Out & About May 2017

The Charity of Mrs Mabel Luke is unique in Newbury and unusual among all almshouse charities in that it was founded well into the 20th century. It also has no age restriction for its residents: the founder expressly wished that families with children be given priority. The trustees of the Charity of Miss Martha Smith – Lloyd Henry Baxendale of Greenham Lodge, Rev Blagden of Greenham Vicarage, Rev Stenning of St Johns Vicarage and Aubrey Butler of Sandleford Priory – put up for sale 19 building plots in the triangle of land between Kings Road, Mill Lane and Denmark Road. Mabel Luke, in a conveyance of January 13, 1928, purchased five plots fronting onto Mill Lane. She built a terrace of four houses on three of the plots, but the two largest plots remained undeveloped. The land of approximately half an acre, cost £300 and was to be used to provide homes for “the deserving poor, of the working classes, resident for at least a year of the town of Newbury or parish of Greenham”. Later comments by Mabel Luke indicated that she wished further houses to be provided on the land from surpluses from income. In a deed of October, 24, 1928, Mabel Luke transferred the land and houses to her charity, The Charity of Mrs Mabel Luke. The initial trustees were Mabel Luke, Margaret

Vyvyan Luke and Lloyd Henry Baxendale. Mabel Luke’s own family seems to have come from Surrey and include several lawyers and members of the clergy. Her father Frederick Clifford was a lobby correspondent in Parliament and became editor of Macmillans Magazine, a political monthly journal, in the 1890s, mixing with politicians of all parties. He wrote the seminal work on Private Members’ Parliamentary Bills. Mabel was 33 when she married Stephen Paget Walter Vyvyan ‘PV’ Luke, who was more than 20 years her senior, in Kensington in 1901. They had one daughter Margaret, born in 1906. PV Luke had had a career with the Indian Telegraph Service. Although not a soldier, at the outbreak of the Afghanistan Campaign in 1878, he led the team that laid the first overland telegraph through the Khyber Pass into Kabul. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Afghan Medal and Clasp. 

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