Page 149 - Wish Stream Year of 2018

Gunnersbury Park, still exist and are now owned by the London Borough of Hounslow. They were purchased from the last private owners, the Rothchild family, who sold the estate well below market value in 1925 to Brentford and Chiswick Borough Council, provided that it was used for public recreation. The grounds are still a public park, and the house a museum and tea rooms. In 1810 Copland bought a 1000-acre estate at Langham, Norfolk and in 1812 moved a short distance from St Martin’s Lane to a large house in Great George Street, Westminster, where he entertained liberally, culminating in 1832 in a grand ball.
The Copland family travelled extensively through- out Europe in the early 1820s. He purchased a commission in the Queen’s Bays for one of his sons at a cost of £6000 (around £350,000 in today’s money*). Copland was also a generous benefactor to hospitals, being elected treasurer of the Charing Cross Hospital. He died in his London house, 29 Great George Street, on 12 July 1834, and is buried in the chancel vault of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A true story of Georgian social mobility!
Edward Bracebridge (Estate Superintendent)
Little is known of Edward Bracebridge, except that he was appointed Superintendent of the Sandhurst estate, with instructions to plant and lay out the grounds, a task that was completed over the autumn and winter of 1803 with consid- erable imagination and using many thousands of trees. It is unlikely that he was very experienced in landscape design, and therefore he was prob- ably overseen by senior staff from nearby Wind- sor Great Park. Very many of those trees planted by Bracebridge still survive. But the tree planting is certainly attributed to him, and a large vari- ety of trees were used, including oak, beech, spruce, Scotch fir, copper beech, lime, silver birch, and acacia.
Bracebridge is listed as ‘Storekeeper’ in the Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Military Enquiry relating to the Royal Military College in 1809. This was likely to be a ‘Quartermaster’ role, and he remained working for the College until his death on 6 September 1825 (age 86) and is buried in Plot 268 in the Sandhurst Burial Ground (photo 13).
Building at Sandhurst
Alexander Copland and his men moved onto the site in 1802. However, all was not well politically.
Photo 13
Whilst Copland was awaiting formal authority to start building, battles were waging within the Treasury and other parts of Government. With the country at war with France, money was in short supply. Income tax had been introduced in 1799 by William Pitt’s government as a ‘tem- porary measure’ to cover the cost of war! The Treasury tried to quash the whole idea of con- structing a new building, and sought cheaper solutions involving utilising unused public build- ings such as a hospital at Chatham, Nottingham Castle and the King’s Palace at Winchester. But fortunately, nothing came of these. Despite the support for the project from the Duke of York, another major impediment was the insistence by much of the powerful establishment that educa- tion for officers was unnecessary, or even dan- gerous, because it implied that the existing sys- tem of nepotism and preferment was unreliable.
But despite these setbacks, such was the need for officers there was a flood of applications for the Junior Department, still at Marlow, necessi- tating even more temporary accommodation to be erected there. Eventually, in early 1808, the Treasury finally approved the building of a Col- lege Headquarters and the Junior Department of 400 cadets, somewhat smaller than had been originally envisaged by James Wyatt. The Sen- ior Department was to remain at High Wycombe
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