Birthplace of Elizabeth Goudge
Tower House, Wells, UK
“No child can have lived in lovelier houses than my first two homes, or in a more enchanted city than Wells at the beginning of the century…”
🍂 Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow
A tale of two houses…
Like a princess born in a palace, Elizabeth Goudge was born into the Church of England and had the wonderful fortune to live her childhood in one of the most magical little cathedral towns in England. Wells may be known as the “smallest city in England,” but it certainly contains more than its fair share of preserved ecclesiastical buildings than your average UK city.1
We will take a look this week and next at the two homes in the heart of Wells, UK that held Goudge’s childhood—Tower House & The Rib. They are both remarkable places in their own right, and we will revel a bit of their history and see their close proximity to the great Wells Cathedral and the Vicar’s Close.
Birthplace: Tower House
According to Christine Rawlins:
“Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge was born on 24th April 1900 at Tower House, St. Andrew Street, in Wells. It is England's smallest city: set in the West Country, in the green and rural county of Somerset. With still nine months left of Queen Victoria's reign, she was born into a world of petticoats and bonnets, servants and horse-drawn traffic; but her birth came too at the cusp of a new century, when the massive upheaval of two great wars was soon to change the world…”2
“The Torminster houses stood in walled gardens, so that when you went to tea next door you seemed to be going on a journey into a foreign country.
In Torminster there was no looking over a low fence to see what the butcher was taking next door for dinner, and no watching the road outside through railings to see who attended next door's tea-party to which you had not been invited. No. High walls enclosed you as in a moated fortress and you could know nothing at all of the goings-on of next door except by a system of espionage carried on through the agency of whichever of the tradesmen happened at the moment to be walking out with cook…”
“…From this followed the feeling that next door was a long way off. You went out through the door in your wall and banged it shut behind you. You were now separated from your own citadel. Your hollyhocks and your roses were hidden from you and if you could see anything of your house it was only the top of a crinkled roof; the eyes of the house, the windows, could no longer meet yours and you felt as though the house had turned its back on you.
Abandoned, you turned to your right, advanced a few paces and found yourself opposite another closed door in a high wall… Next door… You could see nothing of it and for all you knew anything might have happened beyond that wall since you were there last. The house might have been painted magenta, or peacocks might have been introduced in the kitchen-garden and mock-turtles in the front garden, they might have a new lawnmower or a bird-bath, or simply anything. You laid your hand upon the door handle with an expectant heart, like a sail who has sailed from across the seas and lets down his anchor in a foreign harbour.”
🍂 Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
Tower House’s Location in Wells
“The sixteenth-century stone tower at Tower House had "little rooms like monastic cells leading from the spiral stone staircase" and its garden was "enclosed within high stone walls. Immediately behind these walls can be seen the roofs and tall chimneys of the beautiful Vicars' Close, dating from 1348 and believed to be the oldest surviving complete medieval street anywhere in Europe.”3
Finding Tower House
In order to find Tower house, you must first pass around the northern side of the Cathedral and the Cathedral Green:
Just through the portico, on the left, is the stone arch entrance to the Vicar’s Close:
“As the daughter of a clergyman, the first half of her life was lived in the shadow of some of England's most glorious cathedrals. The Reverend Henry Leighton Goudge was still in the early days of his eminent teaching career at the time of her birth. He was Vice-Principal of Wells Theological College and his official residence, Tower House, was almost directly across the road from the ancient Cathedral Church of St. Andrew, consecrated in the year 1239 by Bishop Jocelin de Welles.”4
Grade II listed
Tower House is a grade II listed building in the UK, meaning it is a structure of special interest that warrant preservation efforts. It is a wonderful old house, and likely requires quite a lot of upkeep from its owners.
But Goudge did not live at Tower House long as a child:
“Although Elizabeth was born in Tower House, it was her home only until she was two years old. Then Father was promoted to Principal of the College and the little family of three—her mother Ida, the Reverend Goudge and his little Beth, as he called her—moved across the road to the Principal's residence…
When she came to write her novels about Wells, however, it was Tower House that she used as their setting; all except for the bedrooms at the Principal's House, which she remembered ‘were decorated with carved cherubs of stone or wood.’ "5
“When I wrote A City of Bells I placed my family in Tower House but fetched the cherub population from across the road to be with them…”
🍂 Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow
From inside the walled garden…
One Goudge reader tells this story about her visit to Goudge’s birthplace at Tower House:
“As we drew closer to the wall we had tried so hard to see over, she asked us to turn around and look. It was a view that only those who lived there would be able to see. The towers of the cathedral rising over the walls and greeting the tower of her home across the city streets. A ripple of roofs, a mountain side of carved stone and pinnacles, trees from other gardens. The view that Hugh Anthony and Henrietta would have seen from their bedroom window, the view that had shaped Elizabeth’s early world.”6
What do you find most magical about Goudge’s birthplace?
Related posts:
Beyond the Snow, Christine Rawlins
Beyond the Snow, Christine Rawlins
Beyond the Snow, Christine Rawlins
Beyond the Snow, Christine Rawlins
I spent my early years in the Cathedral city of Truro, with a view of the cathedral and the pleasure of listening to the ringing of it's bells. We lived on a dead end road with bramble bushes separating us from a convent. It is so Goudgian, and when I began reading Elizabeth in my childhood I was able to relate so completely with her stories. So when I see her house, and the view she had, I feel I know a little of what she experienced. It has all been very formational for me, and I read her books over and over, learning something new every time. Gwedhen Nicholas.
I think that view from the Tower House garden, with the cathedral rising up in the back ground is the most magical to me and I expect it filled her memory and imagination her whole life through, perhaps even in ways that she wasn't entirely award of. This posting of yours, Julie, is EXACTLY what I was longing for and incredibly helpful for visualizing the connections between the places in the book. I am a map lover and you have provided it all. Thank you so much.