On 18 July 1851, Sir David Salomons walked into the House of Commons, sat down on a bench, and refused to take his oath of office using the phrase 'on the true faith of a Christian.' He was the newly elected MP for Greenwich. He was also Jewish. The Speaker asked him to leave. He left. Three days later he came back, took his seat, gave the first speech ever delivered in the British Parliament by a Jew, and voted three times before the Serjeant-at-Arms removed him from the chamber. He was fined 500 pounds for voting illegally. Seven years later the law was changed, and Jews became eligible to sit. The bench Salomons sat on that day is in a museum north of Tunbridge Wells - the house he built and lived in, now open to visitors.
The house was built in the 1830s by Decimus Burton, the same architect responsible for much of Regency Tunbridge Wells, for Sir David Salomons. Originally called Broomhill and now known simply as Salomons, it sits north of the town on the Kentish heights. The house features stables, a private science lecture theatre, and an extremely tall water tower that doubles as a landmark across the valley. Major additions came in 1854, 1863, 1908, 1910 and 1913, mostly under the direction of David Salomons's nephew. The house is Grade II listed. The estate is now managed by Markerstudy Group as a conference and wedding venue, and the museum occupies a wing devoted to the family's collections.
Sir David Salomons (1797-1873) had already pioneered Jewish participation in English civic life by the time of his 1851 Parliamentary intervention. In 1835 he became the first Jewish Sheriff of the City of London. In 1855 he was elected the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London. He had also helped to found the London and Westminster Bank in 1832 - the first English joint-stock bank, eventually folded into NatWest - because the existing banks would not employ Jews. His Parliamentary fight was part of a longer campaign. Baron Lionel de Rothschild had been elected to Parliament in 1847, refused the Christian oath, stood down and been re-elected; Rothschild and Salomons together pushed the issue until the law was changed in 1858. Salomons was returned to Parliament for Greenwich in 1859 and sat there until his death in 1873.
David Salomons's nephew, Sir David Lionel Salomons (1851-1925), inherited the house and transformed it. He was a scientist and engineer, a fellow of multiple learned societies, and one of the early enthusiasts of electricity, motor cars and hot-air ballooning. He built laboratories on the estate and a private theatre that he wired for cinema and lecture demonstrations. He may have been the first private owner in England to install electric lighting, and he organised the first British motor show on the grounds in 1895. The museum's collection includes his hot-air ballooning memorabilia, early automobiles - vehicles from the first decades of motoring, when each was effectively bespoke - and his Welte Philharmonic-Organ, a vast pneumatic instrument that played pre-recorded music rolls.
The museum's most resonant exhibit is the bench from which David Salomons rose to speak in 1851. It sits in a small dedicated room with documentation of the constitutional argument that surrounded that moment. The Judaica collection includes the tablets of the Ten Commandments rescued from the Salomons family's private rooftop synagogue in Brighton - an unusual urban form of synagogue, built above the family's house. The library catalogue published in 1903 documents one of the great private collections of the era. Sir David Lionel was a meticulous cataloguer; his *Catalogue of the Library at Broomhill, Tunbridge Wells* runs to multiple editions, and many of the books remain on the shelves.
The Salomons estate is now Salomons Estate, owned by Markerstudy Group and operating as a conference centre, wedding venue and hotel. The museum is open to visitors with seasonal access, supported through Canterbury Christ Church University which previously occupied part of the campus. The house, with its water tower and its lecture theatre and its laboratories, is the kind of place that does not quite fit any single category - country house, museum, Jewish history site, history of science collection. The Salomons family used the house to demonstrate what they believed: that Jews belonged in English civic and intellectual life, that the new electric technologies were worth investing in, that a country house in Kent could be both home and laboratory. The museum quietly carries all of that forward.
Salomons Museum sits at approximately 51.15 degrees north, 0.24 degrees east, in Southborough on the northern edge of Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent. London Gatwick (EGKK) is about 18 miles to the west. From altitude, look for the distinctive tall water tower of the estate, the wooded grounds, and the larger town of Tunbridge Wells immediately to the south. The house sits on the Kentish ridge above the River Medway valley.