History of 40 Queen Anne Street
QUEEN ANNE STREET, first rated in 1723, recalls Queen Anne, the patron of Robert Harley, whose son, Edward Harley, the ground landlord of this part of Marylebone, named this street in her honour. The first occupant of No. 40 was a widow-lady named Tarrent, here until 1745. The house then passed to a Miss Pringle who sold it before 1760 to Henry Herbert, 10th Earl of Pembroke and 7th Earl of Montgomery [1734-1794], who seems to have used it as a London town-house only during the Season. Lord Pembroke’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography states that he commanded a cavalry brigade in Germany, 1760-61, published Method of Breaking Horses in 1762, was appointed a Lord of the Bedchamber to George III in 1769, and was advanced to the rank of General in 1782. What the entry does not tell us is that in 1762 Lord Pembroke donned a black wig, disguised himself as a sailor and – threatening to murder the servants if they betrayed him to his wife - eloped with a Miss Kitty Hunter. The couple fled in a packet-boat to France, but were forcibly repatriated by a privateer who was under an obligation to Miss Hunter’s father. According to the memoirist, Horace Walpole, ‘as the father desired no such recovery’, the couple were soon ‘gone again on their adventures’ – but not before the Earl had vainly attempted to persuade his wife to accompany them. In the course of time, Kitty bore the Earl a son, christened Augustus Retnuh Reebkomp [the last two names being his mother’s name reversed and an anagram of ‘Pembroke’] but the relationship did not last.
Records for 1792 show No. 40 Queen Anne Street in the occupation of a Mr Colborn. By 1796 it was held by a Miss Clay. Before the turn of the century it passed to a Mrs Leece [spelled ‘Lace’ in some records] who lived here to her death about 1846. Her executors sold the dwelling to the surgeon, Benjamin Denman, who had started life as a surgeon in the Royal Navy. A naval surgeon worked under conditions which – sooner or later – called upon him to do the work of twelve. In this smoking, dust-filled shambles, with tourniquets, hot irons and bubbling pitch, Benjamin Denman would have sought to salvage such portions of the King’s servants as seemed worth saving, while the deck tilted, plunged and shuddered beneath his feet. Many of his patients died [as they would have died had he not sawn them] but in every seaport, and on many a quarter-deck, the presence of sailors with hooks for hands and pegs for legs, stood testimony to his rough skill. From Benjamin Denman No. 40 was acquired by the physician, Walter Hayle Walshe [1812-1892], who was a noted professor at University College, London, between 1841 and 1862. Walshe, who published and translated a number of important medical treatises, left here circa 1864. No. 40 was then either rebuilt or very substantially refurbished because in 1872 it appears in the post office directories as the George Tavern, in the proprietorship of John Henry Murray. It continued as a public house until the early 1920s when it was again substantially refurbished and returned to medical occupation with the surgeon, Fielden Briggs. Records for 1927 show the chief occupant as the laryngologist, D.F.A. Neilson, who in that year was sharing with Edward Phillimore Brockman [1899-1977] Consulting Orthopaedic Surgeon to Westminster Hospital. Neilson continued at No. 40 until shortly after the second World War. The property then became the offices of the Treasurer’s Department of the South-Western Metropolitan Region of the Hospital Board. It continued so until the 1960s when it was acquired by the chartered accountants and registered auditors, Lewis Golden & Co., who occupy it yet.