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According to one internet website the Newman surname is the 167th most common surname in Great Britain and its widespread use from the twelfth century onwards certainly implies no relationship between the many different families who made it their own.
This site is dedicated to one specific family of Newmans, who first appear in the beautiful Surrey village of Dorking early in the 17th century and, over the next few centuries, migrate to Southwark via Epsom, eventually becoming Londoners. Hence the title of this site and its accompanying book, From Sylvan Surrey to Babylon, an allusion to Disraeli’s likening of the teeming metropolis as a “modern Babylon.”
Each generation made its own specific contribution, from Robert Newman (1620-1683) of Dorking, who rose from gardener to gentleman, and - for his skills in assisting the Hon. Henry Howard establish his celebrated garden at Deepdene - earned the respect of both John Aubrey and John Evelyn. Robert’s descendants later settled in Epsom at the height of its popularity as a fashionable spa and showed themselves to be solid and enterprising. William Newman (1687-1738) and his cousin, Hugh Newman (1689-1745), were both Epsom bricklayers – the speculative builders of the 18th century – and became wealthy in the service of the gentry who wanted fine houses outside the capital.
In 1784 John Newman (1745-1815), having mortgaged his inheritance, set off for London with his young family, in search of a brighter future. Their memory of better times and a lost inheritance was to haunt them as they struggled to maintain life in a harsh environment. A clandestine marriage, suicides and dwindling bequests, marks out their progress from elegant Regency terraces to the overcrowded alleyways and courts of the Strand and produces a colourful cavalcade of cardmakers, court & bank officials, paupers, clergy, soldiers, sailors and grocers. Straddling the nineteenth century is the remarkable figure of Joseph Potter (1769-1855), mariner, parish beadle and pensioner at Greenwich Hospital, who left a vivid autobiography for the instruction of his Newman descendants. The marriage of his daughter, Elizabeth Myres Potter (1801-1846) to Samuel Hugh Newman (1798-1857) defines the demarcation between Sylvan Surrey and Babylon.
