Melbury House, Dorset

Coming very soon to a cinema near you, Downton Abbey the movie – perhaps an inevitable development given the international success of the television franchise which ran to fifty-two episodes over the course of five years. Not forgetting, of course, Downton Abbey the board game (see below)! Although the conventional costume drama depicting the fortunes of the aristocratic Crawley family and their household is entirely fictional, its scenarios are rooted in the common experience of many British country house estates.

The themes of Series One, for instance – primogeniture, the premature demise of male heirs and the significance of the daughters of the house – find echoes in the history of Melbury House and the Ilchester Estate in Dorset. And one person you probably wouldn’t want to find yourself playing that board game with is Melbury’s present owner who is not, these days, an earl of Ilchester.

see: Google Maps

Today Robin Fox-Strangways, the 10th of that ilk, lives on this road in rural Warwickshire and not – unlike most of his predecessors – at grade I Melbury, ‘one of the most remarkable houses in south-west England’ and the centrepiece of the 15,000-acre Ilchester Estate.¹

see: Google Maps

The 10th earl might perhaps compare notes with John Monckton-Arundell, the 13th Viscount Galway, who lives on this suburban road in Toronto, Canada, and not, as most of  his predecessors had, at the ancestral seat, grade I Serlby Hall set in 3,000 north Nottinghamshire acres (↓), created by architect James Paine for the 1st viscount in 1751. In fact both house and land would be sold in the 1980s as surplus to requirements since..

.. over the course of the preceding decades the slings and arrows of fortune had conspired such that both the Ilchester and Galway estates had devolved to just one woman, the present Mrs. Charlotte Townshend.

see: Rumblefish

The premature death at just 41 of the 9th Viscount Galway in 1971 would see the decoupling of title and estate, Charlotte, his only child, ultimately inheriting the latter (left), the title going to a series of cousins. Viscount Galway was married to Teresa Fox-Strangways who had similarly benefited in 1964 as the only surviving child of the 7th Earl of Ilchester. She died in 1989, daughter Charlotte now also becoming principal beneficiary of the Ilchester estate.

But all this was nothing new for Melbury. After the demise of the Strangways male line in 1726, ‘inheritance by two heiresses in succession meant that women played an unusually important part in shaping the destiny of [this] house and estate in the 18th century‘.² The big headline from Country Life magazine’s primogeniture survey of 2011 (‘Daughters are beginning to inherit‘) demonstrated that Melbury has long been ahead of this particular curve.

Uncannily foreshadowing the tragedies which would befall the 7th earl over two hundred years later, the two sons of 18th-century Melbury heiress Susanna Strangways died young leaving just a daughter. In stealthily engineering thirteen-year-old Elizabeth’s marriage to the son of wealthy Sir Stephen Fox (‘one of the great arrivistes of the 17th Century’³) Susanna would unwittingly gold-plate the Ilchester inheritance, a cousinly connection with the Foxs/Lords Holland later yielding the Holland House estate in west London.

‘Residential property on Ilchester Place is the most expensive in the country,’ it was reported last year. This landholding now amounts to a mere twenty-or-so acres but they – more so even than 15,000 glorious acres of Dorset – explain how private Melbury and its vast park ‘have been kept up as well and as fully as in the past’.⁴ And more directly they account for Charlotte Townshend’s ranking in the Sunday Times Rich List which, at £456m in 2019, is comfortably north of, er, the Queen’s.

Harpers & Queen March 1990

Being ‘the only other person in Britain entitled to own swans‘, Townshend’s ‘near monarchical existence (she never carries money)’ became the object of print media fascination in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a curiosity then as now largely frustrated by the landowner’s ‘low key’, determinedly traditional custodianship of her more than 500-year-old inheritance.

*

The Moncktons, viscounts Galway, became ‘Monckton-Arundell‘ after a legacy of 1769. Although Charlotte, only child of the 9th viscount, did not carry the latter half of her father’s name prior to marriage, being an ‘Arundell’ in fact redoubled her connection with the original builder of her maternal inheritance (and present home), Melbury House. For Sir Giles Strangways (d.1547) was the son and heir of Henry Strangways by his first wife, Dorothy, the daughter of Sir John Arundell of Lanherne.

But it was Henry’s third marriage to Catherine Brouning which would introduce the Strangways to the manor of Melbury Sampford (midway between Dorchester and Yeovil), Henry purchasing the reversion of the Brouning estate from his wife’s nephew in 1500. Dying just four years later, this Dorset acquisition may have been a late addition to a legacy which now included ‘property in eight counties’ but it would become, in the latter half of Henry VIII’s reign, the place where his son and heir Giles elected to build a house. And not just any house.

see: Historic England

Displaying ‘influences beyond the local vernacular, one has to turn to the Tudor royal palaces for architectural parallels’.¹ The square courtyard principal block was of a ‘regularity in advance of its time’.⁶ While the other facades of the house were later to be significantly refashioned, ‘the west range [remains] largely untouched’ (right), Melbury’s crowning 16th-century feature, the hexagonal tower and viewing lantern, rising from a cross wing at its centre.¹ ‘Without a peer for prominence,’⁷ the belvedere ‘must have been one of the first erected in England’.⁶

Knighted at 30, Sir Giles ‘spent a lifetime in the service of the crown’ and was well placed to expand his landholding in the county by snapping up the coastal estate of the former Abbotsbury Abbey after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

see: Dorset Rambler

see: Abbotsbury Swannery

Most of 18-mile Chesil Beach, and Abbotsbury village with its unique swannery and subtropical garden, remain in the family.

Giles Strangways lost his son Henry as the pair fought the French at the siege of Boulogne but he lived just long enough to see his grandson satisfactorily married. Alas, the second Sir Giles Strangways ‘lived – and died – extravagantly. In June 1555 he surrendered himself to the Fleet to avoid outlawry for debts that included over £100 to two London tailors. When he died in his early thirties in 1562, he left his widow with at least six children under 21.’ But the family estates were to be most seriously imperiled two generations on.

see: Trover

Things began rather propitiously for young John Strangways who inherited 6,000 acres of Dorset and Somerset upon coming of age in 1606, becoming ‘Sir John’ two years later and joint-heir of wealthy Nicholas Wadham in 1609. (The latter’s will would also lead to the founding of Wadham College, Oxford, the chapel of which still features the east window donated by Strangways, right.)

see: Art UK

At Westminster during the reign of Charles I, Sir John (left) did his bit to try to shore up ‘that chain which links and unites the hearts and affections of the prince and people together’, but which would eventually snap with the outbreak of the Civil War. Though he was a relatively moderate Royalist Strangways languished for two years in Tower of London, the price of the return of his freedom and sequestrated estates being an eye-watering ten thousand pounds. Sir John died in 1666.

Less than nine years on, the ‘sudden death from a stroke of his rubicund, hearty son Giles ought not to have surprised anyone: Strangways’ accounts for sack and sherry had long been Falstaffian’. And the demise of Giles’ first-born just a year later would have lasting impact as the ensuing tenure of his younger son Thomas would be most notable for a major overhaul of the character of Melbury House…

see: Historic England

… where a large family portrait was soon to dominate the landing of a new principal stair. In the background Melbury is depicted in a more radicial treatment (minus the tower) than would in fact be executed. Also to be found in Melbury’s art collection is the likeness of one ‘Mr. Watson, architect to Tho. Strangways esq, who enlarged & adorned this house 1692‘. Being the otherwise distinctly obscure John Watson, a local practicioner selected for the task of giving the Tudor house a contemporary makeover.

The north and south fronts received near-identical treatment (r), five two-storey bays defined by stacked pilasters being squeezed between the existing gable ends. The east front, however, was entirely rebuilt, the result being described variously as ‘delightfully provincial confusion’⁷ or ‘maldroit artisan Baroque’.⁸ Fronting three new rooms including a 5-bay hall was ‘a Classical facade of 11 bays with an overly narrow central section and a pediment which uncomfortably fails to span the full width’.(↓)¹

see: Historic England

While certain important earlier features, including an elaborate 17th-century fireplace, would be preserved, ‘much internally is of the Watson period’, including a pair of Grinling Gibbons-like carved overmantels in the hall and several spectacular painted ceilings.⁷

Thomas Strangways died in 1713, his childless heir Thomas jnr. thirteen years later at which point Melbury was inherited by the latter’s sisters, Elizabeth and Susanna. Spinster Elizabeth, 36, suddenly became attractive to the 5th Duke of Hamilton; the success of their marriage can perhaps be gauged by the complete absence of the duke from his wife’s will following her death less than two years after the event. Having unusual autonomy over her own property, Elizabeth now bequeathed her stake in the Strangways estate to her sister and with the express proviso that her brother-in-law was in no way to ‘intermedle’ therewith.²

In the year of their father’s death Susanna had married Thomas Horner (of Mells in Somerset) but this union, likewise – notwithstanding the birth of three children – was an unhappy one. Flexing her newly enhanced financial muscle, soon after her sister’s death Susanna took herself off to Europe for several years, Elizabeth (the couple’s only surviving child) in tow, leaving her increasingly vexed husband behind. Whilst abroad Susanna would strike up an ambiguous relationship with Henry Fox, later 1st Baron Holland, a younger son of Sir Stephen Fox (who had risen ‘to immense wealth and public prominence from humble origins’ at the court of Charles II).

see: National Trust

The pair would persuade Henry’s eligible elder brother Stephen, 31 (left, seated), hitherto distracted by a decade-long homosexual relationship with John, Lord Hervey (second right), to regularise his lifestyle by secretly marrying the now 13-year-old Elizabeth in 1735. (William Hogarth painted this conversation piece for both men; Fox’s version remains at Melbury.) The marital fait accompli was the final ignominy for Elizabeth’s father who would go to his grave unreconciled in 1741.

see: Historic England

The following year, with her daughter now satisfactorily ensconced as mistress of the Fox seat at Redlynch less than thirty miles to the north, a liberated Susanna threw herself into projects at Melbury. Most particularly, the surrounding parkland received a significant (if somewhat passe) overhaul. Avenues would be incised through woodland providing ‘wild walks’ culminating in splendid vistas while water courses were manipulated to create cascades. All of which could be contemplated in repose from an existing garden house newly tricked out in fashionable Gothick style (r).⁸

Her son-in-law having been raised to the peerage in 1741, two years before her death Susannah would have the pleasure of seeing Elizabeth’s status elevated to that of countess, Stephen Fox being created 1st Earl of Ilchester in 1756. The couple now exchanged Redlynch for Melbury House (and later a new mansion – Elizabeth’s ‘Pin-money Castle’ – at Abbotsbury, since demolished) where the countess would indulge her love of card games for up to eight hours a day.²

see: National Trust

To what extent this habit influenced their son and heir Henry’s proclivity for gambling is unclear; the 2nd earl routinely lost thousands in an evening at the tables. After his mother’s death in 1792, Henry relocated not just his family but also some choice furnishings from Redlynch to Melbury: Mortlake tapestries now adorned the Breakfast Room, with surplus items from the two houses being dispersed in a sale in 1801. The 2nd earl died the following year and ‘Redlynch would never be lived in again by the family’ (the 4,400-acre estate finally being sold for £97,000 in 1912).²

see source

Squire of Melbury for half a century Henry, 3rd Earl of Ilchester, picked up the loose ends of his father’s upheavals, restoring “all the old-fashioned grandeur”, but was himself disinclined towards major change.² Both sons predeceasing him, Henry’s 62-year-old half-brother William inherited as 4th earl in 1858 after a lifetime in the diplomatic service. Dying childless seven years later, the 4th earl’s young nephew, Henry Fox-Strangways now succeeded to the title and a 20,000-acre portfolio which was soon to a receive an initially burdensome but potentially valuable south-eastern supplement.

*

In 1768 Susanna Strangway’s erstwhile favourite Henry Fox, now Lord Holland, had acquired a 200-acre estate not far from royal Kensington Palace west of London complete with an imposing Jacobean mansion, Holland House. Legendary entertaining therein by later generations drained the family coffers, however, and from the 1820s the parkland would be steadily eroded by leasehold residential development.

Ultimately, the widow of the 4th Baron Holland brokered the sale of the estate to her husband’s kinsman Henry, 5th Earl of Ilchester, who soon initiated further bespoke building work on the heavily-mortgaged property. From 1875 a series of large houses ‘designed by leading architects for successful artists’ would be erected on the north side of Kensington High Street.⁹ Holland House itself was preserved only to be destroyed in WWII. While the surviving parkland was sold to London Corporation and remains a prized public amenity, the very exclusive real estate has been retained. (‘Written consent is required from the Ilchester Estate for any external alteration to the appearance of your house’ – Holland Park Conservation Area Appraisal 2017).

see: Peter Kidd

This metropolitan focus had occasioned an interruption to the expansionist 5th earl’s programme of substantial developments at Melbury, which eventually ‘doubled the size of the house’. In 1872 architect Anthony Salvin had replaced the SW conservatory with a cavernous gable-roofed library.

Twelve years on George Devey warmed to this theme, adding a second tower, a new range abutting the library and a port-cochere entrance, all in ‘stage set’ Jacobethan style.¹

see: NPG

Dying in 1905, the 5th earl’s half-century at Melbury would be precisely matched by his son, the reserved but ‘engagingly frivolous’ family historian Giles (left, d.1959), at which point the reins were handed over to his own son, Edward.¹⁰ But the ill-starred 7th earl outlived his father by only five years having already endured double tragedy with the loss of both sons. In 1947 a fatal accident while cycling home from shooting grey squirrels in the woods had claimed 13-year-old Giles. Eleven years on, younger son Stephen, 20, was shot in the back by Greek terrorists in Cyprus just weeks from the end of his National Service.

Thus in 1964 the Ilchester estate passed to Edward Fox-Strangways’s remaining daughter Theresa (by this time Viscountess Galway), the earldom drifting away to distant male relations.

Tatler [January 2014]

As outlined earlier, at the 7th viscount’s premature death his Serlby Hall estate was placed in trust for the couple’s only child Charlotte who, by the time she additionally came into Melbury in 1989, had already married and divorced her first husband, Guy, the father of Melbury’s present heir, Simon Morrison (b.1984, right).

see: Dorset Magazine

see: Hampshire Chronicle

Melbury’s chatelaine – seen, left, in the Salvin library – was remarried to industrial farmer and fellow hunting enthusiast James Townshend (r) in 1995. The following year saw the arrival of their daughter, rising eventer Melissa Townshend…

… and also the departure of several hundred of Melbury’s ‘accumulated contents no longer in use’.¹¹ Now a single sock could perhaps be regarded as the epitome of redundancy. But spared from inclusion in the decluttering Christie’s auction was ‘one of the socks worn by Napoleon I at the time of his death’..

Hogarth’s ‘The Indian Emperor’

.. said item being among 497 ‘heritage assets’ at Melbury House qualified for exemption from Inheritance Tax and Capital Gains Tax with the proviso they are made available ‘for the general public to view’. The annual Heritage Open Days festival provides strictly limited opportunity to see some of Melbury’s Old Master-laden rooms – ‘the 18th Century at its most sumptuous and civilized’⁴ – and, maybe, the odd sock…

[Ilchester Estates]

1. Hill, M. West Dorset country houses, 2014.
2. Martin, J. Wives and daughters: women & children in the Georgian country house, 2004.
3. Beckett, JV. The aristocracy in England 1660-1914, 1986.
4. Cecil, D. Some Dorset country houses: a personal selection, 1985.
5. Daily Mail 7 June, 1995.
6. Oswald, A. Country houses of Dorset, 1959.
7. Hill, M., Newman, J., Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Dorset, 2018.
8. Mowl, T. Historic gardens of Dorset, 2003.
9. Sheppard, FHW (ed.) Survey of London: North Kensington, 1973.
10. Oxford dictionary of national biography, 2004.
11. Russell, F. The Melbury sale, Christie’s 14 Oct, 1996.

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Hawarden Castle, Flintshire

Wedding presents can be a tricky business at the best of times. For 31-year-old bachelor Sir Stephen Glynne, the unworldly squire of the Hawarden Castle estate in north Wales, this occasional quandary would be exacerbated in the summer of 1839 by the decision of his two sisters to celebrate their nuptials by way of a joint wedding ceremony. Youngest sibling Mary was betrothed to the 4th Lord Lyttleton, already possessed of his magnificent family seat, Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, while Catherine was to marry a young politician beginning to make his mark at Westminster, William Ewart Gladstone.

Though naturally averse to such occasions, with their attendant “excitement and want of quiescence”, Sir Stephen thought he had hit on just the thing, gifting his sisters one share each in a company newly established to exploit the mineral reserves on a small landholding he owned in Staffordshire.¹ Encouraged by his optimistic business manager Glynne anticipated tidy dividends, yielding pin money for his sisters year after year.

But, disastrously, the gift that was intended to keep on giving quite quickly turned into a financial black hole, unlimited liabilities on the failing enterprise threatening to sink the Hawarden estate and take the family down with it. William Gladstone’s beyond-the-call-of-duty commitment to the salvation of his wife’s heritage would prove a crash course in economics for the future prime minister, lessons learned promptly informing his first stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Fast-forward 170 years…

see: YouTube

“It was like doing a really meaty MBA,” the present-day custodian of Hawarden Castle recalled recently (r), reflecting on an ill-judged over-expansion of Pedlars, his well-established vintage homewares business. While it may have been “a disaster”, Charlie Gladstone – aka Sir Charles Gladstone, 8th Baronet – would appear to share the durable, energetic character of his illustrious Victorian forebear, Pedlars being just one of many creative enterprises these days associated with their mutual home, Hawarden (pro. Harden).

see: donna butler

“I don’t think you have an obligation to know the history,” Gladstone contended last year, an approach born partly of the fact that grade 1 listed Hawarden, with its ‘first rank Georgian interiors’ and Temple of Peace (the perfectly preserved former study of the 19th century’s preeminent statesman), has never opened to the public. “Castellated and very well done, no pretensions inside to anything but comfort,” noted a visitor in 1831, “just the sort of place one would like to have.”²

And a far cry from the ‘Hawarden Castle’ first acquired by the Glynne family, which was little more than a freshly wrecked shell…

see: Coflein

… its slighting by parliamentary forces in the Civil War being a lesser price paid by James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby, for his Royalist allegiance. Stanley was executed in 1651; two years later his sequestrated Hawarden estate was opportunistically purchased by Welsh MP John Glynne, ‘a skilful lawyer and industrious parliamentarian’ whose star had risen during the Protectorate.³ ‘A phenomenal committee man,’ Glynne would tack deftly towards the restoration of the monarchy over time, his lucrative private practice all the while thriving. Glynne’s evident prosperity at such a time did little for his popularity, however, and sympathy was in short supply when ‘he added to the gaiety of the coronation by falling off his horse during the procession’.

see: National Trust

Though they would eventually see off legal challenges by the Stanleys to their acquisition of Hawarden, the 680 Welsh acres seemingly held little intrinsic appeal for John Glynne (left, d.1666) and his immediate heirs, his son Sir William, 1st Bt., and eldest grandson preferring their estate at Ambrosden, Oxfordshire. But not long after succeeding his brother as 3rd baronet, Sir Stephen Glynne decided to cash out of Oxfordshire and relocate his growing brood to north Wales, a strategy not entirely unrelated to the presence there…

… of a young child named Honora Conway.

In 1723 Honora was the five-year-old orphaned heiress of the Broadlane estate immediately adjacent to Hawarden and complete not with a ruin but a substantial Hall which the Glynne family would rent. Though his sons were somewhat older, a convenient long-range alliance cannot have been far from Sir Stephen’s thoughts. And, lo – despite the deaths in quick succession of the 3rd baronet and his two eldest sons over a period of eighteen months – it duly came to pass that 19-year-old Sir John Glynne, 6th Bt., married 14-year-old Honora Conway in 1731, thereby instantly doubling the extent of the Hawarden estate.

see: National Library of Wales

‘In 1732 I commenced planting in Broadlane,’ the young squire recorded, the progress of his geometric imparking of the land north and west of the Hall captured some eight years on in Thomas Badeslade’s exaggerated engraving.²

The couple would also be seriously preoccupied with raising a family at this time. The practical realities of rearing fourteen children (despite several not reaching adulthood), allied with other commitments, ensured that it would be two decades before any notion of replacing their old house could seriously entertained. But a 1757 portrait by Thomas Hudson of Sir John and Lady Glynne, he with a scrolled architectural plan in his right hand, celebrated the fact that just such a project was by then nearing completion.

see: National Library of Wales [p.101]

Artist Moses Griffith’s illustration for fellow North Walian Thomas Pennant’s ‘Tour’ published in 1778 shows the tall Georgian box which now replaced the original gabled iteration of Broadlane Hall. Though it would be stylistically overwhelmed externally half a century later, the work of builder/architect Samuel Turner of Whitchurch still ‘forms the nucleus of the present building’.⁴

Country Life

see: Tatler

‘Excellent classical interiors’⁴ include a cantilevered stone staircase, its landing (left) decorated with ‘bold, sophisticated plasterwork’, while the drawing room features ‘the best ceiling in the house’.⁵

Sir John’s eldest surviving son was the 32-year-old rector of Hawarden when he succeeded his father in 1777. Fatefully, during the Rev Sir Sir Stephen Glynne’s brief tenure as squire – before his sudden expiry in the hunting field at Enville Hall in the spring of 1780 – the 7th baronet would take a wife. Among the landed assets yielded by his alliance with heiress Mary Bennett was an unremarkable 100-acre property called Oak Farm, at Kingswinsford in Staffordshire; unwittingly, the seed of Hawarden’s near-destruction was sown.

Sir Stephen had also sown a seed of his own, however, his heavily-pregnant widow giving birth to a son and heir just a month after her husband’s premature demise. During the ensuing prolonged minority, under the management of Lady Glynne and her agent, Henry Boydell, the Hawarden estate prospered, hundreds of marshy acres south of the river Dee being enclosed and reclaimed. When he at last came of age Sir Stephen, ‘with no father to restrain him and a handsome fortune, contrived to to turn his house into a castle’.⁶

‘A young Regency man of Romantic tastes,’ the 8th baronet initially approached John Nash who came up with a castellated makeover of Broadlane Hall in 1807.⁴ For reasons not entirely clear, Nash did not get to follow through but his scheme would heavily inform the building executed by Thomas Cundy, ‘then a little-known architect, the completed project (↑) omitting only Nash’s conservatory and great tower’.⁷ The Georgian house would gradually gain a new stone facade pierced with mullioned windows and crowned with battlements. Large irregular extensions included ‘a service wing with an octagonal turret and a west wing containing a library with Gothic windows and a canted bay’.⁴

see: Tatler

see: Tatler

These fanciful fortifications echoed the ready-made romantic ruins of nearby old Hawarden Castle but this stylistic theme would be largely left at the door, Cundy’s principal interiors being ‘the ‘elegant, mellow library (left) and restrained classical dining room’.⁷

The project would be completed c.1812 (Broadlane Hall being rechristened to reflect its new image) but ill health would allow Sir Stephen little time as king of the new Hawarden Castle. Together with his wife and young son he travelled to the south of France in the winter of 1814 seeking respite from the onset of tuberculosis. He died there the following March in his thirty-fifth year, the same age as his father at his premature demise. (The melancholy return of Lady Glynne and the seven-year-old 9th baronet Sir Stephen would be complicated by the chaos occasioned by Napoleon’s resurgence from exile.)

But this undoubtedly traumatic episode is unlikely to account for the singular personality of the young heir who did not develop quite as others, as would be regularly observed. ‘Sir Stephen is small, shy, timid, gentle-looking, and [speaks] deliberately, gravely,’ commented a visitor to Hawarden in 1831: ‘He never rides, shoots, or dances, or likes any young man’s pursuits, so that he keeps quite aloof in his own house except just the going into dinner.’² ‘It really is pitiful in the extreme,’ wrote another.⁸

‘It is now recognized that the 9th baronet was suffering from what is today known as Asperger’s Syndrome.’² A prodigious memory for purposeless information would gradually be applied to esoteric areas of interest, in particular British ecclesiastical architecture, the visitation and recording of which was to consume much of his adult life. Indulged and beloved by his mother and sisters, with whom he continued to happily share Harwarden, Sir Stephen’s disinclination to engage with the world beyond his spheres of interest rendered him ill-suited to the traditional expectations of a landed squire.

see: a_crafty_traveler

It would also make him peculiarly susceptible to the influence of those entrusted with day-to-day management of the estate. Hawarden’s agent at this time, James Boydell, was the latest generation of his family to occupy this role. But, like his employer, he too was a man driven by obsessive enthusiasms. This unfortunate cocktail, and their mutual failings, would bring Hawarden to its knees.

Of an inventive engineering bent (‘a prolific patenter’), James Boydell became seized with the latent economic potential of iron and coal reserves beneath Oak Farm, the 100-acre Glynne property in Staffordshire, some eighty miles south-east. With the acquiescence of his employer Boydell resigned as Hawarden agent to manage the new mining enterprise which would be powered by his innovative machinery and underwritten by his invested partners, being the 9th baronet and his brothers-in-law, Lord Lyttleton and William Gladstone, to whom Sir Stephen had been pleased to gift shares upon their joining the family.

see: NPG

But in his optimistic haste Boydell grossly underestimated the capital investment required and debts quickly spiraled, unlimited liabilities leaving all members of the partnership seriously exposed. By 1842 William Gladstone was looking to his exceedingly successful father for advice about the escalating situation. Liverpool commodities trader Sir John Gladstone (left) “made the family fortune”, his great-great grandson Sir William Gladstone of Hawarden would tell listeners to BBC radio favourite Desert Island Discs in 1976.

see: Canmore

(He was also ‘one of the largest slave owners in the West Indies’.⁹ In his maiden speech in the House of Commons Gladstone’s youngest son, the future four-times prime minister, had argued for a fair deal for slave owners after emancipation: no-one would benefit more from the subsequent compensation scheme than John Gladstone. Later created Sir John 1st Bt., ‘of Fasque’, his Scottish mansion (r) would eventually be sold off by the Gladstones of Hawarden in 2010, its remaining contents separately realising £1.8 million at Christie’s the following year.)

Heeding the advice of his father, William and Lord Lyttleton backed out of the Oak Farm partnership in 1843. By 1847 the enterprise was bankrupt, the resources of Sir Stephen – the semi-detached squire having been frequently absent throughout in pursuit of his private interests – by now completely exhausted. With debts well in excess of £300,000 the end of the Glynnes’ association with Hawarden loomed.

see: mj_heywood

Gladstone, however, found the prospect of selling his wife’s heritage unconscionable and committed, with others, to finding a solution. Drawing on his inheritance he purchased as many of Hawarden’s 8,500 acres as he could afford, halving the debt; the Castle would be shuttered for the next five years. ‘In 1853 an arrangement was made by which Mr & Mrs Gladstone with their family settled to make their home at Hawarden, sharing household expenses with Sir Stephen Glynne. Under these happy circumstances the house was reopened.’²

While the shadow of Oak Farm would hang over the estate for the remainder of the century, in these re-ordered, somewhat reduced circumstances affairs at Hawarden Castle returned to a relatively even keel, Gladstone now beginning his political ascent in earnest.

‘March 1864: In this month was commenced the building of a new Tower on the north side of the Library, containing 3 storeys, of which the lower was applied to the use of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’⁶

see: Country Life

see: Coflein

Being the opening entry in what would become known as the Hawarden estate ‘Events Book’ (updated annually by every squire since and published by Sir Willam Gladstone in 2017).

Gladstone’s so-called Temple of Peace, the fount of prodigious public and private industry over the next three decades, remains intact (above, r). The statesman’s accumulation of paperwork and books was such that, towards the end of his life, an octagonal strongroom would be appended to the Castle, and Gladstone himself began wheelbarrowing publications into Hawarden village, the foundation of what is today ‘Britain’s finest residential library, and its only Prime Ministerial library’.

This unique repository is also home to the 106 volumes of notes on ecclesiastical architecture amassed by Sir Stephen Glynne, who was out on yet another church scouting mission when he collapsed and died in June 1874, aged 66. It had been agreed that Hawarden would pass ultimately to his nephew, the Gladstones’ eldest son, Willy; the latter predeceased his father, his only son later being killed in action in the Great War.

see: Google Maps

At this point Prime Minister Gladstone’s third son Henry (later 1st and last Baron Gladstone) stepped in, purchasing the succession, clearing all remaining debts and engaging architect (and relative) Harry Goodhart-Rendel to add to the estate. ‘Fortunately a changing economy prevented a second massive enlargement of Hawarden Castle’⁶; satellite adornments included a summerhouse with Gothic fenestration, and Wynt Lodge (left).

The childless peer died in 1935, Hawarden now passing to his unmarried nephew, Sir Albert Gladstone, 5th Bt., who would give the place over, firstly, to the RAF during World War Two and then, by deed of gift in 1946, to his brother Charles. “We wish to record our gratitude for this wonderful gift. We realise that it offers unlimited opportunities for our happiness,” the father of six would record in the Hawarden Events Book.

And unlimited opportunities for happiness is just what is being promised these days by his grandson, (father of six Sir) Charlie Gladstone, co-founder of The Good Life Experience, a festival run by family and friends on the 3,000-acre estate, now in its sixth year.

see: YouTube

Offering oodles of soulful, interactive inspiration (and, in 2019, ‘glamping’ in the walled garden, r), The Good Life is just one of an expanding range of enterprises at Hawarden, and the Gladstones’ 30,000-acre Glen Dye estate in Scotland, endeavouring to proselytize (and monetize) their sustainable, creative lifestyle.

Unsurprisingly, this aesthetic has permeated Hawarden Castle itself in the past decade, since the present generation moved in. (Sir William Gladstone, 7th Bt., died last year, just weeks after recording this podcast conversation with his son and heir.)

see: Ronald Phillips

see: Telegraph

‘The formal rooms have been kept pretty much intact .. but the house, where the family does a lot of entertaining, is also filled with the “tens and thousands” of vintage objects that Gladstone and his wife have collected over the years while running Pedlars.’ Naturally some things have been moved on to make space. One high-end antiques dealer (r) is currently seeking offers in excess of £100,000 for ‘a highly important, virtually untouched’ 1750 Rococo mirror, one previous owner – a literal reflection of ever-changing times at Hawarden Castle…

[Hawarden Estate][Pavilion][CharlieGladstone.com]

1. Veysey, A.G. Sir Stephen Glynne, 1807-74, Flintshire Historical Soc. Journal, Vol.30, 1982,
2. Pritchard, T.W. The Glynnes of Hawarden, 2017.
3. Oxford dictionary of national biography, 2004.
4. Hubbard, E. The buildings of Wales: Clwyd, 1986.
5. Cornforth, J. Hawarden Castle, Flintshire, Country Life 15 June, 1967.
6. Gladstone, Sir W. Hawarden events book, 2017.
7. Mansbridge, M. John Nash: a complete catalogue, 1991.
8. Huxley, G. Lady Elizabeth and the Grosvenors: Life in a Whig family, 1965.
9. Quinalt, R. Gladstone and slavery, The Historic Journal, Vol.52, June 2009.

 

Dalton Hall, Yorkshire

As she verged upon her 16th year in the spring of 1768, Henrietta Hotham, the only daughter of Colonel Charles Hotham, soon-to-be 8th baronet, was in receipt of some worldly relationship advice from her father:

‘No woman who values her own happiness, or her husband’s affection, will ever for an instant appear in his sight undressed.’

Having adjudged that the time was right to address such matters, Col. Hotham (right) – whose military duties abroad had obliged his absence throughout much of his daughter’s childhood – now penned an extensive missive setting out a great many well-intentioned strictures in order that Henrietta ‘might be less at a loss how to play [her] part’, given that ‘the Natural Walk and Situation of Woman is marriage’.

Thus:

‘The first object is the Choice of the Man. If he is ten years older than you, so much the better.’

However:

’If ever you manifest towards him before any human eye the least familiar fondness .. it would be disgusting to him, and shocking to everybody else.’

Meanwhile:

’Intimacies between women in general are dangerous things. The fewer friends you have the better.’

And there was plenty more where that came from. Already a confident, spirited soul, Henrietta was nonetheless grateful for this cautionary advice although its effect was perhaps not quite that which her father had intended: his daughter would never marry.

Marble Hill Society

Had she been apprised of the rather scandalous circumstances of her own conception, however, young Henrietta (left) might have found her father’s trenchant guidance somewhat harder to swallow. For Charles’s own nuptials had been a hastily convened affair, his thwarted elopement with Dorothy Hobart, a woman several years his senior, nevertheless resulting in her pregnancy. Though born at the Hobarts’ Blickling Hall, Norfolk, Dorothy had been raised – and at this point still resided – at the home of her initially disapproving aunt, a woman who knew a thing or two about improper relationships.¹

For Henrietta Howard’s disastrous first marriage to the 9th earl of Suffolk had carried her into a decade-long affair with the Prince of Wales (later George II), royal reward for services rendered later enabling the Countess to commission a Palladian Thames-side villa twixt Richmond and Twickenham. Marble Hill House (below) would become a magnet for some of the great figures of the age –

see: RIBApix

Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Horace Walpole – and a home-from-home not just for the Countess’s impetuous niece, Dorothy, but also, in due course, for the latter’s rashly conceived (but emolliently christened) daughter, Henrietta Hotham.

This house would be selected by architect Colen Campbell for inclusion in Volume III of Vitruvius Brittanicus (1725), his seminal work which would ‘provide the momentum for English architectural development for the next 100 years’.² Volume IV (1739) contained a design conflating elements seen in Marble Hill’s principal facades and which, had fate not intervened to stymie its execution, would have been the inheritance of Col. Charles Hotham, and Henrietta’s family home.

As things transpired it would fall to Charles some forty years later to finally build a residence befitting the squire of South Dalton, six miles north-west of Beverley in Yorkshire’s East Riding, a district wherein his line had held lands for 500 years. As, indeed, they do to this day, Dalton Hall estate and attendant titles having survived intact notwithstanding a spectacular lack of direct heirs spanning the entirety of the 19th century (and beyond). But, while their Victorian descendants may have struggled in this respect, the Hothams definitely had the knack in the beginning.

*

Immediately east of South Dalton lies the hamlet of Scorborough. At the end of the 13th century this manor was held by John de Hotham; thereafter, for twelve generations, it would pass from father to son, all but one being named John, all but two receiving knighthoods. In 1622 the then incumbent acheived a titular upgrade, being created Sir John Hotham, 1st baronet, courtesy of King James I. But Hotham’s on-off relationship with James’s successor would have ultimately disastrous consequences.

‘Hotham (right) represented Beverley in all the five parliaments of Charles I.’ He would be married as many times, ‘the lands and money [so] acquired enlarging his already substantial estate’.³ But the king’s dissatisfaction with Sir John in his role as governor of the port of Hull led to Hotham’s removal, his loyalty to the crown eroding rapidly. It would be pushed to breaking point in 1642 when, with his son John, Hotham secured Hull against a besieging Charles by order of parliament. The king declared Hotham a traitor; the Protectorate would eventually have both men’s heads.

After a year as mutually uncomfortable bedfellows Cromwell’s regime learned that the vacillating Hothams were bargaining to realign once again with the Royalists; parliamentary forces seized Hull in 1643, throwing the baronet and his heir into the Tower. Sir John was finally beheaded on 2 January, 1645, his son being denied even a momentary elevation in status having been dispatched in the same fashion the day before. With the loss of both his father and grandfather, 12-year-old John Hotham now inherited.

Compared to that of the first baronet, Sir John’s life at Scorborough was a model of stability founded upon a long and committed marriage. The family’s sequestered estate having been substantially returned, Hotham subsequently prospered to the extent that…

… in 1680 he was able to expand his landholdings locally with the acquisition of two hundred acres in neighbouring South Dalton.

With his affairs frequently taking him away from their Yorkshire homestead, Sir John was ever willing to provide reassurance to his anxious wife Elizabeth: “Had I a thousand hearts they would all be for your sake,” he wrote in 1684.⁴ Two years on the ascent of King James II occasioned their most prolonged domestic rupture, Sir John joining the anti-Catholic flight to Holland. Alas, his eventual homecoming procession on the coattails of the Glorious Revolution would be blighted by the worst of Yorkshire weather, inducing a chill from which he finally succumbed in April 1689. The 2nd baronet’s memory is preserved by a stupendous tomb in St. Mary’s church, South Dalton.

Georgian Soc. East Yorks

see: Peter Church

(With its ‘serenely proportioned steeple, one of the loveliest in England’, this striking replacement church would be built by the Hotham family in the 1850s for ‘the huge sum, at the time, of £25,000’.)⁵

The death just two years later of his son, Sir John, 3rd Bt., a sickly, childless widower, brought to an end four centuries of direct descent, his soldier cousin Charles Hotham now succeeding. While the 4th baronet was on active service abroad (‘possibly a prisoner’), the news from home was far from moral-boosting, his wife Bridget dying in 1707 barely two years after their house at Scorborough had burnt down.

Upon his eventual return, instead of reinstating a country seat Sir Charles now commissioned a grand residence in Beverley from architect Colen Campbell. This edifice would become something of an expensive white elephant, however, never actually being occupied and effectively abandoned by his son, Charles, after his succession in 1723. The 5th baronet would instead turn his attention to South Dalton.

see: Royal Academy

see: Google Maps

The ‘Plan & Elevations of the Hon. Seat of South Dalton..most Humbly Inscribed’ by John Rocque in 1737 captures a work in progress. From an existing manor house on the estate, Sir Charles intended a modish makeover of the property, clearly influenced by trendsetting developments down beside the Thames. (Like the Countess of Suffolk, Hotham had cultivated a profitable association with the Prince of Wales, a variety of appointments significantly boosting his income.) Contemporaneous with the Countess’s Marble Hill, further downriver the 3rd earl of Burlington, in tandem with William Kent, had created Chiswick House where they had also set about breaking down ‘the rigid formality of the early 18th century garden to create a revolutionary, natural-looking landscape’.

Burlington’s country seat, Londesborough Park, was just six miles west of South Dalton; the earl’s loyal gardener Thomas Knowlton would take a significant hand in Hotham’s plans. And William Kent would in fact design a pavilion for Dalton, set to be the termination of a broad avenue defined by encroaching woodland threaded with meandering pathways (↑) ‘reminiscent of Pope’s designs for Marble Hill Park’.⁶ But the eventual (GI listed) summerhouse has been attributed to Colen Campbell and remains in context as a key element of…

see: WR Dunn

… ‘one of the best-preserved early 18th-century Rococo gardens in the country’. But the final piece of the jigsaw, the house from which these maturing grounds were to form a cultured westward prospect, would not be realised. Though many bricks had been produced locally for the purpose, Sir Charles Hotham died ‘prematurely‘ seemingly before construction had begun in earnest.

‘Work stopped and the estate entered a long minority,’ until his son, Charles, came of age in 1755. Despite inheriting some of his father’s positions at Court, the 6th baronet would gradually retreat from public life, his withdrawn character only exacerbated by the loss of his wife little more than a year after their marriage. ‘Increasingly spending time abroad at foreign spas, when he died [childless] in 1769 Charles left the estate finances in chaos, and [there was] still no house.’⁷

His ageing uncle, Sir Beaumont Hotham, 7th Bt (r) now attempted to steady the ship and was in no hurry to initiate any major capital projects. Instead, he would be busy managing the expectations of his son, and Dalton’s heir, Charles. Despite (or perhaps because of) the latter’s wife and daughter having both spent their formative years in the care of the Countess of Suffolk at Marble Hill House, the redolent existing design for Dalton Hall would now be set aside as Charles looked to build.

‘I do not wonder you should wish to be better lodg’d,’ Beaumont sympathised with his son in 1767, his prudent assessment of affairs affording scant encouragement. ‘Considering the demands upon me .. and others I find coming, I do not foresee anything can be compleated in some years; [but] a beginning, to be sure, might be made.’⁴ Undaunted, Charles was soon seeking out designs and tenders from various local practitioners.

It was York-based Thomas Atkinson who would find favour with a composition similar in plan to his recently completed house for the Langdales, Houghton Hall, at Sancton, just six miles SW of the Dalton estate: a five-bay central block with single-storey links to flanking three-bay, two-storey pavilions set forward on the entrance side. ‘I don’t come into your idea about the Pavilions, for many reasons,’ Sir Beaumont advised his son, ‘it would swell the expense extremely [and] add little, if at all, to the conveniency.’

Work had barely begun on the main section of the house in 1771 when Charles’s father died; the death of his mother the following year would yield more Yorkshire properties. Liberated and secure, the 8th baronet now pushed on full steam ahead with the Atkinson scheme which he hoped would prove ‘an acceptable present to my successors’.⁴

Sir Charles was finally able to move into Dalton Hall in 1775, ‘having built and furnished it out of his income, at a cost of £30,000’.⁴

Circumstances were indeed propitious. Land enclosures and a generally favourable agricultural economy would swell revenues to the extent that more land purchases could be entertained. ‘By the early 19th century the Hotham estate was one of the largest in Yorkshire.’⁸ A hundred years after the completion of the Hall, Bateman’s landmark survey of ‘Great Landowners’ would record a holding in excess of 20,000 acres (today c.13,000a), the family legacy having weathered a remarkable 150-year sequence of inheritance following Sir Charles’ death in 1794.

see: Historic England

One year earlier his only child Henrietta had come into Marble Hill House for her lifetime (having been a significant beneficiary of the will of her great-aunt since the latter’s death in 1767). Dalton Hall and the baronetcy duly passed to Rev. Sir John Hotham who would outlive his brother by less than two years. Sir John’s son Charles succeeded as 10th baronet, dying in 1811 without issue as would many of his successors over the course of the next century.

see: Historic England

Charles’ uncle, Sir William Hotham, 10th Bt., was a 75-year-old retired admiral when he now inherited. Perhaps unsurprisingly, having been ‘barely ever at home’ over the course of a forty-year naval career, William was unmarried when he died at Dalton two years later, his personal legacy being a peerage granted ‘by a grateful king’ in 1797.⁴ So it was that in 1813 his 76-year-old brother Beaumont, 2nd Lord Hotham, became the fourth son of Beaumont, 7th Bt., to inherit all. He died ten months later, to be succeeded by his grandson, Beaumont.

see source

The 3rd Baron Hotham would be squire of Dalton for over fifty years. Although he ‘barely resided there beyond a day or two’, the ‘fine landscaped park’ east of the house would be developed in the 1820s.⁹ Dying unmarried at the end of 1870, bachelor nephew Charles now stepped up only to expire just 18 months later, his brother John, 34, now taking on a country seat in need of attention.

see: Historic England

The 5th Lord Hotham promptly initiated an extensive Victorian remodelling of Dalton Hall. The west front gained a pair of large canted bays looking out onto new terracing (above). On the entrance side ‘Atkinson’s elegant porch was replaced by a colonnade and semicircular porticoes placed in the angles with the wings’. Extensive balustrading and conservatories were also added; the stables ‘were refronted in an Italianate style’ (↓).⁹

see: thecountrylifeuk

Despite this major commitment to the ‘modernisation’ of Dalton Hall the 5th baron would remain a bachelor with no obvious beneficiaries. Such was the scarcity of male heirs to the title and entailed estate that upon his death in 1907 all now passed to Frederick, the fifth son of his grandfather’s brother.

‘The strange tradition of the Hotham peerage, which, though established in 1797, has never yet descended from father to son is kept up at the death after a long illness of the 6th baron at Dalton Hall, aged 60,’ reported the Daily Mail in October 1923, another distant cousin, Henry Hotham, now being unearthed to succeed as 7th baron.¹⁰ The present-day appearance of grade II* listed Dalton Hall dates from Henry’s post-war interventions.

see: Chris Milner Photography

The Victorian colonnade was now truncated, the garden front bays removed entirely while the north pavilion was reduced to a single storey. (Throughout Dalton Hall’s spasmodic upheavals its principal rooms to the west would largely retain their Georgian character, with fine plasterwork ceilings, chimneypieces and fittings.)

Despite the loss of three boys in infancy the 7th baron would at last become the first holder of the title to be succeeded by a direct heir, son Henry inheriting in November 1967. And fifteen years ago the 8th Lord and Lady Hotham decided to relocate to a newly-built ‘Dower House‘ in the village, making way for the current generation at Dalton Hall. Since when the walled kitchen garden on the otherwise ‘completely private’ estate has been restored and is now for hire as ‘a truly unique venue for weddings (↓) and other corporate functions’.

see: njphotographic

‘Marriage is of all others the most fiery trial you can undergo,’ Dalton’s builder Sir Charles Hotham counselled his teenage daughter in 1768. ‘When I consider that State and and look round me and see how very few become it, I tremble for you.’⁴ Henrietta, of course, managed to avoid the fate her father had deemed inevitable. Their present-day descendants, meanwhile, remain pleased to host those still happy to take the plunge…

[Dalton Estate][Archive]

1. Borman, T. King’s mistress, queen’s servant, 2007.
2. Stuchbury, H. The architecture of Colen Campbell, c.1967.
3. Dictionary of national biography, 1908.
4. Stirling, A. The Hothams Volume 1 & Volume 2, 1918.
5. Jenkins, S. England’s 1000 best churches series, Country Life, 14 Jan 1999.
6. Colvin, H., Harris, J. (eds.) The country seat, 1970.
7. Worsley, G. Rococo survival, Country Life, 17 May 1990.
8. Roebuck, P. Yorkshire baronets 1640-1760, 1980.
9. Neave, D., Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Yorkshire: York and the East Riding, 1995.
10. Daily Mail, 8 Oct 1923.

See also:
Fry, C.A. The dissemination of neo-Palladian architecture in England, 1701-1758, [thesis] 2006.
Neave, D., Turnbull, D. Landscaped parks and gardens of East Yorkshire 1700-1830, 1992.

 

Barrington Park, Gloucestershire

Very quietly late last year the curtain came down on one of the more contentious country house sagas of recent times. For November saw the publication of Historic England’s Heritage At Risk register 2018 wherein, for the first time in the twenty-year history of this survey, the Barrington Park estate, near Burford ‘in the heart of the Cotswolds’, was nowhere to be found. The complete lack of fanfare around this milestone moment stands in stark contrast to the hullabaloo of earlier years, debate not confined to the specialist heritage media (↓) but which would spill out into the columns of the national press.

’The strange case of the squire who lets a village die’ ran the headline atop a multi-page feature in the Sunday Times magazine as far back as July of 1977: ‘Charles Wingfield lives in a mansion behind three miles of wall. His behaviour is not just strange, it is scandalous,’ the article thundered.¹ At this time the main focus of concern was the conspicuous neglect of the buildings comprising Great Barrington village, half of which were then empty, ‘some virtually rubble’. But the attention of architectural conservationists soon turned to the fate of the equally imperilled ‘big house’, Palladian Barrington Park, the property of this family – like everything else hereabouts – since 1735.

In an unhelpful twist, however, the cause of this lobby was compromised to some degree by conflicting agendas.

see: Historic England

The original 18th-century core of the Grade l-listed mansion was the natural priority of the Georgian Group, ultimately at the expense of its 19th-century wings which the Victorian Society felt duty-bound to defend. Charles Wingfield was insistent he could not afford to fully restore both; he was equally adamant that, while nothing would be sold, ‘his family would not accept grants to restore Barrington Park because that would entail giving public access’.² Indeed, this determination to maintain privacy had seen off many an interested enquirer.

‘I was refused admittance,’ records historian the late John Julius Norwich in his 1980s compendium, The architecture of southern England: ‘Visitors asking to see the house do so at their peril,’ he warned.³ One person who did manage to gain access, a decade on, was inveterate country house connoisseur James Lees-Milne, a pivotal figure in the evolution of the National Trust, and legendary piquant diarist.

‘Friday 20 Sept 1996: A fascinating experience today, reminding me of my wartime visits to remote country houses and harassed owners. We were greeted in the courtyard by young Richard [Wingfield], his parents and their architect. The whole house draped with plastic sheets under scaffolding, so exterior cannot be seen. The parents live in darkness relieved by an occasional one-horse-power electric bulb. The hall looks more or less intact, but the rest of the 1735 core as well as the Victorian wings in appalling condition. Given tea in large Drawing Room. Long talk with Mrs, a charming, gentle woman who is clearly at sea and has long since thrown up the sponge. In all my days of country house visiting I don’t remember a case more tragic than Barrington. The scenario of a Russian novel.’⁴

Rather more prosaically, within days of that diary entry the fate of the house at Barrington Park would be the subject of a formal public inquiry, Secretary of State John Prescott later upholding the local council’s denial of permission to demolish the wings. With (present owner) Richard Wingfield also asserting ‘as an absolute principle I would not allow people into the house’, the ensuing logistical impasse would not begin to be resolved for another decade.²

The family were not entirely without sympathy in their approach. ’No wonder the Wingfields have no desire to accept cash from the taxpayer, and allow taxpayers to stride through their home as if they owned to place, scattering sweet papers and copies of the Daily Mirror,’ wrote journalist and gleeful provocateur Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn).⁵ And this was by no means the first time that occupants of Barrington Park had become the talk of the chattering classes. For no sooner had the house been ‘finished and fitted up’ in the mid-18th century than it became a bargaining chip in the fallout from a sensational scandal involving the most prominent aristocrat in the county.

*

Presaging the experience of latter-day scholars, in the course of researching his weighty series The Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 19th-century biographer and politician John Lord Campbell encountered unexpected hinderance in researching the final chapters of Volume Four.

British Museum

‘I have had the freest communication of family papers during the whole course of my biographical labours, with [this] single exception,’ he observed in a pointed footnote. The subject at hand was Charles Talbot (r), Lord Chancellor 1733-37 and great-grandfather of the uncooperative 3rd Baron Dynevor, of Barrington Park. ‘Lord Dynevor is in possession of all of the Chancellor’s papers, but declines us any use to be made of them, which seems to me very strange as I am sure that nothing can appear among them that would not be for the honour of his ancestor.’

An ancestor universally honoured at Talbot’s untimely death in 1737 when ‘the political parties on both sides vied with each other in his praise’⁶, his demise prompting Alexander Pope to elegise:

At Barrington shall English bounty stand
And Hensol’s honour never leave the land

The lawyer son of the bishop of Durham, becoming MP for that city, by the mid-1720s Talbot was combining his role as Solicitor-General with a thriving private practice supposedly generating ‘the enormous fee income of £7,500 a year’.⁷ But his association with the two estates cited by Pope would have rather more to do with advantageous wedlock than well-earned wealth.

see: Hitched

In 1708 Charles had married Cecil Matthews (d.1720), heiress of the Hensol Castle estate in Glamorgan, which house (left) he would significantly remodel c.1735. The zenith of Talbot’s professional ascendancy had arrived in November 1733 with his appointment as Lord Chancellor, being raised to the peerage as the 1st Baron Talbot of Hensol. But only two months earlier he had suffered the loss of his eldest son, Charles, not long returned from an edifying two-year Grand Tour under the sponsored tutelage of poet James Thomson (‘Rule, Britannia!‘). Step forward second son, William, fresh from the pursuit of rather more earthly pleasures down in deepest south Wales.

‘We are well informed that in the environs of Hensol, in Glamorganshire, some striking features of his lordship may be traced in several young men and women of that neighbourhood,’ Town & Country Magazine would scurrilously report many years later in surveying the rakish exploits of William, (by now) first Earl Talbot.⁸ His early servant-girl dalliances behind him, Charles’ new heir attempted settling down to conventional married life – but it didn’t last long.

In 1734, seven days after his 24th birthday, Lord Chancellor Talbot’s eldest surviving son was elected MP for Glamorgan; three months earlier, another strategic arrangement had seen his marriage to 15-year-old Mary de Cardonnel, sole heiress of wealthy former Secretary of State for War, Adam de Cardonnel (d.1719), at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square. Likely with an eye to the happy couple’s future, Talbot pere quickly invested a goodly portion of his young daughter-in-law’s matrimonial booty in some prime Gloucestershire real estate.

Since 1553 the manor of Great Barrington had been held by the Bray family who had expanded the manor house and developed its formal grounds (as captured by Kip in 1712, right). But, whatever the Talbots’ thoughts on their new property, within a year of its  purchase fate would force their hand. ‘My Lord Chancellor has a pretty place about 12 miles off, but a sad house, and finds himself oblig’d to build,’ wrote Lord Bathurst (of Cirencester Park) to the Earl of Strafford in September, 1736, being reference to a recent damaging blaze. ‘He has not begun yet,’ Bathurst continued, ‘he has very good stone near him but .. it is such a kind of place which .. can’t possibly make a noble seat, but it may be made a pretty thing.’

see: Georgian Prints

Which was, it transpired, quite a prescient call since any notions of vaulting architectural ambition were foregone in favour of what was ‘essentially a Palladian villa, more usually associated with a residence near a town than a principal landed seat’.⁹ Stylistic details both inside and out at Barrington have long caused suggestion of the hand of William Kent to linger: ‘Were the Tapestry Room’s owl-crested mirror in Chiswick House, Kent’s authority would never be questioned,’ while abandoned entrance gate piers a mile from the house (now overgrown beside the A40) are also ‘thoroughly Kentian’.¹⁰ However, ‘there seems good reason to credit Francis Smith of Warwick with a design as refined, elegant and correct as anything by his more famous contemporaries’.¹¹

see source

see source

The curious contrast between the five-bay arrangement of the S front and the entrance side where coupled pilasters define just three (r) has been attributed to an internal plan which betrayed Smith’s relative unfamiliarity with the smaller, villa scale.¹¹

But while the construction of Barrington had been initiated by Lord Talbot and Francis Smith, the house would have to be completed by their sons, William and William. For Smith died in 1738, a year after the unexpected death (‘to the great misfortune of his Country’) of his client the 52-year-old Lord Chancellor, at the town house he had built in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Talbot may have missed out on the culmination of the Gloucestershire project but he would at least be spared the mortification of the events which would soon overtake its intended occupants.

The now exceedingly well-set 2nd Lord Talbot of Hensol and his still-teenaged wife were by this time the parents of a daughter, Cecil, and in 1739 Mary bore William a son and heir (who would die in infancy). But the second birth had been difficult and her husband would later claim ‘the midwife had told him that if she had any more children it would kill her’. Being thus ‘deprived of her sexual services’, the lusty lord soon returned to his old ways.¹²

see: Geni

Some forty miles south-west of Barrington Park, at the opposite end of the county, lies the mighty Badminton Estate, seat of the dukes of Beaufort. At this time the ten-year marriage of Henry, the ‘sickly’ 3rd duke and his wife, heiress Frances Scudamore, was childless and strained. William Talbot (r) would encounter the duchess early in 1740. ‘She was looking primarily for love, he for a sexual partner, and they were both of them young, healthy, self-centered and reckless. They were made for each other. Within months of their first meeting they had become lovers.’¹²

Regular assignations in London ensued, the couple’s initial concern for secrecy quickly giving way to incaution. For one out-of-town rendezvous the duchess and her groom rode to a rural location where Talbot was waiting with his self-driven chaise. Though the groom had repaired to a respectful distance, all would soon be revealed to him when the back of the carriage came apart, so vigorous was the activity therein. Payoffs and promises for him and other members of the duchess’s staff kept the lid on the affair for a while, but an eventually suspicious duke could always offer more. The dirty linen would be aired during Beaufort’s excruciatingly public divorce proceedings in 1742.¹²

Meanwhile, back at Barrington Park blameless Mary, Lady Talbot was naturally distraught as the affair unravelled. But she appears initially to have entertained hopes that all might not be over between her and her wayward husband, that an informal trial separation might help.

‘He can come down and visit me two or three days out of a week. When [it] is over, if we like living together we can, if we don’t I shall in some measure have weaned myself.’¹³

see: National Trust

But Talbot insisted he would continue to see the duchess, and Mary was advised that unless formal terms of separation were negotiated she might lose everything. ‘I cannot bring myself to part from him and yet to have my very cloathes seized seems horrible,’ she wrote to a friend. And so, while declaring that ‘this separation seems like tearing my soul from body’, her future, and that of Barrington itself, would at last be decided:

‘My Lord has come into settling upon me…either £3,000 per annum clear, or the Barrington Estate with one thousand clear which I chuse.’‘¹³

Seemingly an act of self-affirmation, Mary’s likeness would be painted by leading portraitist Allan Ramsay in 1742.

Unsurprisingly, the bloom would soon come off Lord Talbot’s affair and he moved on – and on. As Horace Walpole noted, ‘the Duchess of Beaufort was not the only woman of fashion who lived openly with him as his mistress. Strong, well-made and very comely but with no air, he had some wit, and a tincture of disordered understanding,’ but was thought over-promoted when made High Steward of the royal household (being a favourite of the Princess of Wales), also created Earl Talbot, in 1761.

His public image would take a knock the following year, however, when The North Briton newspaper’s ridicule of Talbot’s conduct at the coronation of George III resulted in a preposterous duel with its author, radical journalist John Wilkes, in the garden of the Red Lion pub in Bagshot, Surrey (r).

In the calmer waters of the Windrush Valley, meanwhile, newly-separated Lady Mary would settle into her responsibilities at Barrington, and raising the couple’s daughter. ‘To be sure a landed estate requires great care,’ she had recognized when deliberating her settlement options, ‘but it would likewise prove perhaps an amusement.’ A rather expensive and somewhat hazardous amusement, she would before long discover.¹³

‘4 Aug, 1744: I am at present disabled by a pain in my arm, which I have caught by standing amongst my workmen, of which I still have a great many all at my own expense, and a monstrous one it has been to me. Yet where I have spent one shilling for ornament, I have spent two guineas for use, and yet there is still a great deal to do. But nobody that saw the place last year would know it again this.”¹³

The development of the park at Barrington was the focus of much of Lady Talbot’s attention in these early years as solo chatelaine (de Cardonnel family property in Hampshire and elsewhere now being sold to bolster funds). Pleasure grounds ‘of around 120 hectares’ encompassed a circuitous walk punctuated by strategically sited seats and classical structures offering arcadian vistas, or repose [details]. Some decades on, the maturing beauty of Barrington Park would be celebrated in a new engraving for which Lady Talbot paid artist Thomas Bonner £35 in 1778.

(The following year this picture would be published in Rudder’s New history of Gloucestershire whereafter it was promptly ripped off by Westminster Magazine. Claiming copyright infringement and £1,000 in damages, Thomas Bonner sued the proprietors of the 5,000-circulation current affairs monthly who admitted in court that their indifferent copy had “disgraced” their April 1780 edition, distribution of which had been halted. The case was thrown out on a technicality but back issues would instead feature a miscaptioned illustration of Brancepeth Castle, Durham.)

see: The Frick Collection

Also in 1780, and less than two years before his death, Earl Talbot, 2nd Baron Talbot of Hensol would be granted an outwardly superfluous third peerage named for a place with which he had no direct association. But with his existing titles and Hensol Castle entailed upon a male heir (his nephew), and Barrington Park the property of his estranged wife, William lacked a suitably significant legacy to impart to his only (legitimate) child. Cecil – painted (r) by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1762 – had in fact already made good on missing out on a Welsh estate having married the heir to another, George Rice of Dynevor, Carmarthenshire.

So it was that Talbot now became additionally ennobled 1st Baron Dynevor, with specific remainder to his daughter who duly succeeded as Baroness in her own right in 1782.

Following the example of her mother at Barrington, Lady Cecil was much involved in development of the parkland around Newton House at Dynevor (little-altered today) and, after George’s death in 1779, ‘successfully managed the estate alone’. Countess Talbot died in 1787, her daughter only five years later whereupon Cecil’s son George Talbot Rice succeeded to the family estates as 3rd Baron Dynevor. His marriage to a daughter of the 1st Viscount Sydney produced seven surviving children: a son, George, and six spinster daughters, the latter remaining together their entire lives, and comprising a remarkable household at Barrington.

see: Bedfordshire Archives

Reassuring its readers in November 1849, The Welshman & General Advertiser was happy to ‘unhesitatingly assert .. that Lord Dynevor was in perfect health on Monday last, at Barrington Park’, and was definitely not dead, as The Times had erroneously reported three days earlier.¹⁴ The London newspaper had jumped the gun by two-and-a-half years; having already inherited (from a cousin) the Trevor estates of Bromham, Bedfordshire (r) and Glynde in Sussex, son George, 4th Lord Dynevor…

… could easily continue to accommodate his sisters in Gloucestershire. During their brother’s lifetime, Frances, Cecil, Harriet, Caroline, Katherine and Maria Rice all lived together at Barrington Park, taking responsibility for the estate’s villagers seriously. ‘One of the ladies was in their Barrington school every morning, and if any [neighbouring] Taynton child should be absent, one or other of them would cover the mile and a half, each way, to be informed of the reason. There are working people in the district who look back to this time as an El Dorado.’¹⁵

see: ME Wynn & Co.

This benevolent (feudal) idyll was interrupted in 1869 when George died. Having fathered only daughters, the Dynevor title and lands now passed to a cousin, Rev. Francis Rice, while Barrington was placed in trust for his then 19-year-old grandson, Edward Wingfield. The Rice sisters relocated en masse to Matson (r), a Gloucester house offered by their cousin, Lord Sydney, and would continue to fund good works locally.

Somewhat ironically, this mass exodus ushered in the first significant expansion of the house at Barrington Park.

Historic England

Historic England

Plainly anticipating a sizeable brood, Barrington’s freshly married new young squire Edward Wingfield commissioned substantial east and west wings from architect J. Macvicar Anderson. His designs – ‘remarkably tactful’⁹ or ‘overweening’¹⁶, according to taste –  were apparently ‘not executed until the 1880s’¹⁷ (by which time Anderson’s clients had produced seven children). The entrance front would also gain a de rigueur porte-cochere at this time (left).

Mervyn Wingfield succeeded in 1901 but in contrast to his father’s optimistic expansionism, Wingfield’s fifty-year tenure was clouded by vicissitudes which afflicted many a landed estate in his time, introducing an air of retrenchment which was to characterise Barrington Park throughout the 20th century. The agricultural depression post-WWI prompted the sale of several farms and many small properties; income and investments took a further significant hit in the financial crash of 1931.

Giving evidence at a rates appeal in 1934 Col. Wingfield revealed the state of gloom by then already besetting the mansion at Barrington Park. ‘There were many rooms, in particular [former] servants’ rooms, which were dilapidated and unfit for habitation. The domestic quarters were in a semi-basement, nineteen steps below ground level and were dark, dreary and damp.’¹⁸

see: BFI [video]

Death duties and a spiralling maintenance bill would be the sobering inheritance of eldest surviving son Charles in 1952. As the estate workforce steadily dwindled, a reluctance to sell or let village properties to outsiders (see video, left) contributed to the conspicuous decline of Great Barrington which would eventually bring concerned council officials – and the national news media – to his door.

*

“A house the size of Barrington Park, with or without extensions, is never going to be practical for family life, is it? Whatever you do, aren’t you still going to have the problem of not wanting to watch ‘Neighbours’ in the Tapestry Room, or the Georgian hall?“²

So suggested uncomprehending counsel for Cotswold planning authority to present owner Richard Wingfield at the 1996 public inquiry into the proposed demolition of Barrington’s 19th century extensions. Restoration of the latter in addition to the house’s original core would increase costs by at least 50%, a burden the determinedly self-financing Wingfields insisted they could not then entertain. Years of stalemate ensued (though thorough repair of Great Barrington village was under way).

Fast-forward to 2010 and approval is granted for the renovation and discreet modernisation of Barrington Park in its entirety, ‘Mr and Mrs Wingfield [having] reconsidered their own plans for the use of the house’ following the death of Charles Wingfield in 2007. Planning officials now welcomed ‘the attention to detail and sympathetic approach to the repair of this important building’ under the continuing supervision of architects Inskip+Jenkins (who were also busy with their well-received restoration of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill at this time).

see: Sinclair Johnston

The comprehensive scheme of works included: complete re-roofing; repair and restoration of the 18th-century interiors, ‘bringing the important reception rooms with their outstanding contents back into use’; refurbishment and repurposing of the wing interiors to provide ‘a convenient family house for the 21st century’ (complete with passenger lift).¹⁷

see: Civic Security

Removal of the Victorian porte-cochere has returned the entrance front to its original form, the Georgian Venetian door arrangement once more revealed, while the salvaged stone steps (stored since 1882) reinstate ‘the generous approach which related the original house to the parkland’.¹⁷

see: Historic England

see: Collin West

Parkland wherein the Grade II* dovecote and temples (‘of considerable inventiveness’), and other C18th structures, about which there was similarly ‘serious cause for concern’, have now also been removed from the At Risk Register.¹⁹

see: Anna Powell-Smith

At least one of these buildings, like the house itself, can be seen from a distance, the Barrington Park Estate being ‘unfortunately NOT open to the public’. Fully organic since 1995, the 5,000-acre traditional farming enterprise is now “heavily into” the Environmental Stewardship scheme promoted by Defra/Natural England whereby farmers and landowners ‘are paid for effectively managing their land in a manner which protects and enhances the environment and wildlife’.

Recording the forlorn scene he had encountered at Barrington Park back in 1996, James Lees-Milne foresaw ‘absolutely no alternative to demolition of the Anderson additions in order to preserve the Kentian villa. The family are asking for no financial assistance, and would be unable to live in the present house, were it to be reinstated’. Little could he have imagined that the chorus of concern in his time would be confounded, the ‘Russian novel’ having contrived something akin to a fairytale ending…

see: Google Maps

[Barrington Park Estate]

1. Sunday Times, 31 July 1977.
2. Daily Telegraph, 4 Oct 1996.
3. Norwich, J.J. The architecture of southern England, 1985.
4. Lees-Milne, J. Diaries, 1984-1997, 2008.
5. Daily Telegraph, 7 Oct 1996.
6. Gibbs, V. (Ed.) The complete peerage, 1916.
7. MacNair, M. Oxford dictionary of national biography, 2008.
8. Town & Country, Oct 1771.
9. Verey, D., Brooks, A. Buildings of England: Gloucestershire, 1999.
10. Weber, S. (Ed.) William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, 2013.
11. Gomme, A. Smith of Warwick, 2000.
12. Stone, L. Broken lives: Separation and divorce in England 1660-1857, 1993.
13. British Library Add MS 69389.
14. The Welshman & General Advertiser, 30 Nov 1849.
15. Sturge Gretton, M. A corner of the Cotswolds, 1914.
16. Stamp, G. Anti-ugly: Excursions in English architecture and design, 2013.
17. Inskip+Jenkins, Design and access statement, 2010.
18. Jones, A. The Cotswolds, 1994.
19. Kingsley, N. The country houses of Gloucestershire Vol.II, 1992.

 

Trumpington Hall, Cambridgeshire

For centuries, indeed back to the Domesday survey and beyond, the settlement immediately to the south of the city of Cambridge has rejoiced in the heartiest of English place-names. Lately, however, it would seem that the characterful charm of ‘Trumpington’ has been found a tad wanting by 21st-century developers (or ‘place-makers’, if you will) who have been busy rebranding this expanding community.

see: Dezeen

’Welcome to Aura..an excellent choice of homes for any lifestyle, elegantly placed within tree-lined avenues, surrounded by green open spaces’

‘The houses at Novo are arranged in a traditional village-style layout of attractive
avenues, courtyards and mews’

‘Halo provides the perfect location for City living whilst being far enough away to avoid the hustle and bustle in everyday life’

Outside of London few places have felt the pressure for development as much as Cambridge, its university and allied innovative Science Park driving the regional economy and the demand for property. In 2006 the city council made the strategic decision to loosen a few notches in the protective Green Belt which has ringed the city since the mid-1960s, identifying southerly Trumpington as the locus for new development.

‘Seven Acres is our stake in Great Kneighton, Trumpington – Cambridge’s new garden suburb,’ says Danish builder Skanska about its share of the 2,300-house scheme, ‘Great Kneighton‘ being the encompassing designation (‘inappropriate and historically inaccurate’ in the view of some) adopted by the lead developer, Countryside Properties. But all of this is merely the latest – albeit most dramatic – chapter in a process of expansion here which began in earnest in the last decades of the 19th century when ‘the Pemberton family of Trumpington Hall began to sell off plots for building on long leases’.

see: Cambridge City Council

‘Attached to these leases were covenants ensuring high quality design and spacious building plots.’ Compulsory purchase orders hastened the development of higher density housing after the 1923 redrawing of the Cambridge city boundary which captured the ancestral seat of Trumpington’s principal landowner. But in the C21 the Pemberton Estate once again embraced proactive involvement.

‘In 2002 Countryside Properties entered into an option agreement with the Pemberton Trust. Following adoption of the Local Plan in 2006, and allocation of the [land] for development,’ Countryside acquired a 160-acre site ‘for an unconfirmed sum‘. Planning permission for the first tranche of housing was finally gained in 2010, Glebe Farm subsequently becoming the ‘Novo‘ element of Great Kneighton. (‘Around Cambridge, agricultural land with no planning permission was worth around £18,500 a hectare in 2010; residential land was worth £2.9m.’)

see: Google Maps

“We chose to undertake a number of important schemes with Countryside Properties in the Cambridge Southern Fringe” said Richard Pemberton, director of Trumpington Farm Company, the Pemberton Trustees retaining an interest in such as the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, which ‘is on track to becoming one of the leading biomedical centres in the world by 2020’.

Meanwhile, a world away from from such remorseless ‘progress’, behind screening trees at the end of a drive extending east from the family-sponsored Eric Gill war memorial on the High Street, always-private Trumpington Hall (↑) remains at the heart of a 1,300 hectare agricultural estate. ‘With its attractive park, this dignified mansion is an astonishing survival’ inside Cambridge city limits.¹

see: Google Maps

*

The oldest family landholding in Cambridgeshire (just ahead of the Jenyns of Bottisham Hall) was established with the purchase of one thousand Trumpington acres for a thousand golden guineas by barrister Francis Pemberton in 1675. It was altogether a landmark twelve months for Pemberton who gained a knighthood and also his firstborn son that same year. Less pleasantly, his legal role would also result in a brief period of incarceration in Westminster, being ‘the innocent victim of an absurd quarrel about privilege between the two houses of parliament’.²

Indeed, for someone who would eventually occupy the highest judicial office in the land, the life and times of Sir Francis Pemberton included a surprising amount of time behind bars. Born to advantage in St. Albans (c.1624, the son of the mayor), though he would successfully graduate from Cambridge University, biographers are agreed ‘in describing his beginnings as very debauched, leading him to such extravagance that he soon wasted his patrimony’, becoming mired in debt.²

Debt which would see him languish in London’s Fleet Prison for several years yet wherein he would gradually be transformed, applying himself to legal study and honing his skills assisting the causes of fellow inmates. Convincing his creditors that he could discharge his debts more quickly if he was earning, their waivers eventually gained his liberty and Pemberton assiduously set about rebuilding his standing, not to mention a lucrative practice, at the Inns of Court.

see: NPG

Gaining a reputation as a ‘trimmer’ as he navigated the constitutional tectonics during the time of Charles II and later James II, Sir Francis finally ascended to the summit of his profession when appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1681.³ Pemberton would preside over, amongst others, the dubious prosecution for high treason of Archbishop Oliver Plunkett (executed), and of one Joan Buts ‘for being a Common Witch and Inchantress’ (not guilty), before being dismissed on account of ‘imputed judicial independence’ two years later.²

‘Returning to his lucrative private practice, in 1692 Pemberton extended his Trumpington estate by buying up properties there from a bankrupted brother-in-law.’⁴ But he would never take full possession of the Hall which remained home to the widow of the previous owner, and died at his house in Highgate in June 1697. Pemberton’s son, also Francis, was finally able to move in at Trumpington in 1715 whereupon he quickly setting about modernising the Jacobean residence.

see: Historic England

Formerly a shallow H-plan house, its early Georgian remodelling created a entrance front of seven central bays and projecting wings (with infilling in rear). A walled forecourt and gate piers completed the picture. ‘The interior has many good features’ including ‘graceful’ stairs and reset C17 panelling.⁵

see: Google Maps

The Reverend Jeremy Pemberton, a younger son of Francis (2), inherited Trumpington after the latter’s death in 1762 but outlived his own sons, the estate being managed by a cousin prior to the coming of age of his grandson, Francis (3). After taking up occupancy c.1810 Francis would add a third storey and pitched roof to the Hall and a large kitchen extension in rear while the land about would be imparked (though ‘a remarkable crinkle crankle wall’, seen below, may predate this).⁶

see: Google Maps

Francis Pemberton would be the last male heir to Trumpington for 150 years, being succeeded in 1849 by his only child, Frances, at that time a young widow and a mother of three. Like her great-grandfather, Frances (later to remarry her first cousin, Rev. Henry Hodgson) outlived her two childless sons, the estate passing in 1899 to her daughter, Patience, whose husband Reverend Canon Thomas Hudson duly assumed the name and arms of Pemberton. Continuing an unwitting tradition of significant alteration at the Hall…

see: Castleacre Insurance

see: Cambridge Council

… every one hundred years or so, Thomas and Patience added a large library extending from the north wing and also a rectangular bay to the garden front. Their son Francis being killed in action in the early weeks of World War One, Trumpington passed to his sister, Viola, after the death of their mother in 1927. Having married family physician William Wingate, this couple again took the Pemberton name and would soon introduce a loggia (↑) between the kitchen and the immediate garden space.

see: Marathon @ geograph

Viola superintended the convalescence of injured servicemen at Trumpington Hall in WWII, during which time she lost her husband, remaining ‘the grand old lady of the manor’ until her own death in 1972. Meanwhile, the management of the estate had been taken on by her son, Francis (4)…

see: Habitorials

… ‘a leading figure in the agricultural industry’, knighted in 1976. He in turn was superseded by son Antony (left, outside the late-C20th porch), himself now retired and still resident at the Hall. ‘Proud that he can still see the dreaming spires of King’s College from the acres of garden that run down to the River Cam, it’s hard to imagine that, just half a mile away, builders are busy constructing thousands of new homes.’

see: Google Maps

And co-incident with the family’s council-impelled real estate bonanza has been the latest phase of development at Trumpington Hall itself. In 2012 plans were approved for a significant rethink of the house interior, specifically the creation of new kitchen/dining facilities and a reception room adjacent to the formal entrance. In the 24-acre park a new point of focus has been introduced in the shape of a William Kent-inspired pavilion overlooking the old carp canals (r).

WoodlandTrust/YouTube

see: John Sutton

Elsewhere, over 60 acres of broadleaved woodland and 12 kilometres of hedgrerow have been introduced to formerly “prairie-like” farmland, both counteracting the effects of  periodic flooding of the Cam and providing “a legacy for future generations” explained Trumpington’s director and heir, Richard Pemberton (r), earlier this year.

see: The Forum

And, not long after the completion of a new family residence on the estate (left), the Pembertons’ concern for Trumpington’s future generations would make national headlines. ‘Toffs rewrite gay inheritance’ gibed the Sunday Times in 2016, revealing that the family ‘had become the first landed gentry to change the inheritance rules of a trust to pass their estate to the partners of gay descendants’. Their 17th-century founding forebear, Sir Francis Pemberton, his judicial career having been ultimately stymied by a ‘supposed leaning to liberal principles’, might perhaps have approved…²

[Trumpington Estate][Trumpington Hall heritage statement]

1. Watkin, D. et al. Burke’s & Savills guide country houses Vol.III: East Anglia, 1981.
2. Foss, E. The judges of England, Vol.7, 1864.
3. Campbell, J. The lives of the chief justices, Vol.2, 1881.
4. Halliday, P. Dictionary of national biography, 2008.
5. Bradley, S., Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Cambridgeshire, 2104.
6. Mowl, T. The historic gardens of England: Cambridgeshire, 2013.

Kirkdale House, Dumfries & Galloway

‘Self-preservation being the first law of nature, we should assume [that] man would be easily persuaded to the adoption of precautions which promise a defence against contagion; but when he is bent only on the gratification of his appetites, reflection is lost; that divine gift, Reason, is overwhelmed; and he blindly rushes on, regardless of the consequences!’

Authored anonymously in 1810 ‘by a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London’, this 170-page handbook was a popular attempt to demystify and distill what was then considered best practice in the prevention of an all too common affliction of the man about town.

’Imminent and extensive as the dangers are which environ those who incur the hazard of venereal infection, the mischief has been seriously aggravated by the preposterous assumption of a complete acquaintance with the treatment and cure of this disorder, by individuals not of the medical profession.’

Whilst loath to promote any of the wide array of quack remedies then available (‘many of [which] have had a prodigious sale’), the sceptical author did feel duty-bound to make one honourable exception.

’The reputation of all these nostrums has been ephemeral, unless I exclude one, Sir Samuel Hannay’s Specific, which, I presume, has some claims to its pretensions, from having remained in vogue upwards of thirty years. Many have reported to me, that they had used this Wash more than twenty years, with unvaried success.’

The Star 11 June 1812

Hannay’s concoction would sustain a pre-eminence in the marketplace for decades in spite of the fact that his patent application in 1774 was ‘one of the very few examples of a patent that was refused the [Lord Chancellor’s] Great Seal’, having been rejected ‘on the grounds of public decency’.

However, though the ‘unrivalled reputation’ (↑) of his wonder potion endured long after the untimely death of ‘the former eminent chemist’ (in 1790, not yet fifty years old), personal and business debts well in excess of £100,000 were revealed upon Hannay’s demise. Indeed, just about the only tangible asset of substance was his estate on the south-west coast of Scotland complete with its gleaming, not-quite-finished Georgian mansion.

see: Paula VanWhy

But to characterise Kirkdale – ‘with a length of 172ft, one of Robert Adam’s largest classical houses’¹ – as The House That VD Built would be neither entirely fair nor accurate. For Sir Samuel Hannay was a highly active City figure, maintaining ‘the London end of a business partnership that embraced three brothers busy making fortunes in India during the 1770s and ‘80s’.²

Alas, in the wake of Samuel’s death in 1790 became it soon became evident that ‘he had dissipated his own fortune [and] the very considerable sum left to him by his brother, Col. Alexander Hannay’.³ A regional commanding officer in the East India Company army, Colonel Hannay would later be in the crosshairs of leading parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s prosecution of the regime of Indian Governor-General Warren Hastings. Having previously been in debt, it was claimed, Colonel Hannay had ‘returned to Calcutta in possession of a fortune, “like a leech full of blood”’.

But, again, to describe Kirkdale as The House That Colonial Exploitation Built would be neither entirely fair nor accurate. With a queue of impatient creditors, ‘the lands and estate which belonged to the late Sir Samuel Hannay’ were in fact advertised for sale in 1796. But the Hannays would manage to retain possession of Kirkdale which, in the twentieth century, would be complimented by a second estate acquired by marriage, nearby Cardoness House, a few miles further east along ‘one of the most beautiful coastal roads in Britain’.⁴ And though post-war pragmatism wrought significant changes, Hannays remain in situ at both properties, continuing a Galloway heritage of close on 500 years.

*

see: littleninjafox

While Kirkdale has for centuries been the seat of the chief of Clan Hannay, the annual gathering of its worldwide diaspora centres upon a crumbling ruin on the opposite side of Wigtown Bay. Late sixteenth-century Sorbie Tower (left) is now the object of a clan-driven restoration mission being promoted by the present Chief, yet the line from which he descends had actually decamped from Sorbie years before the first stones of this structure were laid.

Alexander Hannay purchased lands at Kirkdale in 1532 which were to pass from father to son for the next three hundred years. Details of the family’s original lairdly dwelling have proved elusive but both it and its Georgian replacement were included in the 1796 sale particulars of Sir Samuel Hannay’s estate: ‘To be sold .. the new mansion house; also at a little distance, but concealed by the wood, the former mansion house, which is in very good repair and fit to accommodate any Gentleman’s family.’⁵

see: Google Maps

Still standing ‘elegant and aloof’⁶, the fleeting sight of Kirkdale House afforded to modern-day travellers along the A75, between Creetown and Gatehouse of Fleet, is unlikely to excite rhapsodic observations akin to those of writer Robert Heron who passed this way in 1792. ‘The house of Kirkdale, among the most advantageously situate in Scotland, rises to the eye with a sort of magic effect, [having] the air of the palace of an Arabian Tale,’ he suggested, his enthusiasm tempered only by the prospect of what might have been.

‘The adjacent fields [are] bare, uninclosed and unadorned,’ he noted, ‘for, since the House was built, circumstances have arisen, to retard the completion of the noble plan.’ Indeed they had.

Kirkdale House was but the latest trapping of a man seemingly determined to ensure that his name should amount to rather more than just a byword for genital hygiene. In 1783 Samuel Hannay’s petition to the Lord Provost for an old Hannay baronetcy, long in abeyance, to be revived in his favour was successful (though, with other branches having stronger claims, ‘how Samuel managed to achieve his title is difficult to understand’).³ And the following year he would be returned as one of two MPs representing the far-flung Cornish constituency of Camelford, a ‘rotten borough’ the oldest inhabitant of which, it was reported in 1796, could not recall ‘to have ever seen the face of any one of its Members’.

The other half of Camelford’s double act during Sir Samuel’s time was James Macpherson, the pair having seen colonial service in West Florida in the 1760s. ‘The ‘Macpherson mafia’ were [also] Anglo-Indian players at the same time as the Hannays’ but with his prospering druggist enterprise in London Samuel would be the only one of the sons of William Hannay (d.1759) not to venture east in the 1770s.⁷

see: Bonhams

In 2011 Bonhams auction house in London sold ‘an important Mughal inscribed emerald mounted in a diamond-set gold bangle’ (r) for £90,000. Having passed ‘by descent’, this spectacular jewel had comprised part of the ‘substantial personal fortune’ amassed by Col. Alexander Hannay in his role as an East India Company tax enforcer on behalf of the nawab of Oudh, in north-east India. Whether this wealth had been acquired by ‘firmness and knowledge of business on his part’ or through opportunistic embezzlement, and precisely who had benefited, would be very publicly debated during Burke’s prosecution of Warren Hastings (an affronted Sir Samuel seemingly itching for redress). But ‘it is obvious that Hannay must have collected sums in excess of the stipulated revenue’.⁸

Many ‘Scots went to India to improve their financial position’, such funds flooding back to Britain proving a timely boon for the Adam brothers, Robert and James, whose hitherto predominantly England-based architecture business was, by 1780, in some difficulty. Thereafter most of their clients would be wealthy compatriots north of the border.⁹ For James Macpherson, London agent of the nabob of Arcot, came Balavil (sold out of the family in 2015) while Hannay family fund manager Sir Samuel would commission designs for Kirkdale House…

see: Sir John Soane Museum

… ‘externally the most complete of their late classical houses, executed more or less exactly as planned’.¹⁰ More accurately, exactly as plan B, for Robert Adam had also prepared a more ambitious scheme for the estate (above) which would never be realised.

see: Yale Center for British Art

This included a larger, more nuanced main house spanning 198 feet, a highly picturesque stable court (r) and a bridge ‘planned as a neo-Egyptian extravaganza complete with swags and sphinxes’.⁶ What transpired in respect of the first and last elements (also possibly the farm buildings) were crisp, austere structures in ashlar granite devoid of decorative embellishment.

see: Canmore

The south-facing rear of the principal block (left), with its central canted bay, ‘affords fine views over Wigtown Bay with the Isle of Man in the distance’.¹ On either flank, ‘narrow three-bay balustraded links join to square, pyramid-roofed pavilions each of two low storeys.’¹¹ The only major external alteration is on the entrance front [see] where ‘the porte-cochere has been converted into a porch’ (↓).¹

see: Quintin Lake

Unfortunately, as Kirkdale House was going up so were Sir Samuel’s debts, a weakness for gambling reputedly accounting for much of the financial damage. Having entered into an investment partnership with Hannay, James Macpherson presciently tiptoed away from this association in 1788, ‘passing on his share of the business to another ‘eastern friend’, his cousin Allan Macpherson’ – who soon faced ruin when Samuel Hannay’s insolvency was revealed after his death two years later.⁷ Insult would be added to financial injury for Macpherson as firstly the Scottish Court of Session…

… and then the House of Lords (1801) subsequently upheld the claim of another substantial creditor as being both legitimate and superior, namely that of Samuel’s own brother, Ramsay. An independent eastern merchant, Ramsay Hannay had sent back nearly £50,000 of his fortune to be managed by Samuel who ‘had granted him a bond secured by all of Sir Samuel’s lands in Scotland’. Macpherson and his fellow creditors unsuccessfully ‘objected that the bond gave Ramsay a fraudulent preference’. (Scots law also came to the aid of the widowed Lady Hannay, granting her a portion of the lands as of right though denying her claim to the old mansion which was still standing at Kirkdale).

see: Lane Fine Art

Faced with a tangled and uncertain inheritance, Sir Samuel’s son and heir (r), also Sir Samuel, took up a military career, service with the Life Guards taking him to the Continent where peril was sometimes less a matter of duty than of honour. For in September 1801 newspapers carried reports of his return from Hamburg, Hannay and a fellow officer having travelled there specifically to fight a duel following an altercation in London’s Bond Street.¹²

In the wake the speedy unravelling of Britain’s truce with France in 1803 Samuel Hannay soon found himself a prisoner-of-war alongside his brother-in-law, Capt. Thomas Rainsford. (Jane Hannay, facing family hostility towards her relationship with her brother’s Life Guards colleague, had eloped with Thomas, the couple apparently being disowned thereafter. In a later reversal of fortunes, Thomas Rainsford would find himself superintending the exile of Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, he and his wife dying there ‘within months of each other in 1817’.)¹³

see: Canmore

Sir Samuel died unmarried in 1841, Kirkdale now passing to his spinster sister, Mary, ‘by virtue of a deed of entail made by Ramsay Hannay’. At her demise nine years later Mary’s nephew, William Rainsford, became the fourth consecutive childless owner of Kirkdale, adding the Hannay name to his own as would, in due course, his brother Major Frederick Rainsford Hannay in 1856. The last-named died in 1884 and it would be during the custodianship of Frederick’s eldest son, Ramsay, that calamity would befall the house that Samuel Hannay built.

‘On Thursday forenoon the large mansion house of Kirkdale was totally destroyed by fire,’ exaggerated one newspaper report in May 1893. More accurately, while the interior structure of the main block was indeed lost, ‘the paintings and most of the furniture were saved’, a fact which possibly did little to ease the mortification of a certain Mr. Charlesworth, however. For, whilst Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay was by now the father of a sizable brood, at the time of the blaze Kirkdale House was in fact let to and occupied by this unfortunate individual.¹⁴

The Edinburgh firm of Kinnear & Peddie were engaged for the rebuilding, replacing Adams’ central staircase and enclosed gallery in a ‘neo-Jacobean manner, not an entirely happy counterpoint to the exterior’.¹¹ Four years earlier this same practice had been responsible for the full-blown ‘Baronial-isation’ of a hitherto relatively modest house just a few miles to the east of Kirkdale.

see source

Cardoness House was the seat of Sir William Maxwell, 4th Bt., and at the time of his daughter Dorothea’s 1910 marriage to the eldest son of Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay, it was destined to pass to her only brother. But unmarried 30-year-old William fell at Gallipoli…

… the Cardoness Estate consequently being inherited by his sister at around the same time that Kirkdale was being handed over to her husband by his father. With two country piles on his hands, in the straitened years post-World War II Kirkdale House – ‘beautifully situated, in excellent order, fourteen bedrooms, large walled garden, shooting over 4,800 acres’ – was made available to let.¹⁵ But following Col. Rainsford-Hannay’s death in 1959 his only surviving child, Ramsay, determined to take a pragmatic grip of his inheritance.

see: icaravans

see: Google Maps

‘With great foresight,’ remarked one press obituary, ‘he knocked down two thirds of one house and converted the other into apartments.’ Cardoness House was ‘savagely reduced in size’, being essentially shorn of its Baronial character (a reminder of which endures in the shape of the entrance lodge, right).¹¹

Meanwhile, in 1967 Kirkdale House would be divided into eight separate rental / leasehold flats which continue to be periodically available (save for one). Further, as noted in that 2004 obituary, Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay ‘used the potential of beaches on the Solway coast to start a successful caravan park, which he realised provided a way for his family to continue their long association with the area.’

see source

‘Some 100 acres of coastal parkland and policies out of the Cardoness Estate’s 2,000 acres have been set aside as a caravan park of distinction,’ while the Kirkdale Estate’s own two miles of ‘private foreshore’ (right) includes holiday cottages and the ancient oak woodland of Ravenshall SSSI (home to, amongst other things, a ‘rare cave-dwelling woodlouse‘). Today these enterprises are managed – in combination with traditional estate activities – by the grandsons of Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay, their father…

see source

… clan chief Dr. David Hannay, being now retired from an academic career in the field of healthcare. Having on occasion asserted ‘the benefits of sex education’ it is perhaps ironic that Dr. Hannay’s dubiously qualified ancestor should have prospered in no small part thanks to ‘the general ignorance, even among the superior classes of society, of the possibility of escaping infection by venereal poison’. The magic formula of Sir Samuel Hannay’s eponymous prophylactic may be lost to us but, happily, his splendid erection, Kirkdale House, still stands proud…

see: The Perimeter / Quintin Lake

[Category A listing][Kirkdale Estate]

1. King, D. The complete works of Robert and James Adam, 1991.
2. McGilvray, G.K. East India patronage and the British state, 2008.
3. Francis, S. The Hannays of Sorbie, 1961.
4. Little, G.A. Scotland’s gardens, 1981.
5. The Star 9 June, 1796.
6. Hume, J.R. Dumfries & Galloway: An illustrated architectural guide, 2000.
7. Trevor-Roper, H. The invention of Scotland, 2008.
8. Davies, C.C. Warren Hastings and Oudh, 1939.
9. Macauley, J. The classical country house in Scotland 1660-1800, 1987.
10. Rowan, A. Designs for castles and country villas by Robert & James Adam, 1985.
11. Gifford, J. The buildings of Scotland: Dumfries & Galloway, 1996.
12. Morning Post 11 September, 1801.
13. Collier, J. A ‘blessed asylum’ or a utopian vision: the viability of a Protestant nunnery in early C19 England, 2014.
14. Southern Reporter 11 May, 1893.
15. Country Life 15 September, 1950.

 

Overbury Court, Worcestershire

‘Don’t believe everything you read in the papers’ may be a healthy general maxim but in the matter of a key moment in the history of the ‘big house’ in the parish of Overbury, at the foot of Bredon Hill on the Worcestershire/Gloucestershire border, Handed on is happy to trust the press. Down through the years most publications which have treated this place record 1738 as the year in which the original gabled manor house here burned down; at variance, one particularly respected source suggests 1735. And then there is this brief item of news which appeared in the Daily Gazetteer in its edition of 1 June, 1736:

’Last Thursday Se’ennight a dreadful Fire broke out at Overbury in Worcestershire, the Seat of Mr. Martin, Esq., which burnt down the Inside of that fine House, with part of the Furniture, amounting to a very considerable damage.’

Whilst it’s not inconceivable that this place could suffer devastating misfortune twice in short order, this blog is satisfied that we have our date. Factual reporting of this nature is, of course, relatively uncontentious. By contrast, some 160 years after the Overbury blaze the first-ever female candidate for the presidency of the United States would be desperately trying to persuade the Martins, an English banking dynasty of impeccable rectitude (one of whom she was seeking to marry), that she was not the scandalous libertarian virago of press characterization.

Despite claiming that “my life has been made wretched by them all”,¹ Idaho-born Victoria Woodhull’s extraordinary, rollercoaster odyssey would have an typically unlikely denoument: a lady of the manor and the largest shareholder in Martin & Co., the prosperous finance house which sustained a family estate ‘maintained [to this day] at a standard of perfection that can hardly be surpassed anywhere else in Britain’.²

see: Google Maps

 ‘House and village evoke a vanished age: all is beautifully maintained and the feeling of a manorial stronghold is still very strong.’³

But while time would appear to stand still here, the Overbury estate (of 5,000 acres encompassing two villages) is far from ossified. This is an olde worlde idyll now powered, for example, by superfast fibre-optic broadband, industrial strength connectivity handy not least for keeping abreast of the various dedicated websites of the estate/farms/villages hereabouts. Not forgetting the Grasshoppers Nursery, the naming of which has its roots in the foundations of the Martin family’s fortune.

see: Google Maps

In the early years of the eighteenth century three brothers from a well-established family of standing in Evesham, Thomas, John and James Martin, became partners in a private banking concern quartered at the sign of the Grasshopper in Lombard Street in the City of London. Originally the site of Elizabethan royal financier Sir Thomas Gresham’s activities, this address would remain the headquarters of Stone & Martin, later Martins Bank, for the next 200 years. (The firm merged with larger Bank of Liverpool in 1918 before finally being swallowed whole by Barclays Bank in 1969.)

see: Historic England

Such was their success, by the early 1720s the brothers were in the market for country estates. James would become lord of the manor of Stow cum Quy, east of Cambridge, seated at Quy Hall (r). Dying without issue in 1744 this property was devised to similarly childless Thomas who would in turn settle Quy upon his nephew, the heir and namesake of brother John. (The Quy estate passed by descent until being sold in 1855 to the Francis family in whose hands it remains.)

Not that John II was exactly short of options having married Judith Bromley, heiress of the Ham Court estate near Upton upon Severn in Worcestershire, while his father was now the squire of Overbury some eight miles to the east.

see: Curt Mekemson

Fire having consumed the residence which came with this estate (initially leased from the Dean and Chapter of Worcester in 1723), John Martin had built a ‘large ashlar house, 1739-43, perhaps by the younger William Smith‘. Of honeyed local limestone, the principal seven-bay facade – its centre pedimented and slightly projecting – faced south, with five-bay returns. (John II is understood to have improved the family seat, possibly with the introduction of the attic storey, the pediment being raised.)⁴

Further reflecting their ascendancy all three Martin brothers were returned to parliament, John as the member for Tewkesbury, a position in which he would be succeeded in turn by each of his three sons. (This constituency was represented by a member of the Martin family, ‘with but few interruptions, for very nearly 150 years’.) But while he did his turn as MP, eldest son John II did not join the bank, ‘having chosen a profession of being his father’s heir’.⁵ In addition to developing Overbury after inheriting in 1767, Martin also commissioned a new mansion at Ham Court (below) from local architect Anthony Keck.

see: Historic England

Having no children at his death in 1794 John II’s property now passed to his brothers, both of whom had become senior partners in the family bank. Ham Court was inherited by Joseph Martin, Quy by Joseph’s son, Thomas, while brother James (II) now took responsibility at Overbury Court. James Martin’s marriage to Penelope Skippe would yield yet more property: The Upper Hall, Ledbury, just over the border into Herefordshire (2,300 acres by 1873) and the significant collection of drawings amassed on his Grand Tour by her bachelor brother John Skippe (who retired to Overbury village, dying there in 1812).

James (II) was a scrupulous parliamentarian, gaining the nickname ‘Starling’ Martin during his three decades as MP for Tewkesbury. ‘A frequent but awkward speaker, much given to protestations of his integrity and independence, he was not always taken seriously; but he was no buffoon. Generally recognized as one of the most independent Members of the House, he passionately advocated abolition of the slave trade.’ Martin paid 20 guineas to George Romney for his likeness (r), captured during seven sittings for the artist in 1786.⁶

James died in 1810; across the remainder of the nineteenth century there were to be but two (albeit largely absentee) landlords of Overbury Court. Such was the commitment of eldest son John (III) to the banking business that he lived ‘above the shop’ in Lombard Street and, perhaps unsurprisingly, married Frances Stone, daughter of a fellow partner, Richard Stone (both men having accessible country retreats in Chiselhurst, Kent). Until John’s son, Robert, retired to Overbury from life in London in 1873 the mansion was periodically let, tenants including Robert Berkeley, the heir to Spetchley Park elsewhere in the county.

see: Historic England

In the year of his return to Worcestershire Robert Martin suffered the loss of his daughter, Penelope, who died following the birth of what would be his only grandchild. (Son-in-law the Rev. Frederick Holland would remain in the family, however, marrying his late wife’s cousin, John Martin’s daughter Elinore, two years later.)

See: Overbury

Some years into his full-time residency at Overbury Court Martin engaged architect Richard Norman Shaw, initiating a rolling programme of major alterations to the house and grounds which would continue well into the twentieth century under his heir, son Richard, and Shaw’s pupil, Ernest Newton. The most substantial element was Shaw’s new north-west wing of 1897-1900 (above), the most publicly visible his earlier grand ornamental gates.

see: Historic England

‘At Overbury the elevations of Shaw’s additions were almost brutally plain [N entrance, left], the interiors rich but simple. He advised the Martins to put plain lining paper on the walls of their best bedroom to start with and then, after a year or two, “to put on a [William] Morris paper at 18s/6d a roll!, as provided by that rampant socialist for well-to-do people”.’⁷ But for the Martins the troubling world of radical social reform had come a whole lot closer to home than simply their choice in wallpaper.

For, one day in December 1877, Robert’s younger son, John Biddulph Martin, then 36 and single, had decided to attend a public talk entitled ‘The Human Body, the Temple of God’ to be given by a 39-year-old woman recently arrived on these shores from her native America. An indefatigable controversialist, Victoria Claflin Woodhull was embarking on the next chapter of an extraordinary life which, in addition to her energetic espousal of women’s suffrage, spiritualism and ‘free love’, had hitherto encompassed: the establishment of both a stock brokerage and a fearlessly muckraking newspaper in New York, a spell of imprisonment for ‘obscenity’ and, not least, her pioneering female candidature for the American presidency in 1872.

John Biddulph Martin was instantly smitten. But the colourful ‘baggage’ of the soon-to-be equally enamoured Victoria made her a difficult enough sell to the wider Martin family even before the couple got around to mentioning her two previous marriages and Zula, her accompanying grown-up daughter.

After five years navigating turbulent emotional waters – an increasingly desperate Victoria’s revisionist biography cutting little ice, her torn beau calling it off at least once – the couple wed in secret in 1883. They began an active married life at their house in Hyde Park, Martin’s wealth funding his wife’s continued campaigning. [Archive]

see: Country Life

With the passage of time came grudging acceptance. A decade on, Robert Martin gifted his younger son the neighbouring Worcestershire estate of Bredon’s Norton – 1,200 acres centred upon Norton Park (right), ‘an amazingly early example of Victorian ‘Tudor Gothic’⁴ – on condition it should revert to him, should John predecease him. ‘Fortunately for Victoria, [her husband] survived his father by three days.’⁸

Now landed in her own right (and also ‘the major shareholder’ in Martins Bank⁸), from 1901 widow Victoria and her daughter began life as ladies of the manor.

Their PR instincts remained acute, however: a multi-page spread in Country Life magazine in 1902 anointed their new-found status (daughter Zula even bagging the frontispiece in the same edition, left). The pair’s reformist zeal was now focused on dragging the unsuspecting villagers of sleepy Bredon’s Norton into the 20th century. While every local farmer was soon equipped with a telephone, various socially progressive educational initiatives would ultimately hit the reactionary buffers.

see: Savills

Victoria died in 1927 by which time neighbouring Overbury was in the hands of her late husband’s nephew, Robert Holland-Martin, ‘her one friend in the family’ (and to whom the Woodhull estate passed after spinster Zula’s death in 1940).¹ Prior to taking up residence at Overbury in 1922 Holland-Martin, his wife Eleanor (Martin, of Ham Court) and their six sons had occupied Bell’s Castle (r), ‘a miniature neo-Gothic castle with an unforgettable view’, which stands between the Court and Norton Park.⁹ (Sold out of the family in 2014.)

see: Curt Mekemson

see source

‘A great deal had been done to the house and garden’ ahead of the Holland-Martin brood’s arrival – a full-height projection of c.1910 on the east front housed a lift shaft (left) – and Overbury Court would continue to evolve.

Architect Sir Herbert Baker contributed a large porch on the west side c.1925 (↑). ‘These improvements were only a beginning: neither Robert Holland-Martin nor any of his family ever felt that Overbury was as perfect as they could make it, and from that time onwards there has never been a moment at which some plan or other was not under discussion.’⁹ [GII* listing]

see: Historic England

In recent times a scheme for a colonnade and pergola which incorporated eighteen Corinthian columns (bank closure salvage) was rejected by planners troubled by its ‘modern garden centre’ aesthetic. The garden has been the object of particular focus over the past century with many designers taking a hand. ‘If it has a fault, like the houses of the village it has had almost too much money spent upon it.’¹⁰

see: Google Maps

The lawn and sunken features to the south (above) were another Edwardian addition, the removal of trees permitting a limitless vista beyond the ‘vast extent of clipped hedges (r) taking fourteen days in September to trim’. The crisp geometry here stands in contrast to the ‘serpentine pools linked by foaming cascades‘ weaving amongst mature trees bounding lawn to the west of the house.¹¹

see source

When Robert Holland-Martin died suddenly in 1944 ‘the City lost one of its most genial, active and useful figures’ and Overbury Court one of its most enthusiastic hosts.¹² A boundless fascination with bygone artefacts, which in his time filled every available corner of house, created a problematic legacy, however. ‘Rather than ‘spend the rest of my life wood-worming [it],’ the contents of Holland-Martin’s museum – ‘one of the most spectacular collections of useless objects in Britain’ – would be dispersed by Sotheby’s on behalf of Holland-Martin’s  granddaughter in 1996.¹³

There had been losses, too, during the time of his heir, son Edward (‘Ruby’), albeit often involuntary. One night in 1955 two men were caught red-handed attempting to break into the strongroom at Overbury using an oxy acetylene torch. The same space had been invaded just a year earlier with the loss of heraldic porcelain and silverware while another burglary in 1969 relieved the family of thousands of pounds worth of similar items.

see: Goldeneye Guides

Losses by design included the Skippe collection of important Old Master drawings which were sold in 1958 and, a year later, another two-day sale of valuable furniture and effects ‘owing to the reduction of the size of the house’. The latter was overseen by architect Victor Heal who ‘demolished Norman Shaw’s NW wing, replacing it with a smaller NE version’ (r).⁴

A renowned amateur steeplechase jockey between the wars, Edward Holland-Martin suffered a crippling fall in 1952 but in partnership with brother Thurston the family’s equestrian reputation continued with the establishment of Overbury Stud. Having bred the likes of Derby-winning Grundy the stud is today home to champion National Hunt sire Kayf Tara.

see: Calix / YouTube

Though he had also served many years as a director of the Bank of England and treasurer of the National Trust, at his death in 1981 The Times observed that ‘Overbury Court was the real centre of his life, a model estate maintained to the highest possible standards’.¹⁴ Standards to which his only child, Penelope (r), has since continued to aspire, and who, aside from superfast broadband, has brought to Overbury one asset money cannot (any longer) buy.

“I have just been listening to the story of Richard working to get a baronetcy,” the perpetually aggrieved Victoria Woodhull Martin would write of her aloof brother-in-law in 1897. “He will get it. Money buys all.”¹ And in 1905, by whatever means, the then squire of Overbury did indeed gain this hereditary distinction – only for it to expire eleven years later when he died without children. But the death in 2017 of Major Sir Clive Bossom, 2nd Bt, would raise son Bruce (co-founder of ‘one of Europe’s most successful private equity real estate firms’) to the baronetcy, his wife of over thirty years henceforth to be formally addressed as Lady Penelope, with their son and heir the next in line…

[Overbury Enterprises]

1. MacPherson, M. The scarlet sisters: Sex, suffrage and scandal in the gilded age, 2015.
2. Sidwell, R. West Midlands gardens, 1981.
3. Reid, P. Burke’s and Savills guide to country houses, vol.II, 1980.
4. Brooks, A., Pevsner, N. Buldings of England: Worcestershire, 2007.
5. Martin, John B. The “Grasshopper” in Lombard Street, 1892.
6. Kidson, A. George Romney: A complete catalogue of his paintings, 2015.
7. Saint, A. Richard Norman Shaw, 2010.
8. Stinchcombe, O. American lady of the manor, 2000.
9. Adlard, E. (ed.) Robert Holland-Martin: a symposium, 1947.
10. Mowl, T. Historic gardens of Worcestershire, 2006.
11. Worcestershire Life, May 2011.
12. The Times, 28 January, 1944.
13. Daily Telegraph, 28 April, 1996.
14. The Times, 14 March, 1981.