life
INTERVIEW
Photo: Patrick with daughter Clemmie on a shoot.
Charles Seely had effectively cornered the market
in good shooting land.
Now one of the richest men in Britain, he went
into Parliament, where he caused something
of a stir. He welcomed the Italian revolutionary
Giuseppe Garibaldi to his home in Lincolnshire and
to Brook House. There were two consequences.
Charles’s wife Anne fell in love with Garibaldi:
letters, which came to public attention when they
went on sale in 2008, spanned 10 years. And
Queen Victoria, whose path frequently crossed
that of Charles as a senior Island figure, refused to
speak to Charles.
“Then at the time of Victoria’s Jubilee 1897,
the responsibility of giving the Queen a present
on behalf of the Isle of Wight fell to Charles,”
explains Patrick Seely. “She is supposed to have
said to him: ‘It’s been a long time, Mr Seely.’ He
replied: ‘As we grow older we get wiser, Ma’am.”
Patrick is also amused by another aspect of
Charles’s business sense. Slurry, the waste from his
coal mines, was made into pig iron, but long after
the days of wooden ships the Royal Navy was still
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tied into a contract to accept the weighty ‘pigs’ for
ballast. They just lined Portsmouth naval yard.
It was all grist to the coffers of this former
milling family, and the landscape below us reflects
this story of growing wealth. Brook Hill House,
known locally as JB Priestley’s home after the war,
was built when doctors advised Charles’s son, Sir
Charles Seely, that living a little higher up would
benefit his health. It is designed by Ashton Webb,
architects of Dartford Naval College, and is now
divided into apartments.
Elsewhere can be found other physical legacies of
the family’s wealth translated into largesse for the
good of the community. “There is a tremendous
sense of public service running through the
family’s history,” says Patrick. Sir Charles, an
MP until 1895 and a keen sportsman, is also
remembered for promoting the free library service
– the libraries in Newport and Cowes both bore
the Seely name, and a reading room was created
in Brook. Sir Charles’s son Jack gave the land on
which stands the Royal Solent Yacht Club to his
fellow yachtsmen, and secured the “royal” epithet
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