Whilst an impression to the contrary might easily be gained – not least through endeavours such as the one you are presently reading – it would be a mistake to assume that everyone who ‘made it’ in 18th- and 19th-century Britain naturally aspired to possess their own country house. Not even the lifestyle of a country squire, in a rented pile, appears, for instance, to have held any attraction for Mr. Dawson Turner, Esq., resident partner in the ‘very prosperous’ Yarmouth & Suffolk Bank for over sixty years from 1794. For all but five of these Turner was content to live ‘above the shop’ with his large family, at four-storey Georgian quayside Bank House in the bustling heart of the port town on Norfolk’s easterm coast.1
A man of many parts, it was here that Turner, between his banking activities, pursued interests in fine art, local flora and fauna and antiquities, privately publishing texts featuring illustrations by his genteely prolific squad of sketching daughters (right), all fully signed up to their father’s various enthusiasms. (Turner had previously made renowned ‘Norwich School’ artist John Sell Cotman an offer he just couldn’t refuse, to relocate to Yarmouth to tutor them.)
When he joined the Yarmouth Bank – founded solely, like all such institutions at the time, upon the personal probity and wealth of its invested owners – Turner’s fellow partners were four closely-related Gurneys: Bartlett, Richard, Joseph and Hudson. The wealth of this Norwich Quaker family had originally derived from the woollen trade; when this industry saw a tectonic shift to Lancashire and Yorkshire, they made the strategic decision to diversify into banking. Yarmouth would be the first of several East Anglian subsidiaries of Gurney & Co., Dawson Turner being a rare recruit from without the Society of Friends (he would christen his eldest surviving son Gurney).
When Dawson Turner’s fellow partner Bartlett Gurney died in 1802 ‘he was succeeded in control of the [parent] bank by his cousins, including John Gurney’, of Earlham Hall near Norwich (r). ‘This delightful old place’ was not owned by Gurney but by the Bacon family, from whom since 1786 he had been content to lease the property.2
As, indeed, were subsequent generations of his descendants over a period of more than a century, ‘perhaps one of the oldest tenancies known for a mansion of the size’.2 John Gurney raised eleven children at Earlham, a lively household which would be further augmented from 1801 by a regular teenaged visitor (and extended relation), Thomas Fowell Buxton. Fatherless from the age of six, Fowell Buxton’s mother was a daughter of Quaker brewer Osgood Hanbury; her sister would marry Richard Gurney of Keswick Hall near Norwich, brother of John of Earlham.
In time, having joined and quickly revitalised the fortunes of the Hanbury brewing enterprise based in Brick Lane in the East End of London, Fowell Buxton became a member of parliament, and William Wilberforce’s anointed successor in the battle for slave emancipation. This lengthy campaign would be waged from two country houses in north Norfolk neither of which Buxton ever owned but in which he would live the second half of his life.
Northrepps Hall, south of Cromer, had been acquired in 1790 by John Gurney of Earlham’s brother-in-law, fellow banker Robert Barclay. The death five years later of his wife Rachel Barclay saw Northrepps sold to her brother Richard Gurney of Keswick, husband of Rachel Hanbury, aunt of Fowell Buxton. The latter, by the time he became the tenant of Northrepps Hall, had married Hannah Gurney (of Earlham) whose sister Louisa would marry another banker, Samuel Hoare, this couple now becoming frequent guests of the Buxtons at Northrepps.
As writer and architectural historian Mark Girouard observed, the inter-marriages of the ‘formidable family clan of rich, philanthropic and intensely worthy Gurneys, Hoares, Barclays and Buxtons are baffling to anyone not born into it’.3
A domestic catastrophe had hastened the Buxtons’ retreat from London to the tranquil remoteness of north Norfolk. Having relocated to Hampstead from their large house next to the booming Hanbury Buxton Brewery in Spitalfields, ironically for a healthier environment, the couple experienced the loss of four of their eight children in the space of five weeks in 1820. Three daughters under five fatally contracted a combination of whooping cough and measles shortly after their eldest brother had returned from boarding school with a separate sickness from which he too succumbed.
The Buxtons now departed to ‘Gurney Country’, north Norfolk, taking a lease on Cromer Hall immediately to the south of that small coastal town (fashionable in Regency times thanks in no small part to its colonisation by the aforementioned interrelated ‘cousinhood’ who had many holiday homes between them in Cromer).3 ‘Sheltered from the north winds by closely surrounding hills and woods,’ as depicted (below) by eldest daughter Priscilla Buxton, Cromer Hall was then an E-plan brick house with crow-stepped gables, owned by a junior branch of the Wyndhams of Felbrigg Hall.4
![cromerhallPB2](https://handedon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/cromerhallpb2.jpg)
‘Cromer Hall October 1825’ [Original sketch, author’s collection]
Mrs. Hannah Buxton in particular ‘found great comfort in the old house’ but in the eighth year of their residence the Buxtons were given notice to quit by a new but ill-fated Wyndham generation with transformational plans for Cromer Hall.5 Local architect William Donthorne was now recruited to dramatically remodel the house in Gothic revival style. But ‘in October 1829, within two months of completion, the Hall was destroyed by fire’.6 Despite being under-insured, young squire Wyndham promptly ordered the place to be rebuilt again only to die before it was complete. In time his widow would sell the Cromer Hall estate to Benjamin Bond Cabbell MP for £64,000, and in which family it has since descended.7
“It is a curious, and, to me, a melancholy scene,” teenaged Priscilla Buxton recorded as her family’s time at old Cromer Hall neared its end, “it seems but yesterday since we came here, seven and a half years ago.”8 It was her mother’s cousin, Richard ‘Dick’ Hanbury Gurney, who now came to the Buxtons’ rescue, offering them an initially stop-gap rental of the nearby house which he had inherited from his father in 1811; it would be their home for the next 44 years.
“Northrepps Hall, Feb. 4, 1829: Here we are! This day we have entered our new abode; begun this stage and section of lives.”8
A huge man with a boundless zeal for field sports, the only proviso Norfolk banker Dick Gurney placed on the arrangement was his retention of shooting rights over the estate. Indeed, it was the opportunities offered by the local terrain for such activity which were at least as attractive to the wider clan as the fact of the area being within walking distance of the coast. In the late 18th century Dick’s relation and equally enthusiastic gun Bartlett Gurney had also purchased land abutting the Northrepps property, an acquisition for which he had initially entertained grand ambitions.
For surviving today at Northrepps Hall is an early ‘Red Book’ commissioned by Bartlett Gurney from Norfolk-born landscaper Humphry Repton. The scheme suggested in this ‘particularly interesting document’ included a classical mansion designed by Repton’s ‘ingenious friend’ William Wilkins Snr. However, the only building realised from the project would be an altogether more modest but highly picturesque Gothic essay, Northrepps Cottage (which ‘while altered remains an important and interesting example of Wilkins’ architecture’).9
It was to this secluded property that Dick’s long-invalided but indomitable and accomplished sister Anna Gurney would relocate from Northrepps Hall, where she had lived until her mother’s death in 1825. That household had latterly also included Fowell Buxton’s sister, Sarah, with whom Anna had formed an intimate bond; the ‘Cottage Ladies’ would become a energetic charitable double act locally, establishing a school for the children of nearby Overstrand (which endures), and aiding many a shipwrecked mariner.
Prior to letting the house to the Buxtons, Dick Gurney had used Northrepps Hall periodically as a shooting box, having also been bequeathed bachelor Bartlett Gurney’s neighbouring land (complete with Northrepps Cottage) specifically to unify the sporting territory. Like all of her siblings, Anna Gurney had drifted away from the Society of Friends but her social conscience never dimmed, now fired by a fervent embrace of the Church of England. So insistent was Anna’s hectoring of her distinctly more relaxed brother that Dick would install stained glass ‘on the Cottage side of Northrepps Hall, that is still there, to guard against her trying to admonish him through the windows’.5
But Gurney’s principle residence was another mansion west of Norwich, Thickthorn Hall (r), three miles from his family’s home at Keswick Hall. And separating these two properties was the Intwood Hall estate of one Joseph Muskett, who took court action in 1818 unsuccessfully claiming Gurney had been taking liberties with his wife, Mary (nee Jary). Luckily, this scandal had broken shortly after Gurney had surprised his family by campaigning successfully (if very expensively) for a local seat in parliament.
But several years on Squire Muskett would be awarded £2,000 in damages following a renewed legal suit which asserted that the member for Norwich was responsible for the now very conspicuous condition of his wife. Illegitimate Mary Jary Gurney was born in 1829 and would be raised in relative seclusion by the subsequently happy couple at Thickthorn Hall.
*
Up at Northrepps Hall near Cromer Richard Gurney’s tenant and now fellow MP Thomas Fowell Buxton (the member for Weymouth where he had inherited, but would never occupy, Bellfield House) cut an altogether more conscientious figure. Having previously campaigned for prison reforms (alongside his Quaker in-laws, high profile Elizabeth Fry and her brother Joseph John Gurney) and becoming the founding chairman of the RSPCA, Buxton was now welcoming an ageing William Wilberforce to Northrepps Hall as his focus returned to the ongoing fight for the emancipation of slaves.
Although the trade in humans had been outlawed in British colonies in 1807 the ownership and exploitation of those already enslaved had not. Committed Christian Fowell Buxton now spearheaded the campaign in parliament, supported enthusiastically on the home front by the ‘Cottage Ladies’ (beating the well-worn path between the Hall and their home in the woods behind) and his daughter and now personal secretary, Priscilla.
A mutual friend recalled the scene at this time: ‘I have in my memory vivid visions of Northrepps Hall – that sunny court brilliant with flowers; Miss Anna Gurney and Miss Sarah Buxton, invaluable helpers in all philanthropic objects of their adored chief, Mr. Buxton, the poor worn-out MP, fatigued from slavery work, sauntering on the lawn, Mrs B. and Priscilla behind, charming and happy. Oh, they were delightful hours and most unusual people.’5
In the teeth of reactionary vested interests, the Emancipation Bill was finally passed in 1833, helped over the line by an unprecedented petition of 187,000 female signatures headed by its instigators, Priscilla Buxton and Amelia Opie. Priscilla’s wedding with her father’s colleague Andrew Johnston MP took place at Northrepps on August 1, 1834, the same day that all colonial slaves were to be granted their freedom.
Exhausted and subject to recurring bouts of ill health, Sir Fowell Buxton (as he became in 1840) now spent more time at Northrepps Hall, which had been little altered since the arrival of the Barclays in 1790. They had heightened and, with the introduction of sash windows and a classically detailed entrance porch, ‘Georgianised’ the 17th-century L-shaped brick and flint house, ‘nearly doubling the size’.10
Now, while the Buxtons ‘were sojourning in Rome, the Hall was a good deal enlarged’.10 A new storey was added to the kitchen wing and the principal reception rooms lengthened, with French windows opening onto newly laid-out gardens. The existing outbuildings were largely demolished, replaced by new stabling, a coach house and ‘coachman’s cottage, [with] a new laundry in an enclosed cobbled square’.5
Naturally, Buxton’s keen social conscience was evident on the home front. ‘He found great pleasure in his tree plantations and was particularly happy that they gave employment to local people on previously uncultivated land, at a very good wage. At one point he was employing 93 men at a time when unemployment was high.’11 His estate workers were, however, not always entirely comfortable with Buxton’s paternalistic embrace.
In 1836, having commissioned some family portraits, Fowell also invited his gamekeeper, Larry Banville, to sit for his likeness. ‘I was obliged to stand to be drawn for the first time in my life,’ the Irishman recorded. ‘I found it harder work to stand still for two hours than four hours walking in wet turnips.’ Ah, but it was worth it, Larry, wasn’t it? ‘My picture almost frightened me .. my head double the size it ever appeared to me in a glass, my arms as thick as the yard arm of a 74-gun man o’ war.’ Buxton was pleased enough, however, hanging it in the drawing room at Northrepps Hall.12
![overstrand](https://handedon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/overstrand.jpg)
C19th drawing [Author’s collection]
Following his death aged 57 in August 1845, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton would be memorialised in Westminster Abbey, his statue joining that of William Wilberforce in recognition of the eventual peaceable emancipation of 800,000 slaves across the British colonies (‘by any standards a colossal achievement’).11 But the man himself was interred in altogether more modest surroundings, in the family vault within the ruins of St. Martin’s church at Overstrand (left, since rebuilt), where the ‘Cottage Ladies’, sister Sarah (in 1839) and Anna Gurney (in 1857 before 2,000 mourners), were also laid to rest.13
Widowed Lady Hannah Buxton would continue to live on at Northrepps Hall until her own death there in 1872. Receiving regular visitations from an ever-expanding brood of grandchildren the capacity of the house had been increased with the creation of the north wing in the 1850s. Peculiarly, the Northrepps estate was also populated at this time by a rather more exotic influx…
… being various species of parrots, cockatoos and the like, an experimental ornithological enthusiasm taken up by the Buxtons’ sons. In Cromer, eldest son Sir Edward Buxton maintained an aviary at Colne House, where emus grazed the lawn3 and to which the Dowager Lady Buxton was a very frequent visitor, going back to Northrepps Hall on at least one occasion with a new addition ‘to our flock, a green Australian parakeet’.10
Marvelling at the ingenuity of these creatures, Charles Buxton recounted how not even the best efforts of ‘a first-rate London locksmith’ could keep ‘the cleverest of the lot’, a large white cockatoo, chained to a perch.14 (A visiting Duchess of Bedford was reputedly somewhat less impressed with the birds’ ability to liberate the diamonds from her tiara.15)
In contrast to this picture of animated domestic contentment at Northrepps Hall, the affairs of the estate’s actual owners had been distinctly less harmonious. Dick Gurney died in 1851 having five years earlier seen his only child Mary married at aged 17 to a cousin’s son, John Henry Gurney, a director of ‘the bankers’ bank’ Overend, Gurney and Co. This couple acquired and would make their home at Catton Hall close to several other Gurney mansions west of Norwich (and which had been the site of Humphry Repton’s very first landscaping commission).
Despite producing two sons, Jack and Richard, life as the dutiful spouse of a banker (and soon MP) fell rather short of the overheated romantic imaginings engendered by Mary’s sheltered upbringing. When she became pregnant for a third time, the father was not her husband but dashing estate groom William Taylor with whom Mary had become hopelessly infatuated. Despite face-saving entreaties by John Henry, as the principal beneficiary of her father Dick’s will, Mary Jary Gurney ultimately had the means (having inherited a reputed £1M in addition to the Northrepps estate) to wash her hands of Norfolk and start a new family life with her beau down in Sussex.
Gurney’s luck soon appeared to take an upswing when in 1864 he came into the Keswick Hall estate of his relation Hudson Gurney. But alas this would be quickly followed by the catastrophic collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co. – ‘The Times immediately christened it ‘Black Friday’ due to the financial panic that ensued’ – leaving John Henry facing not only huge financial liabilities but criminal charges of dodgy dealing.16 The banking Barclay family would salvage the business remnants (creating the present-day ubiquitous entity) and Catton Hall was now sold (to his cousin Samuel Gurney Buxton) but Keswick and Northrepps were transferred to his sons before the trial, in which he would be acquitted.
In relatively reduced circumstances, after the death of Lady Buxton, John Henry Gurney (left) and his sons move into Northrepps Hall, its late-18th century furnishings now being supplemented by assorted items from Catton, Earlham and Thickthorn Halls.5 And the tradition of keeping things in the family would again be evident in the boys’ marriages, both to second cousins.
Eldest son Jack would take his new wife Margaret Gurney (and also his father’s love of ornithology) down to Keswick Hall while Richard remained at Northrepps after his marriage to Eva Buxton (the daughter of Sir Edward Buxton, 2nd Bt., and Catherine Gurney of Colne House). The couple would share the Hall with his father until (the happily rent-paying) John Henry Gurney’s death in 1890. The following year Richard and Eva made their mark at Northrepps…
… adding to its irregular plan with the creation of ‘a new dining room with a beautiful school-room above. At the same time the pillared porch was replaced by an ornate red brick and loftily glazed vestibule’ (below). The youngest of the couple’s five children was 7 when their father died at 44 in 1899. ‘Eva lived at Northrepps as a widow for 27 years with her children and grandchildren about her, as Hannah (Lady Buxton) had done for 27 years before her.’5
‘Though so many close crossings of the breed are, according to some, of no advantage to the strain of blood it must be owned that from a worldly point of view they have been most successful,’ it was observed early last century. ‘There has been no taking strange families on trust, few unsuitable marriages, the descendants rich beyond dreams, and [who] girdle Norwich with their mansions.’17
While the latter all still stand, the kinfolk’s association with Keswick, Earlham and Catton Halls would be steadily decoupled, the last-named in now subsumed into suburban Norwich, Keswick Hall and the long-leased Earlham Hall into the realm of the University of East Anglia. After the death in 1934 of Jack Gurney’s childless son, Gerard, Keswick and its contents had passed to his cousin, Quintin Gurney, who favoured Bawdeswell Hall…
… near Dereham (left), acquired in 1912. (Other 20th century additions now see the Norfolk Gurney diaspora also in residence at Heggatt Hall (r) and elsewhere.)
Meanwhile, the Northrepps Estate would pass in the male line throughout the 20th century. For almost the entirety of the 21st it has been in the custodianship of Simon Gurney* who has credited his late wife, Deborah, with having “rebuilt the estate’s finances to allow” him to pursue the restoration of the landscaping which had been envisioned by Humphry Repton’s Red Book, and hitherto long-since obscured beneath an “immense overgrown jungle”.
Such terrain would, of course, have well-suited those Amazonian parrots and their ilk which were encouraged to ‘fly wild about the place’ by intervening occupants of the Northrepps estate. Being an unlikely outpost of the frontline against the ills of 19th century society, the human comings and goings of that era perhaps echoed the behavioural observations then made of Northrepps’ avian community: ‘They evidently look upon man and his doings with the keenest interest, mingled with surprise and, perhaps, just a soupçon of contempt…’14
[Northrepps Estate][map][Northrepps Cottage]
[*In 1981 his cousin Diane Gurney married the present-day squire of Cromer Hall]
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