The Holt Estate

As is well documented, Sudley House was originally built in 1824 by Nicholas Robinson, who bought the land from the Tarleton family in 1822. The Tarleton family had owned the land as far back as 1775.  In 1882 the estate was sold to the Holt family, a family of wealthy shipping merchants. The Holt family carried out extensive improvements to Sudley House and the outbuildings and didn’t move in until 1884.

The Robinson and Tarleton families built their wealth on the transatlantic slave trade, and George Holt inherited a large amount of money from his father, George Holt Senior, earned from being a cotton broker, which in his father’s time was a slave industry. George Holt Junior founded a shipping line, Lamport & Holt, aged just 21. Holt also made a huge amount of money from coffee importation from Brazil, via New York and New Orleans in the years of 1870 to 1880. Slavery was only abolished in 1888 in Brazil, making coffee another slave trade product. It is true to say that the generation of Holts that lived at Sudley House were philanthropists, and that George Holt Senior was a self-made man whose father was a humble woollen dyer. However, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the origins of these fortunes on the back of enslaved African people. Holt’s considerable wealth meant that he was able to spend lavishly on Sudley House.

The Holt Art Collection

George Holt and his daughter Emma were committed Unitarians and philanthropists whose interests were mainly in art, public health and girls’ education. Holt started his art collection in the 1860s, and at first bought English Landscapes and Chinese porcelain. When the Holts moved into Sudley House, George became semi-retired and focused on building his art collection. At Sudley, he purchased and displayed pictures by JMW Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite artists Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Burne-Jones. In his later years, he focused more on portraits, paying large amounts of money to buy paintings by Romney and Gainsborough. When George Holt and his wife Elizabeth died, Sudley House and Estate passed to their only child, Emma, in 1920. Emma Holt lived at Sudley mostly until the outbreak of war, when she retired to her house at Coniston. She died in 1944, having never returned to live at Sudley.

The Holt Legacy

After Emma Holt’s death, the Sudley Estate was bequeathed to the Liverpool Corporation, ‘for the benefit of the people of Liverpool’. In 1947 the City Engineer reported on the Sudley Estate accepting the bequest by Miss Emma G Holt in January 1945, and recommended to Council that:

a) Sudley House together with the collection of paintings and pictures therein, be transferred to the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee.

b) that the grounds of Sudley containing about 29 acres be transferred to the Parks and Gardens committee for use as a public garden and park

c) that the interest on the sum of £20,000 provided by the bequest for the upkeep premises be made available to the Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee and the Parks and Gardens Committee for the upkeep of the house and grounds.

Beyond the Holts

The land at Sudley was widley used for livestock reared and kept at Rose Lane by the local Harper family, until the end of World War II. The Harpers were dairy farmers, whose cows supplied milk to much of the area until the 1950s. Find out more about the agricultural use of the land in the history detectives’ interview with Joan from Harper’s Dairy

During the war, Sudley House was requisitioned by the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) for use as a hostel. It’s highly likely that the Wrens used the walled gardens at this time to produce fruit and vegetables, but no evidence of this was found.