Handed on

In 1553 the church living (more importantly its associated stipend) for the parish of Leadenham was given by the Crown to ‘a man revered in his time as the most learned man in all Europe’.¹ Not that John Dee – mathematician, philosopher and alchemist (with a sideline in magic and the occult) – would ever have much time for the pettifogging goings-on within this community situated at an historically important crossroads along the southern half of the Lincoln Cliff escarpment.

Rather, this income (and sundry other patronages) would help to fund Dee’s European travels and his accumulation of ‘one of the greatest private libraries of sixteenth-century England’ at his house at Mortlake, by the Thames.² Though he would retain the living until his death in 1608, Dee finally lost its income after three decades of non-involvement at Leadenham, his inattention here being in marked contrast to a mid-nineteenth century clerical counterpart who became altogether too active at St. Swithun’s, certainly for the liking of the local squire.

Together comprising the southern terminus of the linear Lincolnshire village…

see: Buildings By Air @ YouTube

… the graveyard of this ‘notable church with an impressive tower and magnificent crocketed spire’ is contiguous with the grounds of Grade II* listed Leadenham House.³ ‘There cannot be many other gardens, other than those of bishop’s palaces, that possess such an impressive piece of medieval architecture as its background.’⁴ And the local bishop would become embroiled here in Victorian times as an unholy row escalated between Leadenham’s leading family, its parson (and his mother).

Architect Augustus Pugin was also involved, his provocative handiwork at St. Swithun’s surviving ‘well preserved’ (and today, somewhat ironically, falling within the ambit of the most recent chatelaine of Leadenham House, as present chair of the Lincolnshire Churches Trust).⁵ But this saga at least remained an essentially parochial affair unlike a 21st-century imbroglio at Leadenham which would attract national newspaper headlines, the putative heir reportedly incurring ‘vast legal costs battling his parents .. to protect his family heritage’.⁶

A heritage which is now half a millennium in the making and with its origins in the grant of a parcel of land to one Thomas Key in 1520. Five generations and one century on an expanded landholding became the property of his latest namesake, Thomas Key (IV), the first of his line to style himself ‘Gent’ and whose house likely stood on the site of the present-day mansion.⁷

see: Historic England

John Key succeeded his father in 1668, while his heir’s marriage ten years later to Margaret Ellis of nearby Wellingore would bring more land. However, the dominant presence in Leadenham at this time were the Beresfords who, having sold neighbouring Fulbeck Hall (to the Fane family), now built Leadenham Old Hall –  ‘a Charles II essay in beautiful golden ironstone’ (r)  – at the northern end of the village.⁵

Down the road, Ellis Key survived his father by just six years, succeeded in 1724 by his only son John who would die unmarried aged 66. His only surviving sibling, sister Janet, had meanwhile become the wife of William Reeve, scion of a lawyerly family of longstanding in the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray.

see: UK Bride

Though childless, John Key had continued the steady programme of land acquisition in Leadenham, snapping up acres here and there as they became available. At his death in 1789 the holding amounted to 1,147 acres; within a decade this would be doubled by his nephew, sister Janet’s barrister son William Reeve, who upon inheriting quickly set about inaugurating the new era by commissioning a splendid modern mansion.⁸

John Claude Nattes c.1800

Married to Millicent Mary King (of Ashby Hall, Ashby De La Launde, ten miles east) and with an expanding young family, Reeve turned to Leicestershire surveyor/engineers Christopher Staveley (father or son is unclear), hitherto ‘known for church monuments’⁵ but heavily engaged at this time in larger scale logistics, notably the creation of the local canal network. This background is perhaps evident in the sober, practical but not inelegant design of Leadenham House.

The austerity of the two-and-a-half storey, 9-bay entrance front facing west is subtly relieved by slightly recessed corners and centre, and multiple horizontal string courses. A classical porch sat below the tripartite first-floor window while an existing range from the former house of the Keys formed a courtyard behind the ‘square, chastely detailed block’.⁵

Country Life’⁴

Hannah Nash@Vimeo

Late-Georgian refinement abounds within, a suite of reception rooms (with 14-foot high ceilings) wrapping around the cantilevered stone staircase. Beneath ‘an Adamesque ceiling, the first-floor gallery leads to the bedrooms through an arch set above fluted pilasters’.⁴

The shiny new mansion was now comfortably the ‘big house’ in the village. By this time Leadenham Old Hall had descended to ageing widow Mrs. Elizabeth Howard and in 1795 William Reeve unburdened her of the house and its 1,172 acres. (This property remains part of the Reeve estate, being tenanted by the same family for the past 60-plus years.) Cousinly bequests before the century was out brought further property, extending the estate north and west, towards the neighbouring parishes of Brant Broughton and Welbourn.⁸

[Leadenham Estate 2013] see: Lincolnshire County Council

*

“I sincerely hope through the grace of God this year to put all my good resolutions in practice.” So began the first entry in the pocket diary (below) of William Reeve’s eldest daughter Jane in 1808; “From this day I diligently intend applying to the cultivation of my mind.”  Happily, the 22-year-old’s earnest resolve would not preclude a Jane Austen-esque whirl of afternoons spent “gossiping”, regular social engagements and, at the end of January, a sightseeing visit to London with her father.⁹

A hectic agenda in the capital included visits to the theatre, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. But heavy snow complicated their return carriage journey, and appears to have caused an afflicting chill. “Terribly cold,” began Jane Reeve’s brief diary entry for February 22 – unknowingly, her last. A further entry in a different hand on March 3 records that “Dear Jane departed this life at half past six in the evening the 2nd of March”, written by her grief-stricken younger sister, Millicent Mary. The Reeves would also lose a son, Henry, that same year.

(Three decades on Millicent would herself compile fulsome journals chronicling her travels accompanying soldier husband Thomas Chaplin on a two-year tour of duty in Britain’s North American colonies.¹⁰ Her detailed observations – and over one hundred watercolour sketches (↓), most now held in Canadian collections – ‘reveal a great deal about colonial society in a time when everything was in flux’.¹¹)

see: Christie’s

Having lost two children at home, the Reeves would also soon have natural concerns for their eldest son, John, who had enlisted with the Grenadier Guards (initiating a tradition followed by every subsequent generation at Leadenham) and quickly found himself pitched into the Napoleonic wars. But Reeve’s prowess on the battlefield saw him survive at Corunna (1809) and various other peninsular skirmishes, culminating in victory alongside Wellington at Waterloo.

General John Reeve (as he would ultimately become) succeeded his father at Leadenham House in 1820, marrying Lady Susan Sherard, daughter of the 5th Earl of Harborough, the following year. The first of the couple’s four children, John, arrived in 1822 and towards the end of that decade architect Lewis Vulliamy was hired to significantly expand Leadenham House.

Most distinctively his two-storey wing terminating in a blind classical arcade now extended the mansion to the east, while a stout canted porch gave protection to its principal entrance. A substantial new stable range (below) soon followed, with kennels also erected elsewhere on the estate, which sat in Belvoir territory. (‘The Leadenham country takes a lot of getting across when hounds really run .. you must put some steam on.’¹²)

see: Richard Croft @ geograph

But while Gen. Reeve was master of most all he surveyed at Leadenham, one key element of parish life remained outwith his control. For the advowson, the gift of the living of St. Swithun’s lay not with the lord of the manor but with the rectory, at this time the property of Mrs. Justina Smith who in 1839 installed her own son as the new vicar. Unfortunately, Rev. Bernard Smith was an energetic young cleric of distinctly Catholic tendencies…

… tendencies he would be far from shy about expressing, soon inviting his creative university friend (and recent Roman Catholic convert) Augustus Welby Pugin on a working visit to Leadenham.

see: shla.org.uk

With Smith’s encouragement but without formal licence, Pugin set about decorating the chancel ceiling in St. Swithun’s and prominently applying ‘manifold inscriptions’ (in Latin). This was but one of a series of alarmingly ‘popish’ developments which would be catalogued in letters of protest to the Bishop of Lincoln from the indignant occupants of Leadenham House.¹³

In addition to ‘the gaudy decoration of the chancel’ and the ‘profusion of inscriptions in a language unknown to the congregation’ there was also Bernard Smith’s performative conduct, his ‘frequent bowing and crossing himself, [and having] the children under his influence bow and cross themselves on coming into the Church in the same idolatrous manner’.¹³ The bishop was largely on the side of the Reeves, telling his turbulent priest to tone things down.¹⁴

Leadenham House/stables/church 1836

Mrs. Smith, for her part, complained of ‘the incessant interruptions [her son] had met with from Col. Reeves who has with the aid of Lady Susan Reeves undermined his influence in every possible manner, from his first entrance into the village’. ‘He and his family and servants’ would pointedly remain seated during services ‘to mark their disapprobation, an influence that still continues among the lower classes.’

Furthermore, the Reeves perceived passive aggression extended to her own community initiatives, claiming that ‘where I bestow charity, their favour is immediately withdrawn’. These hostilities hastened Bernard Smith’s formal conversion to Catholicism and the Leadenham advowson would eventually be acquired by the Reeve family from Mrs. Smith in 1851. But Pugin’s ‘gaudy decorations’ – ‘thought to be the only example of his work in a parish church’ – would nevertheless survive a general restoration of St. Swithun’s in 1861.

This parochial feuding was firmly in the past by the time the Reeves eldest son Lt. Col. John Reeve returned home from a rather more life-threatening battle zone, the Crimea, in April 1855. ‘All the neighbourhood was in a state of excitement,’ recorded next-door squire Walter Fane of Fulbeck Hall, the invalided Guardsman having been ‘especially popular, quite ready to drink beer and kiss the maids.’¹⁵

see: Leadenham House

Alas, John himself (accompanied by Nelly, left, the bull terrier he had taken with him to war) was quite unprepared for the cheering throngs at Leadenham House, where a band struck up ‘See the conquering hero comes’ on his arrival. As family friend Walter Fane observed, a non-plussed Reeve ‘shocked all the company by escaping into the house as quickly as possible and refusing to come out and make a speech.’¹⁵

A more welcome event for the Leadenham heir would be his wedding to Frances Welby in 1857 though happiness was to be brief, his bride dying shortly after giving birth to their first child the following year. ‘To John Reeve the loss is more than usually to be lamented, as a sensible wife to keep him in the right path was invaluable,’ noted Squire Fane, who was soon to become a family relation himself courtesy of his own son and heir, William.¹⁵

‘Harriet at breakfast rushed into the room and announced that Billy is engaged to be married to Susan Reeve. The females, who know much more of these matters than the males, were not surprised: but to me it came like a clap of thunder.’¹⁵

Museum of Lincolnshire Life

Fane’s counterpart up at Leadenham House was evidently quite delighted at the match. ‘General Reeve could not have been kinder .. or more magnificent. Susan Reeve has an independent income of £450pa. Her father gives her forthwith £20,000 [and] he took William to a coachmaker and presented him with a Brougham.’ (A similar model, right, from Leadenham’s fleet is these days a county museum piece.)¹⁵

Susan’s brother John Reeve would remarry Edith Dundas in 1863 and succeeded to the family estate the following year, the 81-year-old General having outlived his wife by just a few weeks. Lt.-Col. Reeve’s tenure saw the arrival of the Lincoln-Grantham railway line: ‘Most of the village stations had the same basic brick design but [Reeve] insisted that Leadenham be constructed of local Ancaster stone.’

see: Google Maps

Parcels of land continued to be acquired throughout the 19th century, the estate inherited by only son John Reeve (III) in 1897 aged 24 being in excess of 5,000 Lincolnshire acres. Returning home as a newly-wed in June 1900, the vehicle bearing Reeve and his bride Sybil would be hand-pulled by villagers through the newly created stone arch entrance to Leadenham’s park.¹⁶

see: Leadenham House

The Grenadier Guards captain was soon off to the Boer War for the best part of two years but upon his return there would be decorative developments within Leadenham House. ‘Hand-painted oriental panels of rice-paper were introduced [in the morning and drawing rooms], their delicacy marrying most happily [that] of the fine satinwood furniture.’⁴

John Reeve also served in the Great War, likewise his heir Col. William Reeve in World War II. William would leave the military to manage Leadenham in 1948, succeeding seven years on. The size of the estate had diminished in during his father’s time (presently some 3,000 acres): “It’s getting harder for every generation,” Reeve would tell the Guardian newspaper (r) in 1977.¹⁷

The following year saw the marriage of his eventual successor, third son Peter,  the unfortunate ultimate failure of which threatening at one point to imperil the Reeves very future at Leadenham House.

see: TTS Media/Leadenham

The tenure of Peter and Henrietta Reeve produced an architectural addition to the mansion in the form of a stone loggia with a large recessed portico facing the raised terrace, which was created in the 1990s perpendicular to the Vulliamy wing. The same decade also saw the culmination of a decades-long campaign for a bypass to relieve villagers from the heavy traffic on the A17, with consequences for the parkland of Leadenham House.

Peter Reeve (who died last year) was ultimately unsuccessful in efforts to convince planners that a route to the south of the village would have “a severe detrimental effect on the setting of Leadenham House”, and its parkland has been abbreviated and redefined by the multi-million pound scheme.(↓)¹⁸ Sitting against the Lincoln Edge, house and church are now distant eyecatchers for eastbound A17 travellers while the Reeves set about refashioning their westward vista, a reinstated avenue now extending to a small new lake.

see: National Library of Scotland

But the couple would divorce in 2011 leading to an initial radical decision to cash out entirely (sharing the proceeds with their four children). The nuclear option was subsequently altered to a 60/40 property split but eldest son William Reeve, estate manager since 2006, still feared that the fallout posed an existential threat to his family heritage and initiated a protracted, costly legal fight challenging his parents’ settlement. “What I’m fighting to protect is worth it. That’s the bottom line,” he explained.⁶ The very bottom line, however, was that he lost his case.

But despite this Reeve remained in situ at Leadenham, the gracious ambience of the House and its mature grounds being launched as a wedding venue in 2020 and the large stable range regularly enlivened by local events. Elsewhere, much of of the parish remains in family ownership and developments continue, not least at ‘world-class, all-weather’ Leadenham Polo Club.

see: Leadenham Polo Club

And as this post goes to press consultations are ongoing following the January 2025 announcement of a proposed ‘landscape-led solar farm‘ by Tellis Energy UK set to cover ‘the equivalent of around 1,360 football pitches between Leadenham, Brant Broughton and Welbourn’. Returns from the ‘nationally significant’ project are estimated to comfortably outstrip those from traditional agricultural activity: “The money is just colossal.”¹⁹ The sun, it seems, is not yet setting on this five-hundred-year long Lincolnshire story…

Leadenham park westward prospect | see: UK Bride

[Archives]

1. Suster, G. John Dee: Essential readings, 1986.
2. Roberts, R.J. John Dee, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2006.
3. Betjeman, J. Collins’ guide to English parish churches, 1958.
4. Oswald, A. Leadenham House, Lincolnshire I/II, Country Life 17/24 June 1965.
5. Pevsner, N., Harris, J., Antram, N. Buildings of England: Lincolnshire, 1989.
6. Daily Mail 23 Nov 2018.
7. Archivists’ report No.11, Lincolnshire Archives Committee, 1960.
8. Archivists’ report No.14, Lincolnshire Archives Committee, 1963.
9. MS Diary of Jane Reeve, 1-Fane/6/12/1, Lincolnshire Archives.
10. MS Journal of Millicent Mary Chaplin, 1-Fane/6/12/2-3, Lincolnshire Archives.
11. Burant, J. Drawing on the land: The New World travel diaries of Millicent Mary Chaplin, 2004.
12. Rudkin, J. A Belvoir ride. In: Paget, G.(Ed.) Bad ‘uns to beat, 1936.
13. MS COR/B/5/1/2 Lincolnshire Archives.
14. Ambler, R.W. The conversion to Roman Catholicism of Bernard Smith, Lincs. History & Archaeology, Vol.14, 1979.
15. MS Journal of William Fane 1850-62, Fane/6/10/7/D2, Lincolnshire Archives.
16. Grantham Journal 16 June 1900.
17. Lincott, G. Colonel Reeve’s village, The Guardian 3 Sept 1977.
18. Newark Advertiser 12 Aug 1996.
19. Lincolnshire Live 13 Jan 2025.

Whilst an impression to the contrary might easily be gained – not least through endeavours such as the one you are presently reading – it would be a mistake to assume that everyone who ‘made it’ in 18th- and 19th-century Britain naturally aspired to possess their own country house. Not even the lifestyle of a country squire, in a rented pile, appears, for instance, to have held any attraction for Mr. Dawson Turner, Esq., resident partner in the ‘very prosperous’ Yarmouth & Suffolk Bank for over sixty years from 1794. For all but five of these Turner was content to live ‘above the shop’ with his large family, at four-storey Georgian quayside Bank House in the bustling heart of the port town on Norfolk’s easterm coast.¹

A man of many parts, it was here that Turner, between his banking activities, pursued interests in fine art, local flora and fauna and antiquities, privately publishing texts featuring illustrations by his genteely prolific squad of sketching daughters (right), all fully signed up to their father’s various enthusiasms. (Turner had previously made renowned ‘Norwich School’ artist John Sell Cotman an offer he just couldn’t refuse, to relocate to Yarmouth to tutor them.)

When he joined the Yarmouth Bank – founded solely, like all such institutions at the time, upon the personal probity and wealth of its invested owners – Turner’s fellow partners were four closely-related Gurneys: Bartlett, Richard, Joseph and Hudson. The wealth of this Norwich Quaker family had originally derived from the woollen trade; when this industry saw a tectonic shift to Lancashire and Yorkshire, they made the strategic decision to diversify into banking. Yarmouth would be the first of several East Anglian subsidiaries of Gurney & Co., Dawson Turner being a rare recruit from without the Society of Friends (he would christen his eldest surviving son Gurney).

see: Sainsbury Centre

When Dawson Turner’s fellow partner Bartlett Gurney died in 1802 ‘he was succeeded in control of the [parent] bank by his cousins, including John Gurney’, of Earlham Hall near Norwich (r). ‘This delightful old place’ was not owned by Gurney but by the Bacon family, from whom since 1786 he had been content to lease the property.²

As, indeed, were subsequent generations of his descendants over a period of more than a century, ‘perhaps one of the oldest tenancies known for a mansion of the size’.² John Gurney raised eleven children at Earlham, a lively household which would be further augmented from 1801 by a regular teenaged visitor (and extended relation), Thomas Fowell Buxton. Fatherless from the age of six, Fowell Buxton’s mother was a daughter of Quaker brewer Osgood Hanbury; her sister would marry Richard Gurney of Keswick Hall near Norwich, brother of John of Earlham.

see: NPG

In time, having joined and quickly revitalised the fortunes of the Hanbury brewing enterprise based in Brick Lane in the East End of London, Fowell Buxton became a member of parliament, and William Wilberforce’s anointed successor in the battle for slave emancipation. This lengthy campaign would be waged from two country houses in north Norfolk neither of which Buxton ever owned but in which he would live the second half of his life.

Northrepps Hall, south of Cromer, had been acquired in 1790 by John Gurney of Earlham’s brother-in-law, fellow banker Robert Barclay. The death five years later of his wife Rachel Barclay saw Northrepps sold to her brother Richard Gurney of Keswick, husband of Rachel Hanbury, aunt of Fowell Buxton. The latter, by the time he became the tenant of Northrepps Hall, had married Hannah Gurney (of Earlham) whose sister Louisa would marry another banker, Samuel Hoare, this couple now becoming frequent guests of the Buxtons at Northrepps.

As writer and architectural historian Mark Girouard observed, the inter-marriages of the ‘formidable family clan of rich, philanthropic and intensely worthy Gurneys, Hoares, Barclays and Buxtons are baffling to anyone not born into it’.³

A domestic catastrophe had hastened the Buxtons’ retreat from London to the tranquil remoteness of north Norfolk. Having relocated to Hampstead from their large house next to the booming Hanbury Buxton Brewery in Spitalfields, ironically for a healthier environment, the couple experienced the loss of four of their eight children in the space of five weeks in 1820. Three daughters under five fatally contracted a combination of whooping cough and measles shortly after their eldest brother had returned from boarding school with a separate sickness from which he too succumbed.

The Buxtons now departed to ‘Gurney Country’, north Norfolk, taking a lease on Cromer Hall immediately to the south of that small coastal town (fashionable in Regency times thanks in no small part to its colonisation by the aforementioned interrelated ‘cousinhood’ who had many holiday homes between them in Cromer).³ ‘Sheltered from the north winds by closely surrounding hills and woods,’ as depicted (below) by eldest daughter Priscilla Buxton, Cromer Hall was then an E-plan brick house with crow-stepped gables, owned by a junior branch of the Wyndhams of  Felbrigg Hall.⁴

‘Cromer Hall October 1825’ [Original sketch, author’s collection]

Mrs. Hannah Buxton in particular ‘found great comfort in the old house’ but in the eighth year of their residence the Buxtons were given notice to quit by a new but ill-fated Wyndham generation with transformational plans for Cromer Hall.⁵ Local architect William Donthorne was now recruited to dramatically remodel the house in Gothic revival style. But ‘in October 1829, within two months of completion, the Hall was destroyed by fire’.⁶ Despite being under-insured, young squire Wyndham promptly ordered the place to be rebuilt again only to die before it was complete. In time his widow would sell the Cromer Hall estate to Benjamin Bond Cabbell MP for £64,000, and in which family it has since descended.⁷

see: Philip Venning @ Historic England

“It is a curious, and, to me, a melancholy scene,” teenaged Priscilla Buxton recorded as her family’s time at old Cromer Hall neared its end, “it seems but yesterday since we came here, seven and a half years ago.”⁸ It was her mother’s cousin, Richard ‘Dick’ Hanbury Gurney, who now came to the Buxtons’ rescue, offering them an initially stop-gap rental of the nearby house which he had inherited from his father in 1811; it would be their home for the next 44 years.

“Northrepps Hall, Feb. 4, 1829: Here we are! This day we have entered our new abode; begun this stage and section of lives.”⁸

Northrepps Hall by Priscilla Buxton (1834)⁵

A huge man with a boundless zeal for field sports, the only proviso Norfolk banker Dick Gurney placed on the arrangement was his retention of shooting rights over the estate. Indeed, it was the opportunities offered by the local terrain for such activity which were at least as attractive to the wider clan as the fact of the area being within walking distance of the coast. In the late 18th century Dick’s relation and equally enthusiastic gun Bartlett Gurney had also purchased land abutting the Northrepps property, an acquisition for which he had initially entertained grand ambitions.  

For surviving today at Northrepps Hall is an early ‘Red Book’ commissioned by Bartlett Gurney from Norfolk-born landscaper Humphry Repton. The scheme suggested in this ‘particularly interesting document’ included a classical mansion designed by Repton’s ‘ingenious friend’ William Wilkins Snr. However, the only building realised from the project would be an altogether more modest but highly picturesque Gothic essay, Northrepps Cottage (which ‘while altered remains an important and interesting example of Wilkins’ architecture’).⁹

see: Northrepps Cottage

It was to this secluded property that Dick’s long-invalided but indomitable and accomplished sister Anna Gurney would relocate from Northrepps Hall, where she had lived until her mother’s death in 1825. That household had latterly also included Fowell Buxton’s sister, Sarah, with whom Anna had formed an intimate bond; the ‘Cottage Ladies’ would become a energetic charitable double act locally, establishing a school for the children of nearby Overstrand (which endures), and aiding many a shipwrecked mariner.

Prior to letting the house to the Buxtons, Dick Gurney had used Northrepps Hall periodically as a shooting box, having also been bequeathed bachelor Bartlett Gurney’s neighbouring land (complete with Northrepps Cottage) specifically to unify the sporting territory. Like all of her siblings, Anna Gurney had drifted away from the Society of Friends but her social conscience never dimmed, now fired by a fervent embrace of the Church of England. So insistent was Anna’s hectoring of her distinctly more relaxed brother that Dick would install stained glass ‘on the Cottage side of Northrepps Hall, that is still there, to guard against her trying to admonish him through the windows’.⁵

But Gurney’s principle residence was another mansion west of Norwich, Thickthorn Hall (r), three miles from his family’s home at Keswick Hall. And separating these two properties was the Intwood Hall estate of one Joseph Muskett, who took court action in 1818 unsuccessfully claiming Gurney had been taking liberties with his wife, Mary (nee Jary). Luckily, this scandal had broken shortly after Gurney had surprised his family by campaigning successfully (if very expensively) for a local seat in parliament.

But several years on Squire Muskett would be awarded £2,000 in damages following a renewed legal suit which asserted that the member for Norwich was responsible for the now very conspicuous condition of his wife. Illegitimate Mary Jary Gurney was born in 1829 and would be raised in relative seclusion by the subsequently happy couple at Thickthorn Hall.

*

Up at Northrepps Hall near Cromer Richard Gurney’s tenant and now fellow MP Thomas Fowell Buxton (the member for Weymouth where he had inherited, but would never occupy, Bellfield House) cut an altogether more conscientious figure. Having previously campaigned for prison reforms (alongside his Quaker in-laws, high profile Elizabeth Fry and her brother Joseph John Gurney) and becoming the founding chairman of the RSPCA, Buxton was now welcoming an ageing William Wilberforce to Northrepps Hall as his focus returned to the ongoing fight for the emancipation of slaves.

see: Norfolk Museums

Although the trade in humans had been outlawed in British colonies in 1807 the ownership and exploitation of those already enslaved had not. Committed Christian Fowell Buxton now spearheaded the campaign in parliament, supported enthusiastically on the home front by the ‘Cottage Ladies’ (beating the well-worn path between the Hall and their home in the woods behind) and his daughter and now personal secretary, Priscilla.

A mutual friend recalled the scene at this time: ‘I have in my memory vivid visions of Northrepps Hall – that sunny court brilliant with flowers; Miss Anna Gurney and Miss Sarah Buxton, invaluable helpers in all philanthropic objects of their adored chief, Mr. Buxton, the poor worn-out MP, fatigued from slavery work, sauntering on the lawn, Mrs B. and Priscilla behind, charming and happy. Oh, they were delightful hours and most unusual people.’⁵

Northrepps Hall (garden front) by Priscilla Buxton

In the teeth of reactionary vested interests, the Emancipation Bill was finally passed in 1833, helped over the line by an unprecedented petition of 187,000 female signatures headed by its instigators, Priscilla Buxton and Amelia Opie. Priscilla’s wedding with her father’s colleague Andrew Johnston MP took place at Northrepps on August 1, 1834, the same day that all colonial slaves were to be granted their freedom.

see: Norfolk Museums

Exhausted and subject to recurring bouts of ill health, Sir Fowell Buxton (as he became in 1840) now spent more time at Northrepps Hall, which had been little altered since the arrival of the Barclays in 1790. They had heightened and, with the introduction of sash windows and a classically detailed entrance porch, ‘Georgianised’ the 17th-century L-shaped brick and flint house, ‘nearly doubling the size’.¹⁰ 

see: Historic England

Now, while the Buxtons ‘were sojourning in Rome, the Hall was a good deal enlarged’.¹⁰ A new storey was added to the kitchen wing and the principal reception rooms lengthened, with French windows opening onto newly laid-out gardens. The existing outbuildings were largely demolished, replaced by new stabling, a coach house and ‘coachman’s cottage, [with] a new laundry in an enclosed cobbled square’.⁵

Naturally, Buxton’s keen social conscience was evident on the home front. ‘He found great pleasure in his tree plantations and was particularly happy that they gave employment to local people on previously uncultivated land, at a very good wage. At one point he was employing 93 men at a time when unemployment was high.’¹¹ His estate workers were, however, not always entirely comfortable with Buxton’s paternalistic embrace.

In 1836, having commissioned some family portraits, Fowell also invited his gamekeeper, Larry Banville, to sit for his likeness. ‘I was obliged to stand to be drawn for the first time in my life,’ the Irishman recorded. ‘I found it harder work to stand still for two hours than four hours walking in wet turnips.’ Ah, but it was worth it, Larry, wasn’t it? ‘My picture almost frightened me .. my head double the size it ever appeared to me in a glass, my arms as thick as the yard arm of a 74-gun man o’ war.’ Buxton was pleased enough, however, hanging it in the drawing room at Northrepps Hall.¹²

C19th drawing [Author’s collection]

Following his death aged 57 in August 1845, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton would be memorialised in Westminster Abbey, his statue joining that of William Wilberforce in recognition of the eventual peaceable emancipation of 800,000 slaves across the British colonies (‘by any standards a colossal achievement’).¹¹ But the man himself was interred in altogether more modest surroundings, in the family vault within the ruins of St. Martin’s church at Overstrand (left, since rebuilt), where the ‘Cottage Ladies’, sister Sarah (in 1839) and Anna Gurney (in 1857 before 2,000 mourners), were also laid to rest.¹³

see: ‘100 years at Northrepps Hall’

Widowed Lady Hannah Buxton would continue to live on at Northrepps Hall until her own death there in 1872. Receiving regular visitations from an ever-expanding brood of grandchildren the capacity of the house had been increased with the creation of the north wing in the 1850s. Peculiarly, the Northrepps estate was also populated at this time by a rather more exotic influx…

… being various species of parrots, cockatoos and the like, an experimental ornithological enthusiasm taken up by the Buxtons’ sons. In Cromer, eldest son Sir Edward Buxton maintained an aviary at Colne House, where emus grazed the lawn³ and to which the Dowager Lady Buxton was a very frequent visitor, going back to Northrepps Hall on at least one occasion with a new addition ‘to our flock, a green Australian parakeet’.¹⁰

Marvelling at the ingenuity of these creatures, Charles Buxton recounted how not even the best efforts of ‘a first-rate London locksmith’ could keep ‘the cleverest of the lot’, a large white cockatoo, chained to a perch.¹⁴ (A visiting Duchess of Bedford was reputedly somewhat less impressed with the birds’ ability to liberate the diamonds from her tiara.¹⁵)

In contrast to this picture of animated domestic contentment at Northrepps Hall, the affairs of the estate’s actual owners had been distinctly less harmonious. Dick Gurney died in 1851 having five years earlier seen his only child Mary married at aged 17 to a cousin’s son, John Henry Gurney, a director of ‘the bankers’ bank’ Overend, Gurney and Co. This couple acquired and would make their home at Catton Hall close to several other Gurney mansions west of Norwich (and which had been the site of Humphry Repton’s very first landscaping commission).

see: National Library of Scotland

Despite producing two sons, Jack and Richard, life as the dutiful spouse of a banker (and soon MP) fell rather short of the overheated romantic imaginings engendered by Mary’s sheltered upbringing. When she became pregnant for a third time, the father was not her husband but dashing estate groom William Taylor with whom Mary had become hopelessly infatuated. Despite face-saving entreaties by John Henry, as the principal beneficiary of her father Dick’s will, Mary Jary Gurney ultimately had the means (having inherited a reputed £1M in addition to the Northrepps estate) to wash her hands of Norfolk and start a new family life with her beau down in Sussex.

Gurney’s luck soon appeared to take an upswing when in 1864 he came into the Keswick Hall estate of his relation Hudson Gurney. But alas this would be quickly followed by the catastrophic collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co. – ‘The Times immediately christened it ‘Black Friday’ due to the financial panic that ensued’ – leaving John Henry facing not only huge financial liabilities but criminal charges of dodgy dealing.¹⁶ The banking Barclay family would salvage the business remnants (creating the present-day ubiquitous entity) and Catton Hall was now sold (to his cousin Samuel Gurney Buxton) but Keswick and Northrepps were transferred to his sons before the trial, in which he would be acquitted.

In relatively reduced circumstances, after the death of Lady Buxton, John Henry Gurney (left) and his sons move into Northrepps Hall, its late-18th century furnishings now being supplemented by assorted items from Catton, Earlham and Thickthorn Halls.⁵ And the tradition of keeping things in the family would again be evident in the boys’ marriages, both to second cousins.

Eldest son Jack would take his new wife Margaret Gurney (and also his father’s love of ornithology) down to Keswick Hall while Richard remained at Northrepps after his marriage to Eva Buxton (the daughter of Sir Edward Buxton, 2nd Bt., and Catherine Gurney of Colne House). The couple would share the Hall with his father until (the happily rent-paying) John Henry Gurney’s death in 1890. The following year Richard and Eva made their mark at Northrepps…

see: Norfolk Museums

… adding to its irregular plan with the creation of ‘a new dining room with a beautiful school-room above. At the same time the pillared porch was replaced by an ornate red brick and loftily glazed vestibule’ (below). The youngest of the couple’s five children was 7 when their father died at 44 in 1899. ‘Eva lived at Northrepps as a widow for 27 years with her children and grandchildren about her, as Hannah (Lady Buxton) had done for 27 years before her.’⁵

see: Literary Norfolk

‘Though so many close crossings of the breed are, according to some, of no advantage to the strain of blood it must be owned that from a worldly point of view they have been most successful,’ it was observed early last century. ‘There has been no taking strange families on trust, few unsuitable marriages, the descendants rich beyond dreams, and [who] girdle Norwich with their mansions.’¹⁷

While the latter all still stand, the kinfolk’s association with Keswick, Earlham and Catton Halls would be steadily decoupled, the last-named in now subsumed into suburban Norwich, Keswick Hall and the long-leased Earlham Hall into the realm of the University of East Anglia. After the death in 1934 of Jack Gurney’s childless son, Gerard, Keswick and its contents had passed to his cousin, Quintin Gurney, who favoured Bawdeswell Hall… 

see: Adrian Pye

see: Gowing & Hunt Ltd

… near Dereham (left), acquired in 1912. (Other 20th century additions now see the Norfolk Gurney diaspora also in residence at Heggatt Hall (r) and elsewhere.)

Meanwhile, the Northrepps Estate would pass in the male line throughout the 20th century. For almost the entirety of the 21st it has been in the custodianship of Simon Gurney* who has credited his late wife, Deborah, with having “rebuilt the estate’s finances to allow” him to pursue the restoration of the landscaping which had been envisioned by Humphry Repton’s Red Book, and hitherto long-since obscured beneath an “immense overgrown jungle”.

Such terrain would, of course, have well-suited those Amazonian parrots and their ilk which were encouraged to ‘fly wild about the place’ by intervening occupants of the Northrepps estate. Being an unlikely outpost of the frontline against the ills of 19th century society, the human comings and goings of that era perhaps echoed the behavioural observations then made of Northrepps’ avian community: ‘They evidently look upon man and his doings with the keenest interest, mingled with surprise and, perhaps, just a soupçon of contempt…’¹⁴

[Northrepps Estate][map][Northrepps Cottage]

[*In 1981 his cousin Diane Gurney married the present-day squire of Cromer Hall]

1. Campbell, J. ‘The banker’. Dawson Turner: A Norfolk antiquary and his remarkable family, ed. Goodman, N., 2007.
2. Hare, A.J.C. The Gurneys of Earlham, 1895.
3. Girouard, M. Town and country, 1992.
4. Buxton, C. Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1849.
5. Anderson, V. The grandchildren of Northrepps, 1968.
6. O’Donnell, R. Cromer Hall, Norfolk, Country Life 10 Jan 2002.
7. Pipe, C. A dictionary of Cromer and Overstrand history, 2010.
8. Johnston, P. Extracts from the journal of Priscilla Buxton, 1862.
9. Bate, S., Savage, R. Williamson, T. Humphry Repton in Norfolk, 2018.
10. Gurney, R.H.J. 100 years at Northrepps Hall, unpublished MS, c.1895.
11. Barclay, O. Thomas Fowell Buxton and the liberation of slaves, 2001.
12. Virgoe, N., Yaxley, S. (Eds.) The Banville diaries: Journals of a Norfolk gamekeeper 1822-44, 1986.
13. Lane, R. Anna Gurney 1795-1857, 2001.
14. Buxton, C. Acclimatization of parrots at Nortrepps Hall, Norfolk, Annals & Magazine of Natural History, 1868.
15. Vickers, H., McCullough, C. Great country house disasters, 1982.
16. Sowerbutts, R. et al. The demise of Overend Gurney, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Q2 2016.
17. Rye, W. ‘The Gurneys and the allied families of Barclay, Buxton, Birkbeck and Hoare‘. In: East Anglia in the 20th century: Contemporary biographies, ed. W.T. Pike, 1912.
18. Kenworthy-Browne, J. et al. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses, Vol III: East Anglia, 1981.

With the publication in 1656 of his celebrated work Antiquities of Warwickshire, Sir William Dugdale (1605-1686) unquestionably raised the bar in the sphere of English parochial history. Throughout it, however, the indefatigable antiquary and herald seldom passed up an opportunity to decry the process which had liberated properties such as that which today, somewhat ironically, comprises the most prominent portion of the sizeable, ever-private estate of his descendants.

Born just seventy years after it had begun, in Dugdale’s eyes King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries represented ‘the most signal disaster in the nation’s history. No one wanted the monasteries to be closed, he maintains [in Antiquities], except for the king and those of his followers who stood to gain from the distribution of their wealth.’¹ Of the Cistercian abbey at Merevale – a “mountainous and woody Desert” immediately west of the town of Atherstone – Dugdale records how the monastery there had initially been “preserved from Ruin, when lesser Houses went to Wrack” before it too was “overwhelmed in the general Deluge” in 1639.²

The beneficiaries in this instance were the Devereuxs, later earls of Essex, who “patchd up some part of the Ruins here, and resided thereon” before eventually selling up to a wealthy local sheep farmer, Edward Stratford, in 1649. Precisely one century on the Stratford male line would expire at which point the Merevale estate passed into the ownership of the Dugdales of Blyth Hall, in the nearby parish of Shustoke.

As readers of his influential county history were informed, ‘Sir Walter Aston, by his Deed of Bargain and Sale, dated 14 Nov. [1625] conveyed Blithe unto me, William Dugdale, it being the Place of my Residence, and where I compiled this present Work’. At his death in 1686 Dugdale had racked up sixty years as resident squire of Blyth Hall, an achievement later matched by his 20th-century counterpart, Sir William Dugdale (1922-2014), who would favour comparatively homely (Grade I listed) Blyth over the costly Victorian bombast of Merevale Hall, the re-creation of his great-grandfather.

see: Buzzin Drones

Since 2009, however, the family of his heir have made Merevale (r) – a remote hilltop presence locally, with vistas into at least three counties – their private home. Meanwhile, last year saw the launch of the original (and presently surplus) Dugdale seat as ‘your hall away from home, available for exclusive use hire’ after ‘four centuries of continuous use as a family house’. But the founder of this dynasty, as a professional arbiter of ancient lineage at the College of Arms, readily acknowledged that his own roots in his home county were not very deep at all.

‘An undertaking [like this], would have been more proper for such a one whose Ancestors had enjoyed a long Succession in this Countie, whereunto I cannot pretend; for my Father was the first,’ William Dugdale owned in concluding his preface to The Antiquities of Warwickshire. John Dugdale was from Clitheroe in Lancashire; after graduating from Oxford he held various clerical positions in that city before acquiring a long lease on the rectory at Shustoke.

In declining health and wishing to see his only son settled, 17-year-old William Dugdale married Margery Huntbach (of a minor Staffordshire family, ‘whose uncle held land in Shustoke’) not long before his father’s death in 1624.³ William was bequeathed means enough to purchase the Blyth Hall estate near Coleshill very soon after, the couple moving into the rundown riverside property in November 1626. “Beside the great want of repaire in all the buildings there standing, the garden and orchard plots lay open to the rest of the grounde,” Dugdale would later recall (in an unpublished memoir amongst his papers, later removed to Merevale where they remain).⁴

see: Bing Maps

The young squire promptly initiated some productive reordering of the grounds (including linear ‘stew’ ponds ‘created to cope with flooding from the river Blythe running alongside the gardens’), and work would also get underway in earnest on the house itself.⁵

‘Blyth Hall appears to have been a typical high-status house of the period, comprising two gable-ended crosswings to either side of a central hall.’⁶ A stone chimneypiece dated 1629 survives today, as does a ‘mighty 17th-century staircase in the Jacobean tradition’.⁷ And from 1628 William and Margery began producing children almost annually, no less than 18 across 22 years (though only half-a-dozen would survive to adulthood). 

But in addition to this domestic industry Dugdale would begin to develop a bent for historical research, his appetite and organisational capacity gradually earning the respect and influential patronage of like-minded antiquarians Sir Simon Archer (of Umberslade Hall, 20 miles south of Blyth) and Sir Christopher Hatton. In 1638 his labours would gain him employment as a herald at the College of Arms, a role which brought Dugdale into the orbit of the royal court.

His timing wasn’t ideal, of course, and he was soon drawn directly into the travails of Charles I. As a hands-on royalist he would be obliged by the new regime to compound (albeit quite leniently) for the return of his estate, while his day job became somewhat redundant during the austerity of the Interregnum. But with more time on his hands Dugdale now threw himself into other projects, extensive researches (combined with efficient collating and assimilation of the work of others) resulting in landmark publications: Monasticum Anglicanum (with Roger Dodsworth, from 1655), ‘the consummate county history of the century’ The Antiquities of Warwickshire in 1656, and The history of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1658).¹

All of which enhanced Dugdale’s reputation and attracted other remunerative research commissions, needed to supplement the income from his modest estate and to subsidize the fluctuating circumstances of various grown-up daughters.³ When at last 36-year-old Elizabeth Dugdale married she became the third wife of her father’s close friend and heraldic colleague, Isiah Ashmole (whose personal collections became the foundation of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum). Ashmole’s regular visits to Blyth Hall are recorded in an ‘extremely offensive and disgusting Diary, being a relation of all his many maladies, mentioned in the most gross terms’.⁸

Ashmole therein asserts that in 1676 he turned down the top job at the College of Arms, insisting that his father-in-law deserved the position. William Dugdale duly accepted the senior role of Garter King of Arms, its £100 annual salary and a knighthood. He died in office in 1686 (five years after Margery, his wife of almost six decades) and is memorialised in St. Cuthbert’s church in Shustoke.

William was succeeded by his only surviving son, Sir John Dugdale (see mis-titled portrait below), also a knighted (if somewhat less committed) herald⁸ who outlived his father by just fourteen years but certainly left his mark at Blyth Hall where his fine Queen Anne refronting of the house survives intact.

see: ArtUK

‘It is highly likely that the formal gardens on Henry Beighton’s 1728 engraving [are also] the late 17th-century layout created by Sir John, who had ample funds to develop the grounds, having married two heiresses. His main aim was to produce a grandiose approach to the new south front.’⁵(↓) All this was the inheritance of his 46-year-old son William, who would similarly enjoy Blyth for just 14 years, succeeded in turn by his own son, John, 23, who commissioned the engraving, and ‘made more alterations’ before his own death, without children, in 1749.⁹

source: Dugdale’s ‘Antiquities of Warwickshire’, 2nd Ed., 1730

In that same year, eight or so miles north-east of Blyth Hall, Francis Stratford was busy adding a Palladian stable range to his house on the hill above Atherstone. At this time the appearance of Merevale Hall (below) was not entirely dissimilar to Blyth, being ‘a long low house of two storeys with a hipped roof and dormers’.¹¹

[1829] see source

Like John Dugdale, Stratford was without a direct male heir but he did have four daughters, painted individually by Thomas Gainsborough to accompany a double portrait of Francis and his wife, Anne, in 1762, the year of Stratford’s death. (The pictures remain at Merevale: ‘As a group of portraits, unlined and in their original frames, they are a remarkable survival.’)¹²

Five years later one of the quartet, Penelope, married Richard Geast who, as the nephew of John Dugdale, had been bequeathed Blyth Hall in 1749, adopting the Dugdale name. The couple ‘lived at Blyth’¹² and it was their son, Dugdale Stratford Dugdale, who in the first decade of the 19th century now inherited both Blyth and Merevale Halls, adding conservatories at either end of Merevale’s main facade (↑). He also began snapping up land around about: ‘Baxterley, acquired in the late 1820s, was a major acquisition and the estate grew till it reached its current size.’¹³ (5,689 acres in 1883.)

After succeeding his father in 1836 William Stratford Dugdale initiated the strategic expansion of long-existent coal-mining activity at Merevale. Two new shafts 1000-feet deep were sunk at Baxterley, ‘their productivity encouraging Dugdale to overspend in all directions’, most conspicuously on a spectacular reimagining of Merevale Hall.¹³

see: Buzzin Drones

This was not the original plan, however, architect Edward Blore having been ‘brought in to add some bedrooms’ to the existing house (Dugdale and his wife Harriet, sister of Viscount Portman, having at least five of their eventual ten children by this point). But on closer inspection Blore declared the old place to be structurally rotten and, armed with a persuasive set of artist’s impressions (↓), convinced his client to go for a total rebuild. ‘What had been intended as a quick £5,000 job ended up taking six years and costing £35,000.’¹¹

source: British Library

A skilled draughtsman with ‘an early enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, Blore [had] built up an extensive country-house practice, the ‘Tudor’ and ‘Elizabethan’ styles his speciality.’¹² With the land falling away sharply on three sides, he ‘made excellent use of the picturesque potential of the site’ at Merevale, the new three-storey Hall’s dramatic elevation being emphasised by towers and turrets.⁹ 

see: Lodders

The principal entrance was to be centred within the house’s uniquely symmetrical south-east front (which would soon overlook formal garden terraces created by William Nesfield). However, deep into the project Mrs. Dugdale in particular came to feel that this arrangement impinged on the privacy of the capacious ground-floor rooms, and requested the entrance be relocated.

Country Life 13 March 1969

An apparently exasperated Blore now stepped away, leaving his partner Henry Clutton to handle the substantial revision. ‘The house is now entered from the west through a corridor, which has something of the character of a Jacobean Long Gallery.’⁹

‘The ground floor rooms are spacious, well lit and sensibly planned, and when one is in them one can understand why Blore was so successful a country house architect.’¹⁰

see: British Listed Buildings

(‘First floor arcades have Venetian-traceried windows containing heraldic stained glass.’¹¹) The plainly emollient Clutton would be retained at Merevale for some years, adding features such as a gatehouse (r) and a new church for the mining community at Baddesley. This programme of expansion and expense greatly encumbered the estate, however, ‘debt which was not finally cleared until 1927’.¹³

And Dugdale not only lost sight of the bottom line during this period but also, reportedly, the sight in one eye. ‘A very serious accident occurred out shooting with his son, when the latter from behind a hedge discharged his fowling-piece, and the contents lodged in the face and head of his father.’¹⁵ But a worse fate was to befall his namesake son and heir.

William Stratford Dugdale was a 43-year-old bachelor barrister when he succeeded to the Merevale and Blyth estates in September 1871. He married Alice Trevelyan before the year was out, however, and their first-born, William, arrived the following autumn; the boy would become ‘squire’ before he was ten years old.

For on 2 May, 1882 catastrophe visited the wider estate community, a poorly installed new pit-pump boiler having set off a chain of events which culminated in an explosion at (the then loss-making) Baddesley Colliery. Among the eventual 32 fatalities (aged from 13 to 71) was mine owner William Stratford Dugdale, one of many would-be rescuers who soon succumbed to horrific injuries. The shaft ‘was permanently sealed and was never worked again’.¹⁶

see: Waddesdon

But ‘on reaching 21 and gaining control of the estate, his son William [deploying new German mining technology] decided to sink a new shaft and reopen the pit, financed by the sale of an Aelbert Cuyp landscape to the Rothschilds (r) for £15,000’. (With a high grade product, and being the closest colliery to London, Baddesley colliery subsequently thrived until the nationalisation of the industry in 1947.)¹³

Dugdale was 47 when he married Margaret Gilmour; the couple and two young sons would relocate to secondary family seat Blyth Hall for a couple of years from 1924 ‘while Merevale was wired for electric light and central heating was installed but only in the passages, not in the bedrooms!’ Ten years after their return to Merevale (entrance lodges on Watling Street shown below) Dugdale received a baronetcy; Sir William and Lady Dugdale both died in 1965.¹³

see: Google Maps

By this time his heir, Sir William Dugdale MC, and wife Belinda (Pleydell-Bouverie) had been resident at Blyth Hall for twelve years, steadily improving the house and grounds and raising four children, and decided to stay put. ‘Although we used it for summer holidays when we didn’t notice the cold, Merevale remained empty’ for the next thirty years.¹³

source¹³

Having been a gung-ho amateur jump jockey (fell at the fourth fence in the 1952 Grand National), William and his wife subsequently developed a racehorse breeding operation. But ‘at the December Newmarket sales in 1960 Belinda woke one morning in great pain,’ succumbing to an ovarian cyst the following summer. With a redoubtable nanny now taking the strain on the home front, Sir William soon began a somewhat ad-hoc odyssey of service in the public and private sector, becoming chairman of Warwickshire County Council, Severn Trent Water Authority and Aston Villa football club over the course of the next three decades.¹³

see: Major PR

In 1967, artistically inclined heiress Cylla Mount became the 2nd baronet’s second wife, this couple’s son Joshua Dugdale having since inherited and developed her family’s ‘beautiful 4,000-acre estate’, Wasing Park in Berkshire. (‘Map publisher John Mount purchased the estate in 1759. Hosting events such as Medicine – ‘the wokest festival on the planet’ – Wasing is now ‘a vibrant and unique space to celebrate, connect, grow & heal’.)

see: Layne Fab @ YouTube

Meanwhile, his older half-brother Matthew (Dugdale, 3rd Bt., left) and American wife Paige would reinstate Merevale Hall as a family home in 1995. As his heir assumed complete running of the estate, Sir William would be ‘left with Blyth and the garden, with income from the surrounding sand and gravel deposits’, and quickly worked out that ‘I had to keep my mouth shut if family harmony was to be maintained’.¹³ The eternally ‘raffish‘ baronet died at Blyth in 2014.

Today, ‘monumental’ Merevale Hall – looming over 180 acres of ‘grand oak-studded’ parkland¹⁷ (‘not landscaped in any formal sense, but rather left to its naturally picturesque state’¹⁸) – remains an essentially private domain. But a few miles down the road the grounds of comely Blyth Hall will this summer once again host the local country show, while the house itself last year began a new chapter. 

see: Blyth Hall

see: Blyth Hall

For planning permission was obtained in 2020 to adapt (lightly and reversibly) the original Dugdale family seat to now accommodate up to ’30 people in 13 bedrooms .. in the relaxing serenity of one of the Midlands’ prettiest stretches of river’.

As someone whose life work recognized continuity and succession, were 17th century Sir William to return to the home he established four centuries ago he would doubtless be gratified to find it still in Dugdale hands, and much there that remained familiar…

see: Google Maps

1. Dyer, C., Richardson, C. (Eds.) William Dugdale, historian 1605-1686: His life, writings and his county, 2009.
2. Dugdale, W. The antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656.
3. Broadway, J. ‘Unreliable witness: Sir William Dugdale and the perils of autobiography‘: In (1)
4. Tyack, G. ‘Dugdale and the Warwickshire country house‘: In (1)
5. Mowl, T., James, D. The historic gardens of England: Warwickshire, 2011.
6. TDR Heritage, planning submission, 2019.
7. Pevsner, N., Pickford, C. The buildings of England: Warwickshire, 2016.
8. Noble, M. A history of the College of Arms, 1804.
9. Tyack, G. Country houses of Warwickshire, 1994.
10. Girouard, M. The Victorian country house, 1971.
11. Girouard, M. Merevale Hall, Warwickshire I/II, Country Life 13/20 Mar 1969.
12. Belsey, H. Thomas Gainsborough: the portraits, fancy pictures and copies after old masters, 2019.
13. Dugdale, Sir W. Settling the bill: Memoirs of Bill Dugdale, 2011.
14. Colvin, H. A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600-1840, 1978.
15. Berrow’s Worcester Journal 25 Jan 1849.
16. Bell, D. Memories of the Warwickshire coalfields, 2011.
17. Reid, P. Burke’s and Savills guide to country houses Vol. Two, 1980.
18. Merevale: A brief history of the site, Warwickshire Gardens Trust, 1995.

Being also a biographer of Sir John Vanbrugh, the late poet-cum-glass engraver Sir Laurence Whistler was as well placed as any to attempt to summon the spirit of the Baroque playwright turned architect. The product of his imaginings was a 12×9.5 inch window-pane commissioned c.1970 by the sons of the laird of cliff-top Wemyss Castle (on the occasion of their parents’ golden wedding) and which superimposed hypothetical Vanbrugh-esque embellishments upon the ancient seat of the Wemyss family. This flight of fancy would later be written up as ‘a hoax’ in an edition of Country Life magazine (↓).¹

Country Life 10 June 1971

Ironically, glass-making had been one of the Wemyss estate’s less successful economic endeavours, a short-lived early-18th century enterprise attempted by David, 4th earl of Wemyss who would nevertheless commission a celebration of the family’s industrious prosperity in another remarkable idealised image of his home, and which remains in situ. The highly detailed sixteen-feet wide panorama [detail] by Flemish painter Jan van der Sijpen…

… includes the then very lucrative salt manufacture operation at West Wemyss just south of the Castle. However, ‘there is no documentary or physical evidence for the classical pavilion and the formal garden that [are pictured] to the north, which appear to be a whimsical invention of the patron’.²

Fife Libraries, Museums & Archive

Historically, the most significant economic mainstay of this estate – a family heritage today branded the Wemyss Development Company – was coal. ‘[From] the 16th century the company developed and operated a number of collieries in Fife,’ which would define and sustain local communities until the 1960s. Peculiarly, the so-called ‘parrot coal’ found hereabouts could be ‘easily carved, did not mark and took a high polish’, characteristics one local self-taught Victorian artisan, Thomas Williamson, was encouraged to exploit. ‘A remarkable architectural model of Wemyss Castle’ was among various pieces…

… created for the house (others of which are now elsewhere ↑) as a result of ‘the enthusiastic patronage of pit-owner James Erskine Wemyss’. (Via the 1851 Great Exhibition, Williamson’s work also caught the eye of Prince Albert.)³

see: Teyrnon Powell @ YouTube

All of these artistic recreations remain as private as Wemyss Castle itself, of which on terra firma only partial, neck-craning glimpses are available, through the tree line above a coastal path skirting the 50-foot cliff upon which it has evolved across six centuries. And, just as with works of art, beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.

see: castle_and_ghost @ Instagram

The unrelieved mass of the south face of the Castle looks out across the Firth of Forth. In the mind of one late-20th century authority, ‘the barrack-like house of the Wemysses of Wemyss [owes] its present bleak appearance to the reconstruction begun in the 1930s’.⁴ But just two decades prior to that assessment this reconstruction – essentially the sweeping away of substantial Victorian adornments including a six-arched arcade which stretched…

… across the south front – had been welcomed as a ‘restoration of [the Castle’s] 17th-century simplicity’.⁵ Shortly before the remodelling programme got under way, however, another survey had regarded the arcaded seaward front of the house as ‘by far the most attractive’!⁶

This contentious section of Wemyss Castle is the younger half of the house, being a substantial late-17th century adjunct to the relatively modest medieval castle whose curtain wall followed the inland turn of the cliff line. But the latter was not the family’s original abode in these parts, hostile royal intervention having obliged its creation. A presence north of the Firth of Forth since the 13th century, the Wemyss’ (pro. Weems) were generally loyal to the Crown until, well, they weren’t.

see: Outlaw King @ YouTube

And it was an early volte face which cost them their first house, when Sir Michael Wemyss switched allegiance from Edward I to Robert the Bruce during the first Scottish war of independence, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ consequently compelling the ruination of his former ally’s home. It would be more than a century before the principal rectangular tower, connecting with one of a pair of satellite round towers, came to be built on this exposed location.

The Castle’s limited accommodation probably presented a tight fit for the entourage of a sojourning Mary, Queen of Scots in February 1565, a brief but fateful visit during which she fell for disastrous second husband-to-be, Lord Darnley. By the turn of the 17th century the then laird Sir John Wemyss was definitely feeling the squeeze, now substantially infilling the courtyard by the construction of ‘a great gallery, 50 feet long’, against the [sea] wall, and a range of quarters above’.⁷

Succeeding to the estate in 1622, Sir John’s namesake son and heir would enjoy a rapid rise up the social ladder in the early years of the reign of Charles I, initially acquiring a baronetcy within weeks of the king’s accession in 1625. Three years later John added a barony, being styled Lord Wemyss of Elcho but only until June 1633 when he was upgraded to an earldom one week after having been among six noblemen selected to hold the canopy at King Charles’ belated Scottish coronation.

However the 1st earl of Wemyss would become ‘strongly opposed’ to Charles’ promotion of a new church liturgy, being ‘appointed to superintend the signing of the Covenant in Fife in September 1638′ and this dissention feeding into his eventual support for the Parliamentary cause in the Civil War.⁸ The earl died in the same year as the executed king, coincidentally on the very day that his son and heir David buried his first wife.

source¹³

Mineral extraction operations on the Wemyss estate were already providing healthy revenue streams which the industrious David, 2nd earl (left), set about pushing to the next level. Especially lucrative at this time was the extraction of sea salt – estate coal heating huge evaporation pans operated by the villagers of West Wemyss – for which major new export markets in northern Europe and Iceland would now be developed. A new dock was created at Methil just to the north in order to cope with the trading traffic.

The 2nd earl proved no less energetic on the domestic front but, alas, as regularly as his wives would produce children they seem to have been burying them. Of the eleven offspring born in the two decades of David Wemyss’s first marriage to Anna Balfour, none of their six sons, and only one daughter, survived their father. No children came of his disastrous remarriage in 1650 to Helenor, daughter of the 2nd earl of Wigtown, who ’caused a doore to be struken throughe the wall of her chamber, for to goe to the wine cellar, for she had a great desire after stronge drink’ and who died two years later.

Undeterred, a third marriage was promptly entered into but again, of five more children only one, another daughter, survived to teenage. By the 1670s the Wemyss’ family heritage was facing oblivion; something had to be done, and it was. Elder daughter Jean had married the 15th earl of Sutherland and rather than allow Wemyss to become merely an adjunct to that family’s Highlands domain (still today centred upon Dunrobin Castle) in 1672 the 2nd earl legally reordered the destiny of his titles and estates such that all would now be inherited by his younger daughter, thirteen-year-old Margaret.

see: Canmore

In that same year the earl further engineered Margaret’s marriage to a distant cousin, James Wemyss (created Lord Burntisland for his lifetime), doubly satisfying his desire for familial continuity. The young ‘couple went to live with the earl at Wemyss Castle’ which would also undergo major development at this time, detail of which is preserved among the archives at Wemyss Castle, the product of the 2nd earl’s assiduous record-keeping.⁹

Robert Mylne, master mason to the Scottish Crown, was recruited to oversee the building of ‘an addition to my old hall, of 107 feet in length, 28 feet broad, with an addition going north of 37 feet, four storeys, the Battlements to be as high as they are now’, creating the footprint which broadly obtains to this day (above).⁷ The proportions of the north wing of this L-shaped extension balanced the old castle tower at the other end of eight intervening bays on the new entrance front.

Inside, a fine dog-leg oak staircase ascends the full height while arranged over two floors were separate suites of family and State apartments featuring (below) decorative plasterwork ceilings. ‘On 27 April 1671 I have agreed with Thomas Alburne, plasterer, to work all my new house .. from the bottom to the top .. giving him the sum of 2000 merks, with morning drinks and 4 hours to himself and his man, to wit a pint of ale and 2 loaves of oatmeal a day everyman.’¹⁰

The State dining room [source¹³]

Claiming that the document’s contents were affected by ‘the infirmities of age’ and the undue influence of her father’s third wife (Margaret’s mother), Jean suggested her treatment was ‘unjust and injurious to her, passing her by though she was neither an idiot .. nor had done anything to displease him’.⁹

Margaret rejected her half-sister’s assertions as ‘nothing but a rapsodie and congestione of made up stories, irrelevant in law, and false in matter of fact’. She also pointed out that Jean had already been handsomely compensated by her dowry of 45,000 merks. The legal challenge came to nothing (as would a further attempt several years later) but the following year the countess suffered the loss of her husband Lord Burntisland in the tenth year of their marriage, and shortly after the birth of the couple’s fifth child.

see: helenmalanquilter

The Countess of Wemyss remained a widow until remarrying (a man forty years her senior) in 1700, an event which took place just a matter of weeks after her eldest son David, Lord Elcho’s own marriage had literally gone up in flames. Anne, the only daughter of the 1st Duke of Queensbury (who brought a dowry of £100,000 merks in 1697) had been engaged in private prayer when her clothes caught fire and she soon died of her injuries.

Following his mother’s death in 1705, the 4th earl for a time threw himself into politics, his enthusiastic involvement in promotion of the Act of Union taking him to London for several years. During this period he wed Mary Robinson, daughter of a Northamptonshire baronet and another ill-stared bride, also dead within three years of their nuptials. The first marriage had at least yielded two sons but tragedy again struck in 1715 when the eldest, David, succumbed to a fever aged 17. A third marriage (to Elizabeth Sinclair) the following year produced no more children, which left his younger son, James, as sole heir to Wemyss estate when the 4th earl himself expired in 1720.

*

Despite the effulgent image of industrious prosperity depicted in his father’s huge 1718 panoramic, the inheritance of the 5th Earl of Wemyss was not in the best of health (‘the Wemyss’ finances were in a shambles’).¹¹ If this had been a factor in James’ decision, within weeks of coming of age, to elope with Janet Charteris, the only child of wealthy but notorious Col. Francis Charteris, the stratagem would be undermined by ‘the wayward conduct of his Countess’ and the activities of their first-born son.⁸

‘Janet was a silly girl and a sillier woman’ and her manipulative father was determined that Charteris wealth – centred on Amisfield, near Haddington, south of the Firth of Forth – would not subsidise the Wemyss’ financial situation.¹¹ Having provided a purposely ring-fenced dowry, through his will following his death in 1730 Francis Charteris continued to pull strings. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate ultimately to younger nephew, Francis, on condition he take the Charteris name, and that the Earl of Wemyss should forthwith have no involvement in the education of his own children. Soon after his meddlesome father-in-law’s death the marriage of the earl and countess fell apart.

source¹³

The outlook for the Wemyss estate was not enhanced by the activities of their son and heir, Francis’ elder brother David, Lord Elcho (r), who enjoyed a rounded education during seven years at Winchester College: ‘We gambled, went to public houses, and we frequented prostitutes, which if discovered led to nothing more than a flogging.’¹¹ Coming of age Lord Elcho was soon consumed by the Jacobite cause, rising to become ADC to Bonnie Prince Charlie and ultimately taking a one-way passage to Europe in the wake of their rout at Culloden in 1745. (He sustained a rackety military career abroad, dying in Switzerland in 1787.)

Any property in Lord Elcho’s name would be attainted for his complicity in ‘the ’45’. With his second son Francis destined to take the Charteris name, and carry the Wemyss earldom across the Firth of Forth to Amisfield (later supplanted by the creation of nearby Gosford House, which remains the seat of the earls of Wemyss), the 5th earl now arranged for Wemyss Castle to pass to his namesake youngest son. Plain James Wemyss nevertheless maintained a family foothold in Scottish aristocracy through his marriage to a daughter of the 17th earl of Sutherland the year after succeeding his father in 1756.

Having grown up with no expectation of such a turn of events, young James had joined the Royal Navy as a boy. Leaving his frustrated career at sea behind, James duly embraced the role of financially straitened laird (and later the first of several family Members of Parliament for Fife) until his death in 1786. ‘The only important addition to Wemyss Castle in the whole of the 18th century was the construction by William Adam of a library [for his father] in the north-west elevation of the original castle.’⁵

Succeeding Gen. William Wemyss (right, ‘whose lifestyle would have been considered extravagant by any standards’) in 1822, James Wemyss, like his grandfather before him, had joined the Royal Navy aged twelve, and later became the MP for Fife. His three decades of stewardship saw the demise of salt production on the estate, coal mining now dominating the local economy. At his death in 1854 Adm. James Wemyss was succeeded by eldest son, James, who had joined the Royal Navy aged twelve, and later became the MP for Fife.

The new laird soon married Millicent Erskine; in 1864, a fortnight before the birth of the couple’s fifth child (Rosslyn, who would rise to become Admiral of the Fleet, and the senior British signatory at the Armistice), Wemyss succumbed to illness at his London townhouse, aged just 36. If James had had relatively little opportunity to make his mark at Wemyss Castle, his widow would more than compensate.

source¹³

‘The forceful Mrs Wemyss took over the management of the estate, which she carried out brilliantly, but she lacked discrimination when it came to enlarging her already ample house.’⁵ Balancing the books having occupied her first decade, Millicent now let Edinburgh architects Peddie & Kinnear loose on the Castle which gained additional round towers, further castellation and an arcade of six arches along the seaward side.

Most dramatically, behind a new projecting entrance porch (left) on the north front, ‘a magnificent inner hall, at least 80 feet long, and a good two storeys high’ was designed (below), lit by large mullioned and transomed windows, the details of its decorative ceiling copied from 17th-century work elsewhere in the Castle.¹²

source¹²

Born in 1858, eventual heir Randolph Erskine Wemyss, ‘while comparatively young, willingly co-operated with his mother in the building’ work, and the cavernous saloon would be the scene of celebrations on the occasion of his wedding to Lady Lilian Paulet, daughter of the Marquess of Winchester, in 1884.¹³ But this marriage was destined for a notable ‘quickie’ divorce before the century was out.

‘Seldom does an aristocratic divorce case, or any other, get through the courts with as little fuss a the Erskine Wemyss one,’ observed one Scottish newspaper; ‘It came into the court on 12 July [1898] and decree was granted on 20 July, which would take some beating for expedition.’¹⁴ If Randolph (who offered no defence to his estranged wife’s petition) had hoped to slip the public’s attention, he would be disappointed.

‘The court was uncomfortably crowded when the case came on. The plaintiff, a tall lady heavily veiled, with large white feathers in her hat, was elegantly attired in a rich black silk dress.’ In the brief proceedings, Lilian explained that her husband had left her after ‘about six years and that she had not seen him for the past two’.¹⁵ In the custom of the age, the only other witness in the case was a 21-year-old ‘actress’ called Gertrude who told how Randolph had visited her rooms in Charing Cross, and that she had ‘received a cheque for £10 a day or two later’ in the post.¹⁶

Within months of the divorce it was announced that ‘Mr. Randolph Wemyss is engaged to be married to Lady Eva Wellesley’ and, in time, Wemyss’ pointed last will and testament would suggest that there was no amelioration in relations with his ex (somewhat complicating the life of their son and his heir). But throughout this domestic turbulence, the economy of the Wemyss Castle estate hit new heights.

see: Google Maps

The productivity and profitability of the coal resources led to a major upgrading of the dock at Methil, which would now be connected to the rail network with a new four-mile line. (Both facilities would be sold off to the North British Railway company ‘for approximately £227,000’ in 1889.¹⁷) And complementing old West Wemyss (where ‘the estate retains ownership of most of the land and many of the properties’), a new model village, Coaltown of Wemyss, was created (r) to accommodate the expanding workforce.

Privately, following the death of his mother in 1895, Randolph converted the vaulted cellar of Wemyss Castle into a chapel in her memory, commissioning a likeness in stone from Princess Louisa, the sculptress daughter of Queen Victoria. And it would be a god-daughter of the monarch, Victoria, daughter of the 6th duke of Portland, who would succeed the redoubtable Millicent as chatelaine of Wemyss Castle upon her marriage to Capt. Michael Wemyss in 1918, a decade after the death of his father.

But the first years of this couple’s tenure would be clouded by an awkward stipulation in Randolph’s will: ‘It is my express wish that my son shall never allow [Lady] Lilian Mary Paulet, or Wemyss [his mother], or any other member of the Paulet family, to reside at Wemyss Castle, or any part of the estate,’ on pain of forfeiting his entire inheritance. Legal action by the new laird in 1920 to overturn the ‘capricious, vindictive’ clause was opposed successfully by family trustees (his step-mother, the other Lady Wemyss, among them).¹⁸

see: castle_and_ghost

But from the 1930s it was the removal (or significant modification) of most of the changes which had been made to Wemyss Castle by his grandmother, Millicent, along with substantial new elements of their own, which would preoccupy and define Michael and Victoria’s long stewardship of the Wemyss estate.

‘After the 2nd World War, when many other families were reducing the size of their houses, the Wemysses embarked upon additions to their Castle,’ managed by the estate’s architect/factor, A. Stewart Tod (one of three successive generations in this role).¹⁹ Over time ‘all the Victorian balustrades were removed and the round turrets squared and reduced in height’.²⁰ Also consigned to history, the long arched arcade on the seaward south front and the projecting porch and enlarged ground floor fenestration to the north.

see: Google Maps

see: helenmalanquilter

This front now received a new clock-tower entrance in one corner, its design directly inspired by the 2nd earl’s early-18th century tolbooth in West Wemyss.

‘A very agreeable new ground floor line’ spanned the other seven bays here, housing a ‘finely-proportioned long sitting-room, hung with Flemish tapestries’. The construction of this space ‘was ingeniously carried out inside the Victorian saloon and then suddenly revealed in the manner of an architectural conjuring trick when the saloon was demolished’.⁵ Elsewhere, the former state apartments evolved into adjoining double drawing-rooms.

source: Google Earth

Married for more than sixty years, Michael Wemyss died in 1982; his widow Victoria, despite being ‘notorious for emerging at speed from the front gates of Wemyss Castle with scant regard for other motorists’, nevertheless survived to be 104 at her passing in 1994.¹⁹ Having moved into the Castle the previous year, their grandson Michael Wemyss and his wife Charlotte have since made their mark in the grounds, the latter overseeing the resurrection of the 6-acre Walled Garden (a seasonally opened former wilderness) while ‘Michael has planted an avenue of limes down miles of driveway’.²¹

see: Google Maps

Meanwhile, the laird’s first cousins, brother-and-sister partnership William and Arabella Wemyss (left) have been spearheading the ‘centuries old family business’, which today encompasses large-scale property developments, renewable energy and most recently the estate’s own branded whiskies and gin↑. ‘An interest in tradition, but a nose for experimentation, drives the Wemyss name forward.’

It was, of course, specifically in order to keep the family name at the Castle that, in the later 17th century, David, 2nd earl of Wemyss arranged the marriage of his 13-year-old heiress daughter to a distant cousin (“I will never putt my house out of that ancient name for any other in the world.”⁹). But what of the future? The present chief of Clan Wemyss has two daughters…

see: Daily Motion / BBC

… the eldest of whom in 2019 signed up for some 21st-century matchmaking in the form of BBC TV show Love in the Countryside, which tasked itself with sourcing partners for rural lonely hearts. “Hermione, who grew up in the Fife countryside,” was introduced to down-to-earth Yorkshire dairy farmer Martin: Reader, she married him…

[Wemyss Castle Category A listing][Gardens and designed landscape listing]

1. Whistler, L. Pictures on glass engraved by Laurence Whistler, 1972.
2. Wemyss, C. No salt without coal, no coal without salt: The painting of an 18th century Scottish industrial estate. In: Whatley, C., Hambly, J. (Eds.) Salt: Scotland’s newest oldest industry, 2023.
3. Jones, D. Coal furniture in Scotland, Furniture History, Vol.23, 1987.
4. Gifford, J. Buildings of Scotland: Fife, 1988.
5. Hunt, J.M. Wemyss Castle I/II, Country Life 6/13 Jan 1966.
6. Hannan, T. Famous Scottish houses: The lowlands, 1928.
7. Wemyss, C. Noble houses of Scotland 1660-1800, 2014. [Includes contemporary interior images]
8. Cokayne, G.E.C. Complete peerage, 1898.
9. Fraser, Sir W. Memorials of the family of Wemyss of Wemyss, (3 vols) 1888.
10. Hunn, L. et al (Eds.). The architecture of Scotland 1660-1750, 2020.
11. Wemyss, A. Elcho of the ’45, 2002.
12. Building News 30 June 1876.
13. Cunningham, A.S. Randolph Gordon Erskine Wemyss: an appreciation, 1909.
14. Mid-Lothian Journal 22 July 1898.
15. Henley Advertiser 30 July 1898.
16. Illustrated Police News 30 July 1898.
17. The Times 22 August 1913.
18. The Times 10 March 1920.
19. Daily Telegraph 29 June 1994.
20. Thomson, M. Old Wemyss, 1995.
21. Sunday Times 5 March 2000.