloyed\u201d, never found \u201ccallous, insincere, or grudging the last farthing of his possessions\u201d. Two years earlier, she had promised to find him a house in Richmond for his then recently widowed mother,22<\/sup> 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<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the \u20a4150 mentioned in Saxon\u2019s letter represented his annual rent, it would have been three times what the Woolfs paid when leasing the property between 1915 and 1919,24<\/sup> and \u00a310 more than their annual rent for 52 Tavistock Square on a ten-year lease from the Bedford Estate.25<\/sup> So when Virginia acknowledged Saxon\u2019s half-yearly instalments in December 1925 and August 1926,26<\/sup> she probably received \u00a325 rather than \u00a375, half the same \u00a350 annual rent she and Leonard had paid earlier. The \u00a3150 specified in his letter is, despite the vagueness, best taken as the cumulative total (3 x \u00a350) for the three years up to 1927 when the lease could be terminated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 2 February 1924, Mary Sophia Sydney-Turner and her daughter-in-law, Edith Mary (b. Bartram) (1880\u20131954), came to Richmond to \u201cmeasure the alcoves\u201d and to see \u201cwhether Mrs Turner\u2019s father\u2019s bureau could stand in the study\u201d. When Edith reminded her mother-in-law not to forget \u201cthe piano & the pianola\u201d, Virginia pilloried her for fussing, calling her one of those \u201cwearisome women\u2026 who compose the middle-classes\u201d, people who, as she claimed elsewhere, were \u201ccut so thick, & ring so coarse\u201d.27<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 13 March the Woolfs, with Virginia in the midst of writing Mrs Dalloway<\/em>, left Hogarth House for Tavistock Square.28<\/sup> Since 25 February Vanessa Bell and her partner Duncan Grant had for a fee of \u00a325 been decorating one of the rooms with \u201cvast panels of moonrises and prima donna\u2019s bouquets\u201d.29<\/sup> (In 1940 Virginia would see them \u201csuspended over the rubble\u201d following a night of the Blitz.)30<\/sup> On 15 March or soon thereafter she wrote her new address \u201c52 Tavistock Sq re \u201d in the margin of the notebook in which she was drafting her novel.31<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Easter (20 April was Easter Sunday in 1924) Mrs Sydney-Turner, along with the cook and the cook\u2019s daughter,32<\/sup> whose names we never learn, were in Richmond. Virginia had imagined Saxon moving in \u201cwith his troupe of lunatics\u2026 four lunatics and a toothless mother\u201d,33<\/sup> since she knew that Saxon\u2019s father had in the final decades of his life cared for mental patients, sad withdrawn souls rather than \u201clunatics\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cthe very last pages\u201d to be written at the Richmond house that \u201cOld Mrs Turner will die in two years\u2019 time\u201d, expiring, she imagined, \u201camong her china, her linen, & her great flowering wall papers, her father\u2019s bureau, & several enormous wardrobes\u201d.34<\/sup> How she had spent her time in Richmond is unknown. There are no letters to match those that illuminate Virginia\u2019s decade in the district.35 <\/sup>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 \u201crained out its song\u201d to greet the cook as she came down to the basement in the morning.36<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 30 June 1926 Mary Sophia\u2019s body was transported north from Richmond for cremation at Golders Green, and then south to Reigate to be interred beside
her husband after the \u201cquiet and simple\u201d funeral she had requested in her will.37<\/sup> The Turner family were all buried near Redhill, where Saxon\u2019s distinguished paternal grandfather, Rev. Sydney Turner (1814-79) had overseen the Philanthropic Society\u2019s reformatory and farm school in the 1850s.38<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 1926 Saxon complained to Lytton Strachey about Hogarth House still being on his hands.39<\/sup> It is not clear when it was sold. One source has 1926,40<\/sup> but the Woolfs may have waited until Saxon formally exercised the option to \u201cbreak\u201d the lease in March 1927.41<\/sup> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cV. Woolf\u201d 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\u201319, where \u00a350 per annum (Glendinning, 176 and Carey\/Hall, II:27) is a more plausible figure than \u00a3150 (Lee, 352).
5 On him see Hall, ch. 4, and Todd (1)-(3).
6 See L. Woolf (1), 115, 103\u201307 and 115\u201319. \u201cApostle\u201d\u2019 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\u201330.
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\u2019 (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\u2019 solicitors were Halsey, Lightly and Helmsley (Diary 2: 288n1), 32 St. James\u2019s Place in the City of London.
18 In 1924 the solicitors Rashleigh, Turner, Mann and Rosher were at 63 Lincoln\u2019s Inn Fields. Sharon Grote Turner (1843-1930) was Saxon\u2019s uncle, but at 81 years old cannot by then have been an active partner.19 Diary, 2: 287.
20 \u201cThis printing business\u2026 has outgrown us entirely\u201d (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\u2019s 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 \u00a3150, which she thinks that the Woolfs paid when they leased Hogarth between 1915 and 1920 (see n4 above).
25 The figure of \u00a3140 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\u2019s Brother-in-law and Leonard\u2019s Cambridge friend Clive Bell had a flat in a house occupied by Virginia\u2019s 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 m\u00e9nage as \u2018Sydney-Turner\u2019s family\u2019.
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\u20131928).
38 See further Thomas, and the article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography<\/em>. Saxon\u2019s father had adopted the hyphenated name \u201cSydney-Turner\u201d 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\u2019s will, of which Saxon was the sole executor, had gone through probate (7 September 1926: \u00a31,552.9s gross, \u00a31,440.18s net).
40 Lee, 814n63, and Glendinning, 230 who has its sale (for \u00a31,350) occurring \u201cafter two years\u201d of being rented to Saxon.
41 Only a title search could settle the matter. The file in the Richmond Local Studies Library and Archive, \u201cParadise Rd., 32-34 Hogarth House (Formerly Suffield House)\u201d, has no material on the Woolfs\u2019 time there and their financial affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bibliography<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks, Helen. \u201cHogarth House\u2019\u201d Richmond History<\/em>, 22 (2001), 58-63.
Carey, Jonathan (ed. Sarah M. Hall). \u201cA History of Hogarth House, Part I\u201d. Virginia Woolf Bulletin <\/em>No. 60
(January 2019): 28-38; \u201cA History of Hogarth House, Part II\u201d. Virginia Woolf Bulletin<\/em> No. 61 (May 2019): 25-35.
Evans, Margaret. \u201cHogarth House, Richmond\u2019. Richmond Histor<\/em>y, 13 (1992), 52-7.
Fullagar, Peter. Virginia Woolf in Richmon<\/em>d. Richmond: Aurora Metro Books, 2018.
Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Biograph<\/em>y. [2006]: Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008.
Hall, Sarah M. Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Wool<\/em>f. London: Peter Owen, 2006.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf<\/em>. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.
Pearce, Brian Louis. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in Twickenham<\/em>. Twickenham: Borough of Twickenham Local History Society: Paper No. 87, 2007. Thomas, D H \u201cThe Rev. Sydney Turner: A Redhill Social Worker\u201d. Surrey History<\/em> 5:2 (1995): 66-75.
Todd, Robert B.
(1) \u201cHove, Boxing Day 1910: Virginia Woolf and the Sydney-Turner Family\u201d. Virginia Woolf Bulletin<\/em> 64 (May 2020): 36-43.
(2) \u201cA Triptych from Letters to Ka Cox\u201d. Virginia Woolf Bulletin <\/em>64 (May 2020): 26-35. (3) \u201cThe Landlady and the Lodger: Mary Jane Stagg, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Bloomsbury\u201d. Camden History Review<\/em> 46 (2024): 12-19. Woolf, Leonard.
(1) Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-190<\/em>4. London: Hogarth Press, 1960.
(2) Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939<\/em>. London: Hogarth Press, 1967. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf<\/em>. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84. The Essays of Virginia Woolf<\/em>. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (5-6). London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. <\/em>6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-80.
The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf.<\/em> Ed. Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
Wussow, Helen M. Virginia Woolf \u201cThe Hours\u201d: The British Museum Manuscript of \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d<\/em>. New York: Pace University Press, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11885","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11885"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11966,"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11885\/revisions\/11966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richmondhistory.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}