Heatherbank (grade II listed building)

Home of both John Grover and, later, Dr Marie Stopes

John Grover was born in Clerkenwell, London on May 3rd 1835, and came retired to Hindhead at the age of 60, living at Heatherbank in Tower Road until his death on September 30th 1913. He and his wife Sarah are buried in the churchyard of St. Luke's at Grayshott.

After a London career, whose pinnacle was perhaps the building of the New Scotland Yard, Grover arrived in Hindhead and quickly saw the opportunity to put his development skills into practice. In 1895, Grover built the Moorlands Hotel on the Portsmouth Road. Adjacent to the hotel he built (at his own expense) the United Reform Church on the corner of Tower Road. His generosity was repeated in Beacon Hill where he provided the Congregational Church in Churt Road.

Hindhead was not the only area locally to benefit from Grover's vast wealth and business acumen. In 1903, he built a Congregational Church in Hammer and developed the brickworks which not only provided the bricks for his house building programme but also produced much needed employment locally. He opened a clay pit at Clay Hill (now Wey Hill – the ‘fairground’ car-park) to provide the necessary bricks for the many new houses springing up in Hindhead and Beacon Hill. He also built Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s residence.

Dr Marie Stopes was born in 1880 in Edinburgh in Scotland, and although a pioneer in providing family planning services, she wasn’t a medical doctor, something that outraged the medical community at the time. Her first marriage was annulled after five years on the grounds of non-consummation, and it was this that prompted her interest in female sexuality.

She recognised that if she, as a university educated middle-class woman, could lack all knowledge of sexual issues, then poor, less educated women must be even worse off. This realisation prompted her pioneering crusade.

She opened her first family planning clinic, with her second husband Humphrey Roe, in 1921 – and was attacked by the medical establishment for being female, not medically qualified and for employing nurses rather than doctors to consult with most of her clients.

As well as setting up the UK’s first static family planning centre, Marie Stopes also pioneered the concept of mobile outreach. She adapted a horse-drawn caravan and took it into the communities she was trying to reach. Her endeavours proved successful and she gradually built up a small network of clinics across the UK.