Edward Wadsworth, RA was born in Cleckheaton, West Riding of Yorkshire in 1889 and rejected a career in the family’s mill in favour of becoming a painter. He won a scholarship to the Slade where he was a friend and contemporary of Mark Gertler.
He married Fanny Mary Eveleigh, a professional violinist 11 years his senior, and they had two daughters. Mr Wadsworth bought Dairy Farm when the Public Trustee sold the Maresfield Estate in 1924, and he and his wife so liked Maresfield that they gave up their London residence and moved permanently to Sussex.
Wagon barns and outbuildings were renovated to become Edward’s studios, after being neglected since Prince Münster had left the Estate.
His work is widely and internationally represented in important collections.
The mid-1930s saw two commissions that placed Wadsworth at the forefront of art deco design – the tea room of the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea and two huge paintings for the Cunard Line’s RMS Queen Mary.
One of the panels painted for the Queen Mary was so large, he had to work in Maresfield Village Hall, and a wall of the village hall had to be removed to get it out!
Edward indulged in early classic cars and had a Delage, Bentley and Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.
Mr and Mrs Wadsworth sought seclusion and to ensure it bought the ten acre meadow in front of their property, fearing it might be purchased by a developer and covered by bungalows in Peacehaven style – although it was developed in the 1960’s when Henry Boot built six Georgian houses.
During the second world war, the Wadsworths were forced to leave Dairy House due to the military requisitioning of Maresfield Park, and moved to Buxton in Derbyshire. They returned to Dairy House in 1945.
The picture below is believed to be the only photograph in existence of the unspoilt meadow in Maresfield Park, taken in 1949 from ‘Rest Harrow’ (now the ‘Coach House’) with a five shilling Box Brownie camera. The meadow was then owned by Edward Wadsworth, R.A.
Mr Bernard Howe (of Home Farm, Sheffield Park) whilst a tenant of ‘Dairy House’ introduced an early combine-harvester to cut barley in the field which attracted an audience to see the revolutionary new harvesting machine. Mr Neville Cottingham of Woodlands Farm drove the machine which had teething problems before ‘all was safely gathered in’.
Visitors to ‘Dairy House’, as it was later called, could not help being impressed by the statue in the garden, known as the “Old Girl”, carved in elm in 1927 by Zadkine. The elm tree from which it was made was hewn from across the lane and dragged by two horses on loan from Flitterbanks Farm.
The statue stood for 22 years until Mrs Wadsworth left Maresfield and offered it to Mr Henry Bingham Towner, but when he tried to remove it, it crumbled to pieces, eaten by ants, wasps and bees, as if determined never to leave!
Edward Wadsworth died on Midsummer Day, 1949 and the BBC reported his death in their lunchtime news bulletin.