The Peace Family of Castle Hill – Fragments of Memory Page 6
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Possibly James felt that this was the fairest way of handling
his affairs
since he no doubt planned to leave the tailoring business to his son as
some form of compensation. It was, however, a decision which
would
rankle with William for many years. Unfortunately, James
George,
in 1909, was not to know that William would in fact die four years
before
him.
So
Castle Hill
became the family home of Minnie and Arthur Clarke and their
four
children. They would entertain their aunts, uncles and
cousins at
Christmas and Margaret (Edith and Acton’s daughter) liked to
relate the
story of how one Christmas a conjuror had been invited to entertain the
guests. One imagines this was to be a surprise since he was
asked
to wait in James Peace’s house in Easton Street until the
party hour arrived.
While waiting there the conjuror spied Margaret peeping at him through
the bannisters. He asked her if she was coming to the party
and Margaret
told him that she was too little and had to stay at her
grandfather’s
house and was terribly disappointed to miss all the
excitement. The conjuror exclaimed that this must be a
mistake and that Margaret would
go to the party with him. When they arrived at Castle Hill
grandpa
Peace, (James), was very angry with the conjuror but since it
was
Christmas allowed Margaret to stay. ‘Grandpa had a
soft spot for
me’ Margaret would say ‘and I always got away with
murder when I went to
visit Uncle Will because he thought that I was such dear little
thing.’
The
Peace sisters got together regularly for family outings, tea at one or
other of their houses and for jaunts in their father’s motor
car – one
of the first cars in High Wycombe. Castle Hill became a
popular meeting
spot. William, Florence and their children seem to have been
rarely
included in these events although they lived only a
stone’s
throw away in Priory Avenue and later in Priory Road. However it should
be remembered that William’s children were several years
younger than
their
cousins and that when family holidays were planned William would have
been
required to stay at the shop, allowing his father, James George to
accompany
his daughters to the seaside.
In the early 1900s
James George Peace, along with Arthur Clarke and Thomas
Thurlow, bought Minchins Farm in Flackwell Heath and made it
into
a golf course. Virtually all the names on the initial list of
founder
members, as recorded in the Bucks Free Press for 1903, appear somewhere
in the family trees of the Peace and Skull families. The Marquess of
Lincolnshire was the president. The golf
course
was
later sold in the 1920s to the golf members themselves (who were now
mostly
from London ) and became the club that still exists in Flackwell Heath
today. Ownership of land and property
in Flackwell Heath by
the Peace,
Clarke, Griffits (relatives of the Skulls) and Darvill families appears
to have been commonplace and would have been a simple way of
investing
savings
in the absence of the big building societies that we take for granted
in
the
21st century.
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