The £82,000 Worthington House — Rare Legacy of a Forgotten Laboratory

Worthington House’s laboratory exuded the scent of old chemicals and dried plants, a quiet testimony to £82,000 of accumulated intellectual and material wealth. Each jar, ledger, and apparatus hinted at experiments meticulously tracked, yet the room now stood frozen in the middle of research and discovery.

Dr.

Matilda Evelyn Worthington, Chemist and Inventor

Dr. Matilda Evelyn Worthington, born 1864 in Edinburgh, was a pioneering chemist with an education from the University of Edinburgh. Never married, she devoted her life to research in pharmacology and early chemical synthesis. Her presence remains in a cracked leather-bound lab notebook, a pair of broken spectacles, glass vials stained with decades-old solutions, and a bronze mortar and pestle. Daily routines—measuring, recording, annotating—are frozen in time, while her precise temperament is evident in the neatly labeled reagents and careful storage of chemical samples. Family letters tucked between pages indicate distant siblings and her steadfast desire to leave a scientific legacy.

Collapse, Debt, and Deferred Inheritance

By 1914, Worthington’s experimental ventures had failed to secure patents or commercial backing. Debts mounted, creditors pressed, and executors neglected the laboratory. The room preserves traces of abandoned ambition: spilled powders, tipped chairs, incomplete notes, and partially packed instruments. Some samples may have been quietly sold; others remain locked in cabinets, their full value—both financial and scholarly—uncertain.

Beneath a dusty microscope, a folded note reads: “Preserve until successors claim.” Beyond that, Worthington House sits silent, instruments and ledgers frozen in place, wealth in chemicals and knowledge documented but unrealized, leaving the laboratory and its rare legacy abandoned and unresolved.