There has been a settlement on the site of Amersham town since Romano-British times and probably earlier. The ready water supply from the river Misbourne - a sorry victim of overextraction from Chiltern chalk in recent years - , the surrounding beechwoods and arable land, and its position at the crossroads of the natural route through the Wendover gap in the Chilterns and an ancient route South to the Thames valley, make it a natural place of settlement. The parish of Amersham today includes the outlying villages of Coleshill (for a long time an island of Hertfordshire in Bucks) and Amersham Common, as well as the old and new towns of Amersham.
At the time of Domesday in 1086 Amersham is recorded as having a farming area of 10 hides and 3 mills, owned by a variety of Norman nobles. During the mediaeval period the main manors at Amersham were owned by the Earls of Essex, then the Earls of Northampton, and finally the Stafford Dukes of Buckingham. When they were executed for treason, the manors fell to the hands of the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford, who were already considerable landowners at nearby Chenies. In the early 17th century they sold them to the Drake family of Shardeloes, in whose hands they remain to this day, even if that family now owns little land around the town.
The Drake family came to Amersham when Francis Drake married Joan Tothill, heiress to Shardeloes, in 1603. Two myths concerning these families need to be exploded. Francis was not related to his more famous naval namesake, but he was his godson. Joan was not the eldest of 33 children, rather she was the eldest of 3 daughters of a wealthy lawyer, William Tothill, whose father Richard had made his fortune as a printer and publisher in London. Through successfully sitting on the political fence during the Civil War, and a series of judicious marriages, the Drake family built up a considerable holding of land and wealth in the Amersham area. In 1760 they inherited the estates of Sir John Tyrwhitt, changing their name to Tyrwhitt-Drake. The family intermarried with other gentry families from Bucks and Herts (Denham, Garrard, Marshall, Raworth, Annesley, Halsey), and were responsible for many of the surviving ancient buildings in Amersham. Their patronage included restoration of St. Mary's church, building the Market Hall, and the Drake Almshouses - all of which still stand. As Lords of the Manor, the Drakes supplied at least one if not both of the members of Parliament for the borough of Amersham in an almost unbroken line from 1623 to the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832, when Amersham was reduced to a single member.
The ancestral home of the Tothill and Drake families has been Shardeloes, an imposing building perched above its own lake just to the West of the town. The present house was built by William Drake during the 18th century on the site of an Elizabethan manor house, to designs by Stiff Leadbetter and Robert Adam, with landscaping by Humphrey Repton. It remained in the Drake family until death duties obliged the family to sell it in 1957, when it was converted into luxury flats, which is how it remains today. A failure to marry heiresses, producing large numbers of children, and a certain profligacy when combined with death duties meant that the Drakes sold off almost all their holdings in Amersham during the 20th century. An auction of many of the houses on the High Street, took place in 1928 when local papers reported the 'sale' of the town. The senior branch of the Drake family no longer lives in the town, and only the author of this page still lives in the area.The sale of Shardeloes in 1957 has had huge benefits for local and family historians. The muniments room at Shardeloes was stuffed full of legal and historical documents for many years, and almost all of these were then transferred to the County Record Office in Aylesbury. A series of Bucks Record Society papers and a book "Shardeloes Papers" by George Eland, the premier historian of Bucks in the first half of this century, highlight some of the more interesting ones.
Amersham has long been a hotbed of nonconformity in religious beliefs. Townsfolk responded to Wycliffe's ideas and supported the Lollard cause. In 1414, three of them were burned at the stake for these beliefs. Worse was to follow. In 1506 the Bishop of Lincoln held an inquisition in Amersham which resulted in more burnings with William Tylsworth's pyre ignited by his own daughter. A further inquisition in 1521 caused five more Amersham men to be burnt at the stake. These martyrs are remembered by a memorial just outside the town. The town was later host to Baptist, Methodist and Quaker churches, all of which had strong followings. The ecclesiastical census of 1851 shows that the Baptist church in the town was nearly as strong as the official church. The Quaker William Penn, later to become the proprietor of the American State of Pennsylvania, came often to Amersham, where he courted a local girl, Gulielma Springett, whom he married.
Throughout most of the 17th and 18th centuries, Amersham was a typical market town with its merchants, tradesmen and professionals, serving a largely rural agricultural community. Its main industries were lace making and staw plaiting for women and agriculture and chair making for men. The site of one of the mills near the centre of the town became Weller's brewery. Weller's Entire (they knew how to name a drink in those days) was supplied to tied houses for many miles around. In time the brewery was lost in the inevitable round of amalgamations. The site became a factory for Goya perfumes, and is now divided into many small offices. When the brewery was declining along with the fortunes of the Drakes, another local family, the Brazils, were making good. From their butchery business they grew to operating a large sausage and meat pie making factory on the Eastern side of the town. In time this became part of the Bowyers group before being closed down around 1980. To the consternation of reactionaries, the derelict site of the meat products factory was recently converted into a very successful supermarket, which provides a valuable service to the area. Amersham's largest employer today is a latecomer. During the Second World War the government set up a facility for manufacturing radioactive luminous paints in a house with a large orchard behind it in Amersham Common. After the war this grew into the largest supplier of radioactive materials for medicine, industry and research, now called Amersham International plc, whose products carry the name of Amersham to the corners of the globe on a daily basis.
The defining event for the change of Amersham from small market town to commuter community for London, was the coming of the railway. Stevenson had tried to build a line from London through Amersham to Birmingham in the 1840s, but he was thwarted by opposition from local landowners. Fifty years later the inevitable happened and the Metropolitan line was opened from London's Marylebone, through Amersham to Aylesbury, in 1892. Thomas Tyrwhitt-Drake had objected to the line following the natural route through the Misbourne valley, and succeeded in getting it hidden away on the North side of the hillside above Amersham, out of view of the town and Shardeloes. As a result, a whole 'Metroland' community of shops and houses mushroomed around the station, a good half mile from the old town. Now called Amersham-on-the-Hill, this is the largest centre of population in the area today. Instead of bringing industry to the area, the railway has always been a feeder taking people to London, and the majority of Amersham's people now work away from the town.
Thomas was following in the conservative footsteps of his father of the same name. After the introduction of the penny post in 1840 there was a massive increase in the number of letters being written and delivered. Everywhere across Britain houses were being numbered to help speedier and more correct deliveries. Thomas Tyrwhitt-Drake owned most of the houses in Amersham High Street and autocratically believed that numbers were both unsightly and unnecessary. He refused to have them added to the front doors of his houses. When threatened with legal action, he finally caved in and had the numbers affixed. On the inside of the doors...