History: recent former directors

Our records of past centuries are patchy. Until the 1980s, the role of Director was known as 'Manager and Receiver, and Clerk'. At that stage, the main focus was management of the several hundred Walcot and Hayles properties.  Only in recent times has the focus turned more to the central mission of the relief of poverty in Lambeth. Our housing stock, along with investments, generates the income used to fund our work.

• Thomas Garnish (right in the picture) served as Clerk to the Governors and ‘Receiver’ from 1917 to his death in office in 1954. He had previously been a local government officer.
• Winifred Wood (behind the sun dial) succeeded him and retired in 1969. No more is known about her.
• William (Bill) Skelton became Director and Clerk 1969-1985. He had served in the RAF (DSO*, DFC*), later ordained (rector of Bermondsey and offered, but refused, the suffragan See of Kingston-upon-Thames, and the Bishopric of Liverpool). He became director of the Lambeth Endowed Charities (as WF was known until 2007) and “over the next 16 years, administered with considerable flair an old housing estate, almshouses and several other charities, laying the foundations of their present financial strength” (from obituary and funeral address).
• David Jones, was Director and Clerk 1985-1997. He had been Headmaster of Bryanston School 1974-1982.
• Robert Dewar, an accountant by profession, joined the staff in 1995 and succeeded David Jones on his retirement, and served from 1997-2005. 
• Hugh Valentine was appointed Director and Clerk in 2005 and held the role until 2022. He is a former social worker and social services director, and, since 1989, a non-stipendiary Church of England priest and advocate of the worker-priest model.
• Marcia Asare was appointed Director and Clerk to the Governors from April 2022

Sources of Walcot history
The Survey of London, Volume 23
A History of the Lambeth Endowed Charities, 2002, Maud Zimmermann
Mr Walcot's Gift: Celebrating 350 years, 2017 (ed. Hugh Valentine)