Down the leafy lane

I often drive past this old Victorian house set in a leafy garden in the middle of suburbia and alongside a canalized river, but have never known anything about it. All you can really see is an alluring gable with the date 1789 on it (which turns out is stretching the truth a bit - although there might have been some buildings on the site in the late eighteenth century, the gable is most definitely later nineteenth century). Anyway, this is Timour Hall, which is run by the International Police Association as a guest house. It has an rich history that includes a link to Percy FitzPatrick of Jock of the Bushveld fame. They have an interesting website but nothing about why it is called Timour Hall, except that it was given the name in 1878 by Mrs Aletta Jacoba Smith. Maybe some colonial link to East Timor in south-east Asia?