One Sunday last month saw a larger-than-usual annual gathering at a lonely stone monument high on the Berkshire Downs some five miles south of Wantage. Another of the many sombre centenaries presently being observed, this ceremony marked (as the memorial records) ‘the dear memory of Philip Musgrave Neeld Wroughton of Woolley Park, major, Berkshire Yeomanry, killed in action at Gaza, Palestine, April 19th 1917, aged 29’. At the head of proceedings – as he has been for the past forty-five years – was Sir Philip Wroughton, 84, great-nephew of his namesake and present squire of the Woolley Park estate, a property which has passed only by descent across 450 years.
see: Google Maps
The loss of young Major Wroughton in the Middle Eastern theatre of the Great War had been keenly felt not least because the heir to Woolley Park had been a long time coming. In December 1875 Philip Wroughton (d.1910) and his wife Evelyn had welcomed Dorothy, their first-born, into the world. She would be followed in 1877 by Muriel, with their sister Florence coming along some twenty months later. Winifred arrived in 1880, eighteen months ahead of.. Violet. One can just imagine the collective composing of features in the household at news of the arrival of the couple’s sixth child in 1884, christened Mary.
see: National Trust
The ‘monotonous regularity of six daughters in succession was a rather strong order’, their father would jokingly recall at the coming-of-age of his first son (pictured, far right, at Eton with Denys Finch Hatton of Out of Africa fame) who had finally arrived in the summer of 1887.1 The irony of this sequence of events would surely not have been lost on the author of the following reminiscence of Victorian life and times hereabouts:
‘No one who lives at Woolley would choose to be a lady. God made the place for Wroughton men, who throw a long leg over a horse and gallop about the downs – fox or no fox – from dawn to dusk.’2
Protected as the North Wessex Downs AONB since 1972, this ‘surprisingly remote, expansive landscape in the heart of southern England’ is the site of ancient drives, formerly ovine, today distinctively equine: ‘The area is second only to Newmarket in its importance as a centre of activity for the horseracing industry.’
see: Pam Brophy / geograph
And amidst these gallop-strewn chalk downlands ‘Woolley Park stands high and isolated in unspoiled [150a] parkland’.3 Ninety minutes from central London, the Grade II* listed mansion ‘remains a wholly private house to which there is no public access’.
‘Beautifully undulating and finely timbered,’4 Woolley Park dominates the northern end of the parish of Chaddleworth, an area ‘which it seems clear was early enclosed, perhaps as early as the 16th century’.5 This act was possibly coincident with the arrival on the scene of one Thomas Tipping who acquired the manor of Woolley on August 20, 1566, the last occasion on which this property changed hands by sale.
Thomas’s namesake grandson had one daughter, Catherine, who in 1662 would disclaim her interest in Woolley in favour of her cousin, her uncle Bartholomew’s son John, during whose tenure a new house was erected. It was to be a generic later-C17 brick house of a form (H-plan, hipped roof with dormers) exemplified by such as Fawley Court, Buckinghamshire, which happens to lie six miles south of another house which would soon come to the family.
see: Country Life
John Tipping died c. 1700, the succession of his eldest child beginning a father-to-son sequence of four Bartholomew Tippings to the end of the 18th century. The second of these (d. 1737) married the granddaughter of Sir Henry Allnut of Ibstone House (r), a relationship which would in due course see Ibstone pass, with Woolley, to the niece of bachelor Bartholomew Tipping (d. Dec 1798).
The inheritance of Mary Musgrave would prove a turning point in the destiny of Woolley Park. Ten years earlier she had married her first cousin, the Rev. Philip Wroughton; very soon after her uncle’s death the couple commissioned a modish makeover of their new abode, engaging an architect whose pedigree then held more promise than his heretofore slender portfolio.
*
Published ‘in order to display the taste and science of the English nation in its style of Architecture at the close of the 18th century’, the first volume of George Richardson’s New Vitruvius Britannicus appeared in 1802 (eighty-seven years on from Colen Campbell’s landmark forerunner). Prominent among the collected designs were houses by the Wyatt brothers, Samuel and James. In Volume Two they would be joined by nephew Jeffry who, after a lengthy apprenticeship under both, had set up independently in Mayfair in 1799. Later famed for his remodelling of Windsor Castle for George IV (and knighted as Sir Jeffry Wyatville), among Wyatt’s clients that first year were the Wroughtons of Woolley Park.
see: New Vitruvius Britannicus
Wyatt’s plans for Woolley betrayed his Neo-classical tutelage and his scheme here remains ‘remarkably intact’.6 A full-height colonnaded bow now projected from the entrance front recess, shallow-domed with an iron balustrade garlanding the new raised storey (below). In-filling at the rear was altogether more modest, a single-storey colonnaded loggia stretched between the wings (its original iron balustrade later reworked in stone).
see: New Vitruvius Britannicus
‘The most impressive internal feature is Wyatville’s spectacular staircase hall [the original entrance hall], decorated with Neo-classical motifs and lit by a lantern rising out of a dome supported on segmental arches and pendetives.’3 The cantilevered stone stair divides at a half-landing where stands a longcase clock, ‘evidently part of the original design’.6 And telling the time was apparently not this instrument’s only function: ‘Woolley is light and cheerful…
… and smells of pot-pourri, the scented air sprinkled every fifteen minutes by chimes from an old clock on the stairs.’2
see: Minimoves
Philip Wroughton died in 1812 being succeeded by his eldest son Bartholomew who married Mary St. Quintin eight years on. (Woolley Park may have appeared comfortably familiar to his bride whose own family home, Scampston Hall in Yorkshire, had undergone a stylistically similar makeover at much the same time.) This couple having no children, upon Bartholomew’s death in 1858 Woolley now passed to his brother Philip, hitherto happily domiciled at Ibstone House.
Philip Wroughton, in later years ‘noted for having to wear an iron collar to keep his head on, after a fall out hunting when he broke his neck’, duly disposed of the Buckinghamshire estate and moved to the old family seat. ‘He and the six children rode in cavalcade to take possession of their new home. The mama followed by road, sobbing all the way, for she was leaving her own part of the country.’2 (The family of Blanche Norris had been seated at Hughenden Manor, east of Ibstone, prior to its sale to the family of rising political force Benjamin Disraeli, with whom Wroughton had related correspondence.)
Arriving with their sizeable brood the Wroughtons quickly felt the need for more room, hence Woolley gained large extensions north and south between 1858-1860. The periodic encouragement of a good covering of foliage is perhaps indicative of the indifferent character of these wings externally.
see: Historic England
Inside, ‘the large and lavish drawing room takes up the whole ground floor of the south extension, with panelling and mirrors in the French Rococco style’. Some original interior spaces were repurposed but ‘the dining room with a screen of Ionic columns remains much as Wyatville left it’.3
Having completed his enlargement of the house Philip Wroughton now turned his attention to nearby Brightwalton parish church, a small dilapidated Norman edifice which was pulled down and replaced at his own expense. (Brightwalton was one of several neighbouring manors – including Fawley, Whatcombe and Chaddleworth – which were acquired over a fifty-year period from 1787, the Woolley Park estate presently estimated to extend to some 3,300 acres.)
see: Basher Eyre
see: Oswald Bertram
The Wroughtons were responsible for other local ecclesiastical commissions: a replacement village church at Fawley (l) and a chunky chancel (r) for St. Andrew’s, Chaddleworth. Gothic-Revivalist G. E. Street, creator of the Royal Courts of Justice, was the favoured architect for this beneficent building spree.
see: Bing Maps
While his impact at Woolley would be significant Philip Wroughton’s tenure was the briefest of any, dying four days after his 57th birthday in 1862. His wife would remain forty years a widow, his eldest son, also Philip, as many years the squire until his own death in 1910. Though spared the wartime loss of his long-awaited son and heir, Philip Wroughton had already suffered the violent sudden death of the youngest of his eight children.
One spring day in 1903 the Town Clerk of Wantage was taking some friends for a 4mph spin in his early automobile when he was in collision with a ‘motor-bicycle’ at a hazardous local junction. Looking beneath his vehicle the driver was horrified to recognise the stricken teenage form of fellow auto-enthusiast Christopher Wroughton of Woolley Park. As a consequence, after his brother’s demise in 1917 the Woolley estate would be held by their sister Dorothy – eldest of the six long-lived ‘legendary Wroughton girls’7 – and her husband Herbert Lavallin Puxley until their son came of age in 1930.
see: Local Buzz
see: Vine&Craven
At that point Michael Lavallin Puxley assumed the surname and arms of Wroughton (carved in stone above the east facade) by Royal Licence. And it would seem – Sir Philip Wroughton having two daughters – that a similar device will be required if the name is to live on here. In 1984 the eldest (r) – these days very much hands on at Woolley – married Thomas Loyd, heir to (now owner of) the 6,000-acre Lockinge Estate immediately to the north. But, by whichever name, cometh the hour doubtless the next generation will be stepping ‘once more unto the breach‘ at Woolley Park…
see: Google Maps
Very interesting article and history.