The fine home of Leamington’s most famous doctor

THIS is Beech Lawn, the fine home Dr Henry Jephson had built as he reached the height of his powers healing the great and good who came to Leamington to take the waters.

Before it was demolished in 1946, the 14-bedroomed mansion with its associated consulting rooms stood on the corner of Dale Street and Warwick Street with grounds stretching back to Grove Street.

It’s the same three acre site now occupied by the flat-roofed headquarters of Warwickshire fire and rescue service built in 1960.

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According to a book written by Eric Baxter, Henry and his wife Eliza, who had no surving children, moved to Beech Lawn in 1832 and employed seven resident domestic servants, including a butler, footman, cook/housekeeper and lady’s maid.

Dr Jephson’s reputation for curing diseases like dyspepsia, obesity, nervous and mental exhaustion, along with mild heart and artery conditions, spread nationally and regularly earned him what was considered a “fabulous” income of more than £20,000 a year.

It was rumoured he treated not only gout-ridden old colonels but the young Queen Victoria.

Certainly members of the aristocracy were always turning their carriages into his grand drive off Dale Street along with a clutch of celebrities like John Ruskin, England’s leading art critic of the time and Joseph Grimaldi, the famous clown.

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As well as prescribing pills, drinking and bathing in the spa mineral waters - so good for the bowels - the good doctor’s advice usually involved a rigid diet of meat, poultry, game, plain puddings, sherry, lightly-boiled eggs and strict abstinence from all stimulants.

Ruskin didn’t much care for Dr Jephson’s “cures,” although others certainly did, including Leamington’s poorer inhabitants who he is said to have often treated free of charge.

Quite early in his career the young doctor had personally engaged an engineer to report on the best methods of sewage removal from the town.

And he was still very much alive in 1846 when the former Newbold Gardens at the end of the Parade were re-named in his honour. But Dr Jephson was never to see his statue in its ornate temple, added two years later. Because Leamington’s healing waters could not prevent him from going blind.

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Even then he still had 30 years left to live. Though his days of attracting the wealthy to the town inevitably diminished.

He’d always been a generous benefactor to the church and went on to help found Leamington College for boys, fight to preserve the Pump Room, serve as a magistrate and become vice-president and governor of the town’s Warneford Hospital.

Following his death in 1878, Beech Lawn was divided up. Two acres of the grounds were sold for building land while the house itself, with the remaining acre, became a ladies’ college.

Before the fire station was built, some Courier readers remember how the site of the doctor’s great house was used as a car park for coaches bringing visitors to see the Leamington Lights, the popular illuminations staged, ironically enough, in Jephson Gardens until 1961.

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