Hargham Hall (via Docking Hall), Norfolk

Or, ‘The Hares of Norfolk‘.

Or, ‘Three Hares and a Beevor‘.

To East Anglia, a region where the proliferation and resilience of its rodent population has long been matched by their human namesakes. Handed on follows the trail of the Hares and the Beevors taking in three centuries-old Norfolk estates, quite separate but with common roots in the same lineage.

Just north of the town of Downham Market lies Stow Bardolph, ‘one of the most charming tucked-away estate villages imaginable‘.¹ It was acquired by the Hares in 1553, remains in their hands today and – stretching that introductory analogy a little further – could perhaps be considered the home ‘set’. But while it is the oldest of the three estates featuring here, Stow need detain this blog least. For no less than three separate Hare baronetcies and three houses have been associated with this place – and all have gone.

The first incarnation of Stow Hall was built by Nicholas Hare c1589, substantially rebuilt in 1769 and finally completely replaced by a looming Victorian edifice. Latterly serving as a hospital, Stow Bardolph Hall was not overly mourned when it was bulldozed in 1994/5. Interestingly the outline of the building is preserved by yew hedges visible from the vantage point of the still-standing entrance steps to the Hall. And the gardens are among a smorgasbord of diversions to be found at Church Farm Rare Breeds Centre all overseen by descendants of the 5th baronet. (The title, though extant, is now adrift).

see: Google Streetview

Just a few years after Nicholas Hare built Stow Hall his brother John acquired the manor of Docking 25 miles to the north. Here would be built the e-plan house which stands today, still the seat of this branch of the Hares and the hub of an estate which in 1935 extended to 3,600 acres.

see:Nicholas Toyne/British Listed Buildings

The single readily-available image of Docking Hall shows the early C17 north front; the S and E were subject to substantial ‘High Victorian’ alterations by Ewan Christian, architect of the National Portrait Gallery and many a church across the land.

source

A relatively low-key domestic assignment in his canon, Christian’s involvement here very likely came about through an association connected to the one significant deviation in the Docking Hares’ line of descent.
By the 1740s Docking had devolved to the widowed Catherine Henley, only surviving child of Hugh Hare. Catherine had no children and would eventually pass the estate on to her kinsman Edward Christian, son of the vicar of Docking, who assumed by Royal Licence the name and arms of Hare upon succession in December 1798.

Meanwhile, 50 miles south, no such devices have been necessary at Hargham, house and a later title having passed relatively straighforwardly across well over 300 years. Sir John Hare of Stow Bardolph (d. 1638) would leave the core of his estate to eldest son Ralph but there were enough outlying properties to make provision for his five younger brothers. Nicholas would get the manor of Hargham and in turn his son Ralph would, in the 1680s, build Hargham Hall.

‘A compact house of mellow brick’,² little-seen Hargham was originally even more modestly proportioned than appears today, the pronounced sixth bay having been added c.1800 to create a new principal entrance on the West front. (A lower wing would also be built in 1815). A later owner of Hargham, Sir Hugh Beevor (d. 1939), would develop a theory that the Hall might be that all-too-rare thing namely a surviving work by influential C17 architect Sir Roger Pratt whose own seat Ryston Hall (previously featured) lies a mere three miles from Stow Bardolph.

There are Hares buried at All Saints church, Hargham (pro. Harpham) but mostly it’s Beevors. The Rev. William Beevor had married into a landed Yorkshire family but was drawn east when offered two East Anglian livings in the gift of the Duke of Norfolk. And some of William’s male descendants were to prove masters of the advantageous marriage. Grandson Thomas married the sole heir of the Branthwaytes of Hethel Hall (12 miles N-E of Hargham) and was created a baronet in 1784. His eldest son Thomas, 2nd bart., despite long appearing something of a liability (‘always chronically short of money’²), finally wed, in 1795 aged 42, a local woman half his age. Usefully, she was Anne, daughter and sole heir of Hugh Hare of Hargham Hall.

see: Bing Maps

It was actually the unhappiness of this union which would, in time, lead to Hargham becoming ‘Beevor Central’. For not long after the birth of a son and heir Anne fled Hethel with her three children and returned to live permanently with her mother at Hargham. After succeeding as 3rd baronet Thomas would sell Hethel Hall using the proceeds to expand the Hargham estate.²

Whilst many a Hare sought active participation in national public affairs, the third baronet represents the Beevors’ high water mark in this regard. A committed social and parliamentary reformer, he took to styling himself ‘Citizen Beevor’ and personally bankrolled his political hero William Cobbett‘s attempts to get elected to Westminster. One enduring legacy of this friendship are locust trees on the estate, a stand first being planted in 1829 on Cobbett’s recommendation of it’s rot-resistant timber. And despite the legendary hurricane ravages of 1860 and 1986, timber has continued to play a sustaining role at Hargham.

see details

Quite literally, in fact. About ten years ago Sir Thomas Beevor, 7th Bt., and his wife moved out of the Hall (handing the reigns to heir Hugh) and into an award-winning eco-friendly wooden house (r) commissioned with a stipulation that most of the timber used in its construction be sourced from the estate. This progressive approach to affairs is evident elsewhere at Hargham suggesting that a repeat of this ad of 1897 is unlikely any time soon:

‘Announcement of Sale of the noted sporting and residential estate known as Hargham Hall, comprising an area upwards of 2,250 acres and including a family residence, picturesquely situated in a well-timbered park’.³ The decision to sell up followed several decades in which, for various reasons, Hargham had been tenanted. The market at that moment was not propitious, however, and 5th bart. Sir Hugh soon thought better of it, moving back and taking the place in hand a few years later.

Being unable to see the wood for the trees seems no longer to be a problem at Hargham – the only shame is we can’t say the same about the Hall…

see: Google Streetview

[Hargham Hall listing][Docking Hall]

¹ Longville, Tim. Country Life, April 22, 2009.
² Carter, Anne. The Beevor story, 1993.
³ The Times 14 April 1897.

Enville Hall, Staffordshire

‘A fine house with glorious grounds. The house is of the second half of the C18, and more than that one cannot say.’¹ Oh, I don’t know, Sir Nikolaus, I think we can muster a little more. To Staffordshire, long the home of the most popular pleasure garden in England.

‘Large crowds flock for a stroll around the lake and amongst the Gothick follies, cascades and fountains said to be visible from Wolverhampton‘(a) … ‘the finest ornamental grounds in the world‘ (b).

No, these are not references to Alton Towers, the densely ornamented park created by the Earls of Shrewsbury in the north of the county but to Enville Hall at its southern tip, for centuries the seat of another geographically dislocated earldom, that of Stamford. And remarkably, Enville’s crowd-pulling Victorian gardens were but an entirely separate addition to widely admired grounds created elsewhere on the same estate a century before.

Today, while the bones of this landscaping preoccupation remain evident, the effulgence of Enville’s C18th and C19th glory is long gone. For a collision of cirmcumstances around the turn of the last century would mark the end the aristocratic age at Enville and the beginning of a gradual retreat into relative obscurity. Which is, of course, the very reason this blog has stopped by.

see: Kate Mellor Photography

‘Still a very private estate’,² Enville has passed only by inheritance for over half a millennium since its acquisition in the late C15 by a branch of the Greys of Bradgate Park in Leicestershire (family of Lady Jane, the ‘Nine Days Queen’). The earldom of Stamford was bestowed on the Greys in 1628. Earls one and two were very active in the turbulent public affairs of the time – both endured spells in the Tower – to the detriment of their private affairs, their estate becoming ‘very poor and much in debt’.³

see: Bing Maps

When cousin Harry over at Enville inherited as third earl it was no surprise that they subsequently decided to stay put. So it was that Bradgate Park was gradually to be largely abandoned (r), used as only a hunting lodge for the sport afforded by the medieval deer park.

A south-facing U-shaped Tudor brick house had been built at Enville but the super-charging of the family coffers that began with the 4th earl’s marriage to Mary, only child and heir of the 2nd Earl of Warrington, would enable development of the Hall and, before that, the grounds.

‘Lord Stamford is now building a Gothic green-house by Mr. Miller’s direction, and intends to build castles, and God-knows-what.’ So wrote minor romantic poet, local minor gentry and major ferme ornee enthusiast William Shenstone to a friend in March 1750, suggesting something of a rivalry between himself and gentleman Gothicist Sanderson Miller for the aesthetic ear of their friend and patron, the 4th Earl.

see: Staffs Past-Track

Embellishing work that had actually been started 25 years earlier, Miller certainly got to execute some of his flights of fancy at points of advantage across the rising land SW of the Hall, most of which remain in varying states of repair (r). Evidence for Shenstone’s contributions to this Elysian Georgian parkscape – ‘the integrity of which remains relatively intact and unaltered’ – is largely circumstantial but the various water features and cultured vistas accord strongly with his picturesque ethos.†

see: Chris Robinson @ Picasa

Sanderson Miller’s stylistic predilections were to be echoed at the Hall some 25 years later when the 5th Earl commissioned the castellated gothic makeover the entrance front still presents to this day.

see: Bing Maps

Evident from an aerial view are the two octagonal turrets emerging from the deeply recessed centre, while prominent to the fore is the early C18th brick stable block (recently converted and now available to let). But in truth, as that opening Pevsner quote suggests, the house has generally been the least of Enville’s attractions and was to be spectacularly eclipsed…

…in the mid-C19 by a structure that had no problems at all attracting attention.

‘A magnificent, even monstrous folly,’†† in the 1850s the young 7th earl had built as the centrepiece of wonderous new gardens NW of the Hall the mother of all mid-Victorian conservatories. ‘A fairy palace, a temple of wonder,’ waxed Country Life in their only visit here in 1901 and with reason.

see: Country Life Picture Library

Built by Gray & Ormson, the hothouse, over 150ft in length and 66ft in height, was a riot of Gothic tracery and pyramidal peaks: ‘The large number of contrasting elements gave the building an extremely exciting silhouette without architecturally uniting it as a whole’.* Sadly dismantled in 1926, the glazing would be rediscovered in the stables 60 years later and, The Times reported, offered for sale ‘in what can only be described as kit form’ for £25,000.

While the conservatory did at least survive into the C20 the death of it’s creator in 1883 would mean that Enville’s association with his title and in fact the Greys didn’t, quite. For the will of the twice-married but childless 7th earl would see an abrupt bifurcation of the hitherto settled – and by now quite massive – inheritance. Great swathes of four counties had been amassed by the Greys one way or another and were all bequeathed initially to his widow for life. On her death the successor to the title (Harry Grey, 2nd cousin once removed) was, in strict entail, to have the Cheshire estates centred on Dunham Massey (now National Trust).

see: Staffordshire Past-Track

Meanwhile, the Enville estate was to pass, for reasons unclear, to a grand-niece of the earl’s second wife Katherine Cocks, (‘a former bare-back circus rider‘). Catherine Payne would bring a new title to Enville having married Sir Henry Lambert, 7th Bart. in the same year as the earl’s death. However…

…this couple’s eventual inheritance surely can’t have been quite what they had been anticipating. For the countess died in January 1905 but just two months before, in the early hours of November 24 1904, Enville Hall had burned down. Gutted is most definitely the word.

‘Fortunately, all the valuable furniture, pictures and plate were saved,’ The Times reported and Enville’s interior had been completely rebuilt when the couple’s son John inherited. But the latter did have to endure his personal affairs being laid bare in the columns of the same newspaper as his marriage crashed and burned. ‘Our life together, as you know, has been a complete failure,’ declared his adulterous wife which was a tad harsh since it had at least produced a child. Eileen inherited (as Countess of Harrington, later Mrs Bissell) in 1945 and would dedicate over 50 years to the maintenance of Enville before passing the baton on to the Williamses, daughter and grandchildren from her second marriage, in 1999.

see: Enville Cricket Club

One hundred and thirty years ago the family’s estate comprised 7,339 acres; today ‘the Estate is approximately seven thousand acres‘. Sundry titles and extravagances may have come and gone at Enville Hall but the fundamentals quietly endure…

[Enville & Stalybridge Estates]

¹ Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Staffordshire, 1974.
² Staffs. Gardens and Parks Trust. The Ferme Ornee – working with nature, 1998.
³ Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. VIII, 1973.
† Haynes, S. William Shenstone and the Enville landscape, New Arcadian Journal, 53/54, 2002.
†† Woods, M. & Warren, A. Glass houses, 1988.
* Kohlmaier, G. & von Sartoy, B. Houses of glass, 1981.

Ormsby Hall, Lincolnshire

“As a business model it is enviable. The Trust has found a way of capitalising on goodwill: service to the big house. It’s the new feudalism.”

So says a character in the new Alan Bennett play People currently enjoying a sell-out run at the National Theatre. Centring around the fate of a mouldering country pile, the National Trust’s management of its properties and its public is a running theme (Mr Bennett is not a fan). One person who would have been thrilled but also perhaps a little conflicted that Bennett should have turned his attention to this subject is pioneering country seat chronicler the late Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd (latterly plain Hugh Massingberd; see previous post, ‘Haines Hill‘).

‘One of the funniest and most elegiac plays in the English language,‘ declared Hugh of Bennett’s Forty Years On, adding ‘I committed the entire script to memory and to this day have to restrain myself from quoting it in extenso.’¹ But also among Massingberd’s pantheon of idols was one of the National Trust’s founding figures, James Lees-Milne, who not only passed on an enthusiasm for “writing about very dim houses lived in by long lines of landed gents”…

…but had been intimately involved in expediting the transferance of Gunby Hall, principal seat of the ancient Lincolnshire Massingberd family, to the Trust in 1944. The Montgomery-Massingberds remained in situ as tenants but Hugh’s wistful hopes of residence in due course were to be dashed by his father in the 1960s: “I’m afraid, Hughie, the plain facts are that the financial requirements of a National Trust tenant are proving way, way beyond my means.” The curse of the Massingberds had come true: I was not to succeed my father as squire.‘

see: LincolnshireWolds

Hugh may have perceived the Massingberds of Gunby to be cursed but all the while, some eight miles north-west as the crow flies, their kinsmen the Massingberds of South Ormsby were quietly thriving. Indeed, though Orsmby Hall (r) and its well-wooded 100-acre park may have originally been created as a secondary seat for the younger son, the line it would gradually give rise to arguably represents the greater squierarchical success story, house and estate surviving more or less intact from that day to this.

There have been Massingberds in this part of the world since the C14. Sir Drayner Massingberd, brother of Henry of Gunby Hall, bought Ormsby in 1638 having come into a substantial personal fortune via his mother. Over the next twenty years he would snap up 2,600 acres around and about. Drayner’s long tenure at Ormsby set the pattern for the next two centuries: ‘Fortune was kind in as much as only four members of the family possessed the estate’ in that time, being for the most part ‘notably efficient estate administrators, neither ill-advised nor extravagent.’²

That perspicacious, forward-thinking lady of letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu spotted the trait early. ‘I do not doubt Mr Massingberd being sensible…for tis a thing more uncommon and a greater blessing to marry a reasonable woman than a fortune of 10,000,’ she would write in a letter congratulating her friend Philippa Mundy on her marriage to Drayner’s heir, Burrell.

see source

(Some daughters of the house were more impulsive. Aged seventeen, Burrell’s sister Elizabeth married a man in his forties and left in 1700 for a new life in South Carolina. Her practical and financial struggles in the nascent colony are fascinatingly laid bare in pathetic correspondence with her brother here. And Burrell’s granddaughter Anne was to be used and abused by a fortune-hunting cad before settling down with a vicar. Her daughter would make a similar alliance, marrying the Rev. H.F. Lyte, later to author the enduring hymn, Abide With Me.)

That Burrell’s new wife had not come handsomely endowed is evidenced by a letter a year later to his sponsored agent in Rome, William Kent – yes, the William Kent – in which he admits, ‘I find I can’t well afford to build a new house as I once intended’.³ His son William’s marriage improved matters, however, and it was he who would set about replacing ‘the decayed old house in the country’.

see: jonfholl @ flickr

As ‘big houses’ go Ormsby (or South Ormsby) Hall may be small but it’s a small house by a big name. James Paine, ‘the outstanding country house architect of the mid-C18′, was engaged to produce the brick villa between 1750-56. Though modestly proportioned the house was originally topped off by a distinctly immodest pediment stretching the entirety of the entrance front and ‘nearly twice as long as the house is high’.† This feature lasted only fifty years before being removed by William Carr’s associate Peter Atkinson who was brought in to extend the wings in rear.

see: Bing Maps

(A contemporaneous Paine house, Serlby Hall – previously mentioned here - would be similarly shorn of some of the architect’s more fanciful elements after a similar period.) With angled bays on the three original fronts, the restrained refinement continues inside where the centre bay is revealed as three sides of an octagonal entrance room.

To the N and S of this space respectively are Dining and Drawing rooms garlanded with exquisite decorative plasterwork (the hand of Joseph Rose Snr. here), original furnishings and the requisite portraits of successive – mostly father-to-son – squires. As Lees-Milne noted of the other place, ‘fortune favoured Gunby in all but the male line’†† and certainly the Ormsby M-Ms have had generally the better luck in this respect – until now.

Pauline Loven

Adrian Massingberd-Mundy inherited the estate from father Godfrey when he came of age in 1948 (although not taking the reigns fully until retiring as a Royal Navy submarine officer in 1953). He died last September aged 85. Like his only sibling, Anne, Adrian never married hence there appearing to be no obvious heir to the 3,000-acre settled estate. But upheaval remains a stranger to these parts and a successor from the M-M diaspora of his uncle Oswald’s more fecund line will doubtless ensure that the Massingberd arms endure hereabouts not only at the pub down the lane…

see: Google Streetview

[G.II* listing]

¹ Massingberd, H. Daydream believer: Confessions of a hero-worshipper, 2001.
² Holderness, B.A. The agricultural activities of the Massingberds of South Ormsby, Midland History, vol.1, no.3, 1972.
³ Blackett-Ord, C. Letters from William Kent to Burrell Massingberd from the Continent 1712-19, The Walpole Society 2001.
† Binney, M. The villas of James Paine, Country Life Feb 20, 1969.
†† Lees-Milne, J. People and places, 1992.

Packington Hall (via Maxstoke Castle), Warwickshire

So this was originally going to be a post about the best little castle in England. Low-walled, inconspicuously sited, seemingly defending nowhere and nothing in particular (except itself), Maxstoke presents as the classic fort of every small boy’s imaginings.

see: Bing Maps

An almost-square curtain wall, hexagonal turrets in each corner, a towering barbican, all surrounded by ‘a perfect moat’.¹ (Sadly, any drawbridge has long since been replaced which is a shame – there are still invaders to repel.) But Maxstoke Castle is no toytown replica, no ersatz fantasy, it’s the real thing.
Licensed to crenellate in 1345, ‘Maxstoke has hardly been touched…

Gobbolino @ flickr

…a rare example of a complete fortification of a single date‘.² And the family home of the Dilkes (latterly Fetherston-Dilke) since 1599. The medieval battlements are of an appealing red sandstone evocative of these parts (rather more of central Coventry would still be this colour had the Luftwaffe not intervened),

seandhattersley @ flickr

while the L-shaped interior range is variously timber and brick with notable Elizabethan and Jacobean features. Extending along the W and N walls, this relatively modest infilling has presumably been a factor in sustaining Maxstoke as a private house even

see: Country Life

if you do ‘have to cycle a quarter of a mile to fetch a lettuce from the garden’.³ Discouragingly from this blog’s narrow perspective Maxstoke is opened to the public one day a year (next on 16 June 2013). But what really took the wind from Handed on‘s sails was the discovery of The Castle Lady‘s recent appraisal of the building and also this detailed history of the castle’s owners. So it was that attention turned four miles down the lane…

…to a contiguous estate ticking all the boxes. To a pukka stately home still in the hands of the aristocratic family that built it, set amidst a fine 300-acre park within a large estate and with a church only rated ‘one of the most powerful neo-classical buildings of its date in Europe‘.†

see: Bing Maps

To the Packington Hall estate, ancestral – and entirely private – home of the Finchs (Finch-Knightley), Earls of Aylesford, passed only by inheritance since acquisition in the mid-C16. Today, both house and title enjoy an impressive degree of obscurity (particularly given the estate’s alarming proximity to Britain’s second city).

135 years ago, however, they were anything but. Being immediate neighbours for centuries, the odd Dilke-Finch skirmish could only be expected and in the late 1870s newspapers across the land would fulsomely report as charges of libel and adultery were slung back and forth.

“To Mrs Dilke, at Maxstoke Castle, care of the Earl of Aylesford.”

A pointedly addressed envelope from Major William Fetherston Dilke (of Packwood House, the old Fetherston seat 10 miles to the south, now National Trust) to his recently-widowed sister-in-law, Rosamond. Maxstoke’s owner Charles Dilke had committed suicide in Ilfracombe the year before, his brother suggesting that Mrs. Dilke’s ‘intimacy’ with Lord Aylesford had contributed to Dilke’s state of mind. She sued him for libel though the case was ultimately dropped.

The Aylesford marriage itself was ill-starred and culminated in a divorce petition by the Earl on the grounds of his wife’s alleged adultery with Lord Blandford (later 8th Duke of Marlborough). A court was unconvinced by the testimony of all parties as was the Committee of Privileges of the House of Lords a few years later when considering a claim for the Aylesford peerage by the Countess on behalf of her son who she insisted was not Blandford’s. The title would instead go to the late Earl’s brother, Charles…

see: Amanda Slater @ flickr

…so breaking a run of six Heneage Finchs, Earls of Aylesford, stretching back to the 2nd earl, ‘the first of this line to be associated with Packington’. He had married the only child of Sir Clement Fisher, the family which had acquired the estate at the Dissolution.

see source

Sir Clement’s late C17 house was developed and expanded beyond recognition by Matthew Brettingham for the 3rd earl to produce the externally bland grandeur of the Hall we see today. (The garden front (l) was originally more nuanced but it’s loggia would later be in-filled (r).)

JanetHipkiss@Picassa

This was to be a last major commission for the architect most notably associated with Palladian palace Holkham Hall. And while Packington’s imposing stable block has more than a touch of Holkham about it, it predates the Hall by about 15 years and is possibly, at least in part, the work of Capability Brown, brought in to remodel the park c.1750, one of his earliest major projects.

Bridgeman Art Library

Internally, a central top-lit cantilevered staircase rises the full height of the Hall, ‘a particularly dazzling sight’.†† But it was the aesthetically inclined 4th earl’s hiring of Joseph Bonomi that would really elevate Packington to the next level. Most notable is their Pompeiian gallery, ‘the largest and finest that exists in England’. Running the length of the five-bay south front it represents perhaps the high water mark of the fashion for rooms inspired by the excavated antiquities of southern Italy. (This space was unscathed by a serious fire in 1979 which tore through the upper storey, a scrupulous £1m restoration scheme ensuing.)

source: Amanda Slater

Standing in peculiar isolation in the middle of the park is the church of St. James which in listing terms actually outranks the house (Grade I to the Hall’s Grade II*). For this uncompromising square brick edifice alone

see: Aidan McRae Thomson @ flickr

‘Bonomi deserves to be a household word of English archictecture, which he is not,‘ declared Pevsner, adding: ‘If one were to name the most important, impressive English church of the late C18, [this] would be the first to come to mind.‘¹ And while Packington is generally private, St. James’ church complete with its ‘overwhelming’ interior and Handel-associated organ can be visited by arrangement – just give the earl a call.

The 5,000-acre Packington estate is the substantial southern element in a chain of landed estates – rising through Maxstoke to the Dugdales of Blyth – which have long formed a de facto buffer to urban sprawl in this part of the West Midlands. The area having been designated ‘green belt’ in 1975 the planners and conservation campaigners are apt to claim credit: ‘Without it there could have been more or less continuous development..between Birmingham and Coventry.’ Green belt or belted earl? You decide…

[Packington Estate] [Maxstoke]

¹ Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Warwickshire, 1966.
² Binney, M. Maxstoke Castle, Country Life, April 1974.
³ Rosemary Fetherston-Dilke quoted, Coventry Evening Telegraph 15 June 2002
† Tyack, G. Warwickshire country houses, 1994.
†† Binney, M. Packington Hall I-III, Country Life, July 1970.

Otterden Place, Kent & Ledston Hall, Yorkshire

Lady Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Hastings was a woman much esteemed in her lifetime for her progressive piety and socially concerned benefaction. At 22 she inherited considerable wealth and a big house in Yorkshire where she would live for the rest of her days. Never marrying, she sought the furtherance of the interests to which she had devoted her life by the endowment of a charity; focusing on educational and religious causes the Lady Elizabeth Hastings Estate Charity presently has funds of around £14.7 million. Lady Betty died in 1739.

Granville Wheler was a man not widely known when he passed away in 2004, a bachelor of 75. He had lived the whole of his adult life in and around a large house in Kent which he had inherited aged just 19. With no heir (two siblings were also childless), Wheler made over his complete estate to a charitable trust which was to be underpinned not just by the values of a woman he much admired – his distant ancestor, Lady Betty – but also to a significant extent by her fortune, the entirety of which, in the fullness of time, had flowed to him. Today, the Wheler Foundation has assets of just over £41 million…

…consisting largely of the Otterden Place and Ledston Hall estates. It’s a slight departure for Handed on as we visit two houses which were in one family’s hands for centuries but are now held in trust and remain effectively private.

The (two) trustees of the Wheler Foundation ‘have the power to make decisions on their land and assets as an individual who owned the property outright would have.’ The Foundation’s broad objective is the maintenance and preservation of the lands, buildings and works of art at Ledston and Otterden ‘for the benefit of the public, whether or not educational.’ Thus far, ‘the public’ has comprised mostly of several thousand schoolchildren via the Foundation’s significant engagement with the charity Countryside Learning and its programme of estate open days.

Otterden Place 1832 (see source)

This activity has mainly taken place on the Ledston estate but it was at Otterden that Granville and his Wheler predecessors (mostly Granvilles, all interred in the church next to the house) generally preferred to spend most of their time. Tucked away in the north Kent countryside some eight miles SW of Faversham, Otterden is an unusual, mostly-not-quite-as-old-as-it-looks brick mansion with one especially fascinating connection. For in the early C18 this obscure house was the setting for some of the very earliest experiments in the discovery of electricity, about which almost nothing was then known.

source: Harold Wyld

The Otterden estate (now of some 2,000 acres) was acquired by the Rev. Granville Wheler c.1718. Later, in the summer of 1729, and excited by his amateur scientist friend Stephen Gray’s small-scale observations of conductivity, Wheler invited Gray to Otterden which offered scope for more ambitious and elaborate experimentation. ‘With the apt method Mr. Wheler contrived, and with the great pains he took himself, and the assistance of his servants, we succeeded far beyond our expectations,’ Gray wrote.¹ And one boy servant in particular was to have a starring role.

What Gray and Wheler were discovering was the ground-breaking identification of conductors and insulators of current. Using the horizontal expanse of Otterden’s Long Gallery and vertical drop from it’s turret, various objects – an ivory ball, an umbrella, even a live chicken – were suspended by great lengths of silk and would attract brass leaf from below when a glass tube was rubbed against the thread. Soon it came time to test the elasticity of the lowly footboy’s job description.

see source

“Mr. Wheler procured silk lines strong enough to bear the weight of his footboy, a good stout lad; then, having suspended him upon the lines, the tube being applied to his feet and hands, and [another's] finger held near his hands or face, he found himself pricked or burned as it were by a spark of fire, and the snapping noise was heard at the same time.”

“Some time after, in my absence, Mr. Wheler tried a red-hot poker…”

Lively times indeed at Otterden Place which unsurprisingly became the talk of the village: ‘When any of Mr. Wheler’s scientific friends visited him, it was given out by the neighbours that “some conjurations were carrying on in the tower!“‘¹

It was the Rev. Wheler’s grandson, Granville, who would give Otterden a ‘typical early C19 Tudoresque’² remodelling, taking his stylistic cue from that retained C16 crenellated tower. But inside he ‘suffered the interior to be classical’³ with the staircase rising through a double-height screen of Doric and Ionic columns. Hopefully still on the walls among the Lely and Kneller portraits is a spectacular 1728 panoramic of the Ledston Hall estate, a property…

Steve Novak @ Images of England

…which came to the Whelers in 1789 thanks to the Rev. Granville’s first marriage to Catherine Hastings, daughter of the 7th Earl of Huntingdon. As late as 1987, this major G.1 house prominently sited above the Vale of York was described by Country Life in a note as ‘one of Yorkshire’s least known and most complex great houses’.

Camperman64@flickr

Finding the place ‘uncommonly interesting’, Pevsner declared the entrance front ‘an outstanding example of that transitional phase in English architecture between the Jacobean style and [that] of Pratt, May, and young Christopher Wren.’† Largely unoccupied after WWII, the south wing has been converted into flats, the rest of the house remaining empty. The late Granville Wheler initiated a restoration programme in the 1980s but the Hall remains on the English Heritage At Risk Register.

Granville would travel to Yorkshire several weeks each year but Otterden Place was home. (He was actually born at a third family property a few miles to the north of Otterden, Syndale House, which burned down in the early 1960s.) His seems to have been a rather enviable existence: popping into his assistant’s office to chat for a couple of hours in the morning before pottering off for a bit of serious reading or otherwise indulging his enthusiasms – railways, his woodlands and horses. And all three were to coalesce in the fancifully-named…

John baker@geograph

…Otterden & Boardfield Railway, a DIY project to create a horse-drawn track for ferrying timber across the estate. Remnants of this endeavour remain in the undergrowth. The story of Otterden Place and it’s owners would appear to offer great scope for projects, ‘whether or not educational’. Sadly, Health & Safety would probably have issues with stringing up schoolchildren to re-enact those electrical experiments. But train buffs, the address for grant funding applications to restore Granville’s little railway is here…

[Granville Wheler obituary] [Otterden Place listing] [Ledston Hall listing]

¹ Gentleman’s Magazine Vol.151, 1832.
² Newman, J. Buildings of England: NE and East Kent, 1969.
³ Lees-Milne, J. Country Life Aug 27, 1970.
† Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding, 1959.

Severn End, Worcestershire

Where is the heart of England to be found? Or, rather, the heart of Englishness. Many places might advance claims but perhaps the strongest county contender might not be that which springs most readily to mind. Consider: Sir Edward Elgar, Brideshead Revisited, Jeeves & Wooster – cultural icons of Englishness exported around the world and all with their inspirational roots in the same spot, Worcestershire.

Whether he would like it or not, Elgar has been popularly annointed musical diviner-in-chief of the nation’s spirit. A Worcestershire man to his core, his statue stands in the centre of Malvern. Just a mile to the east of this town lies Madresfield Court, seat of the Lygons for the best part of a thousand years and ‘the house upon which Evelyn Waugh based Brideshead, his most successful novel‘. And then there’s the world of P.G. Wodehouse.

see: Google Streetview

‘Worcestershire is at the heart of Wodehouse country.’¹ From Madresfield’s ‘back’ gate (r), follow the Upton road south for three or four miles and you will come upon the village of Hanley Castle. ‘Nephew of the local vicar, we know that Wodehouse knew Hanley Castle well..and Severn End, gracious home of the Lechmeres, seems as near Brinkley Court’ - scene of many of the escapades of Bertie Wooster, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Tuppy Glossop & co. – ‘as we will get.’¹

Bob Embleton @ geograph

Time and again, of course, it was Bertie’s butler, Jeeves, who would save the day and in late October 1896 life would prefigure art: ‘No manuscripts of any particular value have been burnt, and only a very few pieces of plate – this being due principally to the exertions of Caldicott, the butler, of whose energy Sir Edmund speaks in terms of high praise.’²

So recorded a local newspaper reporter on attending ‘the blackened scene of dire destruction’, a catastrophic fire having consumed much of the C15-C17 timber-framed house, seat of the Lechmeres since time immemorial. ‘I found Sir Edmund [Lechmere, 3rd bart.] somewhat downcast at the calamity which has overtaken him. “I loved the dear old place,” he pathetically remarked, “and though I fear it will be impossible to restore it, I am fully determined to have it rebuilt [in] exactly the same style.”³

Roger Jones @ Picasa

Which, under the supervision of sympathetic Worcester architect Lewis Sheppard, is precisely what was achieved. In ‘a sort of forgotten peninsula of low-lying meadowland … what in effect we have in Severn End is an exceptionally well-documented specimen of a ressurected Caroline squire’s seat in its original setting,’ concluded James Lees-Milne in his survey for Country Life in 1975.

Monica500@flickr

The squire in question being Sir Nicholas Lechmere [1613-1701], a staunch Cromwellian who had walked in Oliver’s funeral procession in his capacity of Attorney-General, and the documentation a 50-year long journal detailing his substantial development of house and grounds, much of which remains evident (if partly in replica). His gabled brick wings were all that were left standing after the 1896 blaze though Sir Nicholas might not have mourned them had they, too, perished: “This yeare [1668] I began ye brick building on ye north & south side of ye court, one Mr. John Averian undertook ye [work]. He fayled in all things.”³

Monica500@flickr

A tad harsh, Sir Nicholas! To the modern eye all appears favourable: ‘All the roofs are covered with red tiles and the general effect of the house with its contrasting colouring in brick, timber and plaster, its numerous gables and clustered chimneys, and its regular yet well broken up plan and skyline, is exceedingly picturesque.’ [VCH]

Worcestershire County Archives holds the Lechmere estate papers dating from more or less the time that Writing Things Down caught on in this part of a rude kingdom [1140-C20]. Lees-Milne suggested that ‘on this property the Lechmere family has resided perhaps longer than any other landed family in England’.

In a more systematic attempt to settle this particular matter Country Life in 2004 ranked them joint second (behind the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle) and three generations were in place for the photo call (r). This hasn’t always been so, however: Severn End was Lechmere-less for much of the latter half of the C19 while in 1976 the place was let to tenants on a 15-year repairing lease.† And a two-day auction in a marquee in the grounds in September 1964 would see the dispersal of much furniture and effects. But through its various vicissitudes, Severn End and its 1,500-acre estate endures.

‘All the wood used to replace that devoured by the flames is oak cut in Sir Edmund Lechmere’s woods. Some of the glamour which attaches to actual age may have departed, but what remains is a work of art.’††

Entrance front 1883: see source

¹ Murphy, N.P.T. In search of Blandings, Penguin 1987.
² Worcestershire Chronicle 31 Oct 1896.
³ Lees-Milne, J. Severn End, Worcestershire Country Life, July 1975.
† Sayer, M. & Massingberd, H. The disintegration of a heritage, Michael Russell 1993.
†† Worcestershire Chonicle 23 Nov 1901.

Langleys, Essex

Out east to the eighth largest county in England and the one with the biggest image problem. Essex lost more country houses than most in the 1950s ‘orgy of destruction’ as the appeal of proximity to the capital wained with its dismal eastwards creep. (Unfortunate it may be but at least Essex does have an image unlike, say, Bedfordshire.) For Nikolaus Pevsner, setting out from Liverpool Street train station, ‘the suicidal waiting room on platform 9‘ hardly helped. But he ultimately concluded that the place deserved greater regard even if ‘grand it is nowehere‘.¹ For Tatler, which attempted a valiant rehab job in its July 2012 issue, this very lack of grandness is the county’s trump card, avoiding the ‘newly Range Rovered..who speak like Elizabeth Hurley‘ colonizing the likes of Oxfordshire, the Cotswolds and points west.²

However, the magazine’s tour d’horizon of what today constitutes Essex’s landed class completely omitted mention of Langleys which means they certainly can’t ever have passed along the Chelmsford-Dunmow road:

see: Google Streetview

Really, how good is that?! Exuding an almost comical self-importance, Langleys south lodge is a real attention seeker and essays in miniature the big house at the other end of the drive. Described as ‘one of the loveliest and most splendidly maintained houses, both externally and internally, in England,’³ low-key Langleys is a robust, unfussy composition in brick. One of the few houses in the county still in the family of its builder, it wears its Grade I-listed status lightly but top-drawer Langleys most definitely is, featuring a sequence of exquisite interiors exemplifying periods both before and after its acquisition by Mr. Samuel Tufnell, Esq 300 years ago.

Two families who had prospered in the City of London in Stuart times would be united by the 1680 marriage of John Tufnell and Elizabeth Jolliffe. Their first son Samuel was born within two years, later coming into the lion’s share of his father’s estate in 1699 whilst up at Oxford. Following the well-trodden path to the Inns of Court, Tufnell was called to the Bar in 1703 and thence ‘was free to live the life of a man about town, to indulge in travel and the improvement of his fortune.’†

see: Wikimapia

After a few years based in Highgate thoughts turned to a proper place in the country and in 1711 Tufnell would dig an old Essex family the Everards out of a financial hole by taking Langleys off their hands for £5,498 18s. 6d. Samuel’s makeover of his new property in the next few years, whilst substantial, was also sober and restrained; a man of means but prudent enough to live within them.

So Langleys was not about to become competition for Audley End, ‘the Blenheim Palace of Essex, the county’s only truly great house‘², but then it didn’t really need to try since in one particular respect it already had not only that extraordinary place but every other Jacobean mansion in the country licked.

see: Country Life

see: Essex Archives

For the Old Dining Room (l) and barrel-ceilinged Library (r) above it, both c.1620, display ‘a stupendous richness of plaster ornamentation…not exceeded anywhere else in the country.’¹ And, happily, Samuel Tufnell was discerning enough to retain them, incorporated behind blind windows…

ChelmsfordBlue @ Flickr

…in the North wing (to the fore, below) of his enlarged H-plan house. Probably self-designed, the building’s stout, rather forbidding entrance front is strikingly relieved by carved white-painted woodwork ascending the pivotal bay and pointing towards the armorial pediment. (The whole arrangement is repeated on the garden front only less pronounced in each detail.)

see: Essex Archives

Tufnell would become a diligent MP and later a diplomat abroad but that white flash of exuberance, and the statement lodge above, show he was not beyond a bit of self-indulgence. His account books also reveal something of a wig fetish but if his stylish saloon is any guide, it will have been all in the best possible taste. Whether any of Samuel’s extensive headwear collection remains at Langleys isn’t clear but the refined fittings selected for later Georgian and Regency rooms by subsequent Jolliffe Tufnells (now Micklem) certainly do. ‘The result is that Langleys must now be acknowledged as among the most complete and beautiful of country homes.‘††

[Grade I listing]

¹ Pevsner, N. & Radcliffe, E. Buildings of England: Essex, 1965
² Rivkin, A. The other side of Essex, Tatler July 2012.
³ Ramsey, L.G.G. Langleys, Essex, Connoisseur vol.140, 1957.*
† Steer, Francis. Samuel Tufnell of Langleys, 1960.
†† Hussey, C. Langleys, Essex I-III, Country Life, Jan 1941.*
[* Sumptuously illustrated]