House that inspired Peter Pan for sale

For years Cudlow House was a well-kept secret shielded from prying eyes by a high wall and tall trees.

It was here that JM Barrie spent happy summers playing cricket and tennis in the gardens with the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies.

The boys - George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nichol, who came under his care after both parents died - were the inspiration for Peter Pan.

Barrie, who never had any children of his own, told them stories of a magical world full of pirates and fairies where little children never grew up or died. They became the basis for his classic play, Peter Pan.

He first visited Rustington in 1899 and in 1906 took a series of pictures of little Michael Llewelyn Davies dressed up as Peter Pan in Cudlow's grounds. They were the basis for a bronze statue of the character in London's Kensington Gardens.

The lavish gardens of Cudlow House in Sea Lane have since been sold and flats and a car park now stand on the spot where Michael was photographed.

The building has now been divided into Cudlow House, Cudlow Cottage - which is being sold for £290,000 - and Regency Lodge but the aura of its previous occupants remains.

Graham Churcher has lived in Regency Lodge for three years.

The 48-year-old has traced the history of the house back over 300 years. In his sitting room a whole shelf is dedicated to books about Barrie and Peter Pan.

He said: "A lot of people don't know about the house because up until the Seventies it was behind a high wall and trees.

"It's nice to think of the Llewelyn Davies family being here and having such a lovely summer as in the end they had such tragic lives."

While the five boys were still young their father died of cancer and their mother of tuberculosis.

Years later Michael, immortalised in Barrie's photographs, drowned as an undergraduate at Oxford, George died in the First World War and Peter, who became a publisher, committed suicide.

Yet in the summer of 1906, two years after Peter Pan was first staged, this was all ahead of them.

That year Arthur Llewelyn Davies wrote to a friend, saying Jimmy, as Barrie was known, and the boys spent the days playing cricket and lawn tennis and bathing in the sea.

As the film Finding Neverland shows, the Llewelyn Davies family was crucial to the creation of Peter Pan, which is now in its centenary year.

Barrie, who was born in Scotland, said of the boys: "I made Peter Pan by rubbing the five of you violently together as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you."

The loving Mr and Mrs Darling are thought to have been modelled on Arthur and Sylvia.

It was Sylvia's mother, Emma Du Maurier, wife of the author George Du Maurier and grandmother of Daphne Du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca, who rented Cudlow House in the summer of 1906.

Arthur and Sylvia first visited Rustington in 1891 as guests of their friend Sir Hubert Parry, who wrote the hymn Jerusalem and lived at Cudlow House from 1878 to 1881.

The family would come down for their annual holiday and Barrie first visited the village, staying in Mill House by the sea, in 1899.

Mr Churcher said: "We're always finding out new things about the house. It's never-ending, like a family tree.

"Legend has it there's a smuggler's passage leading down to the sea but we've never found anything.

"But there are many literary and musical links to the house.

"Hubert Parry lived here with his young family. He later built Knightscroft House across the road.

"He was married to Lady Maude, the daughter of the first Baron Herbert of Lea.

"They would have made Rustington fashionable as they would have invited members of their social set to visit.

"There are also records of Thomas Hardy staying here."

Dorothea, Edith, Emma Grace, and Mary Winifred Hoper lived at the house until 1920 and rented it out for the holidays.

Between 1947 and 1953 Mabel and Bertie Neville lived there, often visited for Christmas by their nephew John Aspinall, the international gambler.

In the Second World War it was used to billet officers but survived intact.

Then in the Sixties it was bought by Fred Miles, the aircraft designer whose wife Maxine, known as Blossom, was a leading hostess and threw many parties in the gardens.

Mr Churcher said: "By chance we met a man whose father ran a grocers in the village at the time. He told us the cook at the time, known as Cookie, would let his father use the swimming pool when the family were away.

"His father was asked to store champagne on ice for the parties and remembers Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend coming to stay."

The Miles family also provide a link back to Barrie.

Mr Churcher said: "It's another example of it all fitting together. Blossom's sister, Joan Forbes-Robertson, was a well-known actress in her day and played Peter Pan.

"It is said she was Barrie's favourite Peter Pan."

While Mr Churcher has meticulously traced Barrie's history, the director of Finding Neverland has been criticised for veering from the truth.

The central incongruity is that when Barrie, played by Johnny Depp, befriended the boys, their father was still alive. In the film, however, he is already dead.

It also mentions only four boys, when there were five, and implies a romance between Barrie and Sylvia, played by Kate Winslet, which her descendants say did not happen.

The movie has also been accused of playing down the ambiguous nature of Barrie's obsession with children.

Johnny Depp said: "All this happened around 100 years ago so there are always going to be questions about the exact truth."

Director Marc Forster said: "For me the film was about how JM Barrie was inspired to write Peter Pan. You have to take out certain characters because you are just dealing with those who inspired the story."

The film opens on October 29. Barrie donated the lucrative rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital before his death in 1937 and it is hoped the movie will raise thousands of pounds for the hospital's charity.

Cudlow Cottage is on the market for £290,000 through estate agents Jackson Stops and Staff in Rustington.