House History Research

This house history was purchased as a gift for someone who had recently bought a beautiful historic home in the village of Tunstall, Sunderland. Commissioning a house history through Oak & Willow is a perfect way to mark the moment with something that lasts much longer than a bottle of champagne.

The stories hiding in the records for this one were fascinating. A house that had carried three different names. A retirement home built as a statement of social status. A pub landlord whose family name is still above the door of the local pub today. A woman who helped hold her village together during the Second World War. And a connection to a Russian-named female playwright, studying at a London university.

Here are the highlights.

The House Has Had Three Different Names

The property now known as Whitesmocks Farmhouse was not always called that. It was built in 1877 as Red House — a name that reflected its hallmark Victorian red brick construction and, perhaps, the social ambitions of the man who built it. By 1919 it had been renamed Seaham Villa by its new owner, a pub landlord with a long association with the Lord Seaham Arms in New Silksworth. At some point after the 1950s, it acquired its present name.

Three names across one building’s lifetime is not unusual — but finding the evidence for each of them, and understanding why they changed, is one of the things that makes house history research so interesting.

It Was Built by a Gentleman Farmer for Retirement

The house was originally built by George Dawson, a farmer who had spent his working life at Middle Farm on Tunstall village green. By 1871 he was farming 70 acres, and by the time he retired in the late 1870s, later records were describing him as a “gentleman” — a designation that reflected the prosperity he had accumulated through land and property.

Red House was built in the Victorian villa style: detached, double-fronted, with symmetrical bay windows, separate reception rooms, drawing and dining rooms, four bedrooms, and both front and back staircases, with gas and water throughout. In a village where the surrounding landscape was filling up with colliery workers’ terraces, it was a deliberate statement.

What the research also revealed was that George was an investor. Alongside Middle Farm and Red House, he owned three cottages on the village green and eleven freehold cottages on a road named Charles Street (now redeveloped), let to colliery workers connected to the Londonderry Collieries — despite never being a mining man himself. A farmer who watched an industry transform his village, and was smart enough to profit from it.

It Was Sold by Public Auction — More Than Once

In 1919, George Dawson’s estate was offered for sale in four separate lots. Red House sold on the day for £500. The sale advertisement in The North Star described it as “the most pleasantly situated villa residence” in Tunstall.

It went under the hammer again in 1954, when it was still known as Seaham Villa and advertised with its original layout still intact: lounge, dining room, breakfast room, kitchen, four bedrooms, and outbuildings including a wash-house and coal house. The ground rent had not changed in decades.

The Donkins — A Pub Family Whose Name is Still Very Present Today

The buyer at the 1919 auction was Dixon Donkin, born in the 1850s into a mining family at Shotton Colliery. He had worked his way into the licensed trade, eventually becoming landlord of the Lord Seaham Arms in New Silksworth. The business stayed in the Donkin family for generations — and is still officially known as Donkin’s today.

Purchasing Red House on the village green in 1919 was a significant step from his colliery origins. He renamed it Seaham Villa, almost certainly in recognition of the pub he had managed for so many years. He died in 1926. One of his sons, Mark Donkin, served as a Gunner in the First World War and died from injuries sustained during the conflict. He is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at St Matthew’s, New Silksworth.

Village Life & a Woman at the Heart of It

During the inter-war years, Seaham Villa was home to Thomas Lightle and his wife Sarah Minniss Lightle.

Thomas was a clerk at the local Co-operative Society, and Sarah was a prominent figure in Tunstall village life through the Women’s Institute, presiding at meetings and judging local events. In the late 1930s and throughout the Second World War, the WI was far more than a social club. It organised food preservation, coordinated clothing, and managed the reception of evacuees in communities across rural Britain — all during years marked by rationing, blackout, and the absence of many men. The women who led those efforts were holding their communities together.

An Unexpected Connection — a Playwright on the Village Green

One of the later occupants of Seaham Villa, Thomas Henderson, had a son — Harry — who studied for a degree at University College London. There he met his wife, Irene Motchaloff, also a student, and the author of a play entitled The Blue Banner.

A 1959 article in the Sunderland Daily Echo looked back on Tunstall as offering a glimpse of old England. Residents born in the village recalled drawing water from a well near the farm fields and cattle grazing on the village green. The closure of Silksworth Colliery in 1971 brought an end to more than a century of mining in the area. In the later twentieth century, the land once belonging to the three historic farmsteads was gradually developed for housing, as Tunstall was absorbed into the expanding Borough of Sunderland.

A Glimpse of the Village Itself

Whitesmocks Farmhouse survived it all and today it stands as a Victorian survivor on an ancient village green — its story spanning the agricultural, industrial, and modern life of the area.

Could Your Home — or Someone Else’s — Have a Story Like This?

A house history makes an unusual and lasting gift — particularly for someone who has just bought a home, is renovating, or has a long connection to a property. This commission was bought as a gift as the new owner began work on their home. The research gave them the story of what the house was before they arrived.

Most homes have more of a history than their owners realise. It’s just a question of what the records can tell us. Researching your home’s history can build a picture that goes well beyond names and dates.

If you’re curious about what research might uncover for your own home — or as a gift for someone else — Oak & Willow can help you find out! Click here to browse our house history services.