ROBINSON, Elizabeth formerly Pickard and Martin (née Winder)
Hayes Grove 1773 – 1803
Elizabeth was married three times. She moved to Hayes in 1773 when her husband Joseph Martin purchased the Grove, a red brick substantial house that bordered on the Common. Her son Joseph William was born in 1776 and was ten months old when his father died. He left all his possessions to her.
Her second marriage was to a Yorkshire man, William Pickard, who was living in Ludgate, London. He moved into Hayes Grove. In 1782 they lived at the Grove with her son Joseph William and four servants.Their coachman William Brown lived nearby in Elm Cottage.
William Pickard came from Great Osborne in Yorkshire where he was buried in 1783. He left legacies of £1000 to his brother Thomas, a clergyman, and £200 to his brother Leonard and £400 each to Mary and Margaret, Leonard’s daughters. Other large bequests were made to his cousins and £200 to the poor of Great Osborne. Elizabeth was left £200 and all his plate, linen, carriages and horses and Joseph William was given £500 and his books. The interest on her marriage settlement of £5600 was to continue and on her death the sum was to be divided equally between Joseph William and the children of his brother Leonard.
After William Pickard’s death Elizabeth married Edward Robinson who lived with her at the Grove until her death in 1805. Regular donations were made to support the poor but he was not considered fit enough to rase support when called upon during the Napoleonic wars. In 1790 they employed three resident domestic servants and a gardener and a coachman who lived in separate cottages. In 1803 Revd Till wrote ‘Mr Robinson is much in the same precarious state of health, as usual, though I think upon the whole rather better this winter than the last. Mrs Robinson … is not proof against the general influenza and the day before yesterday I saw her with every symptom of its approach.’ The illness greatly weakened her but she persevered with her main ambition of building and furnishing her son Joseph’s parsonage house at Keston. Revd Till felt that she would not live long after its completion. ‘She has now but one more piece of furniture to provide for him and then, I think, she may contentedly assume to herself the line and lesson of every country churchyard, ‘Farewell, vain world, I’ve had enough of thee.’ She died and was buried near her first husband in West Wickham in September 1805.