This copy of an O.S. map of 1865 shows the Errington land at Askew Farm edged in black. The tithe apportionment of 1840 lists an area of 91 acres bounded by Warren Lane to the north, the boundary between Grays Thurrock and Stifford parishes on the west, the Thames on the south and Belmont Castle land on the east. This included 40 acres of marsh and saltings. Askew Farm is here labelled Cottage Farm. The railway, of course, did not exist in 1795.

George Errington was born in 1756 in Longacre. His father (another George) came south from Northumberland after the Jacobite rising (the family was Catholic), married well and became a magistrate at Bow Street with Henry Fielding. After his father’s death in 1769, George went to live with the adopted family of Lord Mansfield at Kenwood in Hampstead before going to Christchurch, Oxford. It was at that time he met Harriot, aged 15. She already had a child, called Louise, by a Mr. Coren! She became pregnant and they were married in 1777, two months later she gave birth to their son (George Henry). Our George obtained a divorce from Harriot in the Bishop of London’s Court in 1785, followed by a Private Act of Parliament in the House of Lord’s in 1788, which allowed him to remarry. He had lived with Harriot in a house at Robert Adam’s Adelphi off the Strand. After the divorce he lived at the Temple (he was a barrister).

Quoting the Chelmsford Chronicle, at Anne Broadrick’s trial the Counsel for the prosecution, in his opening address said that ‘Mr Errington’s female attachments had been the peculiar misfortune of his earlier days; this was a fact of too much notoriety to require any explanation at this moment’.