Forge Cottage
This splendid three-bay timber-framed building opposite the Village Stores in the High Street still contains much of the forge equipment that kept the old smithy in use until the 1950s. Three generations of the Brown family were the blacksmiths here, competing at one time with at least three other forges in this part of the village alone.
Reuben Brown had been at a smithy at Meadow Cottage, north of Water House, when he started renting Forge Cottage in 1866. It had just been bought by the Mildmay family, Shoreham’s dominant landowners. When Reuben died in 1877, his widow Phoebe ran the business for a short time, employing a blacksmith and others until she too died, in 1881. Their eldest son Solomon then took over the blacksmithing business.
Tragedy befell the Browns in the summer of 1920 when Solomon was struck and killed by a “motor van” in the village. He was 71 and described as an “old and respected inhabitant” by the parish magazine. His brother Isaac was left in charge of the forge. Villagers remembered Isaac and his wife Emma as keen lovers of music – especially songs from the Sunday School Union tune book, often to a fiddle accompaniment. Isaac would invite passers-by to play chess on a board at the front, “laid out on the blacksmith’s anvil”, according to one memoir. The Vicar was a regular competitor. Local children could always get Isaac to mend their metal hoops for free if he wasn’t busy.
Isaac’s daughter Dorothy inherited her father’s fondness for music: she played the organ in the Baptist Chapel in Crown Road, and taught music and singing at a school in Sevenoaks set up by the Wilmot family after they sold the paper mill. After Isaac’s death in 1935, Dorothy carried on living in the cottage and rented the workshop to a Nathaniel “Nat” Boakes, who kept the smithy working for another 20 years or so. Dorothy lived there until shortly before her death in 1988, at the age of 93.
Forge Cottage has been much altered over the years, but it’s believed to date from 1500 or so. Part of the roof might be original, the crude roof timbers still have the original matching carpenters marks (rare with superior houses where roofs had normally been replaced) and there were significant additions in the 17th and 19th centuries.
Text by James Saynor