Eustace was the longest serving Vicar that Hempstead has ever had and the first to hold office in the twentieth century. The son of General Sir William Eustace of Great Sampford, he was educated at Harrow and St. Peter’s College, Cambridge. He was ordained a deacon in 1849 and a priest in 1850, moving immediately to take up the living of which his father was the patron. He married Emily Henrietta, elder daughter of Rev Sir Thomas Bridges, Bart, the rector of Danbury.
In truth, Eustace devoted himself almost exclusively to affairs at Great Sampford and employed curates to look after Hempstead. The most significant and longest serving of these was Rev John Escreet, who is the subject of a separate page. Eustace was, however, responsible for establishing the Church school in Hempstead in 1854. He was able to do this by virtue of a free site and a substantial amount of funding: £400 raised from local landowners and farmers and £155 in grants from the Privy Council and others. Furthermore, the Privy Council permitted a smaller building for the number of children (75) than was the case in Great Sampford some fifteen years later.
Eustace had a much harder time getting a Church school established in Great Sampford, which is described in some detail in Curtis’s Story of the Sampfords. At the same time he was engaged in a major project of restoration on the church there. It is perhaps just as well that he left Escreet in charge of Hempstead because in 1882, just after the work at Great Sampford had been completed, the tower at St Andrew’s collapsed duing a terrible storm and its fall wrecked the nave.
Eustace also raised the funds (£1,585) to enable the construction of the Vicarage in Hempstead on an acre of land donated by Cecil Fane. A red brick building with enough ground for a flower and vegetable garden and an orchard, it was occupied by John Escreet throughout the rest of Eustace’s incumbency, although on the latter’s retirement Escreet moved to Firs House in order that the new Vicar, Rev Edward Roberts, could move in.
Curtis describes a photograph of Eustace in the dress of an old fashioned low churchman.
“He is clad in black coat and trousers, a high white collar and white tie – the clerical dress of his generation which knew nothing of the clerical dog collar. He has no cassock and is wearing a college surplice, open down the front and buttoned at the top, a garment devised by the dons of eighteenth century Oxford so that it could be put on without disturbing a powdered wig. He wears a scarf and not a stole.”
In Great Sampford, Eustace had a reputation for generosity and being a ‘real gentleman’. After his death, the wooden lectern in Great Sampford church, described as “a splendid eagle on rocks, with a pillar resting on lions”, was placed there as a tribute to his incumbency. There is also a small cross in the shadow of the church tower which is the grave of his little child.
Could the lectern have been carved by his curate, Rev. John Escreet? We know from several sources that Escreet was a talented joiner and woodcarver, who made the pulpit, reading desk and lectern for St Andrews and also executed the carving on the south porch, using oak donated by Mrs Almack of Hempstead Hall.
Here is the notice of the wedding of Eustace’s sister, which he conducted in 1854
