The Interesting History of Nunn’s Bottom

In 1815, according to the deeds, Lieutenant-Commander Nathaniel Nunn purchased a plot of land comprising twenty-seven acres of grazing, a three-acre orchard, a stream, and a house. The house still stands today.

Nathaniel could afford the property. His service in the war against Napoleon had produced a tidy share of the bounty from a number of captured French ships. Having completed the purchase, he moved his new wife from their cramped house in Portsmouth to the new property deep in what was at that time the Hampshire countryside. She would be happier there, he felt sure. The village was far enough from the bustle of Portsmouth, with its noise and smell and constant activity, to be a suitable place for the Nunns to raise a family. It was close enough to the town for Nathaniel to make regular trips
to and fro whilst on leave, but far enough that his keeping of the cramped house would remain undiscovered by Mrs Nunn, as would the occupation of said house by his mistress.

Nathaniel was now wealthy enough to build for his wife (who was expecting their first child) a small country mansion, with all the facilities and accoutrements that would be expected of a gentleman farmer. In fact Nathaniel wasn’t really a farmer, because he rented the land to one William Byrd, himself a successful tenant farmer with leases on more than two hundred acres of prime Hampshire farmland to his name. William Byrd, however, doesn’t come into our story so we’ll let him fade from the picture with nothing more said about him.

Nathaniel called his first son George, after his king, without whom he would not now be a rich man. His second son he named Horatio, in honour of his late commander, who also contributed, by his prowess as a naval strategian, to Nathaniel’s wealth. Nathaniel and his wife also had three daughters, but there is no record of what names they were given.

Nathaniel’s mistress wasn’t as faithful to Nathaniel as she should have been and whereas his wife gave him five healthy children, she gave him only a particularly nasty disease of which, a few years later, he died. His son George was by now still only a young lad but he inherited his father’s estate including the farm with its tenant farmer, the mansion, and the
original farmhouse, now used as a barn.

The farm is listed in a land registry of 1885 as Nunn’s Farm, occupied by one George Nunn, who was probably Nathaniel’s grandson. We might gather, from his name, that George was a title handed down through the generations along with the farm and the mansion.

Hence, if we bring our story into the twentieth century, we find a George Nunn in residence (and working the land) at Nunn’s Farm in 1940, a year in which not only was Britain at war again but there was a George on the throne again, a fact of some passing interest but actually of no relevance.

By now there are more detailed and accurate records concerning the property, which makes, I hope, my story more interesting. Britain, as I said, was at war. You may remember it, an especially nasty business. Portsmouth was again bustling with activity, the docks crowded with ships and the town crowded with sailors. This was just before the blitz, when much of the town was reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe. At that time Nunn’s Farm was far enough from the town to be safe but close enough that the younger George (Nathaniel’s great great grandson) could drive down there and enlist in the Navy without telling his father. He was by now over thirty and I don’t know why he would need to tell his father, other perhaps than farming was a reserved occupation so I suppose he had more business at home than in
Portsmouth.

Anyway, he went off to sea and, as far as I know, he didn’t come back. Which left George senior to run the farm on his own, what with a scarcity of men for labouring. The Ministry sent him two young women but he soon wore them out, so they sent him two more and he wore them out as well, and then they stopped sending him young women and said he would have to get along on his own, well him and Mrs Nunn, but she was of a delicate disposition, especially now her only son had gone off to the war never to come back, and not a lot of help.

So George slaughtered his cows, which he had no-one to milk, and ploughed his pasture over for sugar beet, a crop he reckoned would require a lot less work. This sudden change attracted the attention of the Ministry of Food,
who sent an official down from Winchester to make George’s life difficult. He said George should have sought authority to stop producing milk and he could be in all sorts of trouble (and he assured George that trouble from the Ministry did in fact come in many kinds), and this put the fear of God into George who said he would do anything they told him to. And what they told him to do was relinquish one of his fields so they could build a small factory to turn his sugar beet into sugar.

It didn’t take George long to calculate that producing sugar was going to be more profitable than selling beet to farmers for cattle feed, and the factory was duly built where his bottom field used to be. Legally it was still part of George’s farm, but some clerk at the Ministry decided it had a separate address, and informed the GPO and so it became Nunn’s Farm Bottom Field. George didn’t care what they called it. He didn’t even care when one day the postman delivered a letter to the factory from the Ministry of Food with the unlikely abbreviation, Nunn’s Bottom, although had he know the name was going to become permanent he might have thought to do something about it. (Long after Nunn’s Farm had ceased to exist the place was still called Nunn’s Bottom, but more of that in due course.)

Soon he was not only growing beet and processing it but he was buying the crop from other farms to feed his factory. Things were looking up for George Nunn. That all stopped in 1946 though. With the war over, cane sugar started coming into the country again and the demand for beet sugar crashed. George was faced with going back to producing cattle feed or even selling the farm. He was getting on, and he had no son to pass it on to.

He got lucky though. One day a man called Trevor Greatrex called at Nunn’s Farm in a big American car left by a US Army General he had bought on the black market (the car, that is, not the General). Buying and selling things, especially war surplus, was Trevor’s business, and he was looking for warehouse space. Something, preferably, away from prying eyes, although he didn’t say that to George. Actually, George wasn’t as dumb as Trevor thought because he sussed out Trevor’s business pretty quickly, but he said yes anyway because it was good money and what Trevor did was Trevor’s problem.

Trevor even offered to dispose of the equipment in the sugar factory, which he did with some efficiency, turning it first into scrap metal and then from scrap metal into cash, for which he generously only took twenty-five percent. Soon, lorries were coming to Nunn’s Bottom on a regular basis and
unloading things and then coming back and loading them up again. The rent came in regularly for a year while the rest of the farm went to waste and George sat on his backside. Then one day the lorries stopped coming and the police came instead and forced open the warehouse doors and found what they were looking for, whatever that was. George managed to convince them that he had nothing whatever to do with Trevor Greatrex’s business and they believed
him.

They sent a lorry of their own and took away whatever it was they had been looking for and the next day when George opened the doors and turned on the lights what he found was a large quantity of things they hadn’t been interested in and that they had simply left. There were things of all sizes and descriptions. There were cans of food, drums of motor oil, boxes of shoes, and, under a pile of bales of cloth, more than half a million cigarettes. Why had the police missed them? George could only surmise that whatever they had been looking for it wasn’t cigarettes, and rather than search the entire premises they had been content to cart whatever it was off with them and leave the rest. This left George with an interesting conundrum. Was Trevor coming back, or was he in prison? What was George to do with all that stuff? He debated the matter long and hard. His wife, always a worrier, said he should tell the police but he said that was
unnecessary because, after all, they had searched the warehouse once and surely if they’d been looking for cigarettes they would have found them. His wife said she didn’t think that was the point because this was contraband
and it was his duty to report it, to which he replied how did they know it was contraband, after all, for all they knew it could be perfectly legal couldn’t it? His wife said she didn’t think so and of course neither for one moment did George, but all said and done it was after all an argument, how did they know there was even a problem and you don’t go looking for trouble because it will find you soon enough without your help, and on the last point the matter was dropped.

The next thing to worry about was whether Trevor had in fact been arrested and when he didn’t return for two weeks George decided he had and started to think about getting rid of all the stuff, by which he meant selling it for cash. If Trevor ever returned he decided he would say the police had
confiscated everything and shrug his shoulders and act innocent. Trevor might know he was lying but what was he going to do – complain to the police? His wife said he might not do that but he might break George’s arms or legs or whatever it was that gangsters did, but George said she shouldn’t exaggerate, Trevor wasn’t a gangster, for all his big American car, he just thought he was. Really, he was a cheapskate wheeler-dealer and George wasn’t
afraid of him.

Actually, George was afraid of him, and it was some months before he stopped listening out for the sound of his car in the drive, but in the event they never saw or heard from Trevor again.

George now spoke to his friend Arthur Clements in Portsmouth, a man himself not unfamiliar with the world of war surplus and quite soon there were lorries at Nunn’s Bottom again and where there had been piles of goods there
were now wads of cash in George’s pocket, less twenty-five percent, which seemed to be the going rate. When George and Arthur stood in the now-empty warehouse it suddenly looked very big, and Arthur said what was George going to do with it now and George said he didn’t know, which was true. Arthur said he might be able to help his friend there and leave it to him.

Well, George left it to him and nothing happened. Whatever Arthur had been thinking of never materialised and one day George went into Portsmouth and found Arthur and asked him what he had managed to do and Arthur said oh yes he had been meaning to telephone but someone had let him down and sorry.

George went back to Nunn¹s Bottom and stood in the big empty space. He was staring at it when had an idea. Arthur had said how big it was, and that was the problem. What was suitable for a sugar factory in wartime wasn’t suitable for anything else. It needed to be smaller, well not smaller as such but broken up into small units. At present it was open to the roof, but it would take a floor and divide into two that way, and then each floor could be further divided into two or even
three self-contained premises.

If he rented out each of the premises in that way he would get more income than what Trevor Greatrex had been paying him for the whole building. And he was more likely to find tenants for smaller units. It all added up. OK, he had no idea how he was going to find tenants, but so enthusiastic was he
about the idea that he set to work immediately. Labour was plentiful, what with so many men demobbed and without jobs. Materials were scarce, but there he would improvise.

He went back into Portsmouth and saw Arthur again. If you had the cash there was little Arthur couldn’t find, and George had the cash. A week later yet another lorry turned up at Nunn’s Bottom, and this time it was carrying timber. Not enough for the whole job, but enough for stud partitions and a
floor. Four men arrived in the same lorry, and they camped in the big warehouse until the job was finished. At the end of a week George paid them off and when he stood in the warehouse now instead of a big empty space it was a maze of timber framing.

It was six weeks later, when George was about to decide that you really couldn’t rely on Arthur, that the latter telephoned with news of a consignment of plywood sheeting that could be had at a price. It turned out to be less simple than that. Some temporary housing was going up in
Portsmouth and Arthur was kind of involved in the firm that had won the contract to build it. The project involved a lot of plywood and someone had mistakenly over-ordered, and wouldn’t it be a shame and a waste of manpower to send it all the way back to wherever it had come from? Naturally, as this
was government property, proper payment would have to be made, so everything was in order and above board.

When the sheets were delivered you could tell they were government property because they had Government Property stamped on them but only on one side so by the time the walls were up you couldn’t see anything. George closed his eyes and saw nothing anyway, a policy he found gave him if not the moral high ground then at least an illusion of it. And it stopped Mrs Nunn worrying. By the time Arthur’s men had finished all that was left to do was to paint the plywood, and George could do this himself.

When he stepped back three weeks later he had to smile because it did in fairness look pretty good. It had to be admitted that Arthur’s men, for reasons best known to themselves, had put the staircase in the wrong place. Mrs Nunn commented on it so George said it wasn’t the wrong place at all, in fact it would give them more space. Mrs Nunn looked at George like she did when she knew he was lying and mentally shook her head. As far as she was concerned the whole exercise was a waste of time and money anyway because they didn’t have any tenants and she couldn’t see where they were going to come from.

Well she was right about the stairs, and they were a source of irritation to everyone who ever used the building, but she was wrong about it all being pointless. Only a week after George had finished painting the walls (in an
interesting shade of grey Arthur also obtained) a large American car turned up in the drive of the big house. George’s heart sank, but it turned out not
to be Trevor but a friend of his. It seemed that far from Trevor being angry about the loss of his merchandise he was pleased with George for hiding the cigarettes and getting him out of even further trouble, which made George smile. He told his friend Barney (who had bought the car because he wouldn’t be needing it for a while), and it was Barney who now stood in the warehouse as was and admired the
alterations. He whistled through his teeth and said yes, a great improvement (although George wondered how, since he had never seen the place, he could know that) and he would be pleased to rent one of the units if George was ready to let. George said he was and what precisely was Barney’s line of
work?

He was greatly relieved when Barney said he was in the furniture business, upholstering, that kind of thing, and George was very pleased to have a tenant who was a legitimate businessman and then they haggled over the rent and after a few more minutes came to an agreement which gave George more than he had expected and cost Barney less than he had expected. He thought George must be out of touch with what rents were being charged in Portsmouth,
which he was of course. So Barney moved in and he and George got on very well. He even helped him to install a toilet, a refinement George hadn’t thought of. There had been one when it was a sugar factory but somehow it seemed to have disappeared when Trevor sold the contents for scrap.

Barney was a little taken aback when George informed him the address of his new premises was Nunn’s Bottom and it was he who came up with the idea of calling it Nunn’s Bottom Trading Estate. One occupant in one building didn’t
seem to make it a trading estate to George but it did occur to him it would help him to find more tenants, so he got a sign painted up for the purpose and placed it on the road at the entrance to the big house. He also placed an advertisement in the South Hampshire Gazette and was shocked to find
small tradesmen queuing up for his premises. Portsmouth was only half an hour’s drive away and there was a real dearth of business space there. Within three months Barney’s upholstery business was joined by an ironmongery wholesaler, a signwriter, a shopfitter, a veterinary equipment maker and a man who fitted out hearses, a trade it had never occurred to George even existed. What used to be the loading bay for the sugar was now replaced by large garage doors so he could drive the hearses straight in.

And still there were tradespeople wanting accommodation so George turned to the old house, the one that had always been used as a barn when it was Nunn’s Farm. The shopfitter wasn’t happy with having to be upstairs, which naturally involved carting a lot of heavy materials up and down, so he
suggested moving to the barn if he could be on the ground floor. It was his idea to convert the barn for George in exchange for a rent-free period, and George readily agreed. The building split nicely into three units and within weeks of completion the shopfitter was happily installed, and he was
followed by a tree surgeon and a saddler.

George looked on his work and was pleased. This truly was a trading estate, and what’s more he was earning rather a lot of money. He started to look around at development opportunities, but all the available buildings were now fully occupied. What he needed was land to build on, and funnily enough, this being a farm, land was something there was no shortage of. There was the top field which was leased out for grazing pasture and wouldn’t come free for another two years, but the other fields were lying fallow. He talked to his wife about it over lunch one day and the first thing she said was what about planning permission, she being the sort of person who would always see the reason why something might not work.

In fact as there was a shortage still of business accommodation in the area the council were unlikely to object, but George took the precaution of sounding out a friend of his who happened to be the brother-in-law of Harold
Brogden, the town clerk. It wasn’t necessary to resort to bribery, nothing as crude as that. It was more a question of getting what you wanted because you fitted into the local business community. As a farmer George hadn’t, but Nunn’s Bottom was beginning to get noticed and the town clerk didn’t think the council would want to get in the way of progress. Under the Town Planning Act of something or other the planning department could rubber stamp an application like this without reference to the full planning committee. The truth was, all of that could happen if the right people wanted it to happen, or you could be dragged through the whole long,
expensive process if not. Getting his planning permission was not only invaluable to the development of George’s trading estate, it told him he had arrived.

For the first time, George had to borrow from the bank. The new building couldn’t be constructed from dodgy bits of timber and plywood. They would need an architect and real builders. It was a risk. Mrs Nunn, again, raised objections, and this time George almost wished she would talk him out of it, but she knew after all the years of marriage to George there was no point trying so to his disappointment she didn’t. His only experience of the National Provincial Bank was when he paid money in, something he hadn’t done a lot of when he was farming but was now getting used to. The staff at the
bank were getting used to it as well so when he turned up for his appointment with Mr Blanchflower, the manager, he was welcomed like an important customer. This made him a little less nervous. In the event, there was nothing to be nervous about. He had a good business plan, cash of his own, and more security than the bank needed, with the freehold on the land and the big house. Mr Blanchflower made it all sound easy and an hour or so later they were smiling and shaking hands and the die was cast.

With all that money George started to shop around for an architect and settled on Haywood and Padmore from Basingstoke. Joe Padmore came down to Nunn’s Bottom with a young assistant and spent the day taking photographs of the site while the young assistant traipsed about in his wellingtons taking measurements. A plan was proposed to build a single-story structure divided into twelve units of equal size, all with vehicular access and shared facilities, which apparently meant toilets. There was an artist’s impression of the elevation and George was smitten. He wanted it. He signed the contract and authorised Haywood and Padmore to put out a tender for the building work. When the estimates came in they took George’s breath away, and momentarily he faltered.

But the money was coming in from the existing units, all of which were let on long leases, and after all if the bank manager was happy why shouldn’t George be? Banks don’t lend money unless it’s a dead cert, do they? With this reassurance, he signed a contract with Leneghan and Son to build his new units.

Actually Leneghan and Son turned out to be just Son, because old man Leneghan dropped dead of a heart attack the day George signed the contract. It didn’t seem like a good omen, but you can’t cancel a deal because of the
omens, can you?

Anyway, the younger Leneghan seemed to have a range of tradesmen at his disposal and pretty soon the foundations were laid and there as a huge bustle of activity and every day George went down to the site it looked a bit different, so something must have been happening, and indeed something was happening – Leneghan Son didn’t have the working capital to pay the subcontractors, all of whom wanted paying on a weekly basis. George had paid some money in advance and the normal scheme of things was to make stage payments as said stages were completed. Leneghan approached George for an advance on the first stage and George had little choice but to pay him.

Needless to say, a builder who doesn’t have the working capital to get properly started on a project is unlikely to have enough at the other end either, and George found himself paying increasingly in advance. In fact so much did he pay that the day Leneghan, and all his subcontractors, went home for the weekend and didn’t come back on Monday George was out of pocket by a very considerable sum.

Assuming he could even find another builder to take over the project, that would leave him with insufficient working capital himself to make a down-payment. Still, the work that had been completed looked pretty sound and the rents were coming in from the existing tenants, so he went back to see Mr Blanchflower at National Provincial Bank. Mr Blanchflower smiled and said these things happen, had he considered suing Mr Leneghan? George replied that he had but that he would have to trace the man, and that had so far proved difficult. Mr Blanchflower said what a pity and he was sure they could work something out. There was still enough equity in the property to cover the loan and as long as George understood that a larger sum loaned would necessarily mean a higher rate of interest the arrangements, by which he meant a new loan agreement with its attendant arrangement fees, could be made in good time to start work again promptly.

George was in one of those uncomfortable positions where you don’t want to go forward but you can’t go back. So he signed on the dotted line, shook Mr Blanchflower’s hand whilst managing not to look him directly in the eye, and
walked out of the bank into the late afternoon sunlight a worried man.

This time he didn’t ask the architects to help him find a builder. He went to see Arthur. Arthur might be dodgy, but if anything that meant he would know who was reliable and who wasn’t. Arthur took that as a compliment and promised to get back to him. A week later George telephoned him and asked if he had made any progress and he said he was waiting for someone to call him back, funnily enough that very afternoon. George put the phone down and called Joe Padmore.

This time Mr Padmore came up with a firm from Southampton, a firm he had personally had dealings with in the past and knew to be reliable. George did wonder why he hadn’t come up with someone he had had dealings with and knew to be reliable last time, and so did Mrs Nunn, but still, better late than never.

And the new building went up exactly according to Joe Padmore’s plans. It was a sight to behold and as soon as George had beheld it, with his wife by his side, he had a new sign painted saying Light Industrial Units to Let and placed an advertisement in the South Hampshire Gazette and he sat back and waited for the tenants to arrive and form an orderly queue.

Meanwhile, only three miles away, the new Wessex Trading Estate had just opened, with direct access to the main road, and businessmen were forming their queue there instead. In quite, as far as George was concerned, the
wrong place. He sat and waited, and then he waited some more, but still they didn’t come. He had another sign painted and had it put up on the verge a hundred yards down the road, but someone stole it. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would steal a Light Industrial Units to Let sign but clearly someone had because it was no longer there and signs don’t just vanish, do they? That’s what Mrs Nunn said and he could only agree with her.

The bank took the house, the land and the trading estate. They sold it all to the Wessex Trading Estate Company and recovered their debt. What happened to George and Mrs Nunn isn’t known. Well, I expect it’s known by someone, but it has no bearing on the fortunes of the venture George pioneered, which is the subject of this story. I’m sorry if you find the lack of information about the Nunns disappointing. To be honest, OK I do have some knowledge of them because I myself was moved by their misfortune, and if it helps I can
tell you they came out of it not quite so badly as it seems. But if I start telling you all about that we’ll get nowhere, will we?

So to bring you up to date with Nunn’s Bottom Trading Estate, this is what happened. The Wessex Trading Estate soon filled up and they found themselves with a queue of businessmen wanting premises, so they put them into Nunn’s Bottom. (They were going to change the name to Nunn’s Farm but they didn’t. Actually I don’t have too much information on why that was, but strange as it seems it’s called Nunn’s Bottom to this day.) The new building quickly filled up and after another year or so Wessex ploughed yet more money into further development and eventually there was no farmland left at all. Planning permission, you ask. Well, what with all the development going on the council decided Nunn’s Farm didn’t exist any more and this was really an industrial zone, not an agricultural one. That, you could say, was the way of much of England.

Nunn’s Bottom grew to fill up the whole twenty seven acres of what, in Nathaniel Nunn’s day, had been grazing, plus the three acres of orchard, which was remembered only in the name of Orchard Close on the estate, although no-one in later years could imagine why it had that name. Naturally, there were no apple trees on the estate. There was however still a stream, but there had long ceased to be any fish in it. In fact the stream was rapidly becoming a dumping ground for careless tenants, which was a source of irritation to the landlords, but more about that later.

And the big house, the mansion Nathaniel built for his family? Wessex took it over as their head office. As they developed trading estates all over the country, such a prestigious building served them well. They called it
Horatio House, I fancy after Admiral Lord Nelson rather than Nathaniel’s son.