EMD was born in 1890 in this house on Hove seafront. Other biographical information on the web often gives her birthplace as Steyning in West Sussex, but that’s simply the name of the registration district; the house at the time was described as part of Aldrington but now it’s firmly in Hove. 6 Walsingham Terrace was the family home at the time, an elegant Georgian-style house facing the English channel. Henry and Betty de la Pasture moved to the house by 1889; his brother Gerard and his family were living two doors down at number 8. The family spent five or six years at Walsingham Terrace, during which time both of their daughters were born.
Walsingham Terrace was built in the early 1880s by the surveyor Charles L. Jackson and the de la Pastures may have been the first tenants In the Brighton street directories of the time several of the houses, including numbers 6 and 8, are listed as ‘unoccupied’ before 1889. The Terrace contained substantial four-storey houses, with glazed first-floor balconies, area basements and - going by the aerial view of the surviving houses - rather large gardens. At the time, the seafront opposite would have been relatively undeveloped - the bowling greens, tennis courts and restaurant now across King’s Road from the Terrace were all interwar constructions. Maps of the 1890s show open spaces, that would be manicured into lawns by the turn of the century, leading down to the sea. But they weren’t far from the Hove Lawns and Medina promenade, already in place at that time. They were right on the edge of town, though, with fields between the house and Portslade, and a brickworks rather nearby in what is now the desirable area around New Church Road.
They had notorious neighbours in Charles Stewart Parnell and Katherine (Kitty) O’Shea, who lived in 9/10 Walsingham Terrace; Parnell died there in 1891. Perhaps Katherine O’Shea, also a Catholic, went to church with the de la Pastures, although it seems probable that they would not have welcomed a divorced woman into their social circle. By 1895 all the de la Pastures had moved on, EMD’s family to East Butterleigh House in Devon. 6 Walsingham Terrace survived the Second World War although numbers 9 and 10 on the west end of the Terrace were destroyed by a bomb. Numbers 6-8 were demolished in 1964 (you can see in the link that only the facade is in place) and replaced by a block of flats, refurbished in 2004 and renamed Horizon.
Photo of Walsingham Terrace, Kingsway, Aldrington, Hove copyright Simon Carey, used under the Creative Commons 2.0 licence.