Lady Dacre and Emanuel School

Work in progress, not yet for publication. These are notes towards a fuller piece on how a Tudor widow’s will, a Norman coat of arms, a Wandsworth school and a post-war council estate all fit together. Corrections and ideas very welcome.

The founders

Anne Sackville was the daughter of Sir Richard Sackville, Treasurer of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I, and sister of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later Earl of Dorset. Through her grandmother, a Boleyn, she was a cousin of the Queen.

She married Gregory Fiennes, 10th Baron Dacre, whose father had been executed in 1541. The title was restored to Gregory and his sister in 1558. The couple had no surviving children. Gregory died at Chelsea on 25 September 1594.

Three months later, on 20 December 1594, Anne made her will. In it she directed her executors to build “a meet and convenient house to be called Emanuel Hospital in Westminster for the relief of twenty aged people and for the bringing up of twenty children in virtue and good and laudable arts”. The children were to be ten boys and ten girls. She died on 14 May 1595, and the hospital received its charter in 1601.

Lord and Lady Dacre are buried in Chelsea Old Church, beneath a fine monument with their effigies and the Dacre arms. (See the September 2026 Chronicles.)

Emanuel School, including “Lady Dacre and Emanuel School” from The Portcullis (1954).
Wikipedia: Anne Sackville, Baroness Dacre; Gregory Fiennes, 10th Baron Dacre.
National Portrait Gallery: Hans Eworth, Mary Neville, Lady Dacre, and her son Gregory Fiennes, 1559. (I have not found a portrait of Anne.)

The coat of arms

Gregory Fiennes’s arms gather up, in twelve quarters, the families whose heiresses had married into his line over four centuries. Above the shield is a baron’s coronet. The crest is a wolfhound, collared and chained. The supporters are a silver wolf and a red bull. Two mottoes are found with these arms: Fortem posce animum, “Ask for a brave spirit” (from Juvenal), the Fiennes motto; and Fort en loialté, “Strong in loyalty”, the Dacre motto, carved over the gateway of Naworth Castle. Emanuel’s own motto, Pour bien désirer, is that of the Brand family, who inherited the Dacre barony in the nineteenth century. [How and when did the school adopt it?] On either side are the Dacre badges: a knot of gold cord and a ragged staff.

The arms of Gregory Fiennes, 10th Baron Dacre: a shield of twelve quarters under a baron's coronet, with a wolfhound crest, a silver wolf and a red bull as supporters — The arms of Gregory Fiennes, Lord Dacre (d. 1594), shown here with Emanuel School’s motto, *Pour bien désirer*. (Click on image to enlarge.)

1	Fiennes	Azure, three lions rampant Or.
2	Dacre	Gules, three escallops argent.
3	Multon	Three bars gules, a label azure.
4	Vaux	Checky Or and gules.
5	Morville	Azure, semy-de-lys and fretty Or.
6	FitzHugh	Azure, three chevronels interlaced in base, a chief Or.
7	Staveley	Barry of eight argent and gules, a fleur-de-lis sable.
8	Furneaux	Azure, a bend between six cross crosslets Or.
9	Grey	Barry of six argent and azure, on a bend gules three martlets Or.
10	Marmion	Vair, a fess gules.
11	St Quentin	Or, three chevronels gules, a chief vair.
12	Gernigan	Barry of ten Or and azure, an eagle displayed gules.

Quarters 1–4 run across the top row, 5–8 across the middle and 9–12 across the bottom. Highlighted: the four families whose names were given to the Fitzhugh Estate. [Source: European Heraldry: House of Dacre.]

From a coat of arms to a council estate

In 1953–55 the London County Council built five eleven-storey point blocks off Trinity Road, beside the old Royal Victoria Patriotic building and a stone’s throw from Emanuel. It was meant to be the “Victoria Estate”. But in December 1954, the Norwood News reported, the LCC “changed their mind”, and it became the Fitzhugh Estate.

Its blocks are Morville, St Quentin and Gernigan Houses, all named from quarters of the Dacre arms like the estate itself. The other two, Skipsea and Woodhall Houses, take their names from Yorkshire manors that descended from the St Quentins to the FitzHughs and then to the Fienneses. Anne’s executor sold the Woodhall estate after her death.

So modernist tower blocks for London working families carry the names of Norman and Plantagenet landowners who had never set foot in Wandsworth. And they do so only because those names had been gathered into a Tudor coat of arms, and that coat of arms had come to Wandsworth Common with Emanuel School in 1883.

Why “Fitzhugh”, “Morville”, “Gernigan”, “St Quentin”, “Skipsea” and “Woodhall”? (my first attempt at the question, 2021).
The Fitzhugh Estate.

How it all interlocks: threads to follow

The Fiennes in Clapham and Tooting. In the twelfth century Ingelram de Fiennes married Sibyl de Tingrie, heiress to part of Clapham manor. Her father had given land in Balham to the Abbey of Bec, and she confirmed the grant as a widow. H.P. Maskell’s Recollections of Emanuel School (1904) makes this the origin of the name Tooting Bec. [The Victoria County History tells it differently; to check.]
Lady Dacre’s will, 1594, and Emanuel Hospital at Tothill Fields, Westminster, for twenty old people and twenty children.
1873–1883. The charity is reorganised, the girls go to the Grey Coat Hospital, and the boys’ school moves to Wandsworth Common. It takes over the building of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for Boys. (See B.V. Slater’s history of the Patriotic School.)
The school’s own arms are drawn from the Dacre arms. Compare the cover of Scott-Giles and Slater’s History of Emanuel School. [Describe and illustrate.]
C.W. Scott-Giles (at Emanuel 1902–11) was a herald, Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary, and wrote The Romance of Heraldry (1929). His history of the school (1935) is full of the Fiennes and Dacre genealogy. Maskell’s Recollections, with its heraldic notes, was reissued in 1947.
The Wates brothers, sons of the founder of the Streatham builders, were at Emanuel. One of them, Ronald Wates, sat on the LCC from 1949 to 1952, while the estate was being planned. [Did Wates build the Fitzhugh Estate, and did one of them propose the names?]
December 1954. The LCC renames the Victoria Estate. Who proposed the names, and why these four quarters rather than the better-known Dacre, Fiennes or Sackville? [LCC minutes and the Housing Committee papers at the London Metropolitan Archives.]
A “New Elizabethan Age”? The estate was built as Elizabeth II came to the throne. Names from the court of Elizabeth I may have seemed just right.

Sources

European Heraldry: House of Dacre.
C.W. Scott-Giles and B.V. Slater, The History of Emanuel School, 1594–1964 (1935; revised 1948, 1966, 1977).
H.P. Maskell, Recollections of Emanuel School (1904; reissued with a supplement 1947).
B. Cherry and N. Pevsner, London 2: South, p. 705 (the Fitzhugh Estate).
Norwood News, 17 December 1954.
Victoria County History: Surrey, vol. 4: Clapham; East Riding, vol. 7 (the St Quentin, FitzHugh and Fiennes estate).
Emanuel School: our history.

Do you know who chose the Fitzhugh names, or where the LCC’s papers on them are? Please let me know.