Rose Cottage was built in 1828 by Benjamin Howes, on land reclaimed from the Balsall Common waste. In 1838, it became part of the Bates estate, along with Laburnum House, Emscot, and the neighbouring Butler Cottage. Like Emscot, it spent much of the nineteenth century subdivided into three dwellings before being returned to a single home, along with The Cottage to the rear.

Origins

The land on which Rose Cottage stands was reclaimed from Balsall Common and allotted in 1802, via the Enclosure Act, to Henry Docker of Birmingham, a member of the large local Docker family. Five years later, Henry sold the plot, described as ‘formerly an encroachment from the waste,’ to his brother William Docker, who farmed along the lane at Emscot.¹ William farmed the land for twenty years until November 1827, when he sold it to a bricklayer from the nearby village of Knowle called Benjamin Howes.²

Benjamin Howes (or Howse) was a mason and bricklayer by trade, and it seems clear that he bought the land as a construction project. He took on the land in November 1827, and less than eighteen months later, in April 1829, he sold it to William Rotherham, a close friend and adviser to Susannah Hiatt, who had just purchased several plots to the north.³ The documents for this sale describe it as ‘land in Berkswell at Balsall Common’ of 1R 20P, and ‘also all that now erected messuage lately erected and built by the said Benjamin Howes upon the said piece or parcel of land’. These documents mean we can date Rose Cottage’s construction to between November 1827 and April 1829.

The Bates Estate

In March 1838, William Rotherham sold the cottage and land, together with adjacent Butler Cottage and several enclosures, to Mary Ann Bates, granddaughter and co-heir of his friend Susanna Hiatt.⁴ The tenant at the time of the sale was Thomas Glenn, who also farmed the enclosures; the Glenns were not a local family and as yet we know little about them.

The Tithe Apportionment shows that within a year the Glenn family had left and Mary Ann Bates had subdivided the house into ‘three cottages and gardens’ (no. 952), now occupied by James Kyte, John Woolley, and William Spencer. All three men were agricultural labourers, and the three families were still in residence when the census was taken on 6 June 1841.⁵ The cottage remained subdivided on the next three censuses, with residents still mostly farm labourers, although the Lines family of besom makers occupied two of the dwellings in 1851 and 1861.

Mary Ann Bates died in 1870 and in 1872 her husband Henry Kimball sold her estate to an auctioneer from Coventry called Dennis G Barnes, who also bought the other half of the Bates estate occupied by Mary Ann’s brother Henry. The sale documents describe the cottage as ‘a messuage sometime since erected and built by Benjamin Howes upon the said piece of land, now converted into three tenements’.⁶

Later Years

Rose Cottage remained as three tenements until the turn of the twentieth century. Ordnance Survey maps from the earliest detailed survey of 1880 onwards show the property as three blocks: the original Rose Cottage closest to the road, a smaller washhouse or toilet block in the middle, and a separate detached dwelling to the rear. The National Grid map of 1960 names the front cottage as Rose Cottage and the rear cottage as The Cottage.

The 1891 census tells us that two of these dwellings (occupied by the Linney and Willis families) had four rooms each, while the third (occupied by Alfred and Maria Armitt) had just two. By 1911, two of the dwellings had been combined, so that Joseph and Elizabeth Harris occupied 6 rooms, while Charles and Ellen Tillsley had three. This most likely reflects the layout today, with Rose Cottage and The Cottage arranged either side of the washhouse.

The cottages were put up for sale in 1940 as part of the Elson estate, along with Laburnum House and Emscot. Described as ‘two detached cottages, with an adjoining small plot of garden ground,’ they were sold for £630.⁷

Today

Today, Rose Cottage sits empty; although it is one of just two historic cottages (with Emscot) still standing on Meeting House Lane, it is scheduled for demolition in order to open up access for development in the fields at its back. Of course, the planning process moves notoriously slowly, so who knows – Rose Cottage may yet survive long enough to reach its two hundredth birthday in 2028.

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Notes

1. November 1807. Henry Docker of Birmingham, Gent., sells land of 1R 20P to William Docker of Berkswell, farmer. Warwickshire Record Office. Cited in CR2660/10. ↩︎
2. Indenture of Feoffment. 3 Nov. 1827. William Docker to Benjamin Howes and Francis Howes (Trustee). Warwickshire Record Office. Cited in CR2660/10. ↩︎
3. Lease. 6 Apr. 1829. Benjamin Howes of Berkswell, Bricklayer, and Trustee Francis Howes of Balsall, farmer, to Mr William Rotherham. Warwickshire Record Office. CR2660/10. The witness to the sale is William Bates of Laburnum House, son-in-law to Rotherham’s friend Susannah Hiatt. ↩︎
4. Conveyance. 16 Mar. 1838. William Rotherham to Miss Mary Ann Bates. Warwickshire Record Office. CR 2660/15. ↩︎
5. James was not at home, but his wife, enumerated as Mary Skeyte, was there with their four children. ↩︎
6. Conveyance. 18 Jan. 1872. HD and WF Kimbell to Dennis G Barnes. Warwickshire Record Office. CR 2660/16. ↩︎
7. Coventry Standard, 14 Sep. 1940: 6. ↩︎