The Military Academy

NOT MANY folk, wandering peacefully along the bank of the Thames in Lower Sunbury, would think of the place as a mecca for students of conflict. But there was a time, in the middle of the 19th century, when the village boasted one of the foremost ‘think tanks’ dealing with military matters in the whole of the United Kingdom.

The Military Academy, which was located in the grand surroundings of Sunbury House and its extensive grounds, was the brainchild of a Major August Frederick Lendy, a much decorated army officer who had fought in many overseas campaigns, and was a resident of Sunbury.

The good Major (although to be accurate he was a Captain at the time he conceived the Academy) was moved to found it because of the strong criticism voiced by the British public and parliamentarians over the conduct of the Crimean War between 1853 and 1856.

Most of that criticism was directed towards the officer class, which, at the time, was mainly comprised of wealthy aristocrats who might have been jolly good at riding horses and playing croquet but were generally inept when it came to controlling armies of men or devising strategies to win a campaign.

Lendy took over Sunbury House, the former home of Admiral Hawke, and transformed it from a stately mansion into a forerunner of the world’s finest military academies like Sandhurst and West Point.

The Illustrated London News of 1856 comments on his achievements in the following words:

"Everything is transformed. Spacious studios full of military models and magnificent maps replace the former boudoirs. Ladies no longer lounge in the green park, but manly youths are seen busily engaged in the study of the science of war. No longer the echo of music strikes the ear; it is now the report of the rifle and the sound of the pickaxe and the hammer.”

The report adds that Lendy was actively engaged in training young men – those who would become officers in the Army and the Navy – in how to design and build fortifications and earthworks or how to build a battery for field guns.

The London News goes on: "Further still is the rifle ground where the students are exercised with the new Enfield musket. Students and professors wear a military uniform.”

It is weird to think now that volleys of musket fire and the yelling of student officers in training would once have regularly shaken the peace and quiet of Lower Sunbury.

For Lendy, military earthworks and defences were obviously a major obsession – he even wrote a book on the subject called ‘Elements of Fortification,’ which was published in 1857. By the end of the 19th century the academy had ceased to function and the grand house had been turned into flats. Even they did not last long because most of the grand house was destroyed by a major fire on New Year’s Eve, 1915.

The centre of the building, famously decorated with carvings by Grinling Gibbons and paintings by Antonio Varrio (court painter to Charles II), was lost forever, although the two wings were repaired and became separate houses. Only one of them remains today, standing on the corner of Loudwater Close.