As the July meeting of the Havant Local History Group drew to a close, an audience member asked the HCS Cub Reporter: “Who exactly was “J. Bulbeck”, and what right did he have to be possessive about the wall that carries his name?” That was the second time in as many days that the subject of the ‘Bulbeck Wall’ had come up in conversation.
A good question, so we thought we’d consult the most obvious local history resource, the library of Havant Local History Booklets, where surely the answer would be found.
John Bulbeck – A Brief Biography
John Bulbeck was a draper in Havant town centre, likely trading in calico and other cloth — well known enough locally that a satirical playbill of the period (poking fun at the unpopular Havant Local Board of Health) lampooned him as “J. Bullock – Calico John,” alongside other prominent tradesmen such as the maltster/brewer Samuel Clarke (“Hopping Sam”) and tanner Francis Foster.
Bulbeck was a driving force behind Havant’s Catholic community for much of the 19th century. He started a subscription fund in 1836 to build a proper Catholic church to replace the small, hidden chapel at Brockhampton which dated from the 1750s, a time when penal laws still restricted Catholic worship.
Nearly 40 years later, when St Joseph’s Church finally opened on West Street on 15 August 1875, he personally donated the altar – described by the Hampshire Telegraph as “one of the best, if not the best, we have seen in the district”– with carved panels depicting scenes from the life of St Joseph. His involvement wasn’t just financial: he had opinions on the design too, dismissing an earlier architectural plan by “Mr Scoles” as “very hideous.”
Late in life, Bulbeck (or possibly a descendant of the same name) wrote the “Bulbeck manuscript,” composed between 1896 and 1899, a firsthand account of Havant’s Catholic mission history – including vivid details like an old woman’s memory of parishioners hiring horses to reach Mass on Sundays.
The Wall
Given all this, the boundary wall inscribed “J. Bulbeck’s Wall, 1872” almost certainly marks property belonging to this same John Bulbeck – built right in the years between his 1836 fundraising pledge and the church’s 1875 completion, when he was clearly an established, propertied figure in the town.
His name endures today in Bulbeck Road, with the wall visible here behind Homewell, at the back of the now-demolished Bulbeck Road car park..
A note about the Havant Local History Booklets
Following a hiatus during 2025 in which the official online copies of the ‘Havant Local History Books’ disappeared from view, the HCS webmaster has been working with Ralph Cousins on behalf of the team of local history authors and experts to develop a new edition of the booklets, set out using a consistent current software base with a new set of fully indexed PDF digital copies. Plans are already well advanced for a new website dedicated to Havant Borough Heritage, which will showcase the new edition of the books and also provide a more comprehensive online version of the town’s Heritage Trail.
Watch this space, we hope to bring you a further update during the summer. For now, here’s a teaser for the first volume of the new edition:
The current edition of the books is still available to view, if you have a Google account, on The Spring website at this link.
A very interesting article. I aspire to own a wall myself, one day.