Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Thomas Tertius Paget in Laughton and Humberstone


A couple of years ago I visited Laughton, a village a few miles to the west of Market Harborough:
A large house across the road turns out to have been a Wesleyan chapel for a couple of decades in the 19th century. And I am pleased that my guess that the initials "T.T.P." in the brickwork meant that it had once belonged to Thomas Tertius Paget, Liberal MP for South Leicestershire (1867-8, 1880-5) and Harborough (1885-6), turned out to be correct.
Sadly, it turns out that I did not photograph the old chapel - just the initials.

I found two more instances of T.T.P. on Saturday. The first was on a cottage at the entrance to Humberstone Park: the second was in a cottage in the middle of Humberstone, next to its dismal 1960s pub.


More striking were the initials I found on some cottages on the other side of the ring road - they would once have been in fields beyond the edge of the village.

The Paget family had sold the Hall by 1926, but maybe they had retained ownership of the farms on the estate and G.W.P. was a descendant of T.T.P.

Later. If the letters are C.W.P. rather than G.W.P., then I suspect they stand for Sir Cecil Walter Paget. He is not a direct descendant of Thomas Tertius, but he is from the same Paget family.

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