The almshouses at Revesby were commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks I shortly before he died after a fall at his house in 1727. Although often referred to as built in 1728, records indicate they were ‘finished’ in March 1729. Homes were provided for ten persons from Revesby or Mareham, intended for farmers who had fallen on hard times. Most likely many of these would have been former tenant farmers who had become elderly.

The charity was endowed with £50 a year. In the 1860s this was still allowing the residents to receive 8s a month although they were also expected to help the Revesby Estate with fourteen days of work at harvest time. Revesby seems to have avoided any of the terrible scandals that afflicted other Lincolnshire charities such as Spital and Mere.

Most often we hear about the almshouses due to someone dying. In 1842 Mary Herring (87) ‘died by visitation of God’; interesting too that she was sharing the accommodation with a blind man.

In 1862 the almshouses were in the news because of a former resident, Jemima Garner. Her son had decided that the financial arrangements for her were insufficient and so took her off to live with him at Mareham in 1861 – where she died, only a few months after the death of his first wife. Her son John and his second wife were then arrested for poisoning his first wife, which of course made people suspicious about what had happened to his mother. The second wife seems to have been very unpopular locally, both bodies were exhumed in 1862, and traces of arsenic were found. Garner ran a shop which sold it.

There was not enough evidence to prove wilful murder and so manslaughter was the verdict in both cases. Once transported to Australia, Garner campaigned constantly to try to prove his innocence and clearly came to believe that his second wife was the guilty party and that he might have been next himself. In 1889 he was offered a free pardon but refused it as he wanted compensation, and so he stayed in Australia until his death.

A more ‘ordinary life’ of a resident might be Robert Palmer, who reached 90 in 1933. Born at Kirkby to a shoemaker, he had been the oldest of six children and was soon out at work. His first job was picking twitch and stones from fields for fourpence a day. He spent five years away in London, where he married, but gave his wife a choice of London or Lincolnshire – and she chose Lincolnshire. Palmer worked for the estate for forty years and moved into the almshouses at age 81. His one complaint was that he was too old to get to the Methodist chapel and so had to go to the nearby Anglican church.

There are lots of other stories about the almshouses and the people who lived there but one more favourite….In 1894 the Liberals tried to get the residents there struck off the electoral role, but the Conservatives objected on the basis that the residents did not live entirely by charity – and won. Of course, Edward Stanhope, who died in 1893, was a Conservative politician….

Adrian Gray, Historian