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The grand Belsize Court, demolished in 1937 |
Chancing upon a historical gem
TRACKING down family histories has become a popular pastime, with a boom in resources available on the internet and popular TV shows such as the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?
But for amateur historian and retired doctor Mary Shenai, a member of the Belsize Conservation Area Advisory Committee, it was not curiosity about her own background that kick- started a detective hunt around events that happened over 100 years ago. Instead it was a family photo album found in a junk shop by a tree surgeon that led her to scour archives and reveal the story of an Edwardian family in Belsize Park.
When huge cracks appeared in the walls of Mary’s home in Belsize Lane a plane tree was found responsible, so she called a firm of tree surgeons. When she spoke to a Mr Taylor of aboriculturalists Taylor and Rhodes, he told her that not only would he come and look at the tree, but also that he had made an interesting find in a junk shop that related to Mary’s home.
“‘I’ve got an old photo album of your house,’ he told me,” recalls Mary.
However, when she looked at the album, it had pictures of a far larger and grander home, Belsize Court, round the corner from her address – a house that was demolished in 1937.
It set the amateur sleuth off to find out more about the family and home in the pictures, and the result is a fascinating insight on the Edwardian world of Belsize Park.
Mary’s research revealed the house was built in 1811 by George Todd, a Baltic merchant, importing wood. It was sizeable: Todd’s house included 16 acres in the area that now makes up the corner of Wedderburn Road, Lyndhurst Gardens and Belsize Lane.
From careful study of the people in the pictures, Mary deduced the people staring at her from the past were an Edwardian family: so she checked the census for 1901 and discovered the Bergheim family were living there.
The Bergheims were rich, their wealth founded on oil investments, and their property, employing 12 servants, reflected their wealth.
She found the descendants of the Bergheims and met them last year and revealed the forgotten histories of their ancestors.
The pictures are haunting, the people in them long dead – but this brilliantly researched biography brings the Bergheims back to life and uncovers the social history of a grand old house in NW3.
DAN CARRIER
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