The shore west of Hamiton was an obvious area for development once the town was established in 1793 and by the end of the 19th century there were many substantial houses along Pitts Bay Road and just inland from it.
Most, like Long House and Rosebank, Waterloo House, White House, Scarborough, Conyerston, Woodbourne, Richmond and Cardiff have disappeared, now replaced by hotels and office blocks. Others like Falconer House are overwhelmed by modern buildings.
Among the largest and most imposing of these houses were Long House and Rosebank which were replaced by the Bermudiana Hotel which in turn gave way to the ACE and XL insurance company buildings.
Long House was built before 1789 by Samuel Wood whose daughter Eleanor married Joseph Wood, the brother of Stowe and Richard of the 66-acre Woodlands estate. After Joseph’s death in 1815 his wealthy widow Eleanor married naval officer Sir William Burnaby and they too lived at Long House. Burnaby was a controversial figure. He was accused of harsh treatment of prisoners of war on a prison hulk under his charge in 1814 and he took the side of unpopular Governor Lumley, but he also did good work as Commissioner of Roads when Hamilton streets were being levelled and was a generous host to many naval officers. Burnaby Street is named after him. After his and his wife’s deaths, Long House was inherited by Susanna Kennedy, Eleanor Burnaby’s daughter from her first marriage to Joseph Wood.
She too was extremely rich, but was said to be ‘cockeyed’ (perhaps having a squint) although this did not prevent the Colonial Secretary Robert Kennedy from marrying her. They built Rosebank just to the east of Long House in about 1830, the year they married. Kennedy was much older than his wife and was extremely unpopular with Bermudians and responsible for much of the bad feeling between them and Governor Lumley. In 1820, during a period of extreme tension, he had been horsewhipped in St George’s by Mayor John Till. However under later governors he wielded less influence, though surviving as Colonial Secretary until 1859. He died in 1864 and his wife in 1873 and both properties were inherited by the Seymour family, English relations of his.
The combined Kennedy properties included a house called Richmond to the east, which gave its name to Richmond Road, and, the only survivor in 2015, Seon House now called Falconer House at 108 Pitts Bay Road on the harbour side. As with the others, Seon House came to Kennedy through his wife’s family, in this case her cousin Ann Masters, the widow of Cornelius Seon.
Both ladies’ wills provided for their servants, who were allowed to live on in the house until their deaths. The last servant, Mary Waffie, died in January 1916 aged 96. The property was bought from the Seymour family at auction by James Falconer Smith (1848-1931) in 1919 and when the deeds arrived a portrait of an Admiral Seymour arrived too.
Rosebank was bought by William Bluck in 1874 and Long House by William Shedden Barr about 1877. At that time the land associated with these houses extended north to Serpentine Road. In both cases the new owners were community minded. Barr donated large amounts of money for the rebuilding of Trinity Church in Hamilton and gave land to the Bermuda High School to enable them to move from their Hamilton location and build their own school. He taught swimming in the bay now bearing his name. Bluck hosted the annual agricultural exhibition in the Rosebank grounds for over 25 years and allowed the present BAA field to be used by the Hamilton Cricket Club.
When William Shedden Barr died in 1914, he left Long House to a nephew resident in Newfoundland and the house was divided into apartments and occupied by a variety of people including Archdeacon James Davidson and William Hall Darrell. William Bluck died intestate in 1904 leaving a widow Laura Ann née Cox. Rosebank passed to his children and by 1922 one son, Dr Walter Cardy Bluck, had bought out the shares of his siblings.
That year both properties were purchased by a consortium of Bermudians who demolished the houses in 1923 and constructed the Bermudiana Hotel. The hotel survived several owners and a serious fire in 1958 but was finally demolished in about 1993 when the land was sold to the owners of the current buildings on the site.
To the east of Falconer House stood Scarborough. It was built by Hezekiah Frith Conyers sometime after 1874 when he bought the lot upon which it stands from the Joell family who owned the Woodbourne property on the opposite side of Pitts Bay Road. Scarborough had a two-storey wooden gingerbread verandah which faced east to take advantage of the harbour view and to fit its long narrow waterfront lot. It remained in the Conyers family until 1957 when it was sold to Bermuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company.
Woodbourne was located to the west of Long House and its land ran north to Serpentine Road. It was built by the heirs of Solomon Joell Sr, whose 1763 will instructed that a two-storey house be built, with five rooms on each floor, cellars below and sufficient windows and doors to make it ‘a very handsome uniform house’.
By the mid 19 century, the Joell descendants were living in Smith’s Parish and Woodbourne, by then known as Glass House, was rented out. The 12 acres were subdivided into building lots in the 1920s and Woodbourne was demolished in 1988 to make way for an office building.
Waterloo, later called White House, was built sometime between 1797 and 1808 by John Hodsdon. It was later the home of Daniel Robert Tucker (1783-1861), a Hamilton merchant originally from Somerset who for over 20 years was the Commissioner of Pilots and Lighthouses. The property was later used as cattle stalls by Trott & Cox, the forerunner of Pearman Watlington, and White House continued as a residence and later as their offices until it was demolished in the mid 1990s.
To the west, on lots 3 and 4 of the School Lands property, stood another Waterloo and Waterloo Cottage. These lots were purchased by John Wainwright in 1816 and remained in his family until 1943 when they were sold by his heirs to the Hygeia Ice Company, a subsidiary of Pearman Watlington. In 1970 the property was sold to Horizons Limited and became the hotel Waterloo House which closed in 2008 and was demolished in 2010.
Bermuda Architectural Heritage Series: Pembroke published in Bermuda in 2017, available from the Bermuda National Trust www.bnt.bm
