He earned praise for his pastoral diligence and with his
huge legacies he turned to architecture on a cardinal scale.
As Rector he prettified Foxearth’s mediaeval church,
demolishing the south aisle; provided the £900 to build the
school and commissioned various items of church plate and
stained glass window. He was devoted to the welfare of his
parishioners, making no distinction between those who
attended church and those who attended chapel and was at
the forefront of turning over some of his land behind the
school to enable villagers to grow their own crops; this at a
time when farmers were often reluctant for their men to
grow vegetables, on the grounds that work that should be
going into their own crops would be diverted into the
labourer’s own - all  well before the Tysoe allotments and
‘the Promised Land’ were finally achieved in 1893 which
tried to turn labourers into small-scale farmers in imitation
of the continental peasantry.

begrudging his daughter Amy her evening dress. He took
over his mother’s house at Chilton Lodge near Sudbury on
her death in 1862 and which she had bought in 1853 for the
enormous sum of £2325. 14

Although  extant  correspondence  suggests  men  of
desiccated emotions,  the two  brothers  were  genuine
philanthropists as well as being shrewd businessmen who
would have leapt at a way of finding work for local people
and knew a good investment when they came across it.
Altruism though was not always the case with some
members of the family. George’s wife Georgiana was in
favour of litigating the smallest offence. On March 5, 1872
she obtained a summons against a boy named Jarvis for
damaging her dress by kicking mud on it as she was
leaving church. The boy turned out to be the son of a
gentleman's coachman and although Georgiana withdrew
the summons she said the boy deserved to be whipped. Her
idiosyncratic qualities led George in private to give her the
nickname ‘Bird Brain’ which he usually contracted to ‘BB’.
Georgiana to her credit seemed, in correspondence anyway,
not to mind.

Here was a man who stood resolutely for progress; he
invested wisely even when his investments could be looked
on as highly questionable for a churchman, and if the
Bishop of Rochester had found that one of his vicars was
investing in a brewery and a beerhouse, as he undoubtedly
was, then there would have been serious, not to sat highly

His brother’s much loved first wife Rosalind had died
within five years of their marriage although he seems not

hilarious,  consequences.  He  sidestepped  this  curious
dilemma by signing over alcoholic interests to his brother,
George  who, so Trust documents make out, invested
heavily in the fledgling brewery.

General Addison and was set in 3 acres. The General had died
shortly after attending the funeral of the Duke of Wellington at St

The socially adept George had made a large fortune out of a
variety of financial interests including: banking, the law13
and property deals and was an influential member of the
glamorous Kildare Street and Carlton clubs in London. He
had four children but seems to have attached quite as much
importance to his own pleasures as he did to his family’s
and  could spend 100 pounds  on a  new  gun while

Paul’s Cathedral. Addison was a friend of Wellington and had
fought in many campaigns  including  Toulouse (1814) and

Jeffrey Blunden, Churchwarden at Holy Trinity, Long Melford.  
At the same auction he bid for and bought a further four acres

adjoining the Lodge for £380 and a ‘fine period house’ for £500
where George Anthony Foster lived until his mother’s death in

1862.  Chilton Hall, the Rectory at Chilton was presented to the
Rev Andrewes, (John Foster’s father in law after his marriage to
his daughter Elizabeth) in 1863.  

 As a barrister, George practised both in East Anglia and
London