The long-lost mini mansion where one of Victorian England’s greatest ever rags-to-riches stories played out

To take a walk around the mid-century houses bounded by Silverdale Road, Andrews Road and Crawford Close in Earley, Reading, is to walk with ghosts.

On the face of it, they are rows of very normal residential homes, but underneath are the remains of a vast mansion where one of Victorian England’s greatest ever rags-to-riches stories played out.

Solomon Joel was born in 1866, in Whitechapel's then poverty-stricken slums. His parents, Joe and Kitty, ran the long-since-demolished King of Prussia pub from a yard on Middlesex Street — colloquially known as Petticoat Lane.

The young Solly, his older brother, Woolf, and younger brother, Issac were intelligent and diligent — qualities that inspired Kitty’s brother, Barney Barnato, to pluck them from poverty and have them join him at his new company, mining for diamonds and gold in South Africa. Joel was just 15 years old when he left his parents.

Seventeen years later, Joel found himself unexpectedly in charge of the family firm when Barnato went overboard on a ship travelling from Southampton to South Africa. A year later, in 1888, Woolf was murdered in a blackmailing gone very wrong.

These tragic circumstances saw 32-year-old Joel, along with his brother, Issac, inherit a not-so-small fortune of £1,228,659, 18 shillings and five pence (about £143 million today).

By now Joel was at the helm of Barnato Brothers, a director at De Beers and chairman of the Johannesberg Consolidated Investment Company. He had a swift dalliance with politics which didn’t end particularly well (he was briefly incarcerated) before deciding, in 1903, to use some of his money to put down roots in England, and dedicate more time to his real passion — racing.

Joel purchased Maiden Erlegh, a small, 14th-century mansion, largely rebuilt in 1878, and situated on the fringes of Reading.

He wasted no time changing the property, vastly extending it to include more than 70 bedrooms, tennis courts (grass and hard), a cricket field, a six-and-a-half-acre lake and a croquet lawn. His pièce de résistance, however, was a lavish, barrel-vaulted, Pompeiian-style Italian marble swimming bath, complete with marble columns, risqué frescoes and a family crest mosaic at the bottom of the pool.

Outside, the ornamental gardens were dotted with neo-Classical temples. It was said that Joel's main reason for such lavishness was so he could create employment in an area where unemployment was rife. He also donated 20 acres of land to the National Playing Fields Association.

For himself, Joel founded the Maiden Erlegh Stud Farm, whose champion foals would go on to win, among others, The Derby and The St Leger Stakes.

When he died in 1931, aged 65, he was worth just £1 million, 40% of which was due in death taxes. Maiden Erlegh was quickly put up for sale.

The lavish interiors were sold at auction on December 7, 1931, by Knight, Frank & Rutley. There were 1,762 lots, including pieces of Chippendale furniture and original artworks by Canaletto, Constable and Gainsborough, fire extinguishers and plants from the garden.

The 470-acre estate, house and stud farms were advertised as 'Ripe for Immediate Development'.

The Reading Standard was worried, writing in early 1932 that there would be: '...very real risk of undesirable developments... It would be deplorable of the next few years should see the estate, or any considerable portion of it, transformed at the hands of speculative builders, into streets or avenues of houses.'

The house was sold to Captain T. S. Waterlow Fox in February for £25,000 (about £1.5 million) who used it a boys school until 1942. It was subsequently used as a training college by the Church Army, a conference centre by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and, finally, a sanctuary by Hungarian refugees of the 1956 Soviet invasion.

In March 1960, now in the hands of new speculators, the bulldozers reared their ugly arms. The Reading Standard’s fears were about to become reality.

Parts of Maiden Erlegh still exist. The lake is still there, as is Joel's beloved stud farm, though there are reports that the land is haunted by a ghostly horse. The swimming baths — photographs of which survive in Reading Museum's archive — was shipped to the Caribbean by artist Elma Clarke.

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