Ryde Architecture
EAST UPTON HOUSE
Mystery Blaze 1953
On Saturday 3rd October 1953 a fire gutted two rooms in the west wing of East Upton House, Ryde, the unoccupied home of the Carter family. The 20-room house standing in large grounds, badly overgrown since the death of Miss Kathleen Carter five years previously (1948), when her surviving sisters, the Misses Dorothy, Gertrude and Cicely Carter, moved into the nearby lodge.
Rapidly decaying, the house had been broken into several times, as it was left full of furnishings and valuables. East Upton House originally belonged to the late Mr. Edward Carter, High Sheriff of Hampshire and a wealthy landowner. His daughters continued to live in the house after his death in 1931.
The Fire Brigade received the call shortly after 6am. When they arrived at East Upton they found the flames had caught a fierce hold. They managed to retrieve some valuables, including money, from the rooms before they and the contents were destroyed. The doors closing the two rooms from the rest of the house saved it from being completely gutted. Directed by Station Officer A. H. Collis, the firemen worked for six hours to quell the outbreak. Although unable to move a grand piano, they saved it from damage by draping it with wet canvas.
In the semi-gloom the firemen had to rip away some of the boarding over the windows, which for years, even while the sisters were in residence there, had let no gleam of light enter from the outside world. The atmosphere was redolent of decay. The once handsome mansion of a leading Island resident was a dank ruin, the furnishings rotting beneath formerly ornate plasterwork ceilings through which rain poured. Thieves had stripped the roof of lead.
In the hall, where hung the ensign of the Royal Victoria Yacht Club, of which Edward Carter was a member, stood a rocking horse amidst a heap of out-moded clothing, trinkets and furniture. From the ceilings and chandeliers cobwebs hung like curtains over the disorder. The dust of years lay deep in all the rooms and the once lush carpeting was soggy and covered by mould. Valuable antique suites in the rooms stood against the peeling embossed walls and the floors were covered by papers, books, ornaments and bedding strewn about by intruders.
East Upton House Ruins
Outside, the garden was an ever-encroaching jungle of trees, shrubbery and undergrowth, the croquet lawn and tennis courts beyond repair.
The property which was in trust for the Carter sisters, who had been seen little since their father’s death, would have involved too much expenditure to be habitable again. It would be of little use anyway, to the heir, a distant relation who was a monk.
20 January 1968 (almost 15 years later)
East Upton House – One fireman was slightly injured, and others dived for their lives as tons of blazing timber and masonry cascaded down in a mystery blaze early on Saturday. Twenty-four men manning two machines from the Ryde Fire Brigade and a third from Newport, fought the flames for two hours before the outbreak was under control. By then, all that was left of East Upton House, in early days one of the Island’s most prominent country homes, was a blackened ruin.
Sources: IW Times and RSHG Archive
Images: Roy Brinton Collection
Article: Ann Barrett