History

With superb views to the south and east over St Aubin’s Bay, it was built shortly after 1851 by the newly-arrived minister for the Anglican church of St Aubin, the Reverend Samuel King. Born in Middlesex, Samuel King attended Queen’s College, Cambridge where he gained his MA; he was ordained into the Church of England in 1814 and became the Rector of Latimer, Buckinghamshire, from 1820. About this time Samuel married Elizabeth Scott, the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Scott an evangelical rector, who was a founder of the Church Missionary Society.

Elizabeth King’s nephew was Sir George Gilbert Scott, the well-known Victorian architect who designed churches, almshouses and many other buildings including the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station and, in 1862, the Albert Memorial. Although he did design rectories, it is not known whether he designed Cardington House (formally ‘lodge’).

Samuel King bought a small house, now called Cardington Cottage, in 1851 and built the Lodge in its gardens and he carried out both astronomical and metrological observations from the garden of his new house. The Reverend King was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a founder member of the British (later Royal) Metrological Society.

Samuel and Elizabeth did not have any children, but had adopted her niece, Sarah Anne, whose parents had both died when she was only six. Her father was the Rector of Bedford, and it is possible that they lived in Cardington, a small village just to the south of Bedford, and it seems likely that the house was so called because of this connection.

Sadly, the Reverend King was not to enjoy his new home for long as he died in Jersey on 13th December 1856.

Elizabeth King and Sarah Scott inherited the property on Samuel’s death and both lived there until their deaths. They helped raise money for a new school in the town of St Aubin by selling albums of pressed seaweed. After her aunt’s death Sarah took in children whose parents were abroad and may have run a school herself.

The house was sold in 1901 for the sum of £668 to a Walter Scott, who may have been a relative of Sarah. It was then owned by a Mrs Fanny Sheridan who was the widow of John Hendley Sheridan, a china manufacturer from Stoke on Trent.

She sold it in 1920 to Brigadier General Maurice Lilburn MacEwan (1869-1943), a cavalry officer of the 16th Lancers, who had been involved in the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland in 1914.

In 1932 an American couple from Baltimore, Mr and Mrs Gustav Farber, owned the house. Although they stayed in Jersey and died here during the 1950s they only lived in the house for five years, selling it in 1937 to a company for £8,106/5/0d.

During the German Occupation the house was requisitioned by the German forces and used by the Commandant for the Channel Islands Graf (Count) Rudolf von Schmettow as a weekend retreat; during the week he lived in Government House.

Lord Coutanche, the Bailiff during the Occupation, recalled meeting von Schmettow whilst walking along the avenue to Noirmont Manor. Speaking in broken French, von Schmettow assured the Bailiff that although they were close neighbours he would not disturb him in any way.

Von Schmettow had been posted to Jersey on September 26th 1940, then went to Guernsey in 1943 and returned to Germany just before the Liberation in March 1945.

In 1946 a Mrs Lilian Daubeney purchased the property for £10,000; her husband had been in England during the occupation, possibly in the Armed Forces. She sold it shortly afterwards in 1949 to Mrs Vera Hood, wife of Alfred Hood making a profit of just over £3,000. 

The Hoods stayed at Cardington Lodge for nearly twenty years and in that time they saw the value of the property rise to £80,000.

In 1968 the new owner was Ina Florence Marshman Bell, the wife of Henry Frederic Tiarks. Mrs Tiarks was an Australian who became an actress using the stage name of Joan Barry. She was the voice of the leading lady in the first British-made talkie and had a part in an Alfred Hitchcock film, Rich and Strange. Whilst she was starring in the West End she met the handsome and urbane Henry Tiarks, whose family business was merchant banking, in partnership with the Schroder family. It was to be a second marriage for Mr Tiarks and a very happy one. Their beautiful daughter, Henrietta, was an outstanding debutante who married the Marquess of Tavistock and is now the Dowager Duchess of Bedford. The Tiarks increased the size of Cardington Lodge and held many parties there; they left Jersey in 1975 to retire to Marbella in Spain where they both died.

Thomas Henry Markland and his wife Rita bought the newly enlarged house for £320,000 and lived there for fourteen years, selling the property to Albert Connell in 1989. When he died he left the house to his daughter, Jennifer Lesslie.

The property was sold to the Wilde family in 2006 and is administered by the Wilde Family Office in Jersey. Over the last two years the property has undergone a multi-million pound restoration and refurbishment program transforming it into what is now the finest luxury boutique hotel in Jersey.