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The Wombourne Wodehouse, Staffordshire

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestral home, country house, family seat, Obscure, samuel-hellier, Staffordshire on November 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Suggesting an estimated valuation of £6,000,000-£9,000,000 the auctioneers Christie’s left potential bidders at their 2022 ‘Exceptional Sale’ in little doubt.

see: Christie’s [video]

‘The ‘Hellier’ violin [is] a rare masterpiece executed circa 1679 by the genius craftsman Antonio Stradivari, without doubt his finest inlaid violin, previously in the greatest collections of musical instruments.’ Presently lying in a vault somewhere in Switzerland, for some two centuries this feted fiddle resided at the home of the family whose name still attaches, a property which, unlike the Hellier Stradivarius, has never once changed hands by sale.

After well over 800 years, Wombourne Wodehouse remains ‘a remarkable oasis’¹ just a 20-minute bus ride from Wolverhampton city centre, wholly private ‘and lived in as much now as at any time in the past centuries’.² This prodigious feat of continuity is all the more remarkable given the regular lack of direct heirs: an unhelpful recurrence of childless owners, and various semi-detached squires two of whom met with romantic disappointment but would each find noteworthy expression through architecture and music.

see: Google Maps

While necessitated handbrake turns in the line of descent have several times changed the name of its owner, that of the house itself has merely been quaintly tweaked. Established in a clearing on the wooded slopes above the Wom Brook in 12th century, over time its occupants became known as the Woodhouse family…

… subsequent generations of whom created ‘the late-medieval timber-framed core of the present house. By the middle of the 17th century gabled wings had been added to each end of the south side, Edward Woodhouse (d.1688) the first of the family to style himself ‘gent’.’³

But this self-improvement came at some cost, and Edward’s son John would inherit an estate significantly burdened with financial liabilities. At the time of his and his similarly unmarried brother’s deaths in 1702 several mortgages had been raised against the property. Foreclosure soon followed and before the decade was out the Woodhouse ‘had passed to Samuel Hellier (I), a London brewer and the son-in-law of one of the mortgagees’.³

The Field⁴

Though Samuel Hellier would establish the family vault in Wombourne’s St. Benedict Biscop church, within which he was duly interred in 1727, he seems to have had minimal involvement at the Woodhouse, unlike his lawyer son, Samuel Hellier (II) whose improvements included a new dog-leg staircase introduced within the medieval parlour, and extensive panelling. He also initiated improvements to the grounds, presumably still in development at time of his death in 1751, six years after that of his wife Sarah Huntbach, when the couple’s only son was just fifteen years old.

The continuing education of young Samuel (III) was overseen by a trio of guardians whose influence carried him to Exeter College, Oxford, for six years, much of which was spent in pursuit of his passion for music, especially that of his hero, George Frederick Handel. Proficient on both violin and harpsichord, Hellier had inherited a well-stocked library at the Woodhouse, the musical contents of which he was soon enthusiastically (and rather expensively) supplementing.

His father’s collections also included ‘particular pamphlets at one time likely to have been considered subversive’, indicative of Jacobite leanings.⁵ Rather more pressing for his son, however, would be a festering conflict on the domestic front, and which proved to be almost a lifelong battle.

‘The few remarks I shall make [of] the old Lady are these, That she has a Heart as hard as a Rock [and is] of a most Tyrannical, Cruel, uncharitable disposition.’⁶

The ‘old lady’ in question being his grandmother, Sarah Huntbach, who presided over what would in time be Samuel’s maternal inheritance, the estate of the Huntbach family at Featherstone, ten miles north of Wombourne. Having come of age, Hellier had at last returned from university fired with creative ideas for his Staffordshire property, and also freighted with the armfuls of music manuscripts eagerly acquired during his student days.

Her grandson’s arty instincts, and related expenditure, were perhaps deemed somewhat frivolous up at Featherstone, for Mrs. Huntbach kept a frustratingly tight hold on the purse strings throughout her life. A life which, alas for Samuel, turned out to be very long one, Sarah surviving until her hundredth year, only eighteen months before Hellier’s own demise. Though the Wombourne property (and its mineral rights) gave Samuel financial autonomy he would always feel under-resourced, particularly in light of his noble ambitions for the estate.

see: Alan Terrill @ geograph

These ambitions were fired to no little extent by a remarkable (and contagious) outbreak of romantic landscaping locally, which would see the nearby great estate parklands of the Earl of Stamford at Enville Hall (left) and Lord Lyttleton at Hagley transformed with picturesque features and vistas, under the direction of Sanderson Miller and others. Hellier was keen to join in but, with rather less resources at his disposal, would take greatest inspiration from the schemes of poet William Shenstone at his smaller property The Leasowes at Halesowen. (These three estates constituted a ‘must-see’ mid-18th century Midlands circuit.)

A further practical impediment to the realisation of Samuel’s aspirations was the fact that he could not bear to spend too much time in Staffordshire, becoming increasingly allergic to its provincial mindset. “I am wasting the very Prime Part of my days in a Lonely Country House where I’ve no society, or such as my ideas cannot square with,” he wrote in 1763, now a 26-year-old knight of the realm (having been granted the honour when High Sheriff of Worcestershire the year before).

So began a decade of developments at Wombourne which, for the most part, Hellier would attempt to micro-manage remotely, finding the cultural soirees of the capital hosted by such as artist Paul Sandby – accessible from his Holborn residence – altogether more congenial. And it was at one such event that Sir Samuel encountered a young architect just striking out on his own after years understudying Sir William Chambers at the Office of Works.

see: VCH

Long before he vaulted (somewhat opportunistically) from ‘architectural nonentity’ to dazzling heights creating the jewels of Georgian Dublin, James Gandon‘s first known solo work was a modest, quirky commission courtesy of Samuel Hellier, who wanted a small but perfectly formed classical temple to his hero, Handel.⁷ This edifice (r) was one of a suite of features to be encountered along a highly considered, edifying amble through the nine-acre woodland behind his country house.

A grotto, a hermitage featuring a life-sized animated figure (‘Father Francis’) and a Music Room complete with working organ were other elements to be encountered en route, the civilising experience further heightened by strategically placed epigrammatic signage (highly derivative of The Leasowes).

see: VCH

And to be seen in the distance from a grand Gothic seat (left) Samuel Hellier commissioned ‘a 6-feet 4-inch golden dragon weathervane’ to be placed atop Wombourne church.⁸ When the church’s spire came to be rebuilt a century on the weight of this object was deemed unsafe and it was relocated to the cupola of the large stable block at the Wodehouse…

… where it remains today unlike everything else from this grand project. ‘[As he] had to build on the cheap Hellier’s charmingly gimcrack follies deteriorated quickly once later owners took less interest.’⁹ Their vulnerability (to the elements and the depredation of curious locals) made them high maintenance; it had fallen to his man on the ground, estate steward John Rogers to project-manage, hectored by the squire’s weekly missives [preserved among the Wodehouse muniments but excellently digitised here] giving directions and demanding updates.

Hellier also commissioned a splendid new organ for the parish church from London maker Abraham Adcock (promising to “Wombourne people .. ‘Twill make you all alive”) and it was public music-making which would give the Woodhouse a very distinctive edge against the grander stately attractions of Enville and Hagley. With an inherited and now much augmented collection of scores and instruments at his disposal (including the Stradivarius ‘almost certainly inherited from his uncle John Hellier’), Samuel evidently held ‘a strong conviction that music was a necessary ingredient in the life of the community’.¹⁰

Thus, additional to his regular estate duties, John Rogers would also be tasked not only with learning to play the organ (of which there were now several around and about) but also with talent-spotting amongst the locals (his gardener/horn player brother Daniel standing out), and organising tutoring and rehearsals.

see: Edinburgh Uni. Musical Instruments Museum

From London, meanwhile, Hellier was constantly supplying musical instruments and scores (by Handel, Thomas Arne, William Boyce et al), and handy tips to improve his little orchestra: “The principal Thing to promote Singing well is to keep the teeth clean, a maxim universally observed by all the performers in Publick.”

Alas, after several years collective enthusiasm for this distinctive aspect of life on the estate began to wane; another initiative, a charitable school for Wombourne’s poor, also foundered thanks, Hellier believed, to the mean-spiritedness of his local peers. And his ‘carefully thought out’ woodland walk would ultimately prove too popular for his liking, the behaviour of locals ever living down to his estimation.⁸ (“The Staffordshire People continue in ye Rough, uncivilized state they were in, when William ye Conqueror subdued this island.”)

Another among the sundry disappointments which crowded in upon Sir Samuel was his bachelor status. ‘He [had] experienced two fractured love affairs the second of which, ending with a horse-whipping by the irate father of the girl, marked the end of Hellier’s amorous career.’¹⁰ Unloading to a lawyer friend, Sir Samuel had once confided:

“I am in a state of Dispair [that] I will marry at all, Even if its a kitchen Wench or a Girl out of a workhouse. I am convinced one Hours Chatt with a truly Virtuous woman is preferable to a whole years enjoyment with a whore.”

In Hellier’s later years trusty John Rogers (and equally put-upon housekeeper, Mrs. Beech) would increasingly be urged to intercede with his ‘hard hearted’ grandmother on account of his declining health. “Pray inform Mrs. Beech she must not let ye old Lady rest, till She gets Some Money for me, my Physician, a Gentleman of ye first Consequence in London, Solemnly declares I must go directly to Bath, my Life is in danger, and nothing else will do any good.”

(There was perhaps a touch of humbug about Hellier’s pleading. “My appetite is exceedingly bad, so that I can eat little, or nothing, and often what I do eat I vomit up again. However a friend of mine has requested me to send for a Stubble Goose, which will be a pleasure to see them partake of if I am unable to do so. Send up your nicest you can get – not a rank Coarse Goose but one as is well fed – [and] a Partridge or two, or a hare, with it.’ A week later he reported that “the Goose and Brace of Partridges came safe .. very sweet‘.)

Sir Samuel had long felt that ‘the old Lady’ could have been more supportive, and that the limited means at his disposal had stymied his personal and creative aspirations. Concerning the Woodhouse itself, James Gandon’s additional design for a new wing had come to nothing, likewise later negotiations with architect Joseph Pickford, after which he would write (↑) resignedly, “I suppose I must Drop all further thoughts of repairing the old mansion”.¹¹

Even when at long last old Sarah Huntbach passed away, willing her grandson as principal beneficiary of the Featherstone estate, Sir Samuel still found plenty to moan about. Despite taking pains to ensure she had a quality burial (“I shall send a Hatchment elegantly designed to adorn the hearse”) he appears not to have attended the funeral, but wished to be “informed what people say about it, and how many Thousand faults they find, and what Torrents of uncharitable abuse they bestow upon me, the County is famous for it. They are without exception the vilest, good for nothing people upon the whole earth.”

“Neither my friend Mr. Shaw, nor any other person in the whole County, never once paid me [a] trifling Compliment, to wish me my Health, to enjoy the little addition of Fortune which falls to me by the old Lady’s Death,” Sir Samuel wrote to Rogers in January, 1783. “Probably I am too ill beloved and very little respected – but such omissions make a great impression on me, and I take great notice of it.”

But this perceived slight by ‘Mr. Shaw’ – the Rev. Thomas Shaw, 52, rector St. John’s, Wolverhampton, and Hellier’s lifelong friend and advisor – was plainly insufficient to cause Sir Samuel to alter his will which, at his own death the following year, bequeathed Shaw the entire Wombourne estate. Soon after, the fortunate cleric would formally comply with Sir Samuel’s stipulation that he and his heirs change their name to Shaw-Hellier.

see source

Rev. Thomas Shaw-Hellier may have entertained radical change at the Woodhouse as speculative designs (↑) by architect John Plaw for a classical replacement of the old house were produced. But again these came to nothing and upon the arrival of a namesake grandson in 1802, Shaw-Hellier placed the estate in trust for him, granting own his son James rent-free residence for life. But following the latter’s death Thomas Shaw-Hellier appears to have lived most of his adult life elsewhere, a somewhat peripatetic existence dictated by his passion for the hunting field.

see: Britain From Above

His residences would include Packwood House in Warwickshire and a house in Lincolnshire before returning to Staffordshire (and mastership of the Albrighton Hunt), but not to Wombourne. Rather, the outsized Victorian squire purchased Rodbaston Hall (r), 15 miles north near Cannock Chase, dying there in 1870. The military career of his son, Col. Thomas Bradney Shaw-Hellier would also necessitate protracted absence…

… lessees of the Woodhouse in his time including the Hon. Philip Stanhope, Liberal MP for Wednesbury. who would host William Gladstone there in 1888. Nevertheless, the artistically-inclined soldier – whose career would culminate as Commandant of the Royal Military School of Music – initiated two significant bouts of remodelling which would come to define the house as it stands today.

The Field⁴

In the 1870s Col. Shaw-Hellier engaged the services of hitherto predominantly ecclesiastical architect (and ‘confirmed bachelor’) George Frederick Bodley. ‘A three-storey porch and pretty pedimented oriel windows were added to the entrance front, and bay windows inserted into the drawing room. [The latter] was fitted out with panelling in a free late-17th century manner that incorporated a full-height chimneypiece. The room survives intact with its original furnishings.’¹²

Screenshot

And soon after retiring from the military in 1893 the Colonel became an early private patron of Bodley’s former pupil, leading Arts and Crafts architect Charles Robert Ashbee, founder of the Guild of Handicrafts. Reflecting the romantic nostalgia of this movement the detail of the entrance front of the now restyled ‘Wodehouse’ was further enlivened; most strikingly (above, right) a cavernous chapel, with a tall concave gable, and a billiard room were added to the east.

At the opposite end of the house, meanwhile, some of the gables (↑) would be replaced with a lettered parapet proclaiming ‘Domum Dulce Domum’ (‘Home sweet home’ being the Old Wykehamist’s alma mater).

see: Bates & Hindmarsh

In 1899, to the surprise of perhaps even the participants themselves, the 63-year-old bachelor squire quietly married a not-much-younger distant cousin, Harriet Bradney Marsh, spinster chatelaine of neighbouring neo-classical mansion, Lloyd House. (Though this property was put up for sale in 1901 a modern map of the Wodehouse Estate extends to its surrounding land.) But this unexpected alliance has been characterized as ‘disastrous’ and in 1907 the Colonel decided to cast off a life of convention for a final chapter of unabashed fun in the sun.¹³

‘Taormina [in Sicily] was a town with a sophisticated lotos-eating immigrant population, a resort for artists, a resting place for tubercular Englishmen, and a gathering ground for homosexuals.’¹⁴ It was here that Shaw-Hellier now retreated, turning once again to CR Ashbee to build him a new residence on a virgin hillside site among the orange groves, with spectacular Mediterranean views.

see: The Ashbee

‘In the house Shaw-Hellier rented while awaiting his own villa, to which he had transported his old English butler Harry, he kept two pianos, a pianola and an American organ, all of which he played with a most erratic vigour. He was always giving parties .. of rather frenzied gaiety,’¹³ often attended by bisexual Ashbee and his wife Janet, ‘who had no illusions about the old colonel’s ménage, humming with beautiful Sicilian boys’.¹⁵

see: Brewery History

Meanwhile, a world away back in Staffordshire, Wombourne Wodehouse became the residence of his designated heir, nephew Evelyn Simpson (Shaw-Hellier upon inheriting in 1910), already a man of some means whose marriage to Fanny Phillips had linked two provincial brewing dynasties.

Suddenly the Wodehouse was a real family home, soon gaining a sizable service wing while the shortlived chapel and billiard room were now divided up into more practical domestic spaces. In 1915 the Gallipoli campaign claimed the life of the new squire’s son, Arthur. Following his own death in 1922 the Wodehouse entered into well over half-a-century as a female domain, home to spinster sisters Mollie and Dorothy Shaw-Hellier.

see: The Ashbee

‘Delightfully Edwardian, and retaining a taste for fast motoring,’ they had also inherited the Villa San Giorgio in Sicily (r) which they visited annually until its sale in 1950 (now The Ashbee Hotel).¹⁶ Previously their father had sold the ‘Hellier’ Stradivarius violin out of the family in 1911, after which the 18th-century music collections of Sir Samuel…

see: Google Maps

… later cherished and supplemented by Col. Shaw-Hellier, were all but forgotten. But in the mid-1960s the many instruments and ‘and two hundred year old music library of around three hundred volumes’ were rediscovered ‘in the stable buildings of the Wodehouse’, to the great excitement of musicologists.¹⁷ The manuscripts are today housed at the Barber Institute for Fine Art in Birmingham while the 54 musical instruments are on loan to the Musical Instruments Museum of the University of Edinburgh.

One Saturday evening in the summer of 1981, 84-year-old Dorothy Shaw-Hellier, who had occupied the Wodehouse alone since her sister’s death in 1975, made a fateful decision to drive the short distance to the estate’s walled garden to gather flowers. Emerging from the gates her car was in collision with a motorcycle whose rider luckily sustained only minor injuries but Miss Shaw-Hellier died two hours later in The Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton.

see: Google Maps

see: Express & Star

source¹⁸

The Wodehouse now passed to her first cousin twice-removed, Banbury farmer John Phillips who had already been managing the estate, visiting weekly…

… over the previous decade. His family now relocated to Staffordshire, the replacement of century-old wiring and plumbing among the early priorities of a rolling programme of renovations to the house and its ’18-acre gardens, full of unusual plants and blooms’.¹⁹ In time, the latter would be regularly opened for charity; John Phillips died in 2002, ‘three years to the day since the death of his wife of 52 years, Carolyn.’

see source

Since when the Wombourne Wodehouse has been home to the family of their son Henry Phillips who last year submitted a selection of paintings from the Wodehouse collection for auction including several works by ‘obscure but talented Wolverhampton artist’ James Shaw. Happily, these did not include his portrait of Sir Samuel Hellier (r), the man whose gift of this ‘enthralling place’²⁰ so spectacularly benefitted Shaw’s older brother the Rev. Thomas, and whose various enthusiasms have latterly given singular historical resonance to ‘the little world of which he was its cultural engine’.¹⁰

‘Looking particularly pleased with himself in a dazzling silver coat with gold tassels set off with a lacy Vandyke collar,’⁹ the high-minded, well-intentioned but all too frequently frustrated parochial impresario…

see: Anneke Scott @ X

see: Edinburgh Uni.

… would no doubt be most gratified to discover that there are still plenty today who are only too glad to (quite literally) blow his trumpet…

1. Thorold, H., Yates, J. Shell guide to Staffordshire, 1978.
2. Phillips, J. In: Griffiths, M. Wombourne what was, 1990.
3. A history of Staffordshire Vol.XX, The Victoria History Counties of England, 1984.
4. Montgomery-Massingberd, H. Family seats No.92: Wombourne Wodehouse and a musical theme, 12 Jul 1986.
5. Young, P.M. Samuel Hellier: A collector with a purpose, The Book Collector Vol.39 No.3, 1990.
6. [MS letter] The letters of Sir Samuel Hellier.
7. Duffy, H. James Gandon and his times, 1990.
8. Barre, D. Sir Samuel Hellier and his garden buildings, Garden History Vol.36 No.2, 2008.
9. Mowl, T., Barre, D. The historic gardens of England: Staffordshire, 2009.
10. Young, PM. The Shaw-Hellier collection. In: Best, T. (Ed.) Handel collections and their history, 1993.
11. [MS letter] The letters of Sir Samuel Hellier.
12. Hall, M. George Frederick Bodley and the later Gothic Revival in Britain and America, 2014.
13. McCarthy, F. The simple life: CR Ashbee in the Cotswolds, 1981.
14. Crawford, A. C R Ashbee: Architect, designer, romantic socialist, 1985.
15. Ashbee, F. Janet Ashbee: Love, marriage and the arts and crafts movement, 2002.
16. Ward Jones, P. Book review, Music and Letters, Vol.82, No.2, 2001.
17. Frew, C., Myers, A. Sir Samuel Hellier’s ‘Musical instruments’, The Galopin Society Journal, Vol.56, 2003.
18. Express & Star, 16 Dec 1981.
19. Spooner, K. The Wodehouse plays the generation game, Wolverhampton Chronicle, 28 May 1999.
20. Wakeling, C., Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Staffordshire, 2024.

Thornton Watlass Hall, Yorkshire

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bedale, country house, Country houses, heartbeat, Inaccessible, Landed gentry, Little-known, north yorkshire, Obscure on September 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »

On a page otherwise filled with urgent updates on the many facets of the British war effort, in its edition of May 21, 1940 the Daily Mail found space for a picture-led human interest story, brief but with something of a sting in the tail.

tw5yo ‘Here is Britain’s youngest baronet, five-year-old Sir John Smith-Dodsworth. Yesterday Sir John faced his first Press interview – sitting on the grass at his North Yorkshire home. He does not yet know that his father has died.‘

And this early encounter with the ways of the popular press would not be the 8th baronet’s last, media coverage of the circumstances surrounding his marriage two decades later revealing a young squire seemingly somewhat ill at ease with the customary expectations of a man of his station. Expectations he would decisively foresake, in fact, opting at the earliest opportunity to put about as much distance as was physically possible between himself and his baggage-laden birthright, and going on to live the entirety of his adult life in New Zealand.

What Smith-Dodsworth left behind was a sizable North Yorkshire estate which has passed only by inheritance since the 13th century. Unsurprisingly given that time span, as the family name suggests, descent has not been directly in the male line: the Dodsworths brought the house – Thornton Watlass Hall (which would hit the headlines itself for unfortunate reasons in the 1990s) – while the Smith family contributed the baronetcy.

The Smiths had property of their own, of course, and the 19th-century gent in whom the two families’ interests were to coalesce would for a time find himself triple-handed in the country house department. Long since marooned and neglected on land near Normanton in West Yorkshire still recovering…

twnewland … from later industrial exploitation there stands a ruined Georgian stable block. Being the most discernable trace of Newland Hall, the house the Smiths built and which would for a time supersede Thornton Watlass as the favoured residence after the expiry of the Dodsworth male line.

Ten miles south-west, meanwhile, in the grounds of still-extant Birthwaite Hall stands a statue of Stuart era proto-industrialist John Silvester whose family would form another notable link in the lineal chain, which stretches back to the late-14th century marriage of Thomas Dodsworth and Thornton’s heiress, Agnes Thoresby.

twdods The Dodsworths subsequently proved most durable lords of this manor three miles south-west of Bedale in Yorkshire’s North Riding, Thornton seemingly now passing straightforwardly from father to son for eight generations. The first spanner in the genealogical works – at least if Catholic chronicler Bishop Richard Challoner is to be believed – was the martyrdom of a cleric named Edmund Catherick, executed in York in 1642.

This young Catholic priest became caught up in the religious undertow of the incipient Civil War in England. Possibly a relation of the Dodsworths by marriage, Catherick was certainly comfortable enough in their company at Thornton Watlass to divulge his necessarily stealthy vocation. ‘He was apprehended on the road, not far from Watlass,’ however, and ended up in front of the local justice – squire Dodsworth – who ‘without more ado committed him to York Castle, and afterwards appeared as evidence against him’.¹

Catherick was hung, drawn and quartered. ‘It is the opinion of the people of [the] neighbourhood even to this day,’ Challoner intoned, ‘that Mr. Dodsworth and his family for some years after felt the guilt of Mr. Catherick’s blood very heavy upon them in a long series of surprising and dire disasters.’ Now there was perhaps an element of wishful thinking in this, but by his death in 1665 John Dodsworth (‘one of a small number of North Yorkshire Parliamentarians, who raised a company of dragoons for the cause’²) had lost his eldest son John and his grandson, second-born Timothy Dodsworth now succeeding to Thornton Watlass.

South front [Sketch by Samuel Buck 1719-20]

The house of his time, and in which in turn his son John (d.1693) would see out the century, was of ‘half H-plan‘, the gabled cross-wings bookending the central range projecting slightly in front but extensively in rear. While ‘two-light mullioned staircase windows on its [north] elevation suggest an earlier core…

source: DailyMotion / BBC

… the shaped gable in the long west front (r) looks 17th century’.³ But, as all those serried sash windows indicate, the Hall at Thornton Watlass was set to be modishly refashioned by the next generation. In 1719 the latest…

see: Historic England

… John Dodsworth wed Henrietta Hutton and the couple had completed an early Georgian redefinition of the house within the first decade of their marriage. ‘Inside [are] heavy early 18th century doors with broken segmental pediments and a staircase with bulb-and-umbrella balusters, convincing for 1727 but supposed to come from the communion rail of West Tanfield church [six or so miles south].’³ So seemingly comfortable was Henrietta Dodsworth (‘who lived here to the age of 96’⁴) she never really left, her ghostly apparition having occasionally made itself known in the east wing (‘which contains her small panelled bedroom’⁵) down the years.

see: DailyMotion / BBC

The mother of four boys and four girls, her two eldest sons John and Timothy predeceased their father which lead to Thornton eventually being inherited by the third son, Matthew, then resident at nearby Crake Hall. He died in 1804 and for the first two decades of the 19th century the squire of Thornton Watlass was…

… Matthew’s similarly childless brother, the Rev. Frederick Dodsworth, one of the canons of Windsor. At Frederick’s own demise in 1821 the passage of Thornton to the son of the brothers’ sister, Henrietta Smith, which would initiate the Smith-Dodsworth descent, was mutually providential for both families.

Still to be found dotted about the edges of Britain are remnants of this island’s historical fears of foreign invasion. At the western end of the Menai Strait in North Wales stands Fort Belan, one 18th-century landowner’s D-I-Y defence against feared transatlantic reprisals during the American War of Independence. And stretches of England’s east coast remain punctuated by robust Martello towers readied to repulse forces the forces of Napoleon.

But, alas, no physical manifestation survives of an ambitious entrepreneurial endeavour reputedly realised during the final round of Anglo-Dutch hostilities in the second half of the 17th century: a mighty chain which could be pulled across the river Thames, thwarting the progress of the enemy’s fleet. This wheeze has been attributed to the Silvesters, a family of master metalworkers from south Yorkshire who had migrated south, becoming key providers of ordnance and engineering services based at the Tower of London.

‘Anchorsmith’ John Silvester became particularly prosperous and invested his wealth back in his home county, opportunistically acquiring properties from some old landed families now on their uppers. In the wake of Henry VIII’s reformation one such, the Bunny family, had themselves snapped up the confiscated Newland estate west of Wakefield formerly belonging to the now disbanded ancient order of Knights Hospitallers; 150 years later the cash-strapped Bunnys sold out to John Silvester.

see: Rightmove

He lived there until the turn of the 18th century when he now completed another bargain basement acquisition, that of Birthwaite Hall at Darton (r), near Barnsley, seat of the similarly straitened Burdett baronets. (This was the first time Birthwaite had been sold in 500 years.) Silvester removed to this house, which still stands, one front since Gothicised and today in multi-occupancy.

twsilv With no children of his own, at his death in 1722 John Silvester divided these properties between his two nephews. Birthwaite went to his brother’s son, the Rev. Edward Silvester, responsible for a gratefully grand memorial to his uncle in Darton church (left). Dying himself just six years later, childless Edward now passed Birthwaite to his cousin, John, who had earlier inherited Newland as the son of Priscilla Silvester and John Smith. With a choice of estates, Birthwaite Hall was now let to tenants…

see: Stanley History Online

… John Smith junior taking his (second) wife to live at Newland where in the early 1740s he had built a new Classical mansion. With its stables at least thought possibly to be the work of Robert Carr,⁶ father of famed Yorkshire architect John Carr, Newland Hall (r) – a central block of seven bays and three storeys, with balancing half-height four-bay wings – stood amidst a deer park.

Smith had also produced a large number of children by the time of his death aged 56 in 1746, his will bequeathing the bulk of his Yorkshire estates to eldest son John Silvester Smith, but also burdening with him the obligation to provide for his many siblings. However, before harder economic realities properly kicked in, John Silvester Smith enjoyed the life of a well-heeled student at Cambridge, also fitting in a year of Continental travel before he came age. And in 1761 he made a marriage with the unexpected heiress of one of the oldest families in county.⁷

source⁷

Hanging today in the entrance hall at Thornton Watlass is a painting depicting the squire mounted in the foreground of Newland Hall. A three-quarter length portrait of his wife, Mrs. Henrietta Smith, by George Romney, is a rare escapee from the family collection (selling most recently in 2020 for $400,000 ↓). Its possible counterpart of her husband remains at Thornton but following their marriage the couple favoured Newland Hall, which they further enhanced.

see: Christie’s

But in 1780 the family joined the fashionable drift to the city of Bath, a five-year sojourn which appears to have proved beneficial not least for their social standing, for John Silvester Smith returned to West Yorkshire a baronet (created in 1784). And he had seemed in perfectly good health one evening in 1789 on a theatre trip to Wakefield to see Mrs. Sarah Siddons, only to die suddenly the following day, aged 55.⁷ His heir, Sir Edward Smith, 2nd Bt., was then twenty years old; he became a keen sportsman, soon adding hunting kennels at Newland, and whose colt St. Patrick would win the St. Leger at Doncaster in 1820.

Edward’s marriage to Susanna Dawkins in 1804 brought a handsome filip in the form of a £10,000 dowry provided by his plantation-owning father-in-law Henry Dawkins (of Over Norton in Oxfordshire, which remains in that family). But, as his maternal uncle, Rev. Frederick Dodsworth, over at Thornton Watlass Hall noted, ‘all the Newland family are [financially] embarrassed’, Edward (like his father before him) being burdened with providing financial support for his siblings.⁷

At his death in 1821 Frederick left Thornton Watlass to ‘his only close male family member living’ contingent upon Sir Edward adopting the Dodsworth name. Now outwardly well set with three sizable country houses to his name, Birthwaite Hall was quickly sold off but the baronet – who continued to live mostly at Newland – would remain stretched for funds. ‘In 1826 a list of [his] financial obligations was drawn up: he paid annuities totalling the enormous sum of £2,300 [c.£250,000 today] to eleven people,’ mostly members of his family.⁷

see: Historic England

And Dodsworth’s private life was also more involved than it outwardly appeared. Though he had no children with Susanna, his wife’s will, disclosed in 1830, included her husband’s illegitimate son, John Ward among her various legatees. Ward also predeceased Dodsworth who, in his 70s, now moved to Thornton Watlass Hall (→) which he shared with his ‘dearly beloved daughter-in-law’, Ward’s widow, and her son.

This relocation had been precipitated by the arrival of railways in West Yorkshire, two lines of which now encroached the Newland estate. While this development had yielded thousands in compensation, the quality of life to be enjoyed there would be gradually eroded. Smith family portraits and some library contents accompanied the move from Newland Hall which was now let, the tenants there being among the headaches inherited by his brother after Edward’s eventual death at Thornton Watlass on New Year’s Eve 1845.

“I am pressed on all sides for money,” complained Charles Smith not long after he had duly assumed his new identity as Sir Charles Dodsworth, 3rd Bt., in 1846, in his 71st year. In fact, so beleaguered did the new squire of Thornton and Newland become that he eventually decided to put some distance between himself and his freighted inheritance, escaping to Paris for a year in 1849.⁷

source: bhhandel @ X

High on Dodsworth’s in-tray upon his return to Thornton Watlass Hall (r) was the matter of his obstreperous tenant over at Newland, Mr. Tempest, who was defying the baronet’s insistence that the park there continue to be stocked with deer. Being advised by his agent that Sir Charles ‘would have a large valuation to pay’ if he forced his tenant out, ‘he immediately replied, “I will live on bread and water sooner than he should [continue to] reside at Newland”.’⁸

Tempest, however, was still in situ in 1859 when the Newland Hall estate, ‘with valuable mineral rights’, was finally offered for sale, not by Sir Charles who had died two years before, nor by his heir, Sir Matthew Smith-Dodsworth who would survive his father by only nine months. It was trustees on behalf of the latter’s son, four-year-old Sir Charles Smith-Dodsworth, who now legally untangled entails which enabled the disposal of Newland to local mining entrepreneur William Locke for £35,000 in 1861. (Mining continued here for a century.)

The life of the 5th baronet would be curtailed even earlier than that of his father, Sir Charles Smith-Dodsworth dying aged 38 just two years after his marriage to Blanche Lascelles (niece of the 3rd earl of Harewood) and before the union had produced children. Among the actions taken by his duly promoted brother, Sir Matthew Smith-Dodsworth, 6th Bt., was an instruction to introduce obstructive plantations and stone walling on the historic Yorkshire horseracing grounds at Hambleton which had been bought by his ‘turf-loving’ brother in 1876. Sir Matthew ‘had joined a Non-Conformist sect which held that racing was sinful’.⁹

see: Historic England

By contrast, Claude, Sir Matthew’s only son, would in time convert to Roman Catholicism, marrying a fellow Lourdes pilgrimage volunteer stretcher bearer Cyrilla Taylor just two months after he had inherited the baronetcy and 2,000-acre Thornton Watlass estate (right) in December 1931.¹⁰ This now curtailed the hitherto burgeoning artistic career of Sir Claude Smith-Dodsworth, a fellow of the Royal College of Music with compositions, conducting and sundry concert notices in The Times to his name.

But the 7th baronet was squire for less than a decade, dying in May 1940, aged 51, a turn of events which now brought the national press to the door to record the unwitting succession of five-year-old Sir John Smith-Dodsworth. Thornton Watlass Hall would remain ‘amazingly unchanged’¹¹ through the subsequent four decades of Lady Smith-Dodsworth’s widowhood thanks in part to the semi-detachment of her only son whose head would soon be turned by the twin attractions of the Antipodes and ‘a miner’s daughter from Liverpool’.

Daily Mirror 19 Jan 1960

‘In 1988 an unknown man in his 50s knocked on my door and announced himself as Sir John Smith Dodsworth,’ a modern-day occupant of Birthwaite Hall has recalled. ‘He had spent his life as a forester and writer in New Zealand having left the country because of a disagreement with his mother.’¹¹ The last was perhaps not unrelated to the young baronet’s relationship with a junior hotel manager in the Cotswolds, Margaret Jones, which would again attract the attention of the tabloid press.

see: TripAdvisor

And Sir John proved to be obligingly candid about the situation, telling the Daily Mirror of Ms. Jones’ first visit to his ancestral home. “I know my mother was charming to Margaret, but I thought I detected a little coldness. [She] would like me to marry a girl in society. But I don’t like them. All these debs think about is gay parties in London every night. That’s not the kind of life I want my wife to be mixed up in.”¹² Soon after this disenchanting episode Sir John ‘left for New Zealand to shoot deer – leaving…

… Miss Jones behind’. “He may be away for anything up to two years,” said his fiance, adding that she did not really mind waiting.¹³ Their enduring relationship at last resulted in marriage in Yorkshire in August 1961, the couple paying the briefest of visits to Thornton Watlass as Sir and Lady before they emigrated Down Under. “People may think I am giving up a lot by leaving my home here, but we are not really. The estate is not wealthy and I must earn a living. I have spent three years in New Zealand and I love the country and the people.”¹⁴

see: nzpcn.org.nz

In time Smith-Dodsworth established himself as an authority on the flora of his adopted homeland; save for occasional visits, he would never come back to Thornton Watlass Hall, unlike Margaret, Lady Smith-Dodsworth who returned after the couple’s divorce in 1971. Her mother-in-law died in 1984 and within a few years Margaret’s son David had taken on the management of the Thornton Watlass estate; the 9th (and present ↓) baronet’s instincts regarding his ancient birthright might be characterised as the polar opposite of those of his father.

source¹⁵

“Too many places like this have become hotels or nursing homes,” said the young squire in 1988, “but the place is still in good condition and I want to continue to live here.”¹⁵ The condition of one wing of the Hall would suffer just a few years later, however, when Smith-Dodsworth’s strategy for the estate’s viability (‘It will be paying guests but it will still be my home, not a hotel’¹⁵) fell victim to a scam, Thornton Watlass once again attracting headlines for less than ideal reasons.

Daily Mail 7 March 2020

In 1991 one such guest was ‘Lady Rosemary Aberdour’, apparently an aristocratic heiress but in truth a former secretary from Essex who had duped the National Hospitals Fund into an executive role and promptly embezzled over £2 million from the charity’s coffers. One of the many extravagant episodes during the fraudster’s high life spending spree was the hiring of one wing of Grade I listed Thornton Watlass Hall ‘for a two-week party .. leaving behind a trail of damage and unpaid debts’.¹⁶

twclife The following year, in the wake of Aberdour’s conviction and four-year jail sentence, the Hall was the venue for a fundraising ball to help the NHF recoup some of its losses. The event featured a charity auction which included a seized bespoke pearl necklace donated by the Fraud Squad. This particular adornment has, of course, long been a staple of the famous ‘girls in pearls‘ weekly frontispiece of Country Life magazine. In 1996, Miss Elizabeth Brady, ahead of her marriage to the heir to Thornton Watlass, forwent that cliched accessory, opting instead for a scarf and (perhaps uniquely) a pint of ale.

The couple became Sir David and Lady Smith-Dodsworth in 2012 upon the death of the 8th baronet in New Zealand. Until very recent times Thornton Watlass Hall continued to promote a singular welcome to staying guests, some perhaps drawn by the characterful house’s starring role in various television dramas. But with a centuries-long, ongoing story of its own there is little need for fiction at Thornton Watlass Hall: ‘It’s a treasure house of things beautifully documented. The written records of the family are just about totally complete…”¹⁷

see: Google Maps

1. Challoner, R. Memoirs of missionary priests .. that have suffered death in England, 1741/2.
2. Hooper, A.J. The extent of support for Parliament in Yorkshire during the first Civil War, thesis, York Univ., 1999.
3. Grenville, J., Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Yorkshire: North Riding, 2023.
4. Wood, G.B. The Yorkshireman’s home: Thornton Watlass Hall, Yorkshire Life Sept 1958.
5. Wood, G.B. Ghost stories of the North Country, Country Life 22 Dec 1960.
6. Linstrum, D. West Yorkshire architects and architecture,1978.
7. Goodchild, J. News from Newland, [privately published], 1999.
8. [MS] JG 001491, Wakefield Archives, West Yorkshire History Centre.
9. Fairfax-Blakeborough, J. Northern turf history Vol.1: Hambleton and Richmond, 1949.
10. Yorkshire Post 8 March 1935.
11. Shepherd, M. A history of Birthwaite Hall, 2005.
12. Daily Mirror 19 January 1960.
13. Daily News 28 March 1960.
14. Daily Express 9 August 1961.
15. Yorkshire Post 9 March 1988.
16. Daily Express 29 May 1992.
17. Darlington & Stockton Times 20 June 1992.

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Brawith Hall, Yorkshire

Posted in Uncategorized, Yorkshire, tagged Country estate, country house, Little-known, Obscure, Private on February 17, 2023| 4 Comments »

‘Knayton-with-Brawith is a township in the parish of Leake. Knayton is a village, but Brawith consists only of the Hall and farmhouse.’ – Kelly’s Directory 1901.

brayknay2 Lying roughly midway between the North Yorkshire market towns of Northallerton and Thirsk, and a mile-and-a-half distant from the aforesaid village, Brawith Hall, if not exactly remote, stands somewhat aloof. ‘Almost hidden by timber of the most luxuriant growth,’ its relative separation was perhaps a factor in both the reputedly eccentric regime maintained here by two bachelor brothers in the first decades of the 19th century and also in the turnover of tenants of Brawith Hall during the time of their singularly selected heir, William Warcop Preston Consett.¹

Himself an heir of semi-detachment, Consett – whose full name was an obligated compound of his antecedents – would be distracted from his Yorkshire gentry roots in his middle years by an eye-popping acquisition on the other side of the Channel, a Gallic diversion of over twenty-five years (gaining this family a hitherto unheralded footnote in British aviation history). Yet despite circumstances which might have induced a measure of neglect, Brawith Hall could still elicit (typically succinct) approval from Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the prodigious architectural historian having wended his way to this spot in the mid-1960s:

‘A perfectly preserved Queen Anne house.’²

A property which has been in the same hands for well over three hundred years, little-recorded Brawith’s obscurity also remains splendidly intact, being another noteworthy (Grade II*) country house which has seemingly risen without trace.

see: Google Maps

Some three miles north-east of Brawith, keeping each other company by the A19, Leake parish church and Hall are believed to be vestiges of a long lost settlement. From the 1520s Leake Hall was associated with the Danby family who eventually liquidated their interests, including the Brawith estate, toward the end of the 17th century. The wholesale purchaser was Northallerton merchant Edmund Barstow – merchant-cum-property developer? For in 1702 he would finalize the sale of the Brawith portion, complete with ‘a capital messuage, or chief mansion house’, to one Margaret Peacock, widow. She would later settle Brawith on her son Thomas Peacock following his marriage to heiress Priscilla Warcop in 1718.³

brawith1 By an unknown hand, the ‘neat mansion’ which had arisen at some point during this period was a very demure exercise in provincial Baroque.⁴ Of red brick, the south-facing principal front is of five bays divided by giant stone pilasters continuing up through a high brick parapet. (Three pilasters frame four bays on the west side.) Above the pedimented doorway the central first-floor window is distinguished by a rusticated surround.

‘One room inside has a fireplace flanked by giant pilasters, and pedimented doorways, another a splendid Rococo chimneypiece and frieze below the ceiling, all of wood, not plaster.’² These panelled principal rooms are either side of central hall spaces front and rear: each step of the cantilevered ‘good staircase’ features three balusters of differing forms while a 20th century plans suggest a two-column screen in the space behind.⁵

In 1743 Thomas Peacock would formally acknowledge ‘the love of his wife, and the great advancement in lands he had received by her .. and for having agreed to sell some lands which were her own estate’.³ That same year the couple would greet their first grandchild, born to their only daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Peter Consett. Consett was in due course the principal beneficiary of the will of his father, ‘Peter Consett of Stockton upon Tees, Gentleman’ but would dispose of this family’s main landholding (at Yarm), now committing to his wife’s birthright at Brawith.⁶

(Consett’s grandfather, another Peter, had married into the Bell family of Thirsk Hall, childless squire Ralph Bell favouring Consett’s younger son, Bell’s nephew, in his will, and in which line that house has since descended.)

brawithstables3

National Lib. of Scotland

This confluence of means, coupled with a soon-expanding family, saw developments at Brawith Hall: likely the first iteration of a service wing extending from the north-east (evident on maps of the middle of the next century), and a new stable block with (chiming) clock-pediment and cupola. In the summer of 1763 the comfortable obscurity of this Georgian minor gentry household was fleetingly interrupted by a peculiar incident which attracted the attention of the London press:

‘We are informed from Yorkshire that on Thursday se’enight at Brawith, the seat of Peter Consett, Esq., two cows were killed by lightning at the same time two young women were milking them, who received no other hurt than that of being much frightened.’⁷

At Consett’s own demise in 1786 Brawith Hall became the home of his surviving sons, Warcop, 32, and younger brother Peter, the pair contriving, by one 19th-century account, a somewhat gothic existence: ‘The brothers Consitt resided here for more than two-thirds of a century, practising a kind of feudal hospitality, guarded by bloodhounds and attended solely by female domestics.‘¹

Whatever the nature of their household, the brothers were not as unworldly as that description perhaps suggests. Both were subscribers to new poetry and to the latest thinking in exotic gardening; separately, Peter is listed among the governors of the Foundling Hospital in London while Warcop was a co-founder of the (short-lived) North Riding Bank. During his time as squire…

brawithwill … Warcop Consett would steadily acquire a great deal of land and properties across the diffuse parish of Leake (including the manor itself in 1803), the entirety of which he would straightforwardly bequeath to his brother at his death in 1833. By contrast, similarly-unmarried Peter Consett’s will (r), revealed after his own demise six years later, was an altogether more convoluted affair.

(As night followed day in Victorian England, Warcop’s will would face a challenge in Chancery on behalf of an overlooked niece, her father contending that Peter Consett had exerted a prejudicially dominant influence over his brother, and that Warcop’s will was basically ‘a forgery from beginning to end’. Case dismissed.)⁸

In search of an heir for the Brawith estate, Peter Consett (‘a gentleman of retiring and eccentric habits [who] occupied only two rooms of the Hall’⁹) alighted upon a grandson of the brothers’ sister, Jane, wife of squarson John Preston of Askham Bryan Hall. William Preston, the youngest of four sons born to this couple’s eldest son, Rev. John Preston, was at this point just six years old.

Extended stable block/coach house

Granting his female servants Grace Hargitt and Elizabeth Thornton generous annuities for the duration, Peter Consett’s will directed that the pair “shall keep my Mansion house at Brawith and the furniture therein in a proper state of order and cleanliness for the term of twenty one years after my decease .. and I hereby direct that they shall be allowed to occupy said Mansion House .. during the said term of twenty one years”.¹⁰ This was how long William Preston had to wait to inherit the estate, three executors (including relation John Bell of Thirsk Hall) being entrusted with interim oversight. The sale of some now surplus items – guns, crossbows, and a small fleet of carriages including ‘an elegant and highly-finished landau, quite new, never been used’ – soon followed.¹¹

see: Country Life

The rental income was to be judiciously invested, growing the value of the estate. More property purchases now ensued (including the mansion of Crosby Court four miles north, right, in 1846) before, in December, 1860, one week after the 21st anniversary of his benefactor’s death, William Warcop Peter Consett (the will having stipulated he use “no other name whatsoever”), would at last be welcomed as the new squire of Brawith.

‘The whole of the tenantry on the extensive estates of Mr. Consett assembled at Brawith Hall for the purpose of presenting him with an address of congratulations – beautifully written on vellum and splendidly illuminated – on taking possession of the property which had recently devolved upon him.’¹² And being a distinctly eligible young man of means, William was now on the radar of a higher strata of society than could reasonably have been entertained by earlier denizens of Brawith Hall.

As the children and siblings of clergymen it is perhaps less surprising that four of Consett’s (Preston) sisters became vicars’ wives. Ironically, William himself later converted to Roman Catholicism, a move possibly not unconnected with his own marriage in November 1864 to a granddaughter of the 6th Marquess of Lothian (senior members of the Kerr family also taking this path in the second half of the 19th century).

see: Newbattle Abbey

‘Miss Edith Kerr, the eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Charles Lennox Kerr, was married on Thursday last, at Dalkieth Palace, to Mr. W.W.P. Consett, of Brawith Hall, Yorkshire, and, from the intimate relation of the bride to the noble families of Buccleuch and Lothian, a great deal of interest was taken in the ceremony by the public at large. At the conclusion of the ceremony the party drove to Newbattle Abbey, seat of the Marquess of Lothian, where they partook of an elegant dejeuner prepared for them.’¹³

After which the comparatively homely environs of Brawith immediately beckoned, where Consett – initially at least – embraced the traditional role of squire, being appointed a local magistrate and lending his patronage to community events in the calendar of his near-5,000-acre corner of Yorkshire’s North Riding. The service wing of the Hall was likely modernised in his first decade at Brawith, becoming the substantial block of six wide bays and two-and-a-half storeys (attic dormers on the west side) which stands today.

see: Discover France & Spain

However, all of the Consetts’ eight children would be born not at Brawith but at a London townhouse in Kensington, and the couple’s attentions would extend yet further afield in the second decade of their marriage. For in 1876 William Consett purchased the Chateau du Champ de Bataille (r), a spectacular 17th century pile in Normandy, halfway between Paris and Le Havre.

Whatever motivation lay behind this improbable step, if nothing else it would appear to have broadened the marital horizons of the Consetts’ daughters four of whom would marry Continental nobles: Winifred wed Comte Louis de Boisgelin in 1889 while Vera and Violet were both at different times the wife of Baron Nicaise. Most notably, in 1893 Cordelia Consett married Charles, Comte (later Marquise) de Lambert.

see source

Lambert was an enthusiastic early aviationist and became the first pupil to be taken on by American flight pioneer Wilbur Wright during his promotional European visit based at the popular society resort of Pau, in south-west France. And it was here on February 15, 1909 that Cordelia, Comtesse de Lambert was taken up for a five-minute spin in his marvelous machine, thereby becoming the first British woman to fly!

‘Wilbur and my husband settled me into the tiny seat. I was told to hold onto the wood parts either side with my feet resting on a small bar, nothing else between me and the lovely fields. I turned to Wilbur to say how glorious! But my voice was drowned by the motor, which only then I seemed to realise. [When] we came gently to rest I felt sad, tears were near, and words seemed impossible.’¹⁴

Her father’s French adventure seems to have had a bumpier landing, the grand Chateau being finally advertised ‘to be sold, with a view to demolition’ in 1903¹⁵ (a fate the since-restored building has happily avoided). During this era Brawith Hall had been let to a series of tenants of independent means: an officer’s widow, Mrs. Anna Shawe, attended by seven staff, saw out the 19th century while in the early part of the 20th the family of retired Army General James Blyth would divide their time between Brawith and a London residence on Park Lane.

[Personal collection]

‘There was neither gas or electricity at Brawith Hall, a quiet, well-run country house some two-and-a-half miles from the main road,’ a sister of the Blyths’ young 2nd footman William Hague recalled. ‘Willie’s first task in the morning was to fill the forty or more lamps with parafin, clean the glasses and polish the brass. After a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs at eight a.m., in the company of the first footman and two chauffeurs [additional to ‘the eight women servants’], the windows and silver had to be cleaned.’¹⁶

see: Strutt&Parker

Meanwhile, the 1891 census finds William Consett at Crookhill Hall, the south Yorkshire family seat of his brother-in-law Rev. John Woodyeare; a decade on Mr & Mrs Consett appear to have taken the lease on Little Haugh Hall near Bury St. Edmunds (right), a house with ‘the finest Georgian interior in Suffolk’. But William Consett was back in Paris when he died in 1910. His childless eldest son D’Arcy having predeceased him the year before, the Brawith estate now passed…

… to second son, career naval officer and military attache Montagu Consett, who retired with the rank of rear-admiral in 1921. His return to Yorkshire would usher in significant change at Brawith. Most dramatically, in 1919 Montagu ‘sold by private treaty the greater part of his extensive estate [4,736 acres, including Crosby Court mansion] at a price approximating to £150,000’.¹⁷

The family’s focus was now firmly on Brawith Hall and the leading regional architect of the day Walter Brierley was commissioned to devise a scheme for enlarging and remodelling of the house. Brierley envisioned twin two-storey wings east and west of the principal (now garden) front, in the existing style, while the elongated service wing would be truncated and new range of facilities stretched across the rear of the Hall. However, possibly baulking at the estimated cost of this scheme (£13,000), these radical alterations would get no further than the drawing board, the footprint of the Hall being substantially unaltered by the eventual changes.¹⁸

brawith3 A shallow three-bay extension – perhaps incorporating a billiard room Brierley had intended for the west wing – was now introduced at the junction of the old house (four new sash windows regularising its adjacent east elevation) and the plain service wing (which was also to subject to some reordering at ground floor level). Having moved in as a family of five (three sons), by 1929 the Consetts would be advertising for an under-butler for their now ‘family of two, staff seven’.¹⁹

source²¹

In 1937 a stained glass tribute to Montagu’s late wife, Ethel, was consecrated in Leake parish church and he himself would be similarly commemorated fifty years on by his son and heir. After schooling at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth and several years service in the footsteps of his father, Peter Consett (left) decided that ‘his heart wasn’t really in the sea’. So, in 1935, taking advantage of an incentivised exit scheme for officers (‘it didn’t look like there was much chance of war in the near future’), he retired to take over the Brawith estate. He wasn’t at home for long.²⁰

see: Bing Maps

Nat. Lib. of Scotland

Having kept his hand in as a local Territorial officer, Col. Consett would serve in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in World War Two during which time Brawith Hall was requisitioned as a hospital for injured servicemen. While much of the former parkland at Brawith was subsumed into the 800-acre family farming enterprise in the colonel’s lifetime (d. 2001), the gardens of the house were regularly opened in the 1960s, a brief era of peak visibility for a place which, two generations on, remains amongst the least-known of Yorkshire’s surviving family seats…

[Archives]

1. Grainge, W. The Vale of Mowbray, 1859.
2. Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Yorkshire North Riding, 1966.
3. Consett of Brawith MS, North Yorkshire Record Office.
4. Lewis, S. A topographical dictionary of England, 1848.
5. Morrice, R. Stuart and Baroque: a guide and gazeteer, 1982.
6. Will of Peter Consett [MS], MMB/279, West Yorkshire Archive Service Bradford.
7. Lloyd’s Evening Post, 25 July 1763.
8. York Herald, 8 July 1843.
9. The law journal reports, 1842.
10. Will of Peter Consett, York Diocesean archive, Borthwick Institute, Univ. of York.
11. York Herald, June 1840.
12. York Gazette, 22 December 1860.
13. Morning Post, 12 November 1864.
14. U.S. Air Services magazine, March 1935.
15. Burlington Gazette, Vol.1, No.4, July 1903.
16. Wheeler, H. The milliner’s apprentice, 2009.
17. Yorkshire Evening Post, 27 March 1919.
18. Atkinson Brierley archive [MS], Borthwick Institute, Univ. of York.
19. The Times classified ads, 1929.
20. The anti-Establishment landed gent, Northallerton, Thirsk & Bedale Times, 25 Feb 1978.
21. Yorkshire Evening Press, 8 July 1989.

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Torwoodlee House, Selkirkshire

Posted in Scottish Borders, Selkirkshire, tagged ancestral home, Architecture, Country estate, country house, family seat, Little-known, Obscure, Private on February 3, 2020| 3 Comments »

As a time and a place in which to put down dynastic roots few can surely have been less propitious than the Scottish Borders in the first half of the sixteenth century. If the natives’ perennial confrontations with a territorially ambitious English crown were not enough, sudden havoc and devastation could always lie just over the hill courtesy of avaricious freebooting Border reivers. Loyalties were routinely bought and sold to suit ever-shifting agendas, all parties attempting to exploit volatile circumstances to their particular advantage.

see: Bing Maps

Abutting the north-western extremity of Galashiels, the Torwoodlee estate of the Pringle family was established in the teeth of just such unpromising circumstances. Over 500 years later it survives, having faced down existential threat more than once along the way. The wider Clan Pringle were as active players as any during the Borders’ turbulent history, gaining and losing by turns. William, a younger son of James Pringle (Hoppringle) of Smailholm would branch out ten miles west, fully acquiring Torwoodlee in 1510.

Just one year earlier a thrusting young Henry VIII had ascended the throne; in 1513 his forces would claim the life of William Pringle, being one of the thousands of Scots to fall in the disastrous Battle of Flodden. Decades later Henry’s still unsatisfied ambitions for his dominion would affect the destiny of William’s sons, George and Sandy.

Mary, daughter of James V of Scotland, was born on December 8, 1542; within a week she was queen. Henry quickly resolved to secure a union with his young son Edward, a proposal to which the Scots initially agreed before thinking better of it six months later. Thus began the years of so-called Rough Wooing which included ‘a remarkably systematic English effort to create a body of Scots collaborators’.¹ If taken up, formal assurance agreements afforded not only protection from English harassment but license to menace and pillage recalcitrant neighbours if desired.

see: Register of Tartans

With varying degrees of commitment ‘the Pringles – [clan tartan, r] – had signed up as “assured Englishmen”‘.² Though initially coerced, the subsequent opportunistic alacrity demonstrated by William’s younger son Sandy Pringle came to be ‘regarded as intentional treachery rather than Borders craftiness by his fellow Scots’. So ‘English’ did he become that permanent relocation south of the border was deemed expedient (cushioned by the reward of a pension ‘and monastic grants from a grateful Henry VIII’).³

At one point the English had reason to believe that they also had brother George Pringle, 2nd Laird of Torwoodlee, on side, only to later accuse him of ‘treasonably assisting the Ancient enemies of England’ when his allegiance reverted.² Pardoned for any such activity in 1551, George now evidently thrived: ‘[He] seems to have been a wealthy man, and to have lived in greater splendour than might have been expected, when security was so precarious.’⁴ And such apparent prosperity would indeed eventually bring out the very worst in some of Pringle’s fellow borderers, a mob of several hundred sacking the original house in late 1568, looting anything of value and murdering the laird in his bed.

see: milliecitra @ Instagram

Family fortunes would take a generation to recover, George’s grandson – also George – at last being able properly to replace the principal dwelling in 1601. Today approached by an avenue rising through woodland, the ruined remains (r) of George’s ‘very smart house’ stand enshrouded by trees on the 3,000-acre Torwoodlee Estate.⁵ ‘On a steep slope that was extensively terraced to receive the building,’ its semicircular tower remains distinctive, corbelled two-thirds of the way up to a square top storey [listing].

(For long, the laird has welcomed a visitation to Torwoodlee Tower as an important element of Galashiels’ annual Braw Lads Gathering.)

Their house re-established, George now set about restoring Pringle family honour, criminal prosecution of the families of his grandfather’s assailants resulting in their outlawry and the seizure of assets. Marrying at least three times, George’s first wife Margaret Pringle, of the Pringles of nearby Whytbank, produced their son and heir, James. (One of James’ own daughters, Anna, would also look no further than this branch of Clan Pringle, marrying Alexander, 4th Laird of Whytbank, whilst another, Margaret, married George Pringle, 6th Laird of Buckholm, Torwoodlee’s immediate neighbour to the east.)

If ‘fear and expediency [had given] the English the great bulk of their supporters in Scotland’ during the time of the Rough Wooing, ‘desire for the reformed faith gave them their most devoted supporters’.¹ A century on, the rising influence of James, Duke of York (later King James II) saw the religious tide begin to turn once again. Having previously fought the royal cause in Scotland, George Pringle – ‘a staunch friend of the Covenant‘ who succeeded his father at Torwoodlee in 1657 – would now ‘suffer greatly on account of his religion’.⁶

see: Nat.Galleries of Scotland

The 6th Laird (left) became a key ally of James’ arch-enemy Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll. The latter’s dubious prosecution and resultant death sentence in 1681 led to the earl’s audacious prison escape whence he headed initially for Torwoodlee, an expectant George Pringle supplying fresh horses and assistance to England. Argyll would ultimately find refuge in Holland to where in time Pringle himself also fled. The pair made an ill-fated return in 1685, Pringle being amongst many exiled Scots to support Argyll’s doomed overthrow of James II.

The ambitious earl was captured and executed; Pringle managed to escape back to Holland but Torwoodlee was confiscated and given to a royal ally. During his time abroad pressure for information was exerted on George’s only son, James, the teenager resisting threats that ‘every bone in his body would be broken, his flesh ripped up and boiling lead and oil poured into him’.⁶ The successful invasion by William of Orange in 1688 saw Pringle’s eventual return but his homecoming was brief, dying the following year, aged 58.

Torwoodlee would soon be restored to Pringle family ownership and, overdue a period of stability and calm, the tenure of James (d.1735) was long and relatively uneventful, that of his son even more so. Bachelor George, the 8th Laird, ‘hardly appears in the records [and] seems to have lived quietly’, sharing Torwoodlee with various spinster sisters.⁶ At his demise in 1780 all now passed to his nephew James…

… the one and only time Torwoodlee has failed to pass from father to son in its 500-plus year history. (Every laird since has been named James.)

Upon inheriting, 21-year-old James promptly threw up his legal studies and began what would be a defining incumbency stretching across six decades. Losing little time, in 1782 the young squire married Elizabeth Tod, co-heiress of the Dryburgh estate ten miles south-east of Torwoodlee. This property would soon be sold which was opportune since in 1783 the Pringles not only welcomed the birth of their first son but would also set about building themselves a fashionable new residence.

see: Canmore

Eschewing the increasingly redundant defensive vernacular in favour of Georgian comfort and elegance, the new Torwoodlee House was typical of the neat classical country villas now going up in the Scottish Borders. Attributed to emerging Kelso architect William Elliot, Torwoodlee’s ‘main block of two storeys over a high basement’ would be linked to flanking low pavilions ‘by screen walls originally topped by decorative urns’.⁵

see: Canmore

The original five-bay south-facing entrance front is seemingly little-altered, ‘an excellent predimented doorway approached by a graceful flight of steps’ (r).⁵ The house was completed in 1785, the expense incurred being further defrayed by the sale of nearby Bowland, an estate which had been acquired by James’ father in 1752. Local literary superstar Sir Walter Scott would be among the subsequent visitors to ‘Mr. Pringle’s beautiful seat’.

James died in 1840 and the rest of the 19th century at Torwoodlee would be seen out by his namesake son and then grandson both of whom joined the Royal Navy at a young age. ‘Though not lucky enough to have been at any of the great naval battles,’ his father’s longevity enabled the 10th Laird to rise to the rank of rear-admiral at his retirement in 1846.⁷ Thirteen years later his son Commander James Pringle would in turn come ashore upon inheriting Torwoodlee and its ‘neat and substantial mansion’.

see: Iain Lees

For reasons of privacy, this James soon decided that the house should be turned round, the entrance now facing north. In robust Victorian fashion his new centre breaks boldly from the relatively chaste original composition, capped by an armorial pediment rising to the roof ridgeline. Peddie & Kinnear were engaged for the project, the prolific Edinburgh practice also heightening the twin pavilions. Internally, the original entrance hall ‘was incorporated into the existing drawing room’.⁵

see: Canmore

In 1854 James’ sister Elizabeth had married John Borthwick, 14th Laird of Crookston, an estate 15 miles further up the Gala Water valley, held by this family since the 15th century. Producing no children, Crookston passed to Borthwick’s brother, William, whose two eldest sons would head back downriver, finding brides in the shape of James Pringle’s daughters, Melana and Adelaide. Meanwhile, the sisters’ eldest sibling, John, dying young, brother James duly inherited Torwoodlee in 1902 and would see the estate through the first half of the 20th century.

see: Southern Reporter

In recent times attention has focused on old Torwoodlee Tower, which was ultimately abandoned after the family transferred to their new house. Funded by a combination of Roxburghe Estate windfarm bounty and an appeal to the global diaspora of Clan Pringle, the ruin is preserved, as befits a ‘monument of national importance .. which has the potential to contribute to our knowledge of the changing nature of polite architecture during this transitional period’. (With ‘impressive ancient oaks’, Torwoodlee’s parkland, too, is ‘a site of some interest that deserves further investigation’.⁸)

torsqui In contrast to the civility of the Category A-listed House, the old stone Tower is a reminder of wilder times in the Scottish Borders. Not, of course, that the present (14th) Laird of Torwoodlee is entirely above taking sides and going into battle against pesky territorial invaders…

[Torwoodlee Estate][Clan Pringle]

1. Merriman, M.H. The assured Scots, The Scottish historical review, Vol.47, No.143, 1968.
2. Tait, J. Dick the devil’s bairns: Breaking the Border mafia, 2018.
3. Miekle, M.M. Lairds and gentlemen: A study of the landed families of the eastern Anglo-Scottish borders. [Thesis, PDF] Edin. Univ., 1988.
4. Burke, B. A genealogical and heraldic dictionary of the landed gentry, 1848.
5. Cruft, K., Dunbar, J., Fawcett, R. Buildings of Scotland: Borders, 2006.
6. Pringle, A. The records of the Pringles or Hoppringles of the Scottish border, 1933.
7. Carre, W.R. Border memories, or Sketches of prominent men and women of the border, 1876.
8. Borders designed landscapes survey, Peter McGowan Associates, 2009.

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Downton Hall, Shropshire

Posted in Shropshire, tagged Architecture, Country houses, Inaccessible, Landed gentry, Little-known, Obscure, Private, Shropshire, Stately homes on August 3, 2017| 1 Comment »

Completely out of the blue one autumn day in 1872 Sir Charles Rouse-Boughton, 11th baronet, was informed that he had been bequeathed an eighteenth-century mansion, Henley Hall in Shropshire (below), together with its landed estate in the will of a recently deceased neighbour, Mr. John Knight. Being already the squire of his own handsome ancestral pile – Downton Hall just to the north – Sir Charles’s surprise at this turn of events was as nothing compared to that of Knight’s three appalled adult sons, who quickly set about mounting a legal challenge to have the will set aside.

see: Imsweddings

Relaxed and somewhat nonplussed about the whole business, Sir Charles duly submitted to the process, which saw a jury in the Court of Probate successfully persuaded of the proposition that Knight, labelled ‘a capricious, morose recluse’, had edged from mere eccentricity into insanity. Testimony that he ‘seldom dressed till the middle of the day’, and was ‘fond of listening to German bands’ and cruelly pranking his servants, was of perhaps less significance than a landmark judgement from a generation before in convincing the jury that Knight’s legacy was indeed perverse.

For Sir Charles, the court was reminded, ‘was the descendant of a person who in 1840, in consequence of a decision of the Court of Chancery, had come into the possession of a [separate] magnificent estate which had previously belonged to the Knight family and had ever since been in the possession of the Boughtons’. (The Boughton baronetcy, meanwhile, had descended, as we shall also see, from Sir Charles’s great-grandfather via a sensational – and retrospectively dubious – murder trial and execution.)

So the Knights duly retained Henley Hall (at least for a short time before selling). But, while the Rouse-Boughton baronetcy is now extinct, the Downton Hall estate – a Grade II* house sitting at the heart of ‘5,500 acres of breathtakingly beautiful Shropshire countryside’¹ – remains with Sir Charles’s descendants having passed only by inheritance and marriage down more than three centuries. Always private, the late-20th century death of the reclusive last of the direct line revealed a veritable time capsule, with exquisite rooms ‘no-one had been in for 50 years’.

While the Rouse-Boughton name may be that most associated with Downton Hall, it is not there now nor was it there at the beginning. In the latter part of the 17th century, funded by income from legal services, the Pearce, Wredenhall, and Shepherd/Hall families had begun acquiring parcels of land north-east of Ludlow, separately but sometimes together. Intermarriage would further coalesce their interests. In 1726 sergeant-at-law William Hall devised his property in trust to create an inheritance for the use of his sister, Elizabeth Shepherd, who had married Wredenhall Pearce in 1722. Several generations of asset consolidation was reaching critical mass: a statement country seat was soon called for.

see: Jeremy Bolwell @ geograph

‘On a magnificent hilltop site looking eastward to Titterstone Clee,’ Pearce upgraded the house of his grandfather, Richard Wredenhall, to a fine mansion of local brick and stone quoins.² Downton’s three-storey, nine-bay east facade with projecting wings was the work of William Smith, Jnr., and very much in keeping with the foursquare house style of the prolific Midlands practice established by his father Francis and his namesake uncle.

In 1760 the south front would undergo another signature makeover this time at the hands of local architect/engineer Thomas Farnolls Pritchard at the behest of Wredenhall Pearce’s son and heir, William Pearce Hall.

see: Sue Bremner

A narrow, pedimented entrance doorway was introduced between characteristic full-height canted bays, a demure exterior belying the exuberant delights within. For Pritchard had dug into his contacts book, most likely calling in trusty Italian stuccatore to produce the ‘magnificent mid-C18th interiors [which remain] largely intact’.²

One young American visitor to Downton, writing home to her family a century on, was suitably impressed with their achievements: ‘Lunch was served in a very fine room…

see source

Country Life⁷

… they say altogether more beautifully embellished than any other dining room in the area. Some admirable portraits are inserted into the walls, and around them are white plaster frames in relievo corresponding to other ornamental work. The whole produces a beautiful, and to me novel, effect.’

Country Life

Country Life

Bigger and better yet is the saloon where, beneath ‘a large ceiling oval encircled by a vine wreath’², hand-carved ‘trophies of the chase and music appear, united to pendants of flowers and oak-leaf festoons’.³ This decoration continues in the passage and also adorns the stair.

With sufficient means any amount of finery might be acquired but improved social status was generally harder to come by. However, in the same year that Pritchard had been contracted to enhance Downton, another country seat some 75 miles east in Warwickshire had welcomed the arrival of a son and heir to a venerable estate and a baronetcy created in 1641. It was a title soon destined for Downton Hall as a consequence of the controversial premature demise of Sir Theodosius Boughton, 7th Bt., in 1781.

see source

Twenty-year-old Theodosius lived at Lawford Hall (r), near Rugby, with his mother, sister and brother-in-law Capt. John Donellan. The young baronet’s somewhat feckless, impulsive nature did not augur well for the family fortune of which he would shortly be master. Just months before he attained his majority an ailing Theodosius was administered a draught, ostensibly medicinal, by his mother. Two days later he was dead.

Days of fevered speculation about the cause of the young Sir’s death prompted a public exhumation and autopsy in the churchyard at Newbold-on-Avon, traditional resting place of the Boughton line. Certain cadaverous odours, combined with the reportedly suspicious behaviour of Donellan (whose wife now stood to benefit) led to the latter’s arraignment at Warwick Crown Court before notorious ‘hanging’ judge, Justice Buller. Though the evidence against Boughton’s brother-in-law was entirely circumstantial, judge and jury lost little time in finding Donellan guilty of murder by poisoning and he was hanged within days, protesting his innocence to the end.

Meanwhile, over in Herefordshire, one particular gentleman could not disguise his delight at the turn of events. “Wonderful news,” wrote Edward Boughton, a distant relative of the ‘victim’ upon learning that he, as eldest surviving great-grandson of the 4th baronet, now assumed the title. (This whole affair would be recounted at Downton, left, in a 2010 edition of the BBC celebrity genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?)

Sir Edward – lamented as ‘indolent’ by his mother yet whose memorial records a man ‘of inviolable honour and integrity’ – died in 1794, unmarried but the father of several daughters by a maid-servant, to the eldest of whom he left the family’s Poston Court estate. His brother Charles, though slighted by this act, duly became the ninth baronet and was hardly destitute having already married Catherine, only daughter and sole heiress of William Pearce Hall of Downton Hall.

‘I now consider myself bound in Honour, as well as urged by Affection, to declare that my Inclination, my Attachment, my high Opinion of your Merits remain unaltered.’

downtonaaChas A somewhat stilted declaration from Charles Boughton whose object was not, on this occasion, Catherine Pearce of Downton but his first love, Charlotte Clavering, whom Charles had encountered during thirteen years at the anvil of empire in India. Theirs would be a protracted long-distance relationship complicated by the influence of variously-motivated third parties. Ultimately rebuffed upon his return to England the thwarted suitor soon entered parliament as Charles Boughton-Rouse, MP for Evesham (having previously inherited the Worcestershire estate of Rous Lench from a distant cousin, Thomas Phillips-Rouse).

“I have a clear £1,500 a year to spend. Debts I have none. Even the expenses of my late Election are completely satisfied. I shall wait with the most anxious impatience to learn that the Alliance I propose is favoured with your approbation.”

see source

All of which was music to the ears of William Pearce Hall, by this time a man with debts aplenty who would gladly hand over not just his daughter Catherine – Boughton-Rouse’s new object of desire (captured, left, in a full-length portrait of 1785 by George Romney) – but also his Downton Hall estate as swiftly as matters could be arranged.⁴ Having reasserted his family name on inheriting the Boughton baronetcy after the death of his brother in 1794, Sir Charles Rouse-Boughton died in 1821 leaving three daughters and a son William who, rather extraordinarily, managed to pull off the same trick as his father in marrying a ‘Downton’ heiress, albeit inadvertently.

see: Stonebrook Publishing

Eight miles south-west of Downton Hall, over the border into Herefordshire, stands Downton Castle (r), the singular Picturesque creation of aesthete Richard Payne Knight. Oddly, having invested so thoroughly, Payne Knight tired of his romantic project soon after its completion, entrusting the Castle to his brother Thomas Andrew Knight and thereafter, apparently, to his heirs male. Alas, Thomas Knight’s son would die in a shooting accident in 1827, three years after the marriage of his youngest sister Charlotte to Sir William Rouse-Boughton.

A two-year legal case followed Thomas Knight’s death in 1838, a male member of the extended Knight family contesting Sir William’s claim that Thomas’s property could indeed now flow to his daughter. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, a ruling which would see Downton Hall and Downton Castle, and all the land between, united in the same direct ownership for the next sixteen years. (The landmark judgement in Knight vs Knight ‘is still applied by the courts today in order to determine the validity of a trust’.)

see: Historic England

It was an expanded empire of which the court victor became excessively proud, as the aforementioned young American visitor discovered in the course of a personal tour of the estate in 1852. Her party were taken on rail carriages deep into the candlelit quarries beneath Clee Hill (which had been initiated with the proviso ‘that the workings shall not be visible from Downton Hall’): ‘The whole work we were expected to consider very wonderful – and so it was.’

But its seems a little of the 10th baronet – ‘a large, stout, red-faced, white-haired gouty old gentleman’ – went a long way. ‘At dinner I sat on Sir William’s right. He talked enough for a dozen, and I was frightened at my proximity to him, for his great object is to pump everyone to see how little they know and show how much he knows. I must admit that I think Sir William a humbug and a great tyrant.’

see: cloud9photography

A dim view of the squire could not dent an admiration for the attractions of Downton Hall, however: ‘[From] an exquisitely picturesque gate and lodge you gradually ascend a range of hills through an avenue two miles long. How can I convey the glorious scene which breaks upon you as you approach the house..the beautiful vision of the valley beneath.’ (That south lodge is just one of three including in the west ‘an untouched example (↓) of that composite Jacobean-Gothick which flourished in the West Midlands in the 1760s: provincial, unscholarly, picturesque and paper thin’.⁵)

see: Google Maps

In the year of Sir William’s marriage to Charlotte Knight (a precocious horticulturalist recognized for creating ‘one of the greatest cherries we have’) local architect Edward Haycock was commissioned to design a new entrance on the west side of Downton Hall (↓). Executed in trademark Greek Revival style, a one-storey colonnade precedes a ‘circular vestibule, shallow-domed and top-lit with Ionic columns carrying a continuous entablature’.²

BBC/Who Do You Think You Are?

In ponderous Victorian fashion, a stone balustrade incorporating the family motto in latin would be introduced atop the south and east elevations by their son, Sir Charles, 11th Bt. (d.1906), during the course of his fifty-year tenure as squire of Downton. (Downton Castle, meanwhile, had passed to his younger brother, Andrew Rouse-Boughton-Knight, descending in that line until finally being sold in 1979.)

see: Equipix

Equine pursuits would come to dominate affairs on the estate through the twentieth century. ‘Downton Hall is one of those homes that exudes fox-hunting,’ Major Sir Edward Rouse-Boughton (d. 1963) having established the North Ludlow here between the wars. This pack was later amalgamated with the Ludlow Hunt of which Lady Rouse-Boughton and their only child, Mary, would be joint-masters between 1952 and 1973.⁶

Though given a coming out ball at Claridge’s in the debs’ season of 1935, and a society wedding bridesmaid at least twice, the last baronet’s daughter would never marry. ‘After her mother’s death [in 1976] Miss Mary lived all alone in a single room of the lovely red-brick Georgian house. The other rooms, kept so tightly shuttered that their plastered and gilded walls are amazingly well preserved, are a time-warp back to another, more gracious age.’⁷

see: MERL

Mary Rouse-Boughton died in 1991. In the stable tack room a two-bar electric fire had been left on continuously for twenty years ‘in case Miss Mary’s saddles should get damp’.⁷ To meet death duties the Romney portrait (above) of Catherine, Lady Rouse-Boughton – ‘the finest and most valuable of that richly furnished house’s treasures’⁸ – was given to the nation and hangs here. (The whereabouts of another portrait also commissioned by her husband Sir Charles of his prize pig is not known.)

see: Audra Jervis

The entire Downton Hall estate was bequeathed to Mary’s great-nephew Michael ‘Micky’ Wiggin who, having ‘no idea what to do with it’, promptly invited three-time Grand National-winning racehorse trainer Capt. Tim Forster to relocate his stables there. This arrangement continues today under their respective successors, the present owner of Downton being also regional partner at a high-end estate agency yet whose own house has, ironically, never itself been sold…

[Archives]

1. Sunday Times, 10 March 1996.
2. Newman, J., Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Shropshire, 2006.
3. Ayscough, A., Jourdain, M. Country house baroque, 1941.
4. Fielding, M. The indissoluble knot? Public and private representations of men and marriage 1770-1830, thesis, 2012.
5. Mowl, T., Earnshaw, B. Trumpet at a distant gate, 1985.
6. Country Life, 26 February 1976.
7. Daily Telegraph, 6 January 1995.
8. Tipping, H.A. Country Life, 21 July 1917.

Hinton Admiral, Hampshire & Bodorgan Hall, Anglesey

Posted in Anglesey, hampshire, tagged Anglesey, Country estate, Country houses, hampshire, Landed gentry, landowner, Little-known, Obscure, Private, Rich List on November 11, 2016| 7 Comments »

‘Reader, I married him’

– Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

see: Mike Smith @ geograph

Eastleigh is a town in Hampshire just north-east of the New Forest. It is also the name given to the fictional house and estate at the centre of a now ten-year-old novel, The Chase by Candida Clark: ‘Built in 1725, Eastleigh was a house to fall in love with. On certain days in spring the bluebell walk within a broad avenue of limes could be seen by the public.’

The house pictured above is grade I-listed Hinton Admiral, situated on the fringe of the New Forest some twenty-five miles south-west of Eastleigh. Its ‘magnificent twenty acre garden within a much larger estate’ includes a ‘ten acre lime-tree avenue filled with bluebells’, one of the many attractions of the Hinton Admiral annual open day each May. The Chase, Candida Clark’s sixth novel in eight years, was published in the spring of 2006. Later that same year the writer married George Meyrick, heir not only to the Hinton Admiral estate but also to Bodorgan Hall in north Wales (itself ‘a sizeable mansion house, run to a very high standard’) and an C18 baronetcy. Since when Clark has disappeared from the literary scene.

(In a remarkable example of art prefiguring life, the pivotal protagonist of Clark’s last book, Celia Domeyne, wife of Sir Leo, has two daughters and is pregnant with a son. The Meyrick household has since expanded in precisely the same rhythm.)

Were the author ever in need of narrative inspiration for a return to the fray she need look no further than the pictures on the walls. At Bodorgan Hall, a late C18 house sequestered within 14,000 acres on the island of Anglesey, there hangs a portrait, ‘Lady Lucy Meyrick (nee Pitt) as a child’. In fact, Lucy Pitt was but fourteen years old when she married into this family, she and her equally youthful cousin being sensational runaway brides of the schoolboy Meyrick brothers.

see: Dorset Life

Some 320 miles south, a Joseph Highmore portrait (r) of Lydia, Lady Mews, adorns Hinton Admiral, a house built a year after their marriage in 1719 by her similarly middle-aged husband. Sir Peter died six years later contentiously leaving all to the ‘hated’ Lady Lydia. These paintings form part of the collections of two private houses whose hitherto entirely separate histories coalesced 140 years ago under the ownership of Sir George Tapps Gervis Meyrick, 3rd Bt. (The tripartite surname endures, foreshortened in practice today.)

At the election of 1715 Owen Meyrick of Bodorgan entered parliament as the member for Anglesey upholding the Whig sentiments of a family long established on the island. Meanwhile, Sir Peter Mews, a Tory MP of five years standing, was again returned for Christchurch (then) in Hampshire, the manor he had purchased for £22,000 in 1708. However, politically and geographically poles apart, a mutual encounter between the two men significantly responsible for the dimensions of the present-day Meyrick Estate is perhaps unlikely.

Valued service to various Tudor monarchs had helped establish the position of the ancient Meyrick (Meurig) family in the south-west of Anglesey. A debilitating decade-long legal wrangle with a neighbouring landowner at the end of the C16 (which saw ‘both parties indulging in a lively campaign of slander, counter-slander and physical violence’) would take a century to recover from.¹ But throughout the lifetime of Owen Meyrick (1682-1759) ‘the Bodorgan estate grew enormously’, initially through inheritance of the lands of the Bold family through his mother, later by systematic purchase.² ‘Owen Meyrick was the real founder of the later fortunes of the family’ in Wales. [Estate archive, Bangor Univ.]

see: Bing Maps

Quite how this pillar of society took the news that two of his sons, then boarders at Westminster School, had impulsively entered into ‘quickie’ marriages with two even younger girls whom they barely knew, one can only imagine. Lady Lucy Pitt was the youngest child of Thomas Pitt, 1st earl of Londonderry, upon whose death in 1729 she was sent to live in the restrictive household of her cousin Jane Chomondeley’s family at their town house in Buckingham Gate, W1. Lucy’s older brothers, Thomas and Ridgeway, also attended nearby Westminster School.

The miserable regime to which young Lucy and Jane were subject came to the attention of the Meyrick boys, Pierce and Richard, who, upon gallant impulse, enacted a ‘plan’ to liberate the girls, marry and perhaps even flee abroad. A dash to the environs of the debtors’ Fleet Prison hastily ensued, wherein dissolute clergymen ‘earned a disgraceful livelihood coupling young people together at the shortest notice’, no questions asked, commonly in the upstairs room of a local tavern. Trade came mostly from the lower orders but ‘occasionally the dreary purlieus of the Fleet were lighted up by erratic flashes of quality and fashion’.

see source

So it was that Pierce took Lucy, Richard took Jane and, surprisingly, all appear to have lived happily ever after. For, as the annals of Westminster School record, after a period of years both couples formally remarried in 1732. On reflection, Owen Meyrick perhaps concluded that the boys could have fared no better in the marriage market had matters taken a more conventional course. Lady Lucy’s grandfather had sold the fabulous ‘Pitt Diamond‘ (acquired during his time as Governor of Madras) to the French monarchy in 1717 for over £100,000. Comfortably outliving her two childless brothers, Woodlands Manor in Wiltshire (r) was among the Pitt assets which flowed to Pierce Meyrick via his wife. (Jane Cholmondeley was also reportedly ‘a lady of great fortune’.³)

Down in Hampshire impetuous teenage offspring were one problem Sir Peter and Lady Mews would never encounter, the pair being both in their forties when they married in 1719. When he was aged just 25, Mews had been appointed Chancellor to the Bishop of Winchester (who happened to be his uncle). Ten years later, the ambitious purchase of the manor of Christchurch, while enhancing his status and taking him to Westminster, gradually burdened his coffers to the extent that a late marriage to Islington property heiress Lydia Jarvis (or Gervis), 42, suddenly made great sense. And now, of course, Lady Lydia would need an appropriate residence.

‘Hinton Place’ (see: British Library)

Len Williams @ geograph

In the north of Hampshire stands Warbrook House (r), built for himself by architect John James in 1723, the same year in which he succeeded Sir Christopher Wren as surveyor of St. Paul’s Cathedral. James Lees-Milne has not unreasonably suggested that Hinton Admiral is strongly redolent of James’ ‘plain Baroque’⁴ style, the Mews’ house being similarly a brick mansion with an ‘unmistakable’⁵ raised central section defined by simple pilasters. Two long service blocks ran perpendicular to the main house, connected by colonnades, a ‘grandiose, grossly inconvenient plan for a house of by no means large proportions’.⁶

Alas, at the height of his squirarchical pomp Sir Peter Mews died in 1726 aged 54. Claiming no family, Mews left all to his wife but a Thomas Mew of London was anonymously encouraged by letter to pursue a claim. ‘Everybody hates My Lady Mew and wish that she may lose the estate. They say that she is a mean, miserable woman and tricking.’⁷ A subsequent legal challenge was eventually seen off by the redoubtable Lydia who would bequeath Hinton to her nephew, Benjamin Clerke. His son would also encounter Chancery woe when inheriting as a minor, a suit questioning the legitimacy of Joseph Jarvis Clerke being thrown out at a hearing at the Guildhall in January 1754.⁸

see: Google Maps

In 1777, the year before he died, Joseph saw his house gutted by fire. But the exterior structure remained sound, faithful reconstruction commencing immediately, seen through by his heir, cousin George Tapps (created Sir George, 1st Bt., in 1792). Additionally, balancing wings behind each colonnade filled out the original composition.

Meanwhile, just as the restoration and expansion of Hinton was coming together, in 1779 up on Anglesey a new house was also rising.

opm Bodorgan was now in the hands of Owen Meyrick’s grandson, Owen Putland Meyrick, seen (r) in a George Romney portrait of 1788. Meyrick had married Clara, eldest of three daughters of wealthy Richard Garth (whose family were long seated at Morden Hall in Surrey, now National Trust). Through the first half of the C18 the three great landed interests on Anglesey – Bodorgan, the Bulkeleys of Baron Hill and the Baylys at Plas Newydd – had jostled for dominance. But by the 1770s the young masters of Bodorgan and Baron Hill were congenial contemporaries, Owen Meyrick, Lord Bulkeley and their heiress wives frequently dining together.⁹

see: Oliver Mills

Between 1776-1779 architect Samuel Wyatt was engaged to significantly remodel Baron Hill (left, now derelict though the estate remains in the same hands). Wyatt’s site manager on this project was young John Cooper who would be talent-spotted by Meyrick and given his big break with the commission to rebuild Bodorgan.

see: Coflein

The old hall was largely demolished, replaced by a ‘neo-classical mansion of smooth ashlar masonry in a pale, yellowish stone, with a slate roof. The main east front has nine bays, the central three on a semi-circular bow with a domed roof. [There are] fine views from the house and garden out over the park to the estuary and Snowdonia beyond.’ (John Cooper would go on to complete the Anglesey ‘big house’ hat-trick, remodelling Plas Newydd soon after.)

Owen and Clara’s only child, Clara, married Augustus Fuller and their son, Owen Fuller Meyrick, succeeded to Bodorgan in 1825, dying unmarried in 1876. His long tenure saw some rearrangement and extension of the house but ‘the circular saloon, and the hall with its graceful curving stone staircase, remain today as models of C18 elegance’.⁹ The gardens (which in Tudor times featured terracing
down to the sea) would gain particular repute during this period: ‘A large sum is annually put at the gardener’s disposal for the procurement of horticultural novelties. On visiting Bodorgan the wonder is how such an Eden could be formed in so out-of-the-way a place.’¹⁰

see: Tina Endall

In the same year that her brother had inherited this remote domain, Meyrick’s sister, another Clara, married the heir to Hinton Admiral, Sir George Tapps Gervis, 2nd Bt., (whose father had willed that the ‘Jarvis’ variant be appended henceforth ‘to mark my respect for the memory of Lady Mews’). Their son, Sir George Tapps Gervis of Hinton Admiral, gained his second estate and third surname from his bachelor uncle in 1876. (While the last name has been a variable, the christian name of every baronet has remained the same, a tradition certain to continue for at least the next two generations.) Since the unification of Hinton and Bodorgan descent has been straightforwardly father-to-son, the present owner being…

see: Bournemouth.com

… Sir George (Tapps Gervis) Meyrick, 7th Bt., who ranked on the most recent Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated worth of £125m. This figure is accounted for less by 14,000-acre Bodorgan (and its state-of-the-art racetrack) than by the 6,000 acres of southern England, including sizeable swathes of Bournemouth and Christchurch whose C19 development was significantly underwritten by Meyrick estate investment.

see: Bing Maps

The Hinton Admiral estate also includes 2,000 acres of woodland in the New Forest national park, the proposed boundaries of which were redrawn to explicitly exclude the parkland around the house – ‘It is notable that there are no public rights of way through Hinton Park’ – following a landmark legal case. (Similarly, walkers on the Wales Coastal Path are obliged to take an uncommon detour inland around Bodorgan, affording a level of privacy appreciated by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge during their Anglesey sojourn.)

see: Gabriella Gardens

In the early years of the last century the fourth baronet engaged Harold Peto to reimagine some of the principal interior and exterior spaces at Hinton. His ‘rich Frenchy ballroom’⁵ features ‘plentiful gilding done in powdered gold, a method rarely employed on account of its cost’.⁶ But it is as the creator of ‘some of the finest gardens in England’ that Peto is best known and the annual garden open day at Hinton affords a chance to enjoy the Italianate pergola and terracing (r) of his ‘matchless remodelling’.¹¹

see: Country Life

That terracing will likely have had a good hosing down before the day in order to remove the deposits of Hinton’s most conspicuous and troublesome residents, delightful peacocks who further endear themselves by ‘screeching at dawn beneath the bedroom window’.

‘Celia glanced up as one of the peacocks cried out on the terrace. They were her husband’s, too; after ten years of marriage she had still not got used to them.‘ – Candida Clark, The Chase, 2006.

[Bodorgan Estate]

[Update 2019: From the reclaimed, reincarnated walled garden at Bodorgan comes Positive Potions – founder Candida Meyrick talks about the health drinks venture in a TV interview here.]

¹ Jones, E.G. Some notes on the principal families of Anglesey in the C16 & early C17, Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, 1939.
² Roberts, T. The Meyrick family of Bodorgan Hall, Trans.Ang.Ant.Soc., 1983.
³ Grub Street Journal, 10 Aug 1732.
⁴ Jeffery, S. English baroque architecture: The work of John James, thesis, 1986.
⁵ Pevsner, N., Lloyd, D. The buildings of England: Hampshire, 1967.
⁶ Weaver, L. Hinton Admiral, Country Life, 8 Oct 1910.
⁷ Turcotte, D. Strange affairs at Christchurch, 2011.
⁸ Whitehall Evening Post, Jan 1754.
⁹ Mapp, V.E. The rebuilding of Bodorgan Hall, Trans.Ang.Ant.Soc., 1983.
¹⁰ North Wales Chronicle, 13 June 1837.
¹¹ Mowl, T., Whitaker, J. The historic gardens of England: Hampshire, 2016.

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Okeover Hall, Staffordshire/Derbyshire

Posted in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, tagged Country estate, country house, Country houses, Derbyshire, Inaccessible, Landed gentry, Little-known, Obscure, Private, Staffordshire, Stately homes on July 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »

On display in one of the gloomier corners of the British Museum, easily overlooked, is a richly decorated nine-inch porcelain soup plate. This C18 object is presented as an illustration both of the skills of Chinese artisans and also of the lucrative export trade which came their way via wealthy patrons in the West. But no less worthy of remark, from Handed on‘s perspective at least, is the historical dimension represented by the plate’s dominant heraldic emblem, being the family arms of the Okeovers of Okeover Hall.

IMG_1045[1]

The order for what would ultimately be a 154-piece dinner service was placed by Mr. Leake Okeover, Esq., in 1738 at a cost of £1 per plate. ‘The service is the only known instance in which the original painting which was sent to China to be copied has survived; it remains in the family,’ noted Christie’s in 1975 in the course of selling 100 pieces which no longer would (r). ‘The reproduction is exceptionally accurate and marks out this service as one of the finest ever made.’¹

Nought but the best seems to have been the way of Leake Okeover (b.1702) who would inherit the Okeover estate on the death of his grandfather in 1730. The orphaned son of Thomas Okeover and heiress Catherine Leake was free-spending from the moment he came of age as his ‘very extensive accounts‘ record. ‘Bills reveal lavish expenditure on jewellery, clothes,’² and fine pictures including that Georgian gentry must-have, the ‘conversation piece’, typically depicting squire and company in the foreground of a handsome abode.

see: Yale Center for British Art

In 1745 Leake (above, seated) recruited an artist for whom such pictures would become a speciality, namely Arthur Devis, not long relocated to London from his native Preston. While his figures are often formulaic, his scenes somewhat ‘stage-managed … Devis appears to be a fairly accurate delineator of a sitter’s house’.³ Except that in this particular case the house as depicted did not actually exist – and never would. Leake Okeover had gotten a little ahead of himself, this version of Okeover Hall being destined to remain forever just an artist’s impression.

Certainly, grand plans to radically upgrade an existing house were well under way by this time. But before any work had started on the principal south front with its imposing portico things began to go awry. Firstly, in 1747, Okeover’s architect Joseph Sanderson inconveniently died. Soon after, Leake’s extravagance finally began to catch up with him, eventually fleeing abroad to avoid his creditors doing the same. Six hundred years of Okeover heritage was suddenly in distinct peril.

see: Google Maps

The manor of Okeover had passed in the direct male line since a grant of c.1150 by the Abbot of Burton. The home range was imparked soon thereafter, bounded in the east by the River Dove (also the county border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire). At the death c.1400 of John of Gaunt’s ally and sometime enforcer
Sir Philip Okeover the family’s landholdings were on their way to encircling the nearby town of Ashbourne.

While Sir Philip’s son and heir Thomas would twice be elected to parliament for Derbyshire he largely ‘avoided the responsibilities of office, preferring to live quietly on his estates’. These he expanded significantly in the county and beyond through his second marriage to heiress Thomasina Sallowe and of which he would remain squire for 60 years. This record would stand until the time of Sir Rowland Okeover (d.1692) whose 67-year tenure was also notably fruitful.

see: Government Art Collection

‘60 different sorts of apple, 20 sorts of pears, 35 sorts of apricots and other plumms are to be found in the gardens of this ancient seat.’ A seat which at the time of this approving visitation by Robert Plot (then first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum) in the course of compiling his ‘Natural history of Staffordshire‘ (1686), was a mid-sized Tudor house within a square moat (r).

see: Thornber

This was the place to which Leake Okeover removed in 1730, vacating Wymeswold Hall (his mother’s Leicestershire legacy which he had received upon coming of age eight years before). Leake would quickly make his mark at the site of his ancient birthright with a large classical stable block which together with the now private All Saints church (both left) remain essentially unchanged elements of the Okeover tableau.

But it would be at least a dozen years before thoughts turned to seriously remodelling the Hall, setting in train a morphing process which would effectively last two hundred years.

see: Google Maps

Phase One consisted of matching wings, broadly similar in proportion to the stable block, extending north at either end of the existing house; the east wing survives intact. The design for the final major element of the project, Joseph Sanderson’s patron-pleasing grand south front (below), would be a last-minute addition to Arthur Devis’s painting following a visit to the artist’s London studio by Sanderson in December 1746.

see: Yale Center for British Art

While the architect’s death the following August did not necessarily mean the end of Leake’s grand designs, his spending would. In the spring of 1751, facing debts of about £25,000, he took off to northern France for almost two years, lodging under the alias ‘Mr. Scrimpshaw‘ and leaving his wife and trustees to firefight the liabilities.

Wymeswold Hall was among substantial estate assets sold to meet the debts but in correspondence across the Channel Leake refused to countenance the disposal of Okeover itself: “I cannot nor ever will be brought to part with Okeover. I will much sooner never see England again than do it.”⁴

see: Peter Barr @ geograph

see: Churchcrawler

Work on the Hall eventually recommenced but the block at the S end of the east wing (left) was to be the last substantial addition before Leake died in 1765. This space features ‘exceptionally fine’ decorative plasterwork and joinery.⁵ Additionally, ‘there is much fine C18 furniture at Okeover’ and Leake’s especial weakness for exquisite ironwork remains much in evidence around the grounds.⁴

see:ChurchCrawler

The Devis painting above is notable not only for the inclusion of a house which did not exist but also for the exclusion of a wife who most certainly did. A boys club of chums replaces the more typical family group, a scene which would never be possible since Leake and Mary – who died within months of one another, memorialised in profile by Joseph Wilton (r) – had no children. Nor would the next two heirs, the deeper reaches of the Okeover male line being mined until 1912. That year saw the death of Haughton Okeover whose remarkable 76-year tenure encompassed the entirety of Queen Victoria’s reign.

see: Country Life

The C19 saw ‘incoherent, piecemeal’ changes to the Hall: the removal of the west wing, the doubling of the S-E pavilion and a two-storey extension into the space once occupied by the original Tudor house (left).⁴ A satisfactory holistic resolution would not be achieved until the 1950s when Okeover passed in the female line, a turn which would also see the family’s local landholding coincidentally double in size.

see: Lost Heritage

On the opposite side of Ashbourne lies Osmaston, ‘a neat estate village with many picturesque cottages set against the backdrop of the park’,⁶ which itself is ‘stunning indeed’.⁷ The story of colossal Osmaston Manor (r) is excellently recounted here. ‘A magnificent example of that class of mansion in which wealthy Englishmen delight to dwell’⁸ …

… Osmaston was built by local industrialist Francis Wright between 1846-49 and acquired by Liverpool brewing magnate and philanthropist Sir Andrew Walker, 1st Bt, in 1884. In an unusual familial twist Sir Andrew and his son and heir Peter would marry two of squire Haughton Ealdred Okeover’s eight sisters, Maude (as his second wife) and Ethel, respectively.

see: Stones Events

Their brother died childless in 1955, the 3,000-acre Okeover estate now passing to Haughton’s only living nephew, Peter and Ethel Walker’s son, Sir Ian Walker, 3rd Bt, then incumbent at similar-sized Osmaston (r). Owning two houses six miles apart Walker eventually elected to demolish impractical Osmaston in favour of Okeover Hall, also becoming Sir Ian Walker-Okeover in obeisance to the ancient lineage.

see: Eamon Curry

‘Arguably the finest house built in England in the 1950s,’ Sir Ian’s remodelling of Okeover Hall was masterminded by architect Marshall Sisson. In retaining the Georgian E wing and recreating a counterpart, Sisson essentially reasserted Sanderson’s three-sided plan. The S-E pavilion was split to bookend an interposed nine-bay S section.⁵

see: Peak District Online

If the latter’s muted central bow is hardly the imposing statement of Leake Okeover’s imaginings the opposite, courtyard-facing entrance front is less effacing. Featuring ‘a full-height projecting porch with a pediment and giant statues on top from the gardens at Osmaston’,⁵ this is however not easily seen since Okeover remains the wholly private home of Sir Andrew and Lady Philippa Walker-Okeover.

And, while it is possible to walk these never-sold acres and to view the scene as captured by Arthur Devis in the mid-C18, be aware that the bovine residents of the Okeover Estate, too, can be very protective of this ancient manor…

[GII* listing][Osmaston Park][Glenmuick Estate]

1. Howard, D., Ayers, J. China for the West, Vol. 2, 1978.
2. Mowl, T., Barre, D. The historic gardens of Staffordshire, 2009.
3. Harris, J. The artist and the country house, 1979.
4. Oswald, A. Okeover Hall I/II/III, Country Life, Jan/Mar 1964.
5. Robinson, J.M. The latest country houses, 1984.
6. Thorold, H. A Shell guide to Derbyshire, 1972.
7. Craven, M., Stanley, M. The Derbyshire country house: 2, 2001.
8. Country Life, July 12, 1902.

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Newhouse, Wiltshire

Posted in Wiltshire, tagged Country estate, Country houses, Inaccessible, Jacobean, Landed gentry, Little-known, Obscure, Private, Stately homes on October 18, 2014| 4 Comments »

The foundations of both may have been somewhat undermined in modern times but Britain’s country houses (and their owners) have long understood the value of the institution of matrimony. Delving into the history of long-held country estates, the advantageous marriage is not hard to find, providential alliances historically a key means by which an estate’s fortunes were bolstered, indeed sometimes super-charged. In the 18th century ‘financial considerations often determined a family’s marital priorities [with] heiresses regarded as particularly good catches’.¹ And today marriage is once more playing a significant role in sustaining many an ancestral seat as country houses across the land vie to host ‘the wedding of your dreams’.

“I always wondered how people afforded to live in these lovely places. The answer was that many couldn’t. When I suggested weddings most bit my hand off”, Diana Hastie, founder of the Country House Wedding Venues agency, told the Financial Times recently. This enterprise is now one of many such businesses (1/2/3) whose websites, along with those of the individual properties themselves, today offer a rich source of what has been termed ‘country house porn’. By way of a purely serendipitous example of the myriad options now available to the happy couple wishing to marry in surroundings to which they are unlikely ever to become accustomed, a simple dropped vowel during researches for this post inadvertently took Handed on to the dedicated weddings website of Nether Whichendon House.

see: ArtFund

Deep in the Chilterns, this medieval/Tudor house was romantically Gothicised to his own design by Scrope Bernard in the late C18. Sir Francis Bernard (d.1779) had inherited a somewhat neglected pile late in life and his will instructed that the place be sold. And so it was but the buyer, against advice, was to be his youngest son, Scrope, possibly emboldened by his marriage to Harriet Morland, a banking heiress. Nether Whichendon remains in the family: ‘Timelessly enchanting and fabulous, this venue is absolutely unique and perfect for a truly romantic day and wonderful photographs…‘

…many galleries of which are displayed on their weddings website (there is another detailing public opening times and history). Alongside the pictorial riches afforded by such online marketing, the expansion of the role of the wedding photographer – from cheery snapper to virtual artist-in-residence – has likewise been a great incidental boon for the likes of your humble country house blogger. Gone, seemingly, are those ritualised post-ceremony permutations, now replaced by an immersive, fantasy-tinged photo-documentary of the entire day, often yielding revelatory perspectives of the hosting houses. (Long-standing Handed on readers will appreciate the exciting rarity of these interior images, for example.)

see: Newhouse Estate

One particularly novel country house vista can be found on the website of ‘the wedding and special events venue’ that is the 1,300-acre Newhouse Estate in Wiltshire. In the view of one visitor, ‘the most extraordinary object on view at Newhouse is the ‘Hare’ picture (r) said to have been painted about 1640 as a satirical attack on the contemporary Court party’.² Far be it from Handed on to gainsay the mighty Massingberd but this blog recommends the adjacent easel-mounted aerial perspective of this place for closest inspection.

For, however remarkable anything inside Newhouse might be, nothing can surely trump the extraordinariness of the building itself:

see: Angus Kirk @ flickr

No, this is not a trick of photography but two arms of Newhouse’s three-pronged assault on the architectural senses. The seat of the Eyres and their descendants (today Jeffreys) since 1633, Grade 1-listed Newhouse is a remarkable and surprisingly little-documented survival, being one of only two Y-shaped ‘Trinity’ houses in existence (and much the best, the other being this C17 farmhouse in Herefordshire). ‘In late C16 England people were addicted to hidden meanings. Codes, devices and punning allusions were everywhere..entire buildings were constructed in the form of riddles’.³ And John Thorpe – one of the six architects memorialised on the façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was as keen a practitioner as any.

see: Barry Deakin

Among the few buildings which can be confidently associated with Thorpe are Thomas Tresham’s triangular lodge in Northamptonshire and the similarly triadic Longford Castle near Salisbury in Wiltshire (r). ‘One of the most freakish Elizabethan houses, [it’s] plan based on the shield assigned in medieval heraldry to the Holy Trinity’, Longford has been the seat of the Earls of Radnor since 1717 but had been built in the late C16 for the Gorge family.⁴ In 1619 Sir Edward Gorge acquired the Newhouse estate a few miles to the S-E, with a ‘Mansion..late erected’, from William Stockman only to sell it again, in 1633, to another local landowner, Giles Eyre. Newhouse would change hands for money one last time in 1660 but on this occasion it was a family deal, Giles’s grandson William selling the place to his cousin, Sir Samuel Eyre, for £2000.

Samuel’s eldest son, lawyer Robert, his inheritance of Newhouse naturally assured, devoted his energies forging a notable parliamentary career. (Younger brother Henry, meanwhile, made his own way, buying in 1733 500 rural acres just north of London called St. John’s Wood. Later developed as a pioneering garden suburb whose character is still policed, the Eyre Estate remains with this branch of the family, the sale in 2011 of a 5.5 acre site yielding some £250 million for the 50 or so present-day beneficiaries of the family trust.)

see: Wikimapia

see: Angus Kirk

The house inherited by Sir Robert’s son, also Robert, was still in it’s original form (above): a three-storey central hexagon with radial extensions on alternate sides, the entrance facade crowned by a trio of triangular gables. He would add the N-W wing c.1742 which points towards the stable block (above) erected shortly before he died childless in 1752. Newhouse would eventually go to his cousin Samuel whose matching S-E wing balanced the main facade and houses the ballroom which today ‘will seat a maximum of 102 guests for a wedding breakfast’…

…a point in proceedings still usually characterised by civility and order. Which rarely lasts, of course. Alexander Chancellor, the inheritor of ‘two crumbling Inigo Jones pavilions‘ in Northamptonshire, recently revealed the flipside of the country house wedding hosts’ lot : ‘It’s no fun being here when these noisy parties are going on; nor next morning to find my house surrounded by cars that have been left behind by drivers who have drunk too much the night before. Occasionally, I even find condoms in the flowerbeds.’

see: Wikimapia

No doubt in the quarter of a century during which they have been hosting such events the Jeffreys of Newhouse will likewise have encountered their share of eye-opening goings on. But what is equally certain is that the thousands of wedding-goers who have had the pleasure of being their guests in that time will never have seen anything quite like it either…

[Newhouse Estate][Listing][Visit via the HHA]

[Update May 2021: Newhouse estate for sale!]

1. Beckett, J.V. The aristocracy in England 1660-1914, 1986.
2. Massingberd, H. Newhouse in the shape of a ‘Y’, The Field, 21 June 1986.
3. Asquith, C. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, 2005.
4. Hussey, C. Longford Castle I/II/III, Country Life, Dec 1931.

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Handed on

Being a random register of long-held private country houses not generally open to the public

Posts Tagged ‘Obscure’

The Wombourne Wodehouse, Staffordshire

See also:
Perkins, M. Music in Country Houses of the English Midlands, 1750–1810 [thesis] Birmingham City University, 2021.
Morganfourman.com (Shaw-Hellier family genealogy).

Thornton Watlass Hall, Yorkshire

Brawith Hall, Yorkshire

Torwoodlee House, Selkirkshire

Downton Hall, Shropshire

See also:
Reid, P. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses, Vol.II, 1980.
Ionides, J. Thomas Farnolls Pritchard of Shrewsbury, 1999.
Ionides, J., Howell, P. The old houses of Shropshire in the C19th: the watercolour albums of Frances Stackhouse Acton, 2006.

Hinton Admiral, Hampshire & Bodorgan Hall, Anglesey

Okeover Hall, Staffordshire/Derbyshire

Newhouse, Wiltshire

1. Beckett, J.V. The aristocracy in England 1660-1914, 1986.
2. Massingberd, H. Newhouse in the shape of a ‘Y’, The Field, 21 June 1986.
3. Asquith, C. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, 2005.
4. Hussey, C. Longford Castle I/II/III, Country Life, Dec 1931.

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Being a random register of long-held private country houses not generally open to the public

Posts Tagged ‘Obscure’

See also:Perkins, M. Music in Country Houses of the English Midlands, 1750–1810 [thesis] Birmingham City University, 2021.Morganfourman.com (Shaw-Hellier family genealogy).

See also: Reid, P. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses, Vol.II, 1980. Ionides, J. Thomas Farnolls Pritchard of Shrewsbury, 1999. Ionides, J., Howell, P. The old houses of Shropshire in the C19th: the watercolour albums of Frances Stackhouse Acton, 2006.

1. Beckett, J.V. The aristocracy in England 1660-1914, 1986. 2. Massingberd, H. Newhouse in the shape of a ‘Y’, The Field, 21 June 1986. 3. Asquith, C. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, 2005. 4. Hussey, C. Longford Castle I/II/III, Country Life, Dec 1931.

Email Subscription

See also:
Perkins, M. Music in Country Houses of the English Midlands, 1750–1810 [thesis] Birmingham City University, 2021.
Morganfourman.com (Shaw-Hellier family genealogy).

See also:
Reid, P. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses, Vol.II, 1980.
Ionides, J. Thomas Farnolls Pritchard of Shrewsbury, 1999.
Ionides, J., Howell, P. The old houses of Shropshire in the C19th: the watercolour albums of Frances Stackhouse Acton, 2006.

1. Beckett, J.V. The aristocracy in England 1660-1914, 1986.
2. Massingberd, H. Newhouse in the shape of a ‘Y’, The Field, 21 June 1986.
3. Asquith, C. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, 2005.
4. Hussey, C. Longford Castle I/II/III, Country Life, Dec 1931.