Owlpen ManorGloucestershire

A short history and guideto a romantic Tudor manor house

in the Cotswolds

Owlpen Press2006

OW LPEN MANOR, Nr ULEY, GLOUCEST ERSHIRE GL11 5BZ

Ow lpe n Manor is one mile east of Uley, off the B4066, or approached from the B4058Nailsworth to Wotton-under-Edge road: OS ref. ST800984.The manor house, garden and grounds are open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays everyweek from 1st May to 30th September. Please check the up-to-date opening times (telephone:01453-860261, or website: www.owlpen.com).There is a licensed restaurant in the fifteenth-century Cyder House, also available forfunctions, parties, weddings and meetings.There are nine holiday cottages on the Estate, including three listed historic buildings.Sleeping 2 to 10, they are available for short stays throughout the year.

AcknowledgementsWhen we acquired the manor and estate in 1974, we little realized what a formidable task itwould be—managing, making, conserving, repairing, edifying—absorbing energies foreverafter. We would like to thank the countless people who have helped or encouraged, thosewith specialized knowledge and interests as well as those responsible, indefatigably andpatiently, for the daily round.

We thank especially HRH The Prince of Wales for gracious permission to quote from AVision of Britain ; long-suffering parents, children, and staff; David Mlinaric (interiors); JacobPot and Andrew Townsend (conservation architecture); Rory Young and Ursula Falconer(lime repairs); John Sales, Penelope Hobhouse and Simon Verity (gardens); Stephen Davisand Duff Hart-Davis (fire brigades); and Joan Gould and Martin Fairfax-Cholmeley (loans).

The history notes draw heavily, particularly in the section on the Daunt family, on theearlier researches of Hugh Pagan, published in the guidebook of 1966. I am grateful toJeremy Musson of Country Life and Philip Venning of the SPAB for help with references.

We remember fondly our predecessors: Norman Jewson, and Francis Pagan whose owncontribution to Owlpen was scarcely less heroic, and the patronage of so many ‘lovers ofOwlpen’ departed: Francis Comstock, David Gould, Nina Griggs, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe,Nancy Jewson, Raymond Lister, Jim Lees-Milne, Elsie Moore, Bob Parsons, David andRosemary Verey. Commination we reserve for the burglars who removed by stealth so muchof the family’s—and the house’s—history. Finally, we thank the many members of thepublic who have visited over the years, invariably showing appreciation and kindness, andoften bringing fresh insights to disparate details and history.

Nicholas and Karin ManderPhotographsRoy Botterell (p. 53), Ted Humble-Smith (p. 57), Mark Nicolson (pp. 16, 19), Express & Star (p. 62), GoodHousekeeping (p. 56).

Prints and drawings and watercoloursR. Alexander (p. 65), R.A. Bell (p. 52), F.M. Bennett, F.L. Griggs (pp. 49, 74), Gertrude Jekyll (p. 18), N.Jewson (pp. 38, 72), S.R. Jones (p. 78), Gail Langley (inside back cover), A. Powell (p. 66), W.G. Rich (p. 7), W.Rothenstein (p. 46), Jack Shepherd (p. 20), George Wade (p. 43), Joseph Webb (p. 50)

© ∏ Owlpen Press, sixth edition (revised and reset) 2006IBSN 0-9546056-1-6Photoset in Garamond with titles in Rosabel Antique by CNM

www.owlpen.com

CONTENTS

Plan of the House Inside front cover

Acknowledgements page 2

Owlpen Manor page 5

Tour of the House: The Outside page 9

Tour of the House: The Interior page 11

The Painted Cloths page 20

The Garden page 23

The Outbuildings page 26

The Church of the Holy Cross page 29

The Owlpen Estate page 32

The Gas Works page 34

History of Owlpen and its Owners page 36

The Mander Family as Collectors page 54

Mander family portraits page 58

The Arts and Crafts at Owlpen page 63

Select Bibliography page 76

Impressions of Owlpen page 77

Sketch map of the Estate Inside back cover

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¶ Owlpen Old Manor: South Front by Frank Moss Bennett, May 1922

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O W LP E N M A N O R

WLPEN MANOR stands in its own remote valley under the edge of theCotswolds, its domain of pasture and meadow land enclosed by anamphitheatre of steeply-rising hills crowned with beech woods. Here the

pearl-grey manor house with its enormous yews and attendant outbuildings form aremarkable group, nestling under the lee of the hillside. The Tudor manor house,built and rebuilt organically between about 1450 and 1720, its early formal gardenand cluster of traditional buildings, possess a charm, a presence and a perfection ofform and scale which have long been admired as one of the treasures of Cotswoldscenery.

¶ Owlpen Manor with Court House and Holy Cross Church from the south

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The Manor HouseHERE HAS almost certainly been a house on the site of the present manor since thetimes of the earliest settlement, attracted by the springs which rise beneath it.Pevsner suggests the site is ‘early medieval’.1 The fabric of the existing Cotswold

stone manor house is ‘sub-medieval’, having grown by accretions from east to west over aperiod of some three centuries, from the early fifteenth century to 1616, with minoralterations of the early eighteenth century. Since then, nothing has been done—or, moreremarkably, undone—except for the sensitive repairs of Norman Jewson in 1925–6.

Today the house is not a show place or museum, but the home of a large and activefamily, every inch of which is lived in and most of which is shown. As such, thearrangement of interiors changes from day to day, and things may not always be where theyare described in this Guide. It is hoped a little untidiness and household clutter may beindulged. As a Tudor house, there are steep steps, uneven and slippery floors, and decayingsurfaces: please take care.

The oldest part of the present fabric is the east service wing, set at the lower end of thehall. It has arch-braced (and previously wind-braced) cruck trusses to the south end of theroof which are identifiable as fifteenth century. It has no stone wall defining its northernlimits: the wall to the south of the present service entry is of medieval thickness, but wasalways an internal wall, within the core of the medieval house. This was likely to haveconsisted of a central hall, with a cross-wing at either end, a plan retained and developed inthe complicated sequence of later rebuildings.

The present hall/great chamber block in the centre is mid-sixteenth century. There isevidence that it replaces, or is a rebuilding of, an earlier hall, which would have been asingle-story structure open to the roof, with an open hearth. The hall has a screens passageentry at the lower end and a hearth set, rather unusually, in an axial stack at the upper end.

Then the most recent part of the manor is the west wing, an extension at the upper endof the hall, the only part of the house with some pretensions to polite “architecture”. Againthis is probably a remodelling of the earlier solar wing, with its storyed bay window,chimney stack with freestone diagonal-clustered chimneys, and two gables to the west front,dated 1616. Thomas Daunt’s Oak Parlour represents the lord’s parlour at the upper end ofthe hall, with the solar over at first floor level, confirming the tenacity and continuity ofmedieval arrangements in the Renaissance period at the manorial level. The earlyseventeenth-century manor is of two full stories, with attics over, the characteristic gables tothe attics giving them full story height (there is a hearth in the west attic). It is essentially aconventional, but squat, H-plan hall house, with cross-wings of unequal length at eitherend of the hall, a passage at first-floor level connecting them, and twin newel stairs.

1 He also suggests the medieval house was entered from the north (Gloucestershire I: The Cotswolds, 3rd ed., 1999). The church behindthe house is dedicated to the Holy Cross; one of a group of nine so dedicated in the Upper Thames basin between Malmesbury andCirencester, possibly indicating the origins of the Manor in an era of Celtic missionary activity during the decline of the Roman Empire.

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THE MANOR HOUSE

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¶ The west wing of 1616, watercolour byW.G. Rich, about 1890

These two western bays, containingthe Oak Parlour and Hall, seem to bepart of a unified extension to themedieval plan, with the hearths andstacks integral and a sixteenth-centurydoor and frame from the GreatChamber opening to the west,suggesting a previous structure. At anyrate, the early seventeenth-centuryadditions make for a more symmetricaland formal disposition of the rooms,with the twin staircases and moreordered fenestration, notably to thewest, revealing increasing classicalinfluence. The (earlier) rear elevationsare rendered, with random timberwindows in a medieval arrangement;while the front is ashlar faced, except forthe central section, with stone dressingsof the Cotswold vernacular: recessedhollow-moulded mullioned windows,hood-moulds, string courses, andparapet tablings, kneelers and finials.

The kitchen wing probably dates tothis early seventeenth-century period, orshortly after, when the kitchen at the

rear tended to replace the service room at the end of the hall. Archaeological evidencesuggests it incorporates elements of earlier detached outbuildings, set in a plannedrelationship to the main domestic well (north of the present kitchen). The penthouse (or‘pentice’) extension would have been added to the north of the hall (at the end of thescreens passage) to give access to the kitchen wing.

The final phase is one of early eighteenth-century improvements, with an emphasis onincreasing classicism and symmetry and the insertion of sash windows, hearths, panellingand partitions in a general remodelling, restricted to the two main floors of the (early) eastwing. All these works, by Thomas Daunt IV, are well documented from 1719 onwards.

The Arts and Crafts repairs by Norman Jewson of 1925–7 are understated,architecturally an epilogue or afterword. He used the term ‘repair’, never ‘restoration’, ofhis work. He conserved what was already there, with some small functional improvements(such as to the domestic offices and two staircases) and the installation of bathrooms andplumbing to make the house habitable for modern conditions. In 1963–5 the domestic

THE MANOR HOUSE

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offices were demolished and further minor improvements were made, but essentially themanor is a survival from the early seventeenth century which has been remarkably littlealtered.

The house as it stands is not unified in the details of its plan or structure, for it is thecreation of nearly three centuries of organic growth and adaptation to the needs andfashions of successive generations, illustrating the evolution of English domesticarchitecture and history, washed by the passing waves, in Ruskin’s phrase, of humanity, oferosion and replacement. David Verey commented that it is one of those houses which has“been altered so much at so many different periods that is difficult to say that this isElizabethan more than anything else”.

The front (south) elevation is asymmetrical; haphazard, yet “illogically satisfactory” in itsappeal (James Lees-Milne). The three gabled bays of the house contrast in architecturalproportion, detail and period, yet they balance and complement one another happily, withwhat Jewson called ‘good manners’, none asserting its distinctive features over theothers—showing the unity of the Cotswold vernacular building idiom throughout thecenturies of the sub-medieval period.

¶ Owlpen Old Manor: west front from the upper terrace by Frank Moss Bennett, May 1922

Tour of the house

T h e O u t s i d e

T h e s o u t h f r o n tHIS IS THE MAIN FRONT, facingthe valley. The door jambs to the frontdoor have Daunt graffiti of the 1640s.

Early eighteenth century steps lead down hereto the ice-cool well. The three irregular gablesto the south front are each nearly a centuryapart in date, only the stepped parapet copingsunifying them somewhat. The gables aresurmounted by two stone owl finials, a devicerecalling the rebus of the Owlpen arms. Leadrainwater chutes remain, with scalloped edges.

The oldest block to the east (circa 1450:right facing the manor house), is theprojecting end of the fifteenth-century cross-wing, altered in 1719 with the insertion of thesash windows with bolection-mouldedarchitraves. The freestone for these cost 5s.each and came from Hazelbury, Wiltshire, bywagon. Note the chunky timber sections tothe early glazing bars: the lead paint for thesewas 5 s. The attic window was blocked thenwhen the ceiling was raised to the first floorbedroom, to give it nobler proportions.

The wide central gable block (circa 1540)for the sixteenth-century Hall is roughcastrendered. The entrance door is at the lowerend of the Hall. Above the six-light recessedmullioned window are the irregular windowsof the first floor Hall Chamber (QueenMargaret’s Room). Above these again, set in acable-moulded panel, is the (later) deOlepenne/Daunt coat of arms. High up to theright (in the return of the east wing) is awindow blocked up when the present Hallblock was rebuilt to replace the earliermedieval single-story Hall. The diagonal-setchimneys are characteristic of the Cotswoldvernacular.

The west (left) wing bears below the attic apanelled datestone 1616 for Thomas Daunt II:

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TOUR OF THE HOUSE: The Outside

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This is the most recent part of the presentstructure, providing the lord’s parlour and bedchamber, with good attic bedrooms over, atthe upper end of the Hall. The storied andcanted bay window is a distinguished feature:the attic story diminishes to fit the gable andhas a little embattled parapet with curiously

irregular moulded merlons (one a tinyacroterion). This bay was completely detachedfrom the fabric in 1925.

Up the steps to the west is a rather severe,early seventeenth-century west façade of twogables, with stone dressings and continuoushood-moulds.

T h e e a s t f r o n tTHE HOUSE is approached through thekitchen court, the gate piers with ‘biretta’finials. To the left is the corbelled chimneystack of the Tudor service room. The littlewindow (south) at first floor level lights agarderobe (described by Christopher Husseyeuphemistically as an ‘oratory’). An inscript-ion on a panel here (high on the stack)commemorates Jewson’s repairs:

This House, the greater part of whichhad not been inhabited for many years& had fallen into decay, in 1925 became theproperty of Norman Jewson by whom it wasrepaired & again made habitable 1925–26.

This farmhouse-scale elevation is rendered:the window jamb surrounds have scalloped

parge-work decoration, said by NormanJewson to be in a style unique to the region:some original work survives to the north, buton this front it was reinstated in 1976. Thewindows here are timber, in a randommedieval arrangement, although only that overthe door is early. The entrance door leads tothe fifteenth-century service rooms at thelower end of the Hall. To the left (groundfloor) is an early eighteenth-century crosswindow. There is the gable of the shortkitchen cross-wing to the right.

The old domestic offices (which had beenmuch altered by Jewson), originally forming adetached range to the north of the courtyard,were demolished in 1964.

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T h e I n t e r i o rThe entrance hall

THE ORIGINAL NEWEL STAIRS were inthe north corner here, by an early oak chestwhich belonged to William Morris atKelmscott House. The watercolour of themanor house is by A.C. Fare (1938). A timberdoorframe (with bowtell moulding) leadsthrough thick medieval walls to the old pantryoff the lower end of the Hall.

The kitchen (not normally shown) is to the north,probably part of the early seventeenth-century improve-ments, incorporating the ‘pay room’ and detached out-buildings which completed the house in an L-shapedplan. Described on Jewson’s 1926 Sale Particulars as a“Servants’ Hall”, it contains a huge fireplace with breadovens, spit rack, spits and bressumer; also an early stonecooking stove or range in the far corner.

There is a print of the Beatitudes designed byF.L. Griggs, and the herald’s trumpet andbanner used by the Mander family as HighSheriffs. The Sidney Barnsley glazed oak book-press was commissioned by the typographer,St. John Hornby, in 1909.The Great Hall is entered through a pent-houselinking it to the service wing.

The door has an Arts and Crafts steel grille,chased with an open-work briar rose design,executed by Alfred Bucknell in 1926.

The Great Hall(mid-sixteenth century)

THIS IS THE HEART of the Tudor manorhouse, evidently a rebuilding on the site of theearlier medieval Hall, which would have beenopen to the roof. It is dated probably shortlyafter 1542, when Thomas Daunt I inherited;he married Alice Throckmorton of Tortworth,and died in 1573.

The main entry is at the lower end of theHall; the ‘summer’ beams of the compart-ment ceiling stop short at a huge transversebeam, marking the position of the old screenspassage. There is a contemporary six-lightwindow with cavetto mullions and a plainmoulded fireplace (with recessed spandrels).

There is Arts and Crafts modelled plaster-work set in the walls: the plaster owl overdoorat the upper end of the Hall was modelled byNorman Jewson. The animals over the northdoor (to the penthouse) and the thistles in theeast splay of the window are also by him. Theplaster foliage in the west (right) splay isdesigned and modelled by Ernest Gimson, for

TOUR OF THE HOUSE: The Interior

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whom Jewson worked as an ‘improver’ after1907. (Gimson regularly executed suchplasterwork with his own hands, modellingwith his fourth finger, according to Jewson.)

The classical timber arched doorcase (serviceend; east wall) is detailed in the estate accountsof Thomas Daunt IV. It was inserted inSeptember 1722, by Henry Fryer, probably ofBristol, and represents the last phase of newwork done on the house until the repairs ofthe twentieth century. It cost fifteen shillings;the accounts describing it as “a pair of Italiancarv’d pillars” (Italian was a contemporaryterm for the composite order). It was reducedin height when the concrete floor was laid byJewson in 1926, making it stocky inproportion. A spring rose under the floornearby.

On the north wall is a contemporaryheraldic wallpainting depicting the coat ofarms of Daunt (argent, a chevron sable betweenthree Cornish choughs’ heads erased proper)

quartering the canting arms of de Olepenne(the owls in the second and third quarters:sable, a chevron between three owls argent). Theformalized mantling in spirals is vivid.

It celebrates the marriage of Margery deOlepenne, the last of the line which had heldthe Manor from the time of the earliestrecords in the eleventh century, to JohnDaunt, a clothier from Wotton-under-Edge,about 1462.

CONTENTSThe furniture is mainly seventeenth- and earlyeighteenth-century oak, and includes the greatrefectory table with a single plank top under thewindow. On the window sill carvings are displayed:a head of the Bodhisattva in grey schist, sixthcentury, from Gandahara; “Touchstone”, a smallmonolith in granite with hand print incisions andwhorls by the contemporary sculptor AntonyGormley; and a medieval limestone ram’s head.

¶ (Left) The Tudor Great Hall from the LittleParlour

¶ (Right above) Georgian doorcase in theGreat Hall of 1722

¶ (Right below) Touchstone, by AntonyGormley

¶ (Far right) The Little Parlour

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At the upper end is a seventeenth-century buffet‘cup-board’, for the display of plate. The high-backed settle ( circa 1895) by the fireplace is bySidney Barnsley and comes from Ernest Gimson’sown cottage at Pinbury, bequeathed to Owlpen byNorman Jewson in 1975. The mahogany centredining-table is an unusual early Victorian patent byJupe, extending to seat sixteen whilst remaininground. The shield-back Hepplewhite dining chairshave wheat-sheaf splats. There are two Spanishchairs, one covered in Córdoba leather, and aSouth German carving of the Madonna and Childin oak. The folding screen is made up from thefolios of a Spanish manuscript antiphonal, earlyseventeenth century; like the William Morriswoven wool curtains in ‘Honeycomb’ (1876) onthe painted book-case, it comes from Kilsall Hall,in Shropshire.

PICTURESPictures include manyassociated with the houseand its history. OwlpenManor (1976) by BootsBantock is over thefireplace; above the buffetare two pictures from aseries about the housepainted by Frank MossBennett (1874–1953) in1922, before the housewas restored, which forman interesting historical

record. Here there is a first state impression of thecelebrated etching of Owlpen Manor (1930) and itsyew trees by F.L. Griggs with its dedication toNorman Jewson (there are many Griggs etchingsthroughout the house). On the north wall, belowthe Coat of Arms wall-painting, are two views ofthe Cyder Press in the barn by Jewson and by hisfriend Russell Alexander, and sketches of Owlpenby Maxwell Armfield and John G. Garratt.

Family Portraits (either side of the doorcase atthe lower end) are of Charles Mander (1780–1853:varnish manufacturer and philanthropist fromWolverhampton) and his wife, Jemima (born inBoston, Lincs., she died ministering to the poor ina typhus epidemic, aged 43). Charles Manderassisted in the repeal of the Blood Money Act, in1817 saving two men condemned to the gallowsallegedly for stealing 1s. 1d. and petitioning theHome Secretary, Sidmouth: The Prince Regent’sReprieve is shown. To the left is Charles BenjaminMander (1819–1878), son of Charles Mander,founder partner in Mander Brothers in 1845 andan amateur artist, some of whose sketches are to beseen about the house. To the right of the frontdoor is Sir Charles A. Mander (1884–1951), thesecond baronet, by Arthur Pan; he was muchinvolved in public affairs in Staffordshire.

Go through the Georgian doorcase to the LittleParlour at the lower end of the Hall.

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¶ TheLittle

Parlourpainted by

Frank Moss Bennett in 1922,

when the house haduninhabited for 80 years

The Little Parlour (1720)THOMAS DAUNT IV took over the Owlpenestate in 1719. His estate account book showsthat he inserted the door-case, sash windowsand panelling to form this elegant earlyGeorgian interior, created within the shell ofthe massive walls of the old service wing at thelower end of the Hall, shortly after. The buffetrecess to the right of the fireplace bears tracesof original gilding and marbling in the shellhead. The reference of Henry Fryer, thecarpenter, survives stating ‘he is a very goodWorkman and if you please to Imploy him hewill do it to yr content and as wel and asCheape as any man you can Imploy.’ He waspaid £7 for the ‘wainscott’ � aneling and workto the room. The sashes were 8s. each, butglazing at 24s. seems dear. The chimney-piececost 10s. The floor was raised by NormanJewson in 1926, altering the classicalproportions: the dado rail is now a few inchesabove the floor, and the doors cut off at thefrieze rail. The room was repainted in shadesof grey in 1976, a little lighter than it was inthe eighteenth century, and the curtains hung.(Thomas Daunt was buying muslin andfustian for his window curtains in 1721.) This

room represents the last phase of work on thehouse. There was a fire here in May 1981, anda burglary in 1992.Furniture includes an eighteenth-century walnut

secretaire and looking-glass in the style of MattiasLock, with masks of Diana. There is a William andMary arm chair in red cut velvet and an eighteenth-century Dutch marquetry chair.Pictures include a pastel portrait (c. 1770) by

John Russell (over the fireplace) and a portrait (farright) of Sophie Mander as Ophelia (1872) by theNorwegian romantic artist Nicolai Arbo. There is aseries of pictures of Owlpen: (either side of thewalnut secretaire) by Frank Moss Bennett; (northwall) by Norman Jewson, W.G. Rich, JulianBarrow, and (fireplace end) by Bennett showingthis Little Parlour when the house was uninhabitedin 1922.There is a photograph of Queen Mary, avid

collector and visitor of country houses, given whenshe visited Lady Mander at The Mount in 1939.She also visited Owlpen when she stayed atBadminton House during the War.

Now go back through the Great Hall to theupper (fireplace) end to continue to the OakParlour (note the carved, foliated oak spandrelsto the door head).

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¶ (Above) Oak Parlour looking west

¶ (Below) Two Spies returning from Canaan, byBetsey Mander, c. 1770

Oak Parlour (dated 1616)THE DATESTONE outside on this wing isinscribed 1616 T.D. for Thomas Daunt II.He came into possession of the manor in1608, only after having conducted 12 years oflaw suits as far as the Star Chamber forpossession of his inheritance against his niece,Frances, who had usurped him during hisabsence on his estates in Munster.

Frances was the wife of Sir John Bridgeman,who later became chief justice of Chester.After the favourable verdict, disclosing “plotsand practices”, the Bridgemans were ousted,and moved to Prinknash Park, now Abbey,near Gloucester.

ArchitectureThis is the original lord’s Parlour set at theupper end of the Hall, at the time when thedemand for privacy and family life had first ledto the planning of such ‘withdrawing’ parloursand ‘apart-ments’, at the manorial level. Thebay window has geometrical lead lattice lights.The panelling is in situ, in quartered oak, withnaïve attempts at graining, an early example ofsuch work, showing whorls and circles and‘rib-cage’ designs. It is seen to best effectaround the fireplace. This would have been setby the corner of the room as originallydivided, with a small ‘ studdy’ at the north end;it has Daunt graffiti on the stone surround,the dates mid-seventeenth century. Jewson’sfloor, in chestnut from the Uley saw mill, islaid with the wide butt ends reversed, taperingwith the bole of the tree, dove-tail fashion, inthe manner prescribed by Gimson: similarfloors may be seen upstairs.

FURNITUREFurniture is mainly early oak, seventeenth-centuryEnglish, with two late Georgian sofas (one workedby Mary, Lady Mander in the 1930s) and a piecrust supper table. The bookcase in the bay windowis by Peter van der Waals of Chalford (1924). Theleather screen was given by Princess Ratibor ofPrussia (now Poland).

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PICTURESAbove the Stuart chest of drawers is a tapestrypanel [see below] of The Spies Returning from theLand of Canaan worked by Elizabeth Mander(1752–1828), and three more pictures of Owlpenin the spring of 1922 by Frank Moss Bennett. Thepaintings include religious works (a 17th-centuryFlemish Crucifixion and an 18th-century ItalianChrist Child on the Cross); an armorial panel (1627)above the fireplace; and portrait (1896) of Sir C.T.Mander by John Collier. (Sadly, an early landscapeof Mount Edgcumbe by Samuel Scott and GeorgeLambert was stolen in 1992.)

PRINTSGriggs etchings are titled Anglia Perdita andMemory of Clavering (with inscriptions), and StBotolph’s, Boston and Ragdale Hall. There areengravings by William Blake from The Book of Joband David Jones from The Ancient Mariner series.A series of ten small engravings and lithographsabove the Stuart side table is by Edward Calvert(1799–1883), the follower of Blake, producedbetween 1827 and 1831: they represent the core ofCalvert’s work as a visionary and graphic artist.

¶ (Above) Oak Parlour¶ Top right, newel stairs to top attics with monk’s shoe¶ (Facing page, top right) Solar¶ Facing page, bottom right, Solar in derelict manor

in 1910¶ (Facing page, bottom left) beadwork (detail)

Go through to the far end of the room, behindthe leather screen, to continue the tour to the firstfloor.

U p s t a i r sA ‘good’ (D. Verey) newel stair vice with someoriginal timber baulk steps leads upstairs. Theupper flight leads to a haunted garret. There isa squint window to the Hall (supposedly forladies to view the goings-on afterwithdrawing). The reliquary chasse here nowhouses two modern puppets. The door frames(and beams) outside the Solar have distinctivepyramid and step chamfer stops.

The Solar (dated 1616)THE SOLAR is the principal first floorchamber of the early seventeenth-centurymanor, off the upper (west) end of the hall.The bay window has mullions well ‘out ofplumb’. There are good views over the formal

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parterre garden, with early Georgian gate piersand yew parlour, and the estate, with theStuart Court House and Uley Bury iron agehill-fort (between the yew trees) to the west,and the Grist Mill, dated 1728, to the east.The wide floor-boards—also tapering—are athin casing, cross-boarding over the olderfloor. There is a fragment of a stylized lilywall-painting (just above the skirting-board bythe dressing table). The French toile materialwall-covering was put up in 1976.

CONTENTSThe oak four-poster marriage bed of Margret Tanaand Lück Ings is Flemish (or Wesphalian), dated1701. The oak table from Norman Jewson is byBarnsley and Gimson (c. 1895), with characteristic‘hayrake’ stretchers and ‘wish-bone’ tension braces.The portrait is of Jemima Mander (1791–1834)‘with a bauble’. There are tapestry pictures of TheMount and other family houses, and Mary, LadyMander’s collection of beadwork in a Davollcabinet. Family costumes include a man’s cut-velvet embroidered costume (c. 1760) with tricornand ‘queue’ (tail) wig, Edwardian dressing-upclothes, official uniforms and footman’s livery.

There is an exhibition of manorial charters anddeeds dating from 1220, with some good medievalseal impressions. They include leases, grants andawards with indentures (where the counterparts arecut with an indented zig-zag line), and court rolls ofthe manorial Court Baron, or ‘halimote’, referringto feudal dues of heriot, suit of court and the rent ofa red rose on the feast of St John the Baptist, etc.(There is a comprehensive collection of estate andfamily records both here and deposited with theGloucester Records Office.)

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Queen Margaret’s Room (mid-sixteenth century)

THIS IS THE GREAT CHAMBER, or ‘HallChamber’ (above the Great Hall). It is knowntraditionally as “Queen Margaret’s Room”because it has been long associated with thevisit of Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife ofHenry VI, during the Wars of the Roses.

It is said to be haunted by her benign ghost,and numerous ‘sightings’ have been recorded.The room did not exist in its present form onMay 3 1471, when the virago Queen wasreputed to have visited on her way to defeat atthe battle of Tewkesbury. A letter is recordedfrom The Prince of Wales requesting theDaunt family to help the Lancastrian causeand muster men for the battle. (The fifteenth-century stump bed, in which she allegedlyslept, was here until 1927, when it wasacquired by Mr Baron Ash for PackwoodHouse, now owned by the National Trust,where it is shown in a pretended ‘QueenMargaret’s Room’.)

ArchitectureThe double door frame with depressed archhas a fine panelled door with its originalfurniture (and unusual escutcheon), perhaps

re-used from the old Great Hall service door-way. The cross-passage behind the room has ashouldered-arch doorway at the end. It is a‘gentry’ feature of status for this early period,when rooms normally led through from one tothe next; a century or so later such passageswould have been usual enough, and Owlpenhad been eclipsed by newer and betterneighbours. The fireplace (with more Dauntgraffiti) has a ‘floating’ frieze and entablature.

CONTENTSFurniture includes the four-poster bed and chevalmirror in Chippendale style, a French Marot-styletapestry chair, yew ‘cricket’ table (with three legs),Charles II walnut side-table with ‘reel’ turning,early oak furniture and a fine Sidney Barnsleywriting cabinet in walnut and ebony.

In the show case is a family doll which was givento Betsey Mander in 1764, complete with herbrocade gown with stomacher, under-garments,shoes, pocket, change of clothes, etc. Also shown isa pedlar’s basket (c. 1820), collection of Midlandspolished steel jewellery, Charles II horn book andGimson’s own working smock. A worn (so-called)monk’s shoe, child’s size, is one of a hoard foundbehind the painted cloths during restorations: suchshoes have been recorded in old houses as tokens ofgood luck in folklore.

¶ (Above and right) Queen Margaret’s Room with the painted cloths

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[ 20 ]

T h e P a i n t e d C l o t h sHE LIVELY PAINTED CLOTHS are saidto be unique as a complete decorative schemeof such work still in situ in England. They

are certainly the best example surviving of what wasonce a very common form of interior decoration.Frequently recorded in early wills, inventories andaccount books, where such cloths are valued atsixpence to a shilling a yard, they give a privilegedidea of the appearance of many Tudor and Stuartinteriors, before the introduction of wall-papers.Many must have been destroyed in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, when ‘improving’ andmodernizing old houses.

Now only fragments of such work survive in afew provincial museums and old houses. Someappear to be from the same workshop, the back-grounds painted to standard designs from patternbooks.*

Known as ‘painted’ or ‘stained’ cloths, or ‘water-work’ (the technique of each may originally havebeen slightly different, with painters and stainersmaintaining separate guilds until 1502), they were

* Notably those at the Anne of Cleves Museum at Lewes (Sussex), YardeFarm, Kingsbridge (Devon), The White House, Munslow (Shropshire),Gainsborough Old Hall Museum (Lincolnshire), Luton Museum, theShakespeare Birthplace Trust (Stratford-on-Avon) and The Victoria andAlbert Museum (from Bentley, Hampshire).

a cheaper substitute for tapestry, as here in theupstairs rooms of manor houses, or in the halls offarmhouses. They are of the kind recommended byFalstaff to Mistress Quickly, so she should pawnher ‘fly-bitten tapestry’:and for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the storyof the Prodigal, or the German hunting in water-work is worth a thousand of these fly-bitten tapestries(2 Henry IV, II. ii).

Shakespeare refers several times to such paintedcloths: Robert Arden, his grandfather, had eleven ofthem. Estienne Perlin, writing in 1558, remarksthat ‘the English use many hangings, painted cloths(toilles pinctes), which are well done … you canenter few houses but you find such cloths’. By JohnAubrey’s time, in the 1640s, they were already oldfashioned and provincial.

They are first recorded in England in the mid-fourteenth century, continuing to the lateseventeenth century, carefully distinguished fromtables, or easel paintings on panels. The paintedcloth was the forerunner of the painting on canvas,which was gradually to replace the painting onpanel. The technique was similar to that employedfor stage scenery, festival banners pageants, anddesigns for masques and formal mourningaccoutrements.

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These are painted in distemper, a temperatechnique where the earth pigments are bound withglue size, on 42-inch unbleached canvas-linenstrips. Duty marks stamped on the back date themto after 1712: ten years later they are recorded atOwlpen.

They were cleaned by Elsie Matley Moore (ofThe Greyfriars, Worcester, which she left to TheNational Trust) and removed here from the(higher) east bedroom in 1964, so losing theirbottom border. She had made a full-scale facsimileof them for the National Monuments Recordduring the War, writing an article for Country Lifein 1944.

Further copies have been made, using originaltechniques, for display in historic interiors recently.They include The Priest’s House Museum,Wimborne (Dorset), the Shakespeare BirthplaceTrust, and Blakesley Hall (West Midlands).

They illustrate naïve and graceful scenes from thelife of Joseph and his brothers:-

West wall (left of fireplace):Joseph in his ‘coat of many colours’ (or ‘longrobe with sleeves’) is admired by the senior Jacob(with beard and hat) in the Vale of Hebron.

East wall (opposite door):To the left, Joseph is lifted out of the pit by hisbrothers (dressed in smocks); to the right, theIshmaelites from Gilead, wearing fur-trimmeddoublets and hats (the anachronism signifyingtheir merchant status), with a ‘Cotswold’ camel‘laden with spicery’ by the window.

North wall (behind bed):Two of Joseph’s brothers sell him to theMidianite traders for 20 pieces of silver, amongsheep of their flock (and a sheep dog) in thepasture; note a dove high up to the left.

The background is a stylized arrangement ofconical hills, white farmsteads, flowers, foliage,cedars, palms and other trees representing the HolyLand.

¶ (Above left) painted cloths, east wall

¶ (Right) painted cloth details

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T h e G a r d e n(sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries)

HE GARDEN at Owlpen is anunusually complete survival of anearly formal garden on a manorial

scale. It has been described by Sir GeoffreyJellicoe as possibly the earliest domesticgarden in England to survive in somethingapproaching completeness. And, howeverthat may be, certainly many visitors findthe medieval atmosphere, and sense ofromance and mystery, are overwhelming,with yew rooms, hanging terraces linkedby gravel paths and uncomfortably steepsteps, and always the hill impendingsteeply at its back.

The garden has been visited, admired andwritten about by some of the last century’smost inspired gardeners, including GertrudeJekyll, Vita Sackville-West and Jellicoehimself. Gertrude Jekyll describes the lay-out,

giving details, with plans [see left], views andsections, in the book she co-authored withLawrence Weaver, Gardens for Small CountryHouses (1914).

Then Vita Sackville-West described thegarden between the Wars as ‘a dream’, one of‘the places one has seen and loved’, whose yewrooms were precursors to those in her greatgarden at Sissinghurst:

Owlpen, that tiny grey manor-house, coweringamongst its enormous yews, yews that makerooms in the garden with walls taller than anyrooms in the house; dark, secret rooms of yewhiding in the slope of the valley. (EnglishCountry Houses, 1941.)

Geoffrey Jellicoe was moved by the Englishnessof the Owlpen garden, with its medieval senseof mystery, intensified by the yews, anddelightful simplicity and scale of plan, carefullyrecording a number of drawings, plans and

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THE GARDEN

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bird’s-eye views [see p. 24] as a younglandscape architect in 1926.

The medieval garden is enclosed within thecoped stone walls, still suggesting the hortusconclusus of the semi-fortified manor of thefifteenth century emerging into an age ofincreasing peace and prosperity. As Jellicoenoted, the half-acre core of the garden iscertainly Tudor, with early Stuart additions.To the south and west it is laid out on theearliest principle, arepetition in plan of theforms of the façadesprojected either side ontothe ground, with the YewParlour set in the anglebetween them.

In the seventeenthcentury—and,par t i cu l a r l y , underThomas Daunt IV from1719 onwards—thegarden was reordered andclassicized: ‘terrasses’,‘platts’ and raised walkswere reformed, andparterres laid out withstrong axial symmetry.The main axis leads up from the flight of finesemi-circular steps, through the panelled stonegate piers to the centre gable of the southfront. The gates were flanked by the originalwooden palisade, costing £3 15s. 4d. in 1723,until the 1940s. Thomas Daunt’s plantingsfrom 1721 to 1730 are well documented for agarden of this size: he mentions pinks,Catherine peach, fool’s coat tulips, a dutchherb, box edging and a holly tree. Herecommends: “for ye pile, ye herb linaria[toadflax] prepared as an ointment”. Hebought a pair of “garden shiers” (and scythe)for 4s. 6d., also in 1723, no doubt to trim thematuring yews.

The Yew Parlour (at various times known asthe ‘Green Drawing-Room’, the ‘Ballroom’,‘Dancing Floor’ or ‘Wilderness’) was probablyplanted by him, the small yews as accents in a

formal parterre by the loggia of the CourtHouse, known then as the Summer House, aStuart gazebo, which also overlooks the lane.It already has its present form on the firstengravings of the early nineteenth century. It isan ‘unusual feature’, wrote Gertrude Jekyll,‘the result of many years of growth and patienttending’.

THE GARDEN

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¶ Bird’s-eye view of garden drawn by Jack Shepherd, 1927

Nineteenth CenturyThe Manor was abandoned shortly after 1815,until a new mansion was built on the hills,with picturesque Reptonian prospects, ever-greens, clumps andshelter belts, at theother end of the estate,a mile away. But thegardens were kept up,when labour wasplentiful, and we find the manor described as a“garden house”, with a caretaker/gardenerliving in part of the east wing, giving thetopiary yews their annual tonsure andmaintaining the walled kitchen gardens, withtheir superior soil and fertility, for the ‘BigHouse’.

Victorian photographs show the yews neatlytrimmed, the garden carefully tended as adestination for picnics and after-churchexcursions for house parties. Four yew pylonsin front came to dominate and conceal themanor house, which cowered, as VitaSackville-West described it, amongst them.When they were removed in the 1950s,

Christopher Hussey wrote a teasing verse tothe then owner, lamenting the passing of the‘introvert Owlpen of yore … though I likeyew, I really love you even more’.

The garden retained its old-world charma f t e r J e w s o n ’ srestoration, becomingwidely recognised. TheAmerican architecturalwriter, Harold Eber-lein, wrote in 1927:

The garden in which Owlpen Manor House isset, and with which it is so inseparablyassociated, is one of the finest and most satisfyingthings of its kind anywhere to be found …straight-forward and simple and completelyconvincing in its coherence of form and logicalarrangement.

TodayThe present ‘Old English’ garden has beenrecreated by the owners among open lawnsand a field since 1980, with box hedgesenclosing quarters of English par ter re s—having plots of grass—like those in the

“The garden is one of the finest and mostsatisfying things of its kind anywhere to befound.” HAROLD EBERLEIN

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Stoke Edith tapestries, or Kip engravings. Theplanting is traditional, with herbs andaromatics, old shrub roses and cottage gardenfavourites, and the box, holly, juniper,Portuguese laurels, phillyrea and yewreplanted, as well as formal features—a stilthedge and pleached allée—in lime andhornbeam, and sculpture by Simon Verity.

The design makes use of old plans andrecords, suggesting an early garden reorderedconservatively at the turn of the eighteenthcentury, just when the formal tradition wasabout to be swept away, in fashionablegardens, by the landscape garden. The millpond walk recalls the early Georgian Elysiumof rills and meandering paths. Shelter beltswere planted with 2000 native trees (anotherof Jewson’s hobby horses) for the Millennium.

Symbolism and DesignThe theme of the hanging gardens on seventerraces was said to represent the SevenGardens of Paradise. The twelve yews of theYew Parlour symbolised the Twelve Apostles,

like those at Packwood House: the four thatonce stood in front of the house were said torepresent the Evangelists. Nineteenth-centurycommentators extended such correspondencesin a way which today seems whimsical. . .

The architectural form , with the house andgarden closely interlinked—the terraces risingin tiers, like a medieval vision of Babylon,edged with box and accented with clippedyews—was also intended to be seen as set inthe landscape, from across the valley in frontof the house. From here, in its ‘narrow hand-carved valley’ (as the poem by UrsulaFanthorpe describes it), it has a sculpturalquality as a whole, which would have beenmore pronounced before the outsize YewParlour obscured the terraces behind.

The group is entirely enfolded by hills,writes Geoffrey Jellicoe,as though the design has grown from the hillside… similar to the idea of growth in Gothicarchitecture … for this early garden is betterrelated, in its romantic setting, than that of anyother period to the countryside in which it stands.

¶ The garden door painted by F.M. Bennett in May 1922

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HE MANOR HOUSE hasacquired its dependent outbuildingsover the centuries which form with

it an unusually complete and changelessmanorial ensemble. The manor nestles in aharmonious group, with the Court House(1620s), Grist Mill (medieval; rebuilt1728), Great Barn (mid-fifteenth century)and Church (of medieval origins, rebuilt1828/9 and 1874).The interiors of the Court House and GristMill are not normally open to the public.The Church is usually open with the manor:it is still in use and does not belong to theEstate.

The Court HouseTHIS DIGNIFIED Stuart garden building isearly seventeenth century, no doubtcompleting the same phase of building worksas the nearby west wing of the manor (begunby Thomas Daunt II in 1616). It wasconverted to provide a little holiday cottage in1978, ‘a miracle of contrivance’ (HilarySteuert). It adjoins the manor gardens,flanking the composition well known from somany illustrated books on the Cotswolds.

Set as a banqueting house, or gazebo, withviews over the lane and (originally) theparterre garden, it is called The Summerhousein Thomas Daunt IV’s records. It istraditionally known as the Court House,because here the successive lords of the manorof Owlpen are said to have held their CourtLeet, or halimote, trying their servants andtenants for petty offences (like neglectfulhedging and ditching, or cattle trespass), andalso administering the Custom of the manor,recording the deaths of copyhold tenants andcollecting their fees, rents and dues. Courtrolls survive among the muniments atOwlpen. (The Court may have been held inthe Hall of the manor house itself, hereformerly known as The Court.) Thomas DauntIV was still demanding heriot in May 1729,writing to one of his tenants ‘I desire you willdeliver to Michael Pasloe the best of yourbeasts & such as he shall choose.’

It is screened to the east by the mightyphalanx of the Yew Parlour. There is abaroque sundial on the south wall and ovalbull’s-eye windows in the gables. Inside, onthe ground floor is a little loggia, the openingdivided by a column ‘of Tuscan simplicity’ (C.Hussey). It frames here the view of the eastwing of the manor house and its yew trees seenin the F.L. Griggs etching. The necessary housewas also at this level, with a ‘double decker’seat. A spiral staircase, excessively narrow,leads to a sitting-room in the old Justice Roomon the first floor.

The Grist MillA mill is recorded at Owlpen in 1280. Thenwe hear, in an arbitration award that survivesin the manor, that in 1464, Jane de Olepenne,the last of the medieval de Olepennes, after aprotracted law-suit over her inheritance,agreed to pay 13s. 4d. towards the cost ofrebuilding it. But the present building islargely the result of a further restoration by

The Outbuildings

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THE OUTBUILDINGS

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Thomas Daunt IV, who records repairs begunon June 3 1728. He clearly intended thismanorial corn mill, with its elaborate lantern,‘frivolous’ (John Julius Norwich) cupola withflattened ogee lead roof and classicalproportions, to be something of an eye-catcherfeature at the end of his kitchen garden, ratherthan a purely run-of-the-mill agriculturalbuilding.

Thomas’s account books show that he wasanxious to make a profit on the enterprise,having taken account of the personal benefit ofthe miller for general duties: ‘I suppose ye

millers work for me besides his tending ye millwill pay for ye keeping ye horse … ye repair ofthe mill & for carriadge of grist to & fro’. Heprepares annual accounts, computing the cornsold in 1728, a bumper year, at £34 5s. 8d.,less the miller’s wages at £13 a year, leaving ahealthy profit: ‘I did not put the Corn groundfor my house in ye above acct w[hi]ch at 1bushel of wheat pr week at 4d per bushel is £017s. 4d.’ Thus his yield of corn in 1728 wasequivalent to some 80 imperial tons. In 1733 amillwright was paid 5s. 6d. for ‘a shaft for ye

Cog wheel’.Its intriguing mechanisms continued to

grind meal through famine (when it was doledto the poor) and plenty to 1914. Then itpumped water, from the abundant springs thatstill feed the pond behind and the Ewelmebrook that rises up the valley, to Owlpen

House, the Victorian mansion whose ruins—and outhouses—still stand on the dryplateau above the Owlpen valley.

The leadwork and timber in the cupola wererenewed in 1965, when over a hundredweightof honey was extracted. The mill building wascarefully restored as a holiday cottage in 1978.Inside, the machinery, mainly nineteenthcentury, for bolting, cleaning and winnowingthe corn was preserved, with the gantry andpulley for the sack-hoist on the top floor, andsome original gearing, traps (now glazed) andchutes. An array of pulley, cord and chainholes, strap slits and empty mortise holesconvey how much the machinery used in cornmilling was integral to the building itself. Onthe attic floor is a cat-walk giving access to thegrain bins. The cupola is partly functional,giving extra height for manoeuvring the sacks.

Outside is the tranquil mill pond , with itspan-trough, sluice and race, and a decayingwater wheel which it is hoped may be salvaged.The old wheel was still turning after the lastWar.

The Great BarnInside the barn are raised cruck trusses, like asturdy A-frame, whose characteristic kneedblades date it to the fifteenth century. They areyoked by arch-braced collars and key blocks,with slip tenons and cruck spur ties, similar inconstruction to some in the eastern wing ofthe manor, which probably date to the time ofthe last of the medieval de Olepennes.

The barn is a manorial barn, not properly a‘tithe barn’ in the sense that it was ever usedfor the collection and storage of ecclesiasticaltithes. It has six bays, and is described ineighteenth- and nineteenth-century documentsas the Cyder House, retaining the cider mill-stones in the body of the barn until restorationworks in the 1960s—these are now, alas,distributed as ornaments about the garden.

The massive wooden Cider Press stillwitnesses the centuries when orcharding wascommon in these sheltered valleys, and

THE OUTBUILDINGS

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throughout the Severn Vale. There are feworiginal timber presses surviving: this oneprobably dates to the early eighteenthcentury—there are records of cider being madehere in 1733—and must be one of the oldestin the area. There are two massive hursts ofwood, uprights still with bark (known as cheeksor sisters), and an oak block and screw. Theapples were pulped to pomace in a circularmill trough (called the chase) which stood inthe centre of the barn. The vertical crushingstone (the runner or bruising stone), mountedon an axle, was turned by a pony. Cheeses ofpulp were then wrapped in hair cloths to puton the bed of the press, several parcels, layeredin a pile, at one pressing, and the juicecollected in a trough for fermentation. (Notethere are still old ‘squash’ varieties of perrypears in the orchard outside.)

There are records that the barn was re-roofedin the late eighteenth century: in July 1795Thomas Daunt VI bought ‘2,000 tyles for ye

great barn & stable’. The west end was walledoff to form a coach house, with tallet hay loft(and groom’s quarters) over. Carriage licensessurvive entitling Thomas Daunt to keep two-(1762) and four-wheeled carriages (1778 and1781) ‘for privet use’. He bought a ‘bay Marefive years Old 14.3’ for 17 guineas in 1787and two horse blankets for the cold inDecember at £2. Other outbuildings weredemolished in the 1960s, when the barn wasagain re-roofed and repaired, with grant aid.

The barn would have been entered by thegabled wagon porch to the south (blocked upalso in the eighteenth century). Opposite wasanother pair of doors to create the cross-draught for threshing. The slit high up in thegable end outside gives access to a pigeon loft:inside are ranks of nesting boxes, approachedthrough a door from the gallery. It would havebeen a privilege of the lord of the manor tokeep pigeons; unpopular, as they would eat thecrops cultivated by his tenants. The ventilationslits were necessary in a garner used for thestorage of grain for the mill.

The barn was used well into the 1980s forthe storage of wool bales from the farm, forlambing, apple storage (in the flat) andinformal parties; and doves continued to breedand gather—much as it had been usedcenturies before. It was restored andlimewashed as a restaurant with cateringkitchens, this time with European Union grantaid, in 1993.

¶ Two views of Cyder House restaurant in thefifteenth-century barn, showing the cider press

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The Church of the Holy CrossHE CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROSS(or ‘St Cross’) stands just above themanor house, as if presiding over it.

Among a cluster of Cotswold stone build-ings which otherwise entirely antedates theIndustrial Revolution, the widely-cherish-ed Victorian church has mellowed as anunassuming adjunct. It is entered from themanor garden by the lych gate (of 1892)whose Saxon superscription, This is thefield and acre of our God, seems to echo achallenge to the landscape around.

Owlpen Church has medieval origins as therest of the group of buildings, for on this siteOlla would have set up a church-yard cross(one is recorded in the eighteenth century) inhis pen. Yet little enough remains above thefoundation courses of the old chapel as it wasbefore the eighteenth century. Contemporaryaccounts of the simple cottagy building, ‘oflittle architectural character’, which it hasusurped and all but obliterated, disparage itsmean and humble appearance. T.D.Fosbrooke wrote in 1807:a very rude church…consists of a chancel andNave, with a small low spire at the West end.

Such was the chapel-of-ease to the manorhouse and estate, adequate to serve the lordand his family, servants and tenants, togetherwith the two freeholders and ‘thirteen weaversof Owlpen’. The old chapel had been annexedto the parish of Bagpath, some three milesaway (now with a redundant church), wheremost of the Owlpen lands lay, so that theOwlpen benefice was a dependent chapelry ofthe Bagpath rectory.

It had been used by the de Olepennes andDaunts almost as their private possession, withtheir privilege to worship in the chancel, muchto the disgust of the rectors of Bagpath. In1626, the Bishop of Gloucester was invoked toreconcile a quarrel between the then rector andThomas Daunt of Owlpen and enjoined them‘to be and continue Lovers and kindeFriendes’. In 1650, the visiting Archdeacon,describing Parson Venn as “a painfulMinister”, recommended that Owlpen beunited with Uley. This happened only in1842, since when the united benefice hasalways been referred to locally as ‘Uley cumOwlpen’.

¶ (Below) chancel reredos by Powells, 1886–7

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In 1736, Thomas Daunt IV restoredOwlpen Chapel, including major works at thewest end, at a cost of £35 12s. 9d. His son,Kingscote, later officiated as curate of Owlpen(and Wickwar) from 1748 to 1753.Kingscote’s mother, born a Millington Syngeand related to half the Irish clergy, entreatedher kinsmen, the bishops of Kilaloe andElphin, to find him a better living in Ireland‘that his Subsistence might be morecompetent and his Situation more agreeable’.This was in vain for, although a ‘sober andwell inclin’d young Man’, he had persistent illhealth and an impediment in his speech, anddied young.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, at theheight of the prosperity of the Stroudwaterweaving industry, the old chapel, with its‘auditory’ or preaching-church plan, hadbecome ‘wonderfully small’, according toParson Cornwall, for a population of ‘nearly400’; it was ‘in a sad state of decay andneglect’, and its internal arrangements out ofsympathy with the changing ideals of theliturgy:the Songsters (as the singers called themselves) satwithin the Communion Rails, making use of thetable for their hats, instruments and books.

So it was ‘rebuilt and enlarged’ in 1828/9under the architect Samuel Manning. Thepresent wide, aisleless nave, with its covedplaster ceiling, is all that survives of this earlyVictorian reconstruction. The handsome fretceiling of moulded timber is panelled withreticulated ribs and foliated bosses of 1831.

Fundamentally the old chapel survived. Ithad a prominent double-decker pulpit andreading desk, west gallery, high box pews‘facing away from the east’, the squire’s pew‘like a little room’ to the south and the vestryprojecting from the east wall with acommandment board forming the door to thenave, so that the priest could only enter by‘breaking the whole of the Commandments’.

In 1874 the chapel was restored in the fullspirit of eclectic high-church Victorianism byJ.P. St Aubyn (1815–95). The aisleless nave

was refaced outside, repewed and given itspresent arrangement of windows, with thebest Early English and Decorated stylesauthentically juxtaposed. The buttressedapsidal chancel was added as the richest part ofthe scheme, with its open timber roof, andmoulded chancel arch (with rather weakresponds). After the full restoration had beencompleted at a cost of ‘about £1,000’, and thechapel had been elevated to a church throughthe munificence of Stoughton patronage (theypaid £600 of the cost), the building wasreconsecrated with due ceremony by the lordBishop of Gloucester and Bristol on February19 1875.

An inscription records that the chancel was‘beautified’ with mosaics in 1886–7. The neo-Byzantine work in mosaic and opus sectile wasdesigned by Charles Hardgrave and executedby Italian craftsmen working for James Powell& Sons of the Whitefriars Glass Works, withan alabaster reredos and aumbry. The ceilingis richly painted with star-patterns and sun-bursts on a blue ground and the sanctuaryfloor has good encaustic tiles by Godwin of

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROSS

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Lugwardine (for whom St Aubyn designed).The organ (1890) is by Jardine of Manchester.

The chancel stained glass windows aretypical of Lavers, Baraud & Westlake, and thenave windows are by Heaton, Butler & Bayne(1894–1909). Only the three west windowsare by Powells (1912), most notably thePresentation in the Baptistery.

They date to Wadling’s replacement in 1912of a tiny bell-cote by a tower at the west end,with diagonal buttresses and embattledparapet. The old bell was recast and rehung. Abaptistery below was created to accommodatethe Norman font, rescued from use as a cattle-trough—all that effectively survives from themedieval church—and installed on a newbase. The baptistery was enriched withmosaics and opus sectile by Powell at a cost of£400, with triumphal angels, standard rosetrees and lilies: even the stone splays of thewindows are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, andthe floor and dado set with mosaic tiles

suggesting Art Nouveau. The chancel roodscreen also dates to 1912. In 1897 the half-timbered south porch was added tocommemorate the Diamond Jubilee.

The plate includes a chalice and paten of theseventeenth century. The parish registersbegin in 1686. A note in one tersely records:Nov. 14th 1784 Richard Tansey of this parishwas excommunicated. John Gregory Curate.

The eight Daunt brasses, dating from 1542,had been removed by St Aubyn from the floorof the old chapel to their present position onthe north wall of the nave; together with thelater tablets, including a classical one by Kingof Bath to Thomas Daunt IV (died 1748).They commemorate the families which, bylineal descent, held the Manor and lordshipfor close on a thousand years until 1924,

Owlpen Church is a shrine to their dynasticpride. Richly textured, it is today, according toDavid Verey, ‘the most elaborate Victorian-Edwardian interior in the Cotswolds’.

¶ Chancel with mosaics by James Powell & Sons, designed by Charles Hardgrave, 1886–7

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The Owlpen EstateTHE MANOR STILL POSSESSES itsdemesne, or pen ; its own sheltered valleyhemmed about with beech hangers, insulatingit from the modern world and making it ‘aperfect example of a small Cotswold estate’(Ordnance Survey Guide). A l l t h etopographical writershave commented ont h e r e m a r k a b l ecombe, or bottom, asthe local word has it,set under the Edge in a mystery land of deeplywooded valleys between the ‘high, wild hills’of the Cotswold uplands and the gentler Valeof Berkeley. John Smyth writes (in 1639):Owlpen, the situation giving the denomination… quasi hole-pen, being in as deep a bottom orhole as is elsewhere to be seen. It may perhapslike some to derive the Etimology from Owlepen,quasi a pen or Cage for owles; sith noe forestmade up of Ivy bushes can exceed the fitness forthe breed and harbour of owles.Samuel Rudder of Uley (1779) describes thevalley as “a kind of gloomy retreat”:The church and houses lie dispersedly at the topof a deep and narrow combe, almost environedby steep hills, covered with hanging beech woods,and forming a kind of amphitheatre, except tothe west.T.D. Fosbrooke (1807) finds Owlpena singularly romantic and sequestered spot whichit owes to a half dilapidated Court Houseoverrun with ivy, a rude church, no buildings,but now and then a simple cottage of thatch, deepdells, amphitheatres of steep acclivities, clothedwith fine wood, and interjacent knolls of heath,producing a paucity of enclosure, the ruin of thepicturesque.

Traces of strip lynchets dating from medievaltimes surround the valley and the boundariesof the “open fields” can still be seen on theDown at the top of the valley. Livestockfarming and forestry enterprises are administ-ered from the manor, with award-winningbeef produced for sale. For a long time there

were local breeds of Gloucester cattle andCotswold and Hebridean sheep.

The estate lies on Jurassic limestone, and isrun largely for amenity and conservation,where organic farming methods are employed.The forestry consists of traditional stands of

Cotswold edge beechand ash, designated‘ancient semi-naturalwoodland’, fringing thesteep slopes of the

escarpment. Its boundaries are much the sametoday as on the earliest eighteenth-centuryrecords. There are prolific wildflowers,including rare orchids and pasque flowers, andglowworms and butterflies associated with theunimproved, species-rich meadowland.Wildlife abounds: badgers, roe deer and foxes;there are buzzards and sparrow hawks, herons,ravens, kingfishers and, of course, the fabledowls of Owlpen.

“Owlpen … the epitome of the Englishvillage.” HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES

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There is a number of period cottages on theestate, the old dependencies and farmhouses ofthe feudal manor, in addition to the listedbuildings around the manor house. Otherswere sold off in the1920s. ‘Owlpen is theepitome of the Englishvillage’, writes HRHThe Prince of Wales. Old weavers’, keepers’and gardeners’ cottages have been restoredsince 1974 and furnished with antiques andfour-poster beds as holiday cottages, run in thestyle of a country house hotel and let to aninternational clientele returning to Owlpenfrom Alaska to Tasmania. The cottages havebeen described (by The Sunday Times) asconstituting “a Gloucestershire Shangri-la”and (by The Guardian) as “some of the bestavailable in Britain today”.

There are about five miles of footpaths onthe estate, with beautiful and varied walksthrough the beech woods, thick with bluebellsand wild garlic in the spring, along themeadows of the Ewelme valley and theCotswold edge. They interconnect with asystem of public footpaths, including theCotswold Way long-distance path, extendingthrough infinite miles of spectacular country.

Visitors to the manor are welcome to enjoypopular walks through the woods behind themanor to Nympsfield and Uley Bury, across

the fields to Stouts Hill, or along the carriagedrive to Owlpen House.

Vestiges of Owlpen House still stand on thetop of the scarp, at the end of the estate, by the

Nympsfield carriagedrive which leads tothe Wotton-under-Edge to Nailsworth

road. The House was demolished in 1957, butthe trappings of a Victorian great houseremain: two lodges, the stable block, ruinedglass-houses and walled gardens, a gas workswith retort house, a lily pond, and cellars.Victorian plantings, shelter belts, shrubberiesand clumps, are now well past their maturity.The Ewelme brook rises at Twopence Springat the head of the valley, below a bronze ageround barrow.

Owlpen is now something of a ‘desertedvillage’, nettles marking the sites of many oldcottages and gardens, along Fiery Lane and inthe woods. The adult population of the CivilParish is about 35 on the electoral roll (1994),perhaps a tenth of its peak at the turn of thenineteenth century.

The Church of the Holy Cross (Church ofEngland) does not belong to the estate. It isstill in use, with services regularly on alternateSundays.

¶ (Left and below) Views of the Owlpen valley

“A singularly romantic and sequestered spot.”T.D. FOSBROOKE (1807)

[ 34 ]

¶ Garret in the west wingof the Old Manorby Frank Moss Bennett, 1922

The Gas Workshe practical techniques for using coal gasfor domestic lighting were pioneered byWilliam Murdoch (1754–1839), who

first employed gas for lighting his house inRedruth, Cornwall, in 1792. Murdoch was anemployee of the Birmingham partnership ofMatthew Boulton and James Watt, who hadsent the young Scottish engineer to developapplications for the new steam enginetechnology for pumping in the Cornish tin andcopper mines in 1779–98. By 1799 they weredemonstrating a gas lighting plant at theirSoho engineering works in Birmingham. In1805, George Lee was the first to order gasplant from Boulton and Watt for lighting hiscotton works in Manchester.1 The early gasindustry grew rapidly, often pioneered byindustrialists.2

1 Samuel Clegg, who had been a pupil at the Soho works,installed gas lighting at a cotton mill near Halifax also in1805 according to King’s Treatise on Gas Works, vol. 1,1874.2 John Mander, chemical manufacturer, is typical. Hewas the first to manufacture gas in Wolverhampton(before 1819), where he was to use it in lighting hisfactory and in the various chemical processes whichrequired gas as a heat source. The gas plant was still in usein the 1870s. Then with his nephew Benjamin Parton

The Boulton family was later connected bymarriage to the Stoughton family of Owlpen,through the Robb family of Great Tew,Oxfordshire. Thomas Anthony Stoughton I(1790–1862) came into the Owlpen estate onhis marriage to Mary Daunt, the last of herline, in 1815.

Their son Thomas Anthony Stoughton IItook over the estate in 1862, and it wasprobably he who shortly afterwards installedthe gas works for lighting the mansion houseand stable courtyard (where a rusty lanternremains in situ).3 The Owlpen stable block is asubstantial courtyard building built in twophases in the middle of the nineteenth century.It has a later clock turret and arched entrancelodge with good Gothic revival detailing.

Mander he was promoter of the Wolverhampton GasLight Company in June 1820, when city fathers wereclubbing together to supply gas to the growingmanufacturing towns created by the industrial revolution.3 The site of the works is not recorded on the Tithe Mapof 1839, but a building on the site (not the gas holder) ismarked on a survey of the Owlpen estate of 1868 (withrevisions to 1871).

T

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OwlpenThe Owlpen gas works now lies in ruins andlost in woodland near the eastern boundary ofthe estate. It was built by George Bower, ofThe Vulcan Works in St Neot’s(Bedfordshire). It is listed in July 1874 on aadvertisement of country house gas worksconstructed by his firm, with others for B.S.Holford, MP, at Westonbirt, Tetbury, andMajor-Gen. Lord Bridport at Cricket St.Thomas, Chard. Other installations by Bowernot mentioned include those for the Duke ofBuckingham at Stowe, Bucks., the Duke ofMarlborough at Blenheim Palace, and theDowager Duchess of Northumberland atStanwick Hall, Darlington.

Bower was declared bankrupt in 1880, whenhe was owed some £70,000 by a gas workscompany in Brazil. He is known to have beeninvolved in Brazil with installations at RioGrande do Sol, Olinda, Porto Alegre andPelotas. Another overseas scheme was atChristchurch, New Zealand, where the gascompany was founded in 1864, with theretorts, purifiers, gas meter and gasholder bellsupplied by Bower.

The Owlpen gas works comprises a gas houseremaining in fair repair with a chimney stackand the vaulting of twin furnaces over ash pits.The construction is brick and fire-brick, withsome stone quoin work. Only the foundationsand footings of the coal stores, yard and gasholder remain, and most of the retort househas suffered from the damage caused by yearsof vegetation growth, three walls and whateverroof structure there may have been havingfallen in. There is likely to have been a limerepository, a spent lime shed and a tar pit ortank. Water was supplied from a pump in theGrist Mill by the Old Manor.

The left hand (east) furnace is large, linedwith fire clay bricks: there is no sign of tardeposit, here or round the chimney, or ofcorbelling to support an iron retort, indicatingthat it could have been used for manufacturinggas by distillation from wood fuel suppliedfrom the estate woodland, as Bower had done

in gas works installed by him on the EuropeanContinent. The centre for wood distillation inEngland from 1804 was Worksop. A secondfactory operated at Warminster for some yearsand a third factory at Speech House Road inthe Forest of Dean still worked in 1961,yielding pyroligneous acid and charcoal as wellas wood gas.

Extant gas works in a country house/privateestate context are rare.4 Gas as a means ofdomestic lighting had a relatively brief periodof use. It developed mainly after the inventionof regenerative burners (1853–4), which madegas manufacture on a domestic scale moreefficient and economical. Gas was beingreplaced by electricity by the 1880s: Cragside(National Trust) of 1880 is often cited as oneof the first examples. Certainly by the mid-1890s gas was antiquated in fashionablehouses, although suppliers of country house gasworks were still advertising in 1911.5

4 The gas works at Culzean Castle, Ayrshire, dating fromthe 1850s, is thought to be one of the only othersurvivors. Very little of the works itself remained,principally the gas master’s cottage, and it was badlydamaged when converted for acetylene gas circa 1900.The chimney and furnace are a reconstruction to originalplans from ground level, using new hand-made bricks, tocreate an interpretation centre for the work of Murdoch,who was born near Lugar locally, for the bi-centenary ofhis development of gas lighting in 1992.

A municipal gas works is exhibited at Biggar,Lanarkshire, managed by the Royal Museums ofScotland, and there is display material at Leeds City ArtMuseum in connection with an exhibition held atLotherton Hall, Aberford, West Yorkshire. SaltramHouse, Devon (NT), retains good gas light fittings. Otherrural estate-scale gas works are recorded at: Combe HayManor, south of Bath (in use until 1939), Quarry BankCotton Mill at Styal, Cheshire (NT), Shobdon Court,Herefordshire, and Hinton St George and Tyntesfield(NT), both in Somerset.

The Manders were installing electricity in theirStaffordshire houses in the early 1890s, where bothWightwick Manor and The Mount had electrical plantsand dynamos.5 See M. Humphrys, Construction and Management ofSmall Gasworks, 1911.

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Hi s t o r y o f O w l p e n a n d i t s o w n e r s

WLPEN (pronounced locally“Ole-pen”) derives its name, it isthought, from the Saxon thane,

Olla, who first set up his pen, or enclosure,by the springs that rise under thefoundations, in the ninth century. Theorigins of the manor may be earlier, datingto Romano-British settlement of the area.The site of the present manor house isdescribed as ‘early medieval’ (Pevsner).

The immediate area has many signs of earliersettlement. There are sites of round barrowsand standing stones within a short walk of themanor. Uley Bury—the long, bare, flat-topped hill which shields the manor from thewest wind—is an impressive multi-vallate,scarp-edge hill-fort of the middle iron age (say,300 BC), commanding spectacular views overthe Severn Vale. Nearby is Hetty Pegler’sTump, renamed ‘Uley Long Barrow’, one ofthe best preserved middle neolithic chamberedlong barrows of the Cotswold-Severn group(2,900–2,400 BC).

Between the manor andUley Bury is the West HillRomano-Celtic templecomplex. Careful excavationin 1976–9 revealed areligious site of neolithicorigins which maintained

continuing importance through fourmillennia. They yielded the head of its titulargod of Mercury; a masterpiece, ‘one of themost important Roman sculptures to be foundin Britain’ (The Times), which is now in theBritish Museum. Other finds, include a hoardof over 200 sheet-lead curses.

The Owlpen estate has a recorded history ofclose on a thousand years, well documentedfor a manor of its size, whose owners weresquires residing, far from typically in theearlier medieval period, on their own manor.

Despite many reversals, they were neveralienated from it; nor was it bought or soldbefore the twentieth century. Its historyconnects it with a number of old families,houses and estates throughout south westEngland, as well as Ireland, and with talentedartists and writers and famous visitors.

¶ de Olepenne marriage settlement, c. 1220

de Olepenne family (1100–1462)By 1174, the de Olepenne family had alreadybeen settled here for two generations, nodoubt calling themselves after the place. Wehave records of at least ten successivegenerations holding uninterrupted possessionas lords of the manor of Owlpen. Theybecame local landowners of some importance,acquiring land holdings in neighbouringparishes from Tetbury to Cam and Coaley,and occur as suitors and litigants, asbenefactors to the local abbeys and hospitals.They were faithful henchmen to their feudaloverlords, the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle,whose charters they regularly attested, whosewills they administered as executors (as in

O

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1281) and with whom they served on crusadesand military campaigns.

The de Olepennes were pious ecclesiasticalbenefactors. In the twelfth century, the fatherof Bartholomew “de Holepenna” died clothedin the habit of the Benedictine monks of StPeter’s Abbey, Gloucester. Bartholomewconfirmed his father’s gift of a hide of land tothe Abbey in 1174 (with his son Simon’sconsent) and was a benefactor also to StBartholomew’s Hospital, Gloucester; in 1227,a James de Olepenne was attorney to theabbots of Cirencester; and John de Olepennewas a benefactor to St Bartholomew’s Hospitalagain in 1325.

In 1329 John de Olepenne III was made award, in his nonage, of the local landowner,Walter de Cheltenham. In 1350 he wasthreatened with being ‘distrayned in his lands’,but let off ‘because he continued many yearsbeyond the seas with Maurice de Berkeley’,probably accompanying his overlord inAquitaine and on the French Crécy-Calaiscampaigns of 1346–7. (Maurice was takenprisoner after Poitiers, until his ransom waspaid in 1361.) He lengthened the vowel of hisname to ‘Owlepenne’, from which thecorruption Owlpen (or even ‘Wolpen’)developed in the next century.

Robert Owlepenne II sold Melksham Court,Stinchcombe, which he had inherited throughmarriage with the de Mylkesham family, to SirWalter de la Pole in 1413. His successor, John(owner 1441–62), was a man of substance,farming the alnage (as an inspector of cloth)for Gloucestershire with Thomas Tanner ofDursley, and defeating the powerful Berkeleysin a suit over property in Cam.

His granddaughter Margery was his heiressand the last of the medieval de Olepennes.Her guardian, Richard Basset of Uley, and hergrandmother, Jane, squabbled over theinheritance and had recourse to litigation, Janepleading her case before the Lord Chancellor,George Neville. A resulting award of 1464survives in the manor, including a provisionfor Richard to repair the mill, while Jane was

to pay 13s. 4d. towards the cost. Above thefoundation courses, only the great barn andfour bays of the present east wing of themanor—all with similar cruck trusses—datefrom the time of these last of de Olepennes.

Daunt family (1462–1815)Margery de Olepenne married John Daunt, amember of a merchant family established inWotton-under-Edge since the time of EdwardII. Earlier in the century, Nicholas Daunt hadmarried Alice, daughter of Sir William deTracy, ancestor of the Sudeleys of Stanway andToddington. John’s father, also John, bornabout 1420, was a Lancastrian, a lawyer atBarnard’s Inn in Holborn in 1446, and electedto the Parliament of 1449–50 for the boroughof Wotton Bassett, by which time he hadperhaps entered the service of the Crown. Hemarried Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Stawell,ancestor of the lords Stawell of Somerton. In1451 he was appointed Keeper of the RoyalPark at Mere in Wiltshire, and the followingyear he was promoted from King’s Sergeantand Groom to the position of Yeoman of theCrown, with a salary of sixpence a day fromthe issues of Wiltshire. In 1462, in the worstdays after Towton, a commission was issuedfor the arrest of Daunt and others, includingthe vicar of Mere, ‘evil-disposed persons, andadherents to Henry VI’.

In April 1471, the outside world brushesagainst Owlpen. Edward, Prince of Wales, the

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Lancastrian heir, wrote from Weymouth toJohn Daunt the elder, asking him to raise‘fellowship’ and money from Mere and Purtonfor the Lancastrian campaign:

att our landinge wee have knowledge thatEdward Earle of March the Kings greate rebellour Enemy approcheth him in Armes towards theKinges highnes whiche Edward wee purpose withGods grace to encounter in all haste possible.

The letter, long preserved at the manor, is nowlost, but is quoted by the county historianSamuel Rudder (born in Uley) in 1779.

A tradition in the Daunt and Stoughtonfamilies records that Margaret of Anjou, theardent queen of Henry VI, spent the night ofMay 2 1471, en route to the fateful battle ofTewkesbury, at Owlpen.

¶ Thomas Daunt II’s west wing, 1616;watercolour by Norman Jewson, 1926

John the younger was doubtless as loyal aLancastrian as his father, and would have beenproud to welcome the royal guest to his manorat Owlpen. Queen Margaret is said to walk inthe Great Chamber, a ‘grey lady’ wearing afur-trimmed gown and wimple—a quiet andapparently benevolent ghost (and one of atleast three ghosts traditionally recorded in thehouse).

John and Margery Daunt were richer thanthe de Olepennes had ever been. In the earlysixteenth century their son, Christopher(owner 1522–42) or, more likely, theirgrandson Thomas I (owner 1542–73) was ableto build, or rebuild, the centre blockcontaining the present Hall and GreatChamber. The alliance of the two families ismarked by the mid-sixteenth-century heraldicwallpainting showing the arms of Dauntquartering de Olepenne on the north wall ofthe Hall and, in stone outside, over the hood-mould of the first floor window. Christophermarried a Basset of Uley; Thomas, morepolitic, married Alice, daughter of WilliamThrockmorton of Tortworth.

The marriage was advantageous: the fortunesof the Throckmortons, also Lancastrians and acadet branch of those seated at CoughtonCourt, Warwickshire (National Trust), wererising, with a succession of knighthoods, thepatronage at Court of the earl of Leicester anda baronetcy by 1611. Thomas I entailed theOwlpen and Gloucestershire estates (some 945acres in total at this time) on his male heirs,which was the unknowing cause of a disastrousfamily feud in the next generation.

Thomas I and Alice left five sons. Thomas IIand William, their second and third sons,settled in Ireland as planters, or ‘undertakers’,in Munster. Thomas II acquired large estateswest of Cork, at Tracton Abbey and, in 1595,Gortigrenane, which comprised (by 1638)‘one castle, 100 messuages, 200 cottages, 200tofts, 200 gardens, 4 mills and 1,000 acres ofland’. He was uprooted by the Munsterrebellion in 1598 and met with constant

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difficulties, but was ultimately to consolidatehis Irish estates with success.

The fourth son, Giles, of Newark Park,Ozleworth (now also owned by the NationalTrust), was a keen hunter (and notoriouspoacher), described by the historian of theBerkeleys, John Smyth, in 1608 as one of ‘ninemen of metal, and good wood-men (I meanold notorious deer-stalkers) armed with netsand dogs’ who raided the Berkeley woods andwhose detection became a cause célèbre. Hetold Smyth of himself and George Huntley ofBoxwell, that ‘their slaughter of foxes inOzleworth have byn 231 in one yeare’. Hedied in Ireland in 1622, having taken over hispack of hounds.

Meanwhile Henry, the eldest son of ThomasI and Alice, had inherited the Owlpen estate.Alice died in 1599, her epitaph stating: ‘vigintisex annos vera vidua vixit’ [26 years she lived atrue widow]. Henry died in 1591, leaving ason Giles to succeed him, and a daughterFrances. But Giles died in 1596 without issue,and Frances was now married to JohnBridgeman, an ambitious young barrister oflittle personal charm. Bridgeman claimedpossession of the estate in right of his wifeagainst her uncle Thomas II, and occupied thehouse as next-of-kin. Bridgeman’s claim wassupported by the influential Sir ThomasThrockmorton, executor to Henry, described(by Smyth) as a ‘powerfull and plottinge gent… who both made the maryage, and abettedthe title’.

The ousted Thomas II returned fromIreland to defend his inheritance, pursuing hisclaim on the grounds that the estate wasentailed to heirs male, to the Star Chamber. Ittook him twelve years to secure a favourableverdict before the Attorney General, SirEdward Coke, making discovery of ‘plots andpractices’. Bridgeman secured the manor ofNympsfield in 1613 and in 1628 purchasedPrinknash Park, near Gloucester, when he wasappointed Recorder of that city. There was amagnificent fireplace at Prinknash until the1920s bearing the Daunt/de Olepenne coat of

arms, now in a museum in America.Bridgeman was later knighted and becameChief Justice of Chester. He is nowimmortalised in Fanelli’s marble effigy besideAlice in Ludlow Church, Shropshire. He was aharsh judge and Ralph Gibbon, a localSalopian, composed a scornful pasquinade:Here lies Sir John Bridgeman clad in his clay;God said to the devil, Sirrah, take him away.

Thomas II had to pay compensation, but itwas obviously not crippling: perhaps revenueswere beginning to come in from Ireland. Atany rate, in 1616 he rebuilt Owlpen’s oldsolar/parlour wing to the west, adding a newstoried bay window in ashlar with a datestoneand his initials. There was some re-arrangement of the internal accommodation,hearths and chimneys, details and dressings tothe gables—with their distinctive owlfinials—and fenestration; he probablyincorporated the old outhouses in a newkitchen block. His work represents the lastmajor change to the fabric of the manor, sothat its appearance today remains much as heleft it, a house which has grown by slowaccretions from 1450 to 1616 and whereThomas II’s early seventeenth-century workstill predominates. The Court House no doubtalso represents the same phase of works.

When Thomas II died, on August 20 1621,he could look back on much solidachievement. The Daunts were established aslandowners in two countries and, though theearly death of his Oxford-educated eldest son,Achilles (the first of the family to use thatname), was a sorrow, he had other male heirs.His next son Thomas III (owner 1621–69)inherited both Owlpen and Gortigrenane. Theother Irish estate, Tracton Abbey, went to theline of Thomas I’s third son, William Daunt,and from him a clan of Daunts, carrying thename Achilles or William, colonized the broadsouthern strip of Cork from Youghal to theKerry border, which became known as‘Daunt’s country’.

The Daunt principal landed interests, likemost of their marriages, were now based firmly

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in Ireland; there, according to John Smyth in1639, they chiefly resided, so that Owlpenbecame a mainland base, a secondary estatewhich an elder son would administer, whilethe paterfamilias reigned in Ireland. Therethey joined the ranks of the Anglo-Irish‘Ascendancy’ and the family by now had somepretensions to gentility: Thomas III was finedin 1630 for not taking up the order ofknighthood. Surviving lists of books, in aCatalogus librorum of 1639, in Greek andHebrew as well as Latin, French and Italian,indicate men of learning.

The seventeenth-century Daunts begin toemerge as personalities, coming alive through aCivil War correspondence for the years 1646and 1650 preserved between Thomas III inIreland (where he was High Sheriff of countyCork in 1645) and his eldest son, Thomas(1619–63) at Owlpen. Thomas is revealed asan ardent Parliamentarian, jubilant at Fairfax’ssuccesses against the “Cabbs”, and confidentthat “if God send peace, all will doe well, forthe Impartiall Judgement of parliament willconfirme right to all”. He writes blow by blow‘diurnals’ on the progress of the Parliamentarycause. Interspersed with these are crypticrequests for his father to act in important andconfidential business, requiring his presenceand money. He asks for ‘a barrel of pickledSamphier and some scallop shells’, complainsthat the cattle are poor, that he has notreceived his share of a legacy and that only halfhis library has been sent over from Ireland. Heis seen lobbying the GloucestershireCommittee, which included, in January 1646,‘Mr Carew Rawleigh, sonne to Sir WalterRawleigh … Sir Gyles Overbury … and MrHerbert, who wrote the booke of travaile, agentleman which understands Arabicke andPersian’ (and Charles I’s future biographer), allof whom were expected to be friendly to theDaunts. Thomas married the daughter of SirGabriel Lowe of Newark Park, but he diedbefore his father, and never inherited.

Achilles Daunt (1622–1706), Thomas’syounger brother, succeeded to Owlpen and

Gortigrenane in 1669. He was unmarried andtook little part in affairs. Their politics did notprosper the Daunts at the Restoration. Achilleswas attainted as a rebel and a traitor by JamesII’s Irish Parliament in 1689. He was inEngland at the time and so avoided trouble,although the old castle at Gortigrenane seemsto have been burnt down at this time. TheProtestant streak was strong, but he was tooold to profit from supporting William III.Besides, the Owlpen property was no longersuch as to make its owner important: the estatehad been eclipsed in size by its newerneighbours, the house was inconvenient.

After Achilles died in 1706, the house washardly occupied for fourteen years. Then, in1719, Thomas IV (1676–1748/9), Achilles’nephew and heir, came over from Ireland afterhis aunt’s death to collect the Lady Day rents,and with intent to build. We see his work asthe final building phase, classicizing andsymmetricizing details of the old house,making small improvements to its comforts,installing five sash windows and the bolection-moulded fireplaces, panelling the Georgianrooms, raising ceilings, reordering the gardenswith their yews and terraces, the gate piers anda palisade, rebuilding the grist mill, the greatbarn and, finally, the church. All theexpenditure is carefully recorded in hissurviving account books. Externally his fundsallowed him only to reface the façade of theeast wing; internally it was a remodellingrather than a reconstruction. His recordedworks about the estate continue actively to1739; he died ten years later, having raisedwhat was to prove the last family (of tenchildren) in the house until recent times. Hismonument in Owlpen Church describes himas ‘truly Pious, strictly Just, zealously loyal tohis King and Country’.

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Two bachelors, Thomas V (1701–77) andhis younger brother Kingscote Daunt(1723–58), set up house together after theirfather’s death. Kingscote was a contemporaryat Pembroke College, Oxford, of the lawyerSir William Blackstone and of others whom heproudly lists among those with whom he wason terms of friendship. He officiated as curateof Owlpen (and Wickwar), while his lettersshow him taking the Bath waters for his illhealth and searching for a better livingthrough connections at Oxford and in Ireland.

The estate then passed to Thomas VI(1755–1803) who had already inheritedGortigrenane from his father Achilles, ThomasV’s twin brother. The house had entered itslong period of neglect. He took little interestin Gloucestershire. A surviving notice showsthat these last Daunts were contemplatingselling the estate with 355 acres:the estate in hand for living & for farm rent …besides the Mannor House out houses & gardens,a grist mill, some cottages, about 200 akers ofwell grown wood, situated in a most healthiecountrey … any purchaser that will be informedin particulars, himself, his letter or messenger willbe kindlie received at Owlpen…by Tho. Daunt.

He kept a carriage and a chaise at Owlpen,which he used as a convenient base for visits toBath. His accounts from Bath tailors andhairdressers show him as fastidious, buying a‘fashionable stripe scarlet Waistcoat’, bows forhis boots and shoes, ‘pound powder and rolers’for his hair, materials in cassimere, marseil[les],shalloon and flannel; and a pair of sidelockpistols from John Richards in the Strand.

Thomas VI was believed locally to have beena magician. After his death, the sealed room inwhich his books and papers had been kept formany years, was said to be haunted. They werethought so dangerous that parson Cornwallwas sent for to destroy them and ‘as they wereburning, birds flew out of them’.

¶ Ruins of Gortigrenane, the Daunt house of 1817near Bandon, co. Cork, in 1998

He was to be the last of the Daunts for, onhis death in 1803, the male line again failed asit had done 300 years before. By 1807, T.D.Fosbrooke was describing the house as halfdilapidated and overrun with ivy.

Stoughton family (1815-1925)

Sleeping BeautyThomas’s daughter Mary inherited as a childof 13. In 1815, she married Thomas AnthonyStoughton I (1790–1862), a Kerry landownerwho acquired interests in Monmouthshire coalthrough his mother. She was born a Lewis ofSt Pierre and Penhow, Chepstow, and waswidow of John Hanbury, member ofParliament for Pontypool. Stoughton’s fatherhad managed their estates, but his Hanburystepsons described him as ‘an indigentIrishman’, suing him at chancery for profitingdishonestly from their mother’s dower andsalting away their inheritance.

The manor was by now too small, oldfashioned and uncomfortable for the patricianlife they intended to live, and was soonabandoned for a ‘better’ site at the eastern endof the estate, a mile away, high on the openCotswold plateau. There they built a grandand splendid mansion, in a late Georgian-Italianate style, called Owlpen House (latterlyOwlpen Park), allegedly on the model ofStoughton’s London Club.

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The architect was Samuel Saunders Teulon,who worked locally at Tortworth, and on thechurch in Uley (1857). Stoughton was wellconnected in the architectural world: his halfbrother was Charles Hanbury-Tracy, firstbaron Sudeley of Toddington, an amateur

architect who was chairman of the Committeewhich chose the Pugin and Barry design forthe New Palace of Westminster.

Stoughton was an extravagant builder ofimpressive mansions on his estates. Heextended his seat at Ballyhorgan, co. Kerry, in1812; the Daunt house at Gortigrenane, co.Cork, was rebuilt as a plain classical block in1817. The architect was probably AbrahamHargrave Sr.

Owlpen House dated from the early 1850s, ahouse of seven bays, with a curious four-storybelvedere and extensive conservatories. Todayonly the lodges, stables and gasworks remain.

It was inherited, after Mary Stoughton’sdeath in 1867, by her son, Thomas AnthonyStoughton II (1818–85) and his wife Rose(1840–1924). In 1889, after Thomas Anthonydied, Rose married again Colonel H.W. Trent,who hyphenated the Stoughton name with hisown. Largely to Stoughton family patronagewe owe the church above the manor, heavilyVictorianized in two phases; in 1828/9, whenthe nave was rebuilt by Samuel Manning, and1874, when the chancel was added by J.P. St

Aubyn. It is their family shrine, with brassesand monuments to the successive generationsof Daunts and Stoughtons.

But in other respects the nineteenth centurywas disastrous for the manor and the parish.The Stroudwater woollen cloth industry, for

c e n t u r i e s t h emainspring of thelocal economy, wasunder check after theNapoleonic Wars, andafter a period ofexpansion with then e w s t e a mtechnology, it couldnot compete with theNorth. There wereriots and panic andmass emigration fromUley and Owlpen inthe 1830s. Owlpenwas badly hit by thefailure of Edward

Sheppard’s cloth mill in Uley, whichemployed ‘nearly all the families at Owlpen’,in 1837. Parson Cornwall at the timedescribed in his (published) diaries how ‘theimprovident weavers were left, almost to aman, utterly desolate. I was obliged to engageto pay the bakers, or whole families wouldhave starved.’

¶ The staff from Owlpen House, 1890s. The bailiff,Edward Smith, is centre (bearded).

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¶ (Above) George Wade RA (1853–1933), watercolour of the ‘old manor’

¶ (Left) Owlpen House, north front, designed by S.S. Teulon for T.A. Stoughton, about 1850

The population of Owlpen collapsed almostovernight from 255 in 1831 to 94 by 1841,still more than the estate alone could employ.The bald statistics conceal great social distress.In 1838 it is recorded that 85% of thepopulation of the parish were officiallypaupers. Parishioners emigrated from Uleyand Owlpen to America, Canada (in 1835),New Zealand and Australia (where OwlpenHouse in the Hunter Valley is dated 1837).The cottages were abandoned (we are toldthere were 200 empty houses in Uley). Theraison d’être of the manor had gone, and thehouse stood shuttered, a caretaker/gardeneroccupying a few dilapidated back rooms in theeast wing.

By the end of the nineteenth century anantiquarian interest in Tudor architecture andthe things of Old England was developing,and the remarkable survival of the manorhouse and garden, as something of a SleepingBeauty, was becoming known to a steadystream of visitors. The house is described as‘quaint’ and ‘curious’, the rooms kept inmodest repair for picnics and excursions, and

the gardens maintained, the yews receivingtheir annual tonsure, in a time of plentifullabour. The manor begins to be recorded inearly photographs, a romantic sight, exactly asit had been left by Thomas Daunt IV at hisdeath in 1749, dwarfed amongst enormousyews, quite out of scale, mysterious beneaththe rampant ivy. It was written up in an earlyCountry Life in 1906 by Avray Tipping, whodescribed it as by then ‘a garden house morethan anything else…making its brave fightagainst consuming Time’.

¶ Owlpen Old Manor, c. 1885

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House and garden began to feature in thestately Edwardian books on Englisharchitecture and landscape. The hillsidegardens were ‘discovered’ by Gertrude Jekyll,who may have helped with the planting ofisland beds. She described them appreciatively,with plans and drawings, in her standard bookon Gardens for Small Country Houses (1914),written with Lawrence Weaver. It was visitedby landscape artists in search of picturesqueviews and historical subject matter, by writersand architectural historians, as well as manywho have left no record. Frank Moss Bennettvisited in April/May 1922 (there is a collectionof ten sketches at Owlpen). The youngAmerican architect, Francis Comstock, stayedin the spring of 1924, making meticulousmeasured drawings, which proved invaluablelater for restoration work, of all itsarchitectural details. He was later thechampion and cataloguer of the work of F.L.Griggs. He described Owlpen as ‘by far themost perfect small Manor House, to me, in allof England’.

The condition of the ‘beautiful ancientmanor house at Owlpen’ had already arousedthe concern of antiquarians, architects,conservationists and historical societies by1912. Edward Hudson, founder-editor ofCountry Life, Thackeray Turner, chairman ofthe Society for the Protection of AncientBuildings (SPAB), F.W. Troup and A.R.Powys, two successive secretaries of theSociety, Avray Tipping, the architecturalwriter, Ernest and Sidney Barnsley and AlfredPowell, architects of the Sapperton group,were all manoeuvring behind the scenes topersuade Thomas Anthony Stoughton II’swidow, Rose, now Trent Stoughton, to makeurgent repairs. ‘The roof is propped up fromthe floor joists below and [there is] a seriousfissure, reaching from the top of one of thegables to within a few feet of the ground’,wrote A.R. Powys. Failing that, he wassuggesting that the property be given to theNational Trust, when ‘it might be possible toraise a sum for its repair’.

¶ Queen Margaret’s Room, 1922, by Frank Moss Bennett

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¶ Owlpen Manor and Church, c. 1905

However, the condition of the house onlydeteriorated. During the first world war,Sidney Barnsley complained (writing inDecember 1921) ‘there was no question thatrepairs were not done as they should havebeen’. There were rumours that the old manorwas to be done up and ‘americanised’, whichRose Trent Stoughton vehemently denied: ‘myhope is to restore the Manor house as a homefor myself and my heirs’. Granville Lloyd-Baker, the concerned local squire ofHardwicke Court, observed (October 1920):I was at a Morris Dance at Owlpen three weeksago… Of course, the floors must be as shaky asthey were sixty years ago. I don’t think Mrs T.-S.can do anything to it. The Irish troubles have hither hard. She has given up her car, and is goingto give up the garden…

Sidney Barnsley was writing to A.R. Powysat the SPAB on 10 July 1921: ‘It would be fatalif the house was ever again used as a dwellingplace, as the alterations and repairs that wouldbe necessary would mean its ruin—except ofcourse if it was taken in hand by Weir andsomebody could be found appreciative enoughto sacrifice modern ideas of comfort!’ Again,he suggested the National Trust as a fall-back.It would have been one of the first houses tobe taken on by the Trust (after the ClergyHouse at Alfriston).

Rose had plans to put the ‘Old Manor’, as itcame to be called, into repair for her own use.She commissioned the architect, Randoll

Blacking of Guildford (he did some work atGloucester Cathedral), to survey the manorand draw up plans for its modernization in1921. But in Ireland times were hard. TheDaunt estates at Gortigrenane had been soldin the 1880s. The Stoughton lands in Kerryhad been sold to the tenants in 1905 and thenthe Big House, which had been kept on, wasabandoned in 1917/18, to be destroyed in theTroubles in 1920/21. Rose was the last of herline. She died childless in June 1924 and herheir was her nephew, William AnthonyStoughton, an ageing bachelor who gave hisaddress on the first sale conveyance ever signedfor the estate as ‘Arthur’s Club, St James’s’.

¶ Garret in the decaying manor, circa 1910

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¶ Norman Jewson by Sir William Rothenstein, 1913

Norman Jewson (1925–6)Cotswold Arts and Crafts repairsSuch was the condition—shuttered andforsaken, yet picturesque in its timelessness—of the manor house when Norman Jewson(1884–1975) first stumbled across it on one ofhis bicycle excursions from Sapperton. TheCotswold region had been ‘discovered’ byartists and craftsmen in the wake of WilliamMorris (1834–96), who had lived (from 1871)at a sister manor house, Kelmscott Manor, inthe Thames Valley.

Ernest Gimson (1864–1919) was in theforefront of those carrying on the ideals ofMorris into a younger generation and becamethe leader in the revival of Cotswold Arts andCrafts, moving to the Cotswolds in 1893. Helived for a time (from 1894 to 1901) at

Pinbury Park, setting up workshops andshowrooms for his furniture at Daneway,another sister house, both on the CirencesterEstate at Sapperton, under the patronage ofthe Bathurst family.

Norman Jewson was in turn inspired byGimson and his ideals of ‘fitness’, provencraftsmanship and integrity of design, sensitiverepair and honesty to materials. He had beentaken on as an “improver” by him, when ayoung architect just down from Cambridge in1907. Norman Jewson soon settled—andmarried—in Sapperton also. He describes hisencounter with Owlpen:

Another excursion was…to Owlpen, a verybeautiful and romantically situated old house,which had been deserted by its owners for a newmansion about a mile away a century before.The house was rapidly falling into completedecay, but a caretaker lived in a kitchen wingand would shew some of the rooms to visitors,including one the walls of which were hung withpainted canvas, of the kind Falstaffrecommended to Mistress Quickly. The terracedgardens with a yew parlour and groups of neat,clipped yews remained just as they were in thetime of Queen Anne, a gardener being kept tolook after them.

There was also a large barn containing a cidermill and a massive oak cider press, as well as theold mill of the manor, which had been kept intolerable repair, as the mill wheel was being usedto pump water up to the modern house. In spiteof the dilapidation of the house, which was so faradvanced that one of the main roof trusses hadgiven way, the great stone bay window hadbecome almost detached from the wall and hugeroots of ivy had grown right across some of thefloors, it seemed to me that such an exceptionallybeautiful and interesting old house might still besaved.

However, the owner at that time did not wisheither to sell it or to repair it herself. Some yearslater, when the old lady who owned it died, thenew owner put the property up for auction, so Iwas able to buy the old manor house, with [nine]

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acres of garden and woodland, and put it inrepair, though I could not afford to live in itmyself.

Owlpen, somnolent and under a spell ofenchantment, represented for Jewson all thatwas vital and enduring in the Englishtradition, ‘a noble inheritance’, as he wrote inA Little Book of Architecture (1940); likeKelmscott itself and Daneway, ‘symbols of theaccumulated experience of the past’.

In 1924, the Owlpen estate, including the‘Old Manor’, its Victorian usurper, OwlpenHouse, and a number of outlying farms andcottages, in total some 720 acres, was offeredfor sale in lots.

In July 1925, Norman succeeded in buyingOwlpen at auction with its old garden,orchards, gardener’s cottage, mill, barn andoutbuildings for £3,200. He was competingagainst Charles Wade, the eccentric collectorwho (in 1919) had bought Snowshill Manor,near Broadway (National Trust)—and whoseoffer of £3,750 the Trustees had turned downthe Christmas before, evidently angling formore. (Wade later knew both Norman Jewsonand F.L. Griggs.) The few remaining contentshad also been sold, including the village stocks,old dog spits, and Queen Margaret’s ofAnjou’s reputed bed and chair.

Jewson continued the work of recording andsurveying begun by Francis Comstock, andtook photographs and water-colour sketches,many of which survive at Owlpen. He engageda team of craftsmen, employing them as directlabour, photographed (p. 48, below) at thesteps of the garden. Many of them were fromthe Bisley area and had trained under ErnestGimson or Detmar Blow, another Arts andCrafts architect who practiced locally. Hesought out the sources of traditional materials—timber (he said) from the Uley sawmill;Cotswold freestone, rubble and roofing tiles;ox hair and lime. The frail old house wassensitively and honestly repaired over the nextyear so that it should assume as near aspossible its original beauty.

Jewson was a dedicated member of theSociety for the Protection of Ancient Buildingsfounded by William Morris; he worked underWilliam Weir, one of the most skilfulexponents of its philosophy of repair, notrestoration. He took great care to preserve itstextures, all that was resonant and subtle in itsfabric, employing the local traditional craftsand skills: lime-based techniques, then insurvival as much as revival, and theconservative practice advocated by the Societyof “repair by building” and tile repair (e.g., tothe hood-moulds). He used hand-made nails,clouts and spikes (he was proud of these on hisown door). The wrought ironwork—forged‘arrow-head’ and cockspur hinges and Norfolklatches, rat-tail casement stays and bowfasteners, as well as a brass firescreen, grille (tothe cellar) and sconces—was made by AlfredBucknell, at Water Lane, with the help of FredBaldwin. He retained the Georgian layer ofarchitectural development, sash windows andpanelling, which many architects restoringearly houses in the 1920s might havesuppressed through some misguided purism.

He himself contributed modelled plaster-work, vivid animals and owls, although manyof those examples now at Owlpen were castunder his supervision fifty years later, from his

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own moulds; he enjoyed touching up thesixteenth-century wall-paintings with theenthusiasm of an amateur; he designed castleadwork for scalloped spouts and therainwater heads, with more owls and the date.He designed simple furniture and fittings;cupboards, a bookcase and an elm kitchendresser, apparently made by Peter van derWaals of Chalford. Griggs donated afirescreen.

¶ Owlpen Restoration 1926.Back row: Fred White, Tom Coles, Jack Fern, Reg Kilby,

Reg Gardiner.Middle row: Harry Drinkwater, Charlie White, Ted

Hunt, Ray Parsloe, Frank Hogan, Herbert Howley, BillChappell.

Front row: Leslie Brown, Bill Woodward (foreman), WilfHunt (motorcycle).

Much of this work was removed in the1960s (with the old casements of broad glass)and various projected designs were nevercarried out: sketches for an owl newel finialsurvive (although he did bequeath hiswoodcarving chisels, as much as to say, “Go,and do likewise…”).

The craftsmen were supervised to the lastdetail of feature and flourish in which hedelighted: the traditional pargework of theTetbury area in a scalloped design made by the

plasterer’s hawk to the window jambsurrounds; the diapered patterns ofnailheads on the battens of the boardeddoors; the laying of a floor as Gimsonhad taught with the butt ends reversed,so that the boards taper with the bole ofthe tree, head to tail, a classic example ofeconomy, beauty and use comingtogether; the swept valleys of the roofs,with proper galetting; graded stone ‘slats’with their quaint local names, likebachelors and long nines, cocks, wivots andcussoms; the traditional canted chimneytops which were something of amannerism. He removed the ivy whichfestooned the whole building,limewashed the exterior harling, whichlooks harsh in his photographs, andtrimmed the yews.

Jewson’s discovery and subsequentpurchase and repair of Owlpen was to behis most enduring achievement. Whenthe work was worthily done, he tooksome pride in having saved the buildingand given it new life, describing hisapproach diffidently in a letter to NinaGriggs in 1944:

I have never been ambitious in theordinary sense of wanting to be somebody.I have always been ambitious to satisfymyself (or my own standards). I suppose Igot nearest to it at Owlpen than at anyother time.

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¶ Owlpen Manor : etching by F.L. Griggs (1876–1938)

In the process the house was modestlyrestyled as the Gentleman’s Residence of theinter-war years, with its servants’ hall andcapacious domestic offices, a flower room, twobathrooms, its own water-driven electric plant(in the Grist Mill) and a new-fangled patentheating system, ‘The Pipeless British Marvel’,circulating hot air straight into the Hall from aboiler behind.

The house was too large for him to live inhimself and, little more than a year afterbuying it, he again put it on the market, and itwas sold (this time for £9,000)—alas, to hispersonal loss—in November 1926.

Norman Jewson’s great friend, Fred Griggs(1876–1938) led the revival of etching in aneo-Romantic tradition inspired by the work

of Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert andWilliam Blake, choosing as his subject matterthe scenes of an arcadian England of Gothicbuildings. He aptly inscribed to him the firststate of his etching of Owlpen Manor (1930), aproof of which is in the manor collection:To my friend NORMAN JEWSON, who, withone only purpose, & at his own cost & loss,possessed himself of the demesne of OWLPEN /when, for the first time in seven hundred years, itpassed into alien hands, & with great care & skillsaved this ancient house from ruin.

The etching is one of Griggs’s mostpowerful, haunting images, with the gabledmanor house overwhelmed, born down upon,by the neatly-trimmed yews to create anairless, claustrophobic sense of tension,

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relieved by the two female figures with bobbedhair.

Later David Verey, author of the Buildingsof England series guide to Gloucestershire, wasto describe how this etching, which becamewidely known to collectors on both sides ofthe Atlantic, made of Owlpen an icon, givingit visible and literary form. The househemmed about by maturing yews became anostalgic symbol of Englishness for those whohad known and loved this part of the West ofEngland and were separated from it during theWar years. Griggs’s celebrated image ofOwlpen seemed an icon of the values ofEnglish civilization for which his generationwas prepared to fight. ‘Owlpen in its remoteand beautiful valley near the Severn estuary isthe epitome of romance’, he wrote. IfOwlpen’s story and substance was a romance,Jewson and Griggs appeared its conjurors,awakening its mysteries and making them realfor a new generation.

¶ Owlpen Manor : etching by Joseph Webb

A good deal of work in the Cotswold Artsand Crafts tradition, prompted by Owlpen’sstory of grim survival and redemption, survivesfrom this period, including examples now inpublic collections. A delightful stem pot byAlfred Powell may be seen in the CheltenhamMuseum and Art Gallery (see page 70 below).A series of sketches by William Simmonds ofthe interior of the medieval barn and kitchen

is in the Reading Museum of English RuralLife. Another jewel-like sketch by Jewson’s(and Griggs’s) friend Russell Alexander, muchesteemed by Griggs, was left by Jewson to themanor collection (see page 65 below). F.L.Griggs’s follower, Joseph Webb (1908–62),identified passionately with Owlpen, callinghis own studio ‘Owlpen’ and producing amagical little etching of the manor for his ownletterhead in the early Thirties (below left).

Barbara BrayIn November 1926, Jewson sold to BarbaraCrohan; she changed her name to BarbaraBray (above) after her divorce in 1939. Sheaddressed him, when she was selling the housein August 1963, ‘as magician of thisresusitated [sic] dream-place’. Owlpen becameonce again a country house and family home,over which she presided for a generation,bringing life, comfort and light into thebuilding. She had been brought up atLangdon Court in Devon, where her parents

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entertained King Edward VII and LilleyLangtry. She is remembered as anunforgettable entertainer, a voluble mono-loguist, active and jolly. She was sociallyambitious, her hospitality attracting manyinteresting guests, among them EvelynWaugh, Peter Scott and Joan Evans (who alllived nearby), and a coterie of literary figures,including her cousin, Clive Bell, and variousmembers of the ‘Bloomsbury group’. Herdaughter, Bridget, married the ninth earl ofPortsmouth.

The house was becoming well known in anage before the National Trust and countryhouse visiting concentrated the limelight on afew stately and commercial examples.Between the Wars it was described withenthusiasm in the increasing literature on theEnglish country house: the books by thecountry writer H.J. Massingham, by theliterary garden-maker Vita Sackville-West, bythe young landscape architect, GeoffreyJellicoe (1926), who was so impressed by themysterious, medieval atmosphere of thegarden, by the American topographical writerHarold Eberlein, by the artist-writer S.R.Jones and, of course, the growing number oflocal writers on the Cotswolds.

Barbara Bray had a dozen evacuee childrento stay from the poor East End of Londonduring the Second World War. FrancisComstock later related how Queen Margaretof Anjou made one of her apparitions:One night, in making her customary round, shelooked in… to see that the four children weresleeping; she found them all awake and excited;they told her of their visitor, “a lovely lady withlong sleeves and dress all trimmed with fur, andwith a funny peaked hat that had a long veilhanging down behind”, a description of such acostume as Queen Margaret might have worn,and of which the children must have beencompletely ignorant.

The painted cloths were now recognised asthe rarity they are, and Elsie Matley Mooremade a complete facsimile of them for theNational Monuments Record during the War.

Christopher Hussey, another regular visitorwho had first seen Owlpen before it wasrestored ‘on a dark autumn afternoon in1925’, empty and sad behind its drippingbarrier of yews in the bowels of the valley,painted a number of sketches of Owlpen; theCountry Life articles came out in 1952. Hedeplored, in jocular tone, the extirpation ofthe four giant yews in the 1950s, writing oneof his charming doggerel verses to BarbaraBray on a Reynolds Stone Christmas card:

For the owl hooting inside the penThe view outwards is better, I’m sure;

And inquisitive architect menHave no longer to peer and to pore

For a sight of your welcoming door.But I who like yewsAnd picturesque viewsAm still sorry to lose

The old introvert Owlpen of yore.�–But I won’t go on being a bore

For though I like yewI really love you

Even more.

Francis PaganBarbara Bray sold Owlpen “very, very tired, &of course, rather sad” in 1963 to FrancisPagan. She wrote to Jewson:if I must part, I—you—any friend or wellwisherof the manor, & its perfect neighbours, could nothope for more suitable, & understanding new-comers.

He immediately put in hand essentialrepairs, with the aid of a grant from theMinistry of Public Buildings and Works,particularly to the outbuildings and roofs;improvements were made to the heating,plumbing and services to make the house moreconvenient (even in the Twenties, such thingshad not been Jewson’s strong point).

Elsie Matley Moore was enlisted for theconservation, cleaning and rehanging (1964)of the painted cloths so that they could beconveniently displayed in the Great Chamber,

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which better suited their character. The roomfrom which the cloths were removed waspanelled in deal, matching up with some exist-ing panelling installed by Thomas Daunt IV.

The house was regularly opened to thepublic in 1966 for the first time in thesummer months, as it has been intermittentlyever since. The first old shrub roses wereplanted in the gardens.

Mander familySince 1974 Owlpen has been the home ofNicholas and Karin Mander (who is Swedish)and then of their family of five children whohave been brought up there; Sarra, Marcus,Benedict, Hugo and Fabian, said to be the firstfamily to have been born and raised in thehouse since the early eighteenth century.

Over the subsequent years they have beenfortunate to reassemble much of the old estate,buying back farmland, woodland and cottages.The cottages and outbuildings—including anumber of listed buildings—have beenrepaired and restored as holiday cottages,serving a new generation of guests from allover the world. The Manders have made theirlives here, and the manor has become onceagain the focus of a farm and busycommunity.

¶ Norman Jewson in old age

Norman Jewson befriended the Manders inhis last years, when he was able to renew hisacquaintance with Owlpen after long separ-ation. He would reminisce fondly about hiswork there, although the answers to manyeager questions he simply couldn’t remember:‘It was rather a long time ago, you know’ [fiftyyears]. He would talk of the Arts and Crafts inall their forms and of the people he hadknown, and advise tenderly on new projects ofconservation and adaptation. He deploredonly the grubbing up of the yews and thegrandiloquent Victorian restoration of thelittle Church behind the manor house: ‘It’s apity there isn’t a church like the one atDuntisbourne Rouse, but then you can’t haveeverything!’’

He told how Ernest Barnsley would beratehis brother, Sidney’s, workmanship bypushing pennies through the gaps between theback boards of his high-backed settle. Whenhe died he bequeathed the settle, which hadbelonged to Gimson at Pinbury, to Owlpen, aswell as his Barnsley work table, and sketch-books and verses, and the diaries he kept of hisContinental travels.

¶ Bookplate for Mander Bros,by Robert Anning Bell, 1896

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The Mander family, too, has its links withthe origins and ideals of the Arts and Craftsmovement. The Manders were pioneerindustrialists: an ancestor, Thomas, a youngerson, moved from the Warwickshire villageswhere the family had settled by the thirteenthcentury to Wolverhampton in 1745, his sons,Benjamin and John, establishing in 1773,amongst a variety of enterprises, a japanningand (later) varnish, paint and ink businesseswhose brands continue today. They were (inthe eighteenth century) nonconformists andphilanthropists, who became involved in manycharities and public causes, in county and civicaffairs in Staffordshire, in the yeomanry,in the arts and politics. Nicholas Manderis the heir to the family baronetcyawarded for public services in theCoronation honours of 1911.

As patrons of the arts, the family arenotable for the two adjoining houseswhich were built (or rebuilt) for them byEdward Ould in the ‘Ould English’ stylein the final decades of the last century.The Mount, the principal family seat, isnow a hotel with some sixty bedrooms,although many of its contents survive atOwlpen.

Wightwick Manor is in a delicate andself-consciously picturesque ‘CheshireTudor’ idiom whose textures owe muchto the late-nineteenth-century rehabilit-ation of houses like Owlpen. It waspresented to the National Trust, the firstcountry house to be so presented in thelifetime of its donor, by Sir GeoffreyMander, Liberal M P for EastWolverhampton, in 1937. Today it ispreserved intact as something of a periodpiece, much enriched by the outstandingcollections of Pre-Raphaelite art andWilliam Morris furnishings, augmentedby Sir Geoffrey and Rosalie, Lady

Mander, who became authorities on the circleof William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites.Norman Jewson commends Lady Mander’sbook on Rossetti in a letter to Nina Griggs in1966, ‘to my mind, a really good andsympathetic biography.’

Owlpen represents these traditions—of longhistory, solid building, romantic survival,sensitive repair and adaptation, creativeenterprise and public service, hospitality and alittle eccentricity—which may still be aninspiration to those who visit today.

¶ Family group, 1994, by Roy Botterell, Sunday Express

[ 54 ]

The Mander Family as CollectorsHE experience of visiting the oldmanor at Owlpen today is for manyenhanced, or curiosity aroused, by the

family clutter, still accumulating, thereassembled. The Mander family have longbeen inveterate collectors. As Mark Girouardwrites, they were part of ‘a large body ofcultivated upper middle-class families whoread their Ruskin and Morris and expressedtheir artistic tastes in their houses.’

Charles II Benjamin Mander (1819–78)was an amateur artist who helped found oneof the first Schools of Art in 1852, travelledwidely in Italy, and would improve the oldmasters in his collection “to their greatgain”. Wightwick Manor still shows thefamily’s early patronage of the Arts andCrafts movement and of the artists of thePre-Raphaelite brotherhood, a tour de forceof late Victorian civilized taste. Thecollection at Owlpen is modest as a typicalcountry house mélange formed by diverseinheritances and acquisitions, a galimatias ofstyles and periods. It derives largely from

that of Sir Charles Tertius (1852–1929) andMary le Mesurier, Lady Mander (1859–1951) atThe Mount, Tettenhall Wood (Staffordshire).

Mary Mander [below] was described byEdward Ould, principal architect of both TheMount and adjoining Wightwick, a littleobsequiously, as having ‘more taste than anylady I have met’. Her collections werevoraciously catholic, if indiscriminate. Hundredsof objets—fans, enamels, Rockingham, Spodeand Staffordshire china, Chinese and Delft blue-and-white porcelain, maiolica and faience, chinacats, textiles and needlework, lace, beadwork,dolls, domestic brass, tobacco boxes andcurios—cluttered every surface, as well asaccumulated books, the usual Jacobean, lateStuart and Georgian furniture, pictures,Caucasian and Persian rugs and family silver. Allwas listed in her annotated inventories, withprices paid to dealers for seeminglyuntransportable items culled on energetic travelsin Taormina, Granada, Cairo, Tunis,Khartoum, Fez, Cuba and Brazil, many longbefore the First World War.

¶ Mary Mander in the Libraryat The Mount

T

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All was displayed in a context of the fittingsand materials of the “artistic” house, withceilings by Leonard Shuffrey and heraldic glassby Bryans and Webb to Ould’s 55-footEnglish Renaissance Library. This grandEdwardian living hall was modelled on KirbyHall, Northamptonshire, “a magnificent ruin”which made a deep impression also on Jewson.Queen Mary visited her in 1939 (when shewas presented with an obligatory whitetortoiseshell fan, with Mary written on theshaft, and an enamel needle-case), ThePrincess Royal, as well as many public figures:Lloyd George was her guest when heannounced the General Election campaign inNovember 1918.

Most of these things—and others moremasculine, like old wine, guns, game trophiesand prizes, scientific gadgets, presentation keysand trowels, official uniforms, carriages, Whitesteam cars, and a Canadian horse-drawn sleigh—were dispersed after her death at a three-daysale in 1952. Many items found their way toWightwick and to Midland public collections,or were divided among contentious heirs,furnishing several family houses.

Her children, too, were keen collectors.Gerald Poynton Mander was a donnishantiquarian, bibliophile and Midland historian,an asthmatic dilettante who rose for afternoontea. He settled first at Ludstone Hall andcollected from undergraduate days: incunabulaand books by rare Midland printers (on whichhe wrote a standard monograph), miniaturesand enamels, many of them now in theWolverhampton Museum—and prints,including the Griggs etching of Owlpen.

His spinster sister, Daisy Mander, read,travelled and collected compulsively. Hernumerous dolls she left to the BantockMuseum; many of her textiles and needlework(which she practised) are at Owlpen. On herdeath in 1968, she left thousands of books(many also at Owlpen) and some fifty packing-cases of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryporcelain.

Sir Charles IV Arthur Mander, the secondbaronet, lived at Kilsall Hall, Shropshire. Aman of talent and charm, he devoted himselfto public causes, county affairs and charitywork, as well as industry. His wife, MonicaMander, left the baskets collected all over theworld to the Bantock Museum.

Owlpen retains items from these sources andmany others, from families in Germany,Mexico and Sweden, like fitting a quart into apint pot. At Owlpen are many of the familypapers from the mid-eighteenth centuryonwards, some of which have been republishedfor today’s readers in the latest family history.With the archive of Daunts and de Olepennes,quaint medieval documents and deeds whichreveal little of the personalities behind them,there is an illuminating survey of the lives ofsquires, merchant industrialists and countrygentry spanning eight hundred years.

Much was lost in a burglary in1992—including all the clocks, silver, cabinetsand the only ‘good’ pictures—and display isalways difficult.

Besides firebacks and antlers, only thepainted cloths have remained in the housethroughout. The present owners have sortedand catalogued and been lucky to add much,notably items associated with the house andthe work of Ernest Gimson and hiscircle—Norman Jewson, the brothers Sidneyand Ernest Barnsley and Fred Griggs—in thegreat Cotswold Arts and Crafts revival. Todaythere is Arts and Crafts furniture from theirpersonal collections, from the late DavidVerey’s Arlington Mill Museum collection atBibury, dispersed in 1995, and a swellingarchive of notebooks, drawings and ephemera.

Such Cotswold Arts and Crafts treasures mixhappily with simple early oak and walnutfurniture, family pictures, and paintings andsculpture, often by friends. And still thousandsof books, including the original copies ofMorris and Ruskin which inspired theManders more than a century ago.

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¶ The Mander family at Owlpen, courtesy Good Housekeeping, 1997:“We share a bathroom with 13,500 people”.

¶ Mander family at The Mount on the occasion of Mary Lady Mander’s 90th birthdayon 12th March 1949, courtesy Tatler

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¶ The Mander Family, 2000Marcus, Hugo, Nicholas, Fabian, Karin, Sarra and Benedict

(Left) Group photograph at The Mount:(Front row) Emily Mander, Monica Lady Mander, Marcus Mander (later third baronet), Jill Ramsden, Marietta Stirling,

Sir Charles Mander (second baronet), Mary, dowager Lady Mander (centre), Gerald Mander, Daphne Mander, PhilipMander, Hilary Purslow, Nancy Mander, Margaret Cardew

(Centre row) Elizabeth Neve, Hilda Vaughan, Irene Neve, Dolores Mander, James Ramsden, Rosalie Lady Mander, SirGeoffrey Mander, Daisy Mander, Margery and Peter Nevile, Priscilla Mander, Wm Purslow, Amy Stokes, Mary Kettle

(Back row) Mary Vaughan, Edmund Vaughan, Margaret Neve, John Neve, Sir Roger Knuthsen, Mary Lena and PatrickHickman, Cecily Phillips, Mary Amphlett, Mrs Amphlett, Reginald and Bridget Bailey, Violet Hargreaves

Mander Family Portraitshe family portraits at Owlpen form a long sequence over the generations. The earlierportraits are mostly by minor provincial artists, whose chief interest is in the lives ofthe sitters. They lead on to high Victorian swagger by the society artists of the day.

Benjamin Mander(1752–1819)Pioneer industrialist and phil-anthropist of Wolverhampton.Among many ventures, he wasco-founder in 1773—with hisbrother, the chemist, JohnMander—of businesses inchemicals, japanning and tin-

plate working, and later varnish, paint and printinginks. The Mander brands established by him continuedfor at least 230 years. He was one of four Manders to beappointed among the first town commissioners ofGeorgian Wolverhampton in 1777, where the familycontinued in public service for many generations.

He was founder-chairman of the WolverhamptonUnion Flour and Bread Co., a charitable venture to dolecheap bread to the poor in the social distress followingthe Napoleonic wars. He became a popular hero whenhe won a celebrated trial in 1814 at the Stafford Assizes,accused by the bakers of illegal combination.

He inherited, through his mother Elizabeth (néeClemson) property in Wolverhampton which had beenin her family since the seventeenth century. It forms thecore of the Mander Centre covering over 4 acres, one ofthe first shopping mall developments in Britain(1965–76), which dominates the city today.

Benjamin was a leading local nonconformist. On 14th

July (Bastille Day) 1791, the Birmingham house ofJoseph Priestley, the chemist, Unitarian dissenter andsocial reformer, was burnt to the ground in an outbreakof mob violence against ‘Jacobinism’. The mobproceeded to Wolverhampton intending to burn downBenjamin Mander’s house. He managed to defend hishouse and property with a drawn sword, placing aservant with a poker at the back door, until a troop ofcavalry arrived to disperse the crowd.

Elizabeth Hanbury MANDER(1752–1828)Betsey was the wife of BenjaminMander, by whom she had elevenchildren. Her doll and several examplesof her needlework are in the manor

house. In her youth, we are told, ‘she was a giddy, livelygirl, so her sisters usually spoke of her as the romp’.

Charles Mander I (1780–1853)Charles followed as a japanner in his father, Benjamin’s,firm in Wolverhampton. He started a varnish works in1803, one of whose early customers was QueenCharlotte. He sold the japanning business in 1840.

Charles ‘Boots’ Mander was, like many earlyindustrialists, a progressive social reformer, whoseexertions led to at least two acts of Parliament. In 1817he posted to London to petition the Home Secretary,Lord Sidmouth, to grant against the sentence of deathpassed on two innocent men accused of stealing just1s.1d., then a capital offence. This led in the next sessionof Parliament to the repeal of the Blood Money Act,under which anyone who succeeded in gaining aconviction for felony was entitled to £40 as blood money,‘a terrible premium by which many judicial murderswere committed and one of the worst Acts that had everdisgraced the Statute Book’. The incident formed theinspiration of the novel, Now and Then (1847), by theMethodist writer and jurist, Samuel Warren.

He was also a defender of religious freedoms. Hepursued a 22-year Chancery law suit, which he financedpersonally and eventually won. It became a test case, oneof several at the time which challenged in the courts thetenure of nonconformist chapels and endowments. TheLord Chancellor Eldon’s judgment became a celebratedruling in charity law, leading eventually to the DissentersChapels Act of 1844.

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Jemima Mander (1791–1834)She married Charles Mander in 1812. She was bornJemima Small, daughter of a linen draper in Boston,Lincs. Gerald Mander relates:There was some romance in the meeting with her husband.He was travelling the eastern counties in 1809 and lost hisway, which in the general absence of sign posts and A.A.men was confusing. The rider wisely left matters to hismount, and the old mare instinctively led him to Boston,where Mrs Charles Mander that was to be, dwelt, the eldestof a family of orphans, and aged 18. But her uncle andguardian made her wait till 21.

Having had ten children, she died aged 42 fromtyphus contracted while helping the poor in theWolverhampton slums. Charles later married heryounger sister, Elizabeth, described by an employee as ‘agreat economist [i.e., ‘housewife’] and a real Christian’.In his letters he describes her as ‘my old rib’.

Photograph of CBM by the Swedish pioneerof photography, Oscar Rejlander

Charles Benjamin Mander (1819–1878)He established the partnership of Mander Brothers,varnish manufacturers, with his brother, Samuel (head ofthe Wightwick Manor cadet line), in 1845. A paint andcolour works was set up in 1864 which became ‘theNumber One producer of paint and varnish in theBritish Empire and a household word’. He purchasedThe Mount estate at Tettenhall Wood, Staffs., in 1862.

With a keen interest in the arts, he founded the firstpurpose-built institution for art education in Britain in1852–4. He travelled widely, particularly in Italy, was ‘afirst-rate artist’ several of whose pencil sketches are aboutthe manor house, and had a hobby of improving the OldMasters in his collection ‘to their great gain’.

In public life, he was a magistrate and towncommissioner, then one of the first town councillors, inWolverhampton, where he promoted the free library andworthy temperance schemes to provide drinking-waterfountains for the people of the town.

Sophia MANDER(1827–69)Wife of Charles BenjaminMander, by whom she hadeight children. She diedaged 42 six months after thebirth of her youngest son,Jack (later chief constable ofNorfolk). CBM went on tomarry the children’sgoverness, Harriet Spooner.

Sophie Mander (1855–1937) as OpheliaSophie was a younger daughter of CBM and Sophia.Here she is painted by the Norwegian historical painterNicolai Arbo on a family visit to Paris in 1872. Arbo

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wrote, delivering the painting: “It was my idea in mypicture to represent Ophelia in the scene, whereshe—supposing Hamlet to be mad—exclaims: O, what anoble mind is here o’erthrown!’”

Sophie married the antiquarian, Canon Henry PaineStokes, hon. fellow and historian of Corpus ChristiCollege and ‘arguably the second best local historianCambridge has had in the last hundred years’. Thejournals of their son, Louis Mander Stokes, with anaccount of Rugby and the events leading up to his earlydeath in the trenches of the Somme, were published in1995.

Alderman Sir Charles Tertius Manderfirst baronet (1852–1929)‘CTM’ was the eldest son of Charles Benjamin andSophia. He was educated at Rugby and Corpus,Cambridge. He was first chairman and ‘governingdirector’ of Mander Brothers Ltd. in 1924. He serveduniquely four times as mayor of Wolverhampton(1892–6). He was made an honorary freeman of theborough, was a magistrate, colonel of the StaffordshireYeomanry, and active in numerous local charities. He

was granted a baronetcy for his public services in theCoronation honours of George V, who also awarded thefirm (which had supplied varnishes to Queen Charlotte acentury before) his royal warrant

He commissioned the architect Edward Ould to alterThe Mount in 1893, later adding a fine library andmusic room in a grand English Renaissance style in1909.

The portrait, presented by ‘his fellow townsmen andother friends’, is by Hon. John Collier (1850–1934), anEdwardian society artist in the swagger tradition. He ispainted aged 44, wearing levée order with sabretache inhussar style, holding the newly-introduced busby.

Mary le Mesurier Mander (1858–1951)Full length by Alfred Jonniaux (circa 1927)Mary, wife of Charles Tertius, was Canadian, born inHalifax, Nova Scotia. She was the daughter of HenryPaint, a ship-owner of Guernsey extraction and an MPin the early Dominion Parliament. Her sister marriedTheodore Mander, builder of Wightwick Manor.

She presided over The Mount, a well-run countryhouse in the Victorian/Edwardian heyday, known for itsFrench cooking and collections visited by many publicfigures. She lived on in slowly diminishing splendourafter the War, until she died aged 92.

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Sir Charles Arthur MANDERsecond baronet (1884-1951)In early life he was a keen sportsman. He shot (rifle) forEton, Cambridge University and for England, when hewas just 22. But ‘I prefer a good day’s hunting to a goodday’s shooting’, he would say.

He was a major in the Staffs. Yeomanry in the FirstWorld War in Egypt and Palestine. He fought in thethree battles of Gaza (where he was wounded), and inthe decisive aftermath of Meggido, the last great cavalryvictory, riding in triumph into Damascus with GeneralAllenby.

Full length, in hunting clothes, by Alfred Jonniaux

He lived as squire of Kilsall Hall in Shropshire. Hisfather was a founder of the Wolverhampton Wanderersfootball club, of which he was also President, oftenattending Saturday matches muffled in a greatcoat wornover his hunting clothes. He died suddenly chairing acommittee meeting of the Albrighton hunt.

After Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, Charles Arthurtrained with branches of the Mander firm in Berlin,Paris, Milan and Norway—‘in other words, by taking aholiday’.

He was an industrialist, serving as managing directorof Mander Brothers. But he devoted his energies topublic life and charitable affairs, serving at one point onover 67 committees and organizations, involved in everyaspect of Midland and national life. He was president ofRotary International for Britain and Ireland and Vice-Chairman of the National Savings Committee. He wastwice mayor of Wolverhampton, and an honoraryfreeman of the city. He was also made an honorary chiefRed Crow of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana, where hededicated the Waterton-Glacier National Park to worldpeace in 1932.

He was a public speaker of authority and charm onboth sides of the Atlantic for the numerous causes hesupported, appearing regularly on the early radio. A manof artistic talent, he wrote children’s novels and livelytravel journals (of his ocean voyages, huntingexpeditions, war exploits, etc.); he sketched and sang. Heplayed the piano with Sir Malcolm Sargent who was oneof many public figures to stay at Kilsall, signing thevisitors’ book with musical quotations.

He married Monica Neame, of London and Kent, bywhom he had two daughters and a son, Charles Marcus.

This portrait (1947) is by Arthur Pan, who famouslypainted Sir Winston Churchill.

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Sir Charles Marcus Mander, third baronet (b. 1921),as high sheriff of Staffordshire in 1962.He was a director of Mander Brothers, and fought with theColdstream Guards in the second world war, where he waswounded following the Salerno landings in Italy in 1943.

Maria DoloresMander was bornin Hamburg ofEnglish, Germanand Mexicandescent. Theportrait is byLeonardoPizzanelli(1922–84), ofFlorence.

Charles NicholasMander, owner ofOwlpen, painted as achild by LeonardoPizzanelli in 1955.He is the sixth CharlesMander in successionand the twenty-eighthlord of the manor ofOwlpen.

¶ Mander family at launch ofVarnished Leaves, WightwickManor, June 2005Back row: David Mander,

Steve Earl, N. Mander,Claire Mander, Barry Coles,Sir Glenn Hickman Bt, JakiBennett, Rosie Richardson.

Middle row: Emma Stirling,Lady Dolores Mander,Saskia (baby) and SarraEarl, Sir Marcus Mander,Karin Mander, CarlMander, Gilla Leigh, GwenMander

Front row: Chris Lahr,Charles Stirling, FabianMander, Hugo Mander,Penelope Loder, Francis andGeorgie Mander, MarcusMander, Charles Crole.

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The Arts & Crafts at OwlpenWLPEN is not an Arts and Crafts house,but rarer, remoter Tudor, wherearchitectural development stops dead in

1616. Its later layers of accretion—very earlyGeorgian and Cotswold Arts and Crafts—areunderstated and reabsorbed, yet add disproport-ionately to its substance and interest.

The house owes its survival to the late nineteenth-century reassessment of the vernacular styles of earlyhouses and farm buildings under the inspiration ofthe Arts and Crafts movement. Owlpen’ssympathetic resuscitation by Norman Jewson in1926 harnessed the principles of conservative repairfirst promulgated by Morris and the Society for theProtection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). The newemphasis, which Owlpen exemplifies, on the carefulconservation of a vanishing ‘heritage’ has been oneof the most fruitful legacies of the Arts and Craftsmovement, continuing to impel a vital world-wideendeavour.

The Victorian dream-houses—even Wightwick—with their picturesque revival of details andprecious, self-conscious historicism, tend towardsswagger, grandeur and gloom. But Ernest Gimson’sgeneration was preaching a committed honesty andthe direct practice of craft, without any pretence of‘stylism’: “solid realities … not names and dreams.”Gimson was “the greatest of the English architect-designers” (Nikolaus Pevsner), and one of the greatfurniture designers of the English tradition, whosework is apparently “rarer than Chippendale”.

Gimson, in turn, was Jewson’s miglior fabbro, hismentor and “better craftsman”. And Jewson was “inmany ways the greatest of all Gimson’s followers”(Leicester Catalogue, 1969), of a generation ofarchitects who combined sound knowledge andsureness of touch with intense poetic feeling. JohnCornforth writes that Owlpen was one of a distinctgroup of early houses restored in the ’twenties. Adreamy feeling of escapism is evident and Jewsonwas alive to the sense of enchantment, catching thespirit of place, as well as texture and period. Foraftercomers like Christopher Hussey, Owlpen was adream made real, crystallizing the spirit of the secretvalleys of the Cotswolds, and preserving somethingof a dream’s lovely unreality.

Many commentators find that today “Owlpen isthe quintessence of the ‘old English’ style” (JohnSales, Shell Guide, 1990), where “workmanship ofdifferent dates co-exists harmoniously, andseventeenth- and eighteenth-century furnishingsblend easily with later things in the manner prizedby the Arts and Crafts movement” (Geoffrey Tyack,1994). Most of the family things at Owlpen weremade long before the Arts and Crafts movement,but a Catalogue offers thematic notes on thedeveloping collections of some less familiar‘Cotswold Group’ items. For Owlpen is one of fewCotswold houses where the spirit of this movementmay be seen—and experienced—by the publicoutside a museum, and in something approachingan original context.

¶ Repairs tomedievalcruck roofin east wingby NormanJewsonin 1925-6

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CATALOGUEOld Pantry

ERNEST GIMSON (1864-1919)Trestle tableThis is Gimson’s own trestle work-table, the designsimilar to one of March 1914 in the CheltenhamMuseum. Alfred Powell described Gimson’s “fresh,clean rooms” in Gray’s Innfurnished with good oak furniture and a trestle tablethat at seasonal hours surrendered its drawing-boardsto a good English meal.A letter from Jewson to David Verey states:This table was made to [Ernest Gimson’s] design athis workshops at Daneway for his own use. He used itwhen making designs and working drawings forArchitectural Work, Furniture and Metalwork in hisoffice at Sapperton Cottage. After his death in 1919,Mrs Gimson gave it to me in recognition of myassociation with him & I am glad to know that thegrowing number of people who appreciate ErnestGimson’s work and influence will be able to see it…

Entrance HallA.C. FARE (1876–1958)Owlpen ManorFare was a West Country architect with practices inBath and Bristol. He worked with Sir GeorgeOatley, preparing perspectives of the Wills Towerat Bristol University, and painted from old printsimaginative reconstructions of long-demolishedbuildings, and a popular view of Bristol in the Blitzof 24 November 1940 (now in the BristolMuseum).

SIDNEY BARNSLEY (1865-1926)Oak bookcase (1909)The Barnsley glazed bookcase in stained andfigured oak with ebony stringing was made at theSapperton workshops in about 1909. The design isbased on seventeenth-century book ‘presses’, suchas those made for Samuel Pepys now in theMagdalene College library, Cambridge, whereGimson worked through Sir Sydney Cockerell.

It was commissioned by C.H. St John Hornby(1867–1946), a leader in the private pressmovement, the revival in fine printing inspired by

William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. He was founderof the Ashendene Press and partner in the firm ofW.H. Smith & Son. He was a friend of Sir EmeryWalker, the typographer, who founded the DovesPress with T.J. Cobden-Sanderson (who is said tohave coined the term ‘Arts and Crafts’) in 1900 andlived from 1923 at Daneway House, the house nearSapperton where Gimson and Barnsley had theirworkshops and exhibited their work. It is the workof these two presses which “secured for the plainunadorned type face its place in modern bookproduction” (Nikolaus Pevsner).

Oak Chest (circa 1660)The chest is from William Morris’s own collectionat Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and thenKelmscott Manor, in the Thames valley. NormanJewson describes how the Arts and Crafts designerssought out simple early chests such as this,“interesting Jacobean pieces in their original greyoak, not stained … as they invariably are in antiqueshops”, with unrestored colour and patination.This one is panelled, with a primitive opposedbeast design, based on the guardians of the tree oflife, in the frieze rail.

F.L. GRIGGS (1876–1938)The BeatitudesSet in specimen Leasbourne type majusculesdesigned by F.L. Griggs in 1928 for the LanstonMonotype Corporation. Leasbourne was thedistrict of Chipping Campden where Griggs settledand built his house, Dover’s House, “a sort of life’sjob for me”, using many of the same craftsmenwho worked at Owlpen.

This print was produced by Davina Wynne-Jonesunder Nina Griggs’s supervision in 1985.

ALFRED BUCKNELLGrille (1926) [illus. above, page 11]Briar rose motif designed by Norman Jewson andmade in chased steel open-work by AlfredBucknell, who produced most of the blacksmithwork for the house at his forge at Waterlane.Bucknell had worked for Gimson from about1903, and worked extensively for Jewson later. Hisson, Norman, continued to produce metalworkuntil the 1980s. Several of Jewson’s drawings forsuch things as wall sconces, typical of his work, areat Owlpen].

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The Great HallRUSSELL ALEXANDER (d. 1951)Cyder Press (1926) [illus. above]Arcadian, Palmeresque vision of the cider press atOwlpen in crayon and gouache by RussellAlexander. He was a close friend of NormanJewson and of Fred Griggs. Griggs wrote to theartist on 17 January 1926 (letter at the AshmoleanMuseum, Oxford) which records that in 1925Alexander presented Jewson with a small drawingof Owlpen which Griggs admired. Alexanderprepared the first Catalogue of Griggs’ etchings andwrote the introduction to Griggs’s illustrated bookon Campden. He was a poet and essayist, and theforeign news editor of the News Chronicle.

NORMAN JEWSON (1884–1975)Cyder Press (1927)Jewson was an amateur watercolourist of somedistinction and left a number of his water-colours and drawings to Owlpen. In later lifehe recognised the superiority of his friends’work:I would be well satisfied if I could produce a paintingwith as much poetry in it as one of his [Russell’s] best.I suppose it is my friendship with Fred [Griggs] andRussell, Gimson & William Simmonds, that hasmade me so dissatisfied with my own failure.(Letter to Nina Griggs, 16.11.44).He was happy to sell this version to David Verey:

The Cider Press was one my old friend F.L. Griggsliked, but I have another of the same subject paintedby his and my late friend Russell Alexander which Ilike much better (4.9.68).

MAXWELL ARMFIELD (1881–1972)Owlpen ManorArmfield was associated with the BirminghamGroup of painters, a leader of the ‘tempera revival’and author of A Manual of Tempera Painting(1930). He married Constance Smedley in 1908,and they both worked in the circle of artists close toWilliam Morris. They moved to the Cotswolds“because it was remote and inexpensive”, in 1909.She describes “the quiet lovely life” atMinchinhampton in her autobiography:We seem to have stepped into almost feudal peace, andthe craftsmanship … delighted us as much as theTudor manorhouses and characteristic architecture.

SIDNEY BARNSLEYOak High-Backed Settle (circa 1895)Made for Ernest Gimson’s own cottage at Pinbury,above Sapperton, where it is shown in a drawing ofthe sitting-room by Alfred Powell [above right]:The room was large, and the floor flagged with whitestone, the walls and ceiling, beams and joists white. Alarge black dresser, hung with gay and well-usedcrockery, a large settle at the fireside … and otherrush-bottom chairs made by himself on his pole lathe,were its furniture.

Inspired by traditional farmhouse settles, it showsthe design principles of the Cotswold Arts andCrafts movement in one of Gimson’s treasuredpieces. Made of local quarter-sawn oak and with acoved top, it has decorative bands and diapers ofsimple chiselled gouge-work (similar to those on achest at Froxfield, Hants), and the constructionaljoiners’ tenons ‘honestly’ displayed.

Norman Jewson subsequently acquired it (atEmily Gimson’s sale in March 1941) for his owncottage at Sapperton.

The settle is a characteristic Arts and Craftsrevival of traditional forms. CHB Quennell,discussing a similar Barnsley settle (in The Case forModern Furniture), wrote:

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¶ Ernest Gimson’sliving roomat Pinbury,

drawn byAlfred Powell

in 1922,showing furniture

now at Owlpen

It must be made by hand, and therefore…seems to mockat the industrial system. If settles could talk, it would say:“Here I am, and know not the meaning of compromise; Imust be made as once all settles were made; if you attemptto standardise my parts and make me by machinery, Ishall at once become so hideously ugly that you will beappalled. I am human in that men have made me.”

F.L. GRIGGS (1876–1938)Owlpen Manor (1930)Fred Griggs was perhaps the best-known of the smallgroup of etchers in the British etching revival workingin the neo-Romantic tradition, as followers of WilliamBlake and Samuel Palmer. This is one of threeimpressions of the first state (the others are in theAshmolean, Oxford, and the Boston Public Library,U.S.A.), with Griggs’s apt dedication to Jewson. [Seeabove, p. 49.]

The Minster (1918: right of the Owlpen etching)This represents an ideal of the English abbey at theend of the fifteenth-century, an imaginative epitomeof the development of Gothic styles in the centuriesbefore the Reformation. It is dedicated to the bells ofOseney Abbey. Pencil studies, a germ for this earlyetching, are also in the manor collection. Griggs saidhe was reminded of a passage of Froude:It has all gone, like an insubstantial pageant, faded; andbetween us and the old England there lies a gulf of

mystery which the prose of the historian will neveradequately bridge.Gimson wrote of this plate to Griggs:If the ‘Gothic revival’ had been half as convincing as youretchings it would have gone deeper into people’s hearts.They be grand towers & sure enough were this the 13thCent. you would be king’s Mason & I your carpenter.

Sarras (1926: above the Gimson settle)This is the Arthurian city of legend: a pilgrim roadapproaching the city of God leads tortuously by thefragments of pagan ruins and a spring of renewal.Griggs writes to Russell Alexander of the walled city,hidden and mystical, with three churches at its heart.

¶ Modelled plaster vine trail by Jewson

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NORMAN JEWSON & ERNEST GIMSONModelled plasterworkPlasterwork was the only craft that Gimson regularlypractised himself. The example in the splay of thewindow to the west (right) is by Gimson. Theremaining plasterwork in the room, including theanimals above the door from the pentice entry and theowl overdoor to the Oak Parlour, is from mouldsmade by Norman Jewson, and cast under hissupervision 50 years later. The owl overdoor was castby Simon and Judith Verity.

Modelled plasterwork was one of the crafts revivedby the Art-Workers’ Guild, under the influence ofGeorge P. Bankart (1866–1929). He was a specialistin decorative plasterwork (also lead and metalwork)who extolled the simple, hand-modelled work athouses like Wilderhope (Shropshire), Speke Hall(Merseyside), Chastleton (Oxfordshire) and HaddonHall (Derbyshire). Bankart collaborated with Gimson,who studied the craft with the leading London firm ofWhitcombe & Priestley. Gimson describes thetreatment of flowers at Knole House in Kent:The modelling is very simple. There are no sharp lines, noquick curves, no undercutting, none of those tricks of themodern plaster-worker for making his designs ‘sparkle’;but instead, dull lines, gentle curves, and little variety ofrelief … though it may lack something of realism, itexpresses the freshness and healthy growth which is themost vital quality in the natural flower.

Jewson was early struck by the “unusual beauty verylocal in character” of Gimson’s modelled plasterceilings. W.R. Lethaby describes Gimson’s work as“quite original and modern, but as good, every bit, asold work, and yet as simple as piecrust.” The contrastbetween the distinctively ‘Cotswold’ Arts and Craftsmodelled plasterwork here, with its soft shadows andsubtle relief, and L.A. Shuffrey’s more or lesscontemporary Italianate work, also derived fromJacobean examples, with rich pendetives, armaturesand undercutting, as at Wightwick and The Mount,is instructive.

¶ Curtains in wovenwool “Honeycomb”pattern by WilliamMorris & Co.

WILLIAM MORRIS & CO.Curtains (from The Mount, circa 1891)They are woven wool in ‘Honeycomb’, designed byMorris in 1876. In 1877 Morris had brought M.Bazin over from France to teach him the newtechniques of weaving on Jacquard power looms, usedhere for this ‘triple-cloth’ (three-ply) weave. Hiswoven textiles were worked under his directsupervision at Merton Abbey from 1881.The Morris & Co. showrooms were in Oxford

Street, next door to Sedding’s offices where Gimsonworked, and Morris’s naturalistic textile designs werean important early influence.

¶ The Manders were early clients of William Morris.Here Sir Geoffrey and Lady (Rosalie) Mander show(‘Bird’) tapestry curtains to the Clement Attlees atWightwick Manor. The Morris circle was influenced byprogressive ideals—a romantic, Utopian socialism—andSir Geoffrey, following the strong family tradition ofpublic service and radicalism, was a Liberal MP1929–45. He gave Wightwick to the National Trust in1937; it was one of the first houses to be given under theCountry Houses Scheme, and the first in the lifetime ofits donor.

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The Little ParlourNORMAN JEWSON (1884–1975)Owlpen Manor (1926)One of two versions at Owlpen of a watercolour of theeast front painted while Jewson was working on thehouse. It is a similar view to the one chosen by Griggsfor the etching of Owlpen.

The Oak ParlourF.L. GRIGGS (1876–1938)Memory of Clavering (1934)Half-timbered houses at Clavering in Essex, with aglimpse of the early Perpendicular church in thebackground, provide an idealized village street. Thesubject was composed entirely from memory, a poeticevocation, 15 years after he had last visited. The streetis deserted in early morning sun, after heavy rain, witha foreboding of the Black Death, or apocalypse, orReformation. The sonnet is from The Rose as Fair bythe pastoral poet W. Browne. This was the mostsuccessful of the later, nostalgic etchings. When sentsome photographs after completing the etching, theartist was saddened how much the village hadchanged: today the houses have been modernized,with integral garages.

Ragdale Hall (1931)Ragdale Hall, in the Leicestershire wolds, is a parallelprint to the Owlpen one, of a Tudor house underthreat, symbolized by the graveyard outlined in theforeground. Here the house was condemned todemolition in 1959, despite the protests ofconservationists all over England. There is now ahealth farm in the ‘new’ hall.

Anglia Perdita (1921)“Lost England”: this is a pair to The Minster, depictingthe courtyard of an abbey on the eve of theReformation. The inscription is dedicated to thefamed bells of Croyland Abbey, “than which therewere none so consonant in all England” (Ingulph’sChronicle of 1091), proclaiming “the glory of theCrucified”. Printed on Griggs’s own Dover HousePress in Campden.

St Botolph’s, Boston (1924)The church is at Boston, Lincolnshire, the largestparish church in England, with a tower which risesabove the fens, ‘Boston Stump’, of 300 feet, begun in1309. Griggs wrote: “I’ve got nearer to the soil ofEngland in it, I think, than ever before.” This proof is

dedicated to A.J. Finberg, the Turner scholar andauthor of the catalogue of Turner’s Liber Studiorummezzotint engravings, a work (in the Owlpencollection, with prints from Griggs’s and Ruskin’sown collections) which greatly influenced Griggs.

PETER VAN DER WAALS (1870–1937)Bookcase (in bay window) (1924)The oak bookcase was made for H.P.R. Finberg, A.J.Finberg’s son. He founded the Alcuin Press inChipping Campden and after the War becameProfessor of English Local History at Leicester.

Waals was Gimson’s Dutch foreman at Sappertonwho set up his own workshops at Chalford afterGimson’s death in 1919, taking with him almost allGimson’s cabinet-makers, tools and materials. Hecontinued to produce furniture, much of it based onGimson’s designs, until his death. Waals workedclosely with Jewson between the Wars and apparentlyexecuted joinery for Owlpen.

Sir George Trevelyan has written a Memoir of histime working for Waals in 1929-31 which (he told thewriter) was “’the greatest experience of my life’. (TheTrevelyans were described by Rosalie Mander asanother ‘liberal and eccentric family’, who encouragedSir Geoffrey Mander to give Wightwick Manor to theNational Trust in 1937. In 1941, they gave their ownhouse at Wallington, Northumberland, to the Trust.)

In addition the room contains examples of graphic art bythe romantic artists who influenced Griggs: WilliamBlake and Edward Calvert.

Bathroom

ERNEST GIMSONOak table (circa 1910)The framing has stoppedchamfers, responding to those inthe beams of the room. Thetypical stretcher detail is derivedfrom a yoked hay-rake designadapted by the Gimson-Barnsleyfurniture-makers. Illustrated inErnest Gimson: his life and work,

it has been much copied by later designers.

NEVILLE NEAL (d. 2000)Ash chairsThere are various chairs about the house made byNeville Neal of Rugby in the traditional manner. Nealjoined Edward Gardiner as a pupil in 1939 and

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worked with him until his death in 1958. Gimsonlearnt the craft of chair-making from the Bosbury(Herefordshire) chair-bodger, Philip Clissett, in about1886–7. He later encouraged Gardiner in the craft,using a pole lathe to turn the uprights and stretchers;the splats, arms and seat rails are shaped with a drawknife and spoke-shave; the seats are of rushes. Hisclients included Hugh Fairfax-Cholmeley, who ownedseveral pieces now at Owlpen and commissioned ahouse, Mill Hill, Brandsby, in Yorkshire, with workby Bankart, Gimson, the Barnsleys and A.H. Powell.Designs at Owlpen are ‘Gimson’, ‘Clissett’ (modifiedby Gimson from a design by Clissett) and ‘Pass’(commissioned by Mrs Pass for a village hall ).

The Solar

ERNEST BARNSLEY (1863–1926)Oak worktable (circa 1895)This early Barnsley table belonged to Norman Jewson,acquired from Gimson. The under-framing hascharacteristic faceted chamfering, a form used bywainwrights to reduce weight, with bowed ‘hay-rake’stretchers and ‘wish-bone’ tension braces.

Lionel Lambourne writes of a similar table:Barnsley forged the grammar and syntax of theSapperton style with such pieces as this table, at firstsight plain, strong and simple in construction, butenriched and enlivened by the power of the smoothlychamfered structural details, which in the strutsunderneath possess an organic form akin to that of apelvic bone.

HARRY DAVOLL (1875-1963)Display cabinetsDavoll was trained by Gimson and worked under himat Daneway to his death in 1919; he subsequentlyworked with Peter van der Waals at Chalford to 1933,before setting up on his own.

Queen Margaret’s Room

WILLIAM MORRIS & CO.Child’s chair (circa 1880)The chair may be after a design by Ford MadoxBrown (1821-93) after chairs from Sussex in 1864-5,and one of numerous examples made for Morris &Company 1864–1940. Its prototype has beendescribed as ‘unpretentious furniture in aSheraton/Regency tradition’ (Simon Jervis), deriving

from D.G. Rossetti’s interest in turning and ebonizedfinishes. This one was in the Nursery at The Mount,probably bought for the generation of 1884.

EMILY GIMSONSmockGimson’s working smock, embroidered by his wife,Emily Ann, née Thompson. She was the daughter of aYorkshire rector who, writes Jewson, ‘took a keeninterest in village activities, helped Gimson in hiswork and was an excellent housewife’.

The craft of smocking, which was dying out as anarticle of everyday wear for country folk by the mid-nineteenth century with increasing urban-isation, wasrevived under the general interest in traditionalhandicrafts inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement.Mrs Oscar Wilde, an active member of the RationalDress Society, Liberty & Co. and Kate Greenaway,the children’s book illustrator, were all enthusiasts.Smocks were promoted as ‘aesthetic dress’ for childrenand smocking has remained popular, particularly onchildren’s clothes, intermittently ever since.

Other smocks shown include a child’s smock madefor C.A. Mander in about 1888, a brown child’ssmock from Ticehurst, Sussex, and a smock workedby Karin Mander in 1975.

SIDNEY BARNSLEYWriting desk (1913) [detail p. 70]The first design for this fine English walnut andebony writing desk (now in the Cheltenham Museum1972.187.81) is dated Feb. 1913. It is one ofBarnsley’s acknowledged masterpieces, described byfurniture makers as an ‘epiphany of technique andskill’. It is based on a re-interpretation of the Williamand Mary period fall-front secretaire cabinet. Thefront opens on tooled quadrant hinges, enclosingtwelve drawers and ebony cupboards. The finish hasholly stringing, moulded panels of octagons in ebony,bands of gouge-work diapers, exposed dovetailsforming decorative patterns, turned ivory handles tothe interior drawers and the typical stepped sledge feetof the Gimson school. The raised and fielded panels ofthe sides are solidly framed by flat-chamfered stiles inthe form of posts, inlaid with lozenges of ebony,recalling Barnsley’s interest in Byzantine prototypes.Even the back is carefully finished with ten raisedpanels in moulded frames.

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The Cyder House

SIDNEY BARNSLEYCupboard (circa 1913) [illus. above]This large cupboard of English walnut and ebony is alavish piece of later Barnsley furniture, finished anddetailed to the highest standards. It has fielded ebonypanels with holly inlays, and beautifully fitted doorsand drawers. Octagonal posts frame a fret frieze,finished in chiselled gouge work, to the upper stage. Itdeploys motifs used by the wainwright, where thechamfers reduce weight, as described by George Sturt.The centre of the base stage is set in a canted plan. Itwas commissioned by Hugh Fairfax-Cholmeley: thedesign drawings in the Cheltenham Museum(1972.187.17) are dated 21 March 1913. The

completed work was invoiced on December 10th 1913for £70.

SIDNEY BARNSLEY (1865-1926)Farmhouse dresser (c. 1900)A simple kitchen dresser in pine from Barnsley’s ownSapperton cottage contrasts with the cupboard. Itillustrates the ideals of the Arts and Crafts designers tocreate “good citizen’s furniture … well made to thelast degree” (Morris). Gimson’s aim was to producethis “cottage-type furniture at a price that working-class people could afford to pay” (Jewson). Theseearly, functional pieces are rare as they were noteconomic, their established clients preferring tocommission quality pieces finished in veneers, inlaysand exotic woods—ebony, satinwood, walnut, burrelm—now associated with the movement.The dresser, like the settle, was a type of piece much lovedby Arts and Crafts designers for its homely associations,and Gimson and the Barnsleys designed many differentversions (Good Citizen’s Furniture).

The dresser belonged to Sidney Barnsley, then to hisdaughter, Grace. She was a pottery designer ofdistinction and a pupil of Alfred and Louise Powell,decorating pottery for Wedgwood in the ’20s and’30s. She later started the Roeginga Pottery atRainham, Kent, with her husband, Oscar Davies,where they made and decorated their own pottery.

¶ Stem pot by Alfred Powell (1865–1960) illustratingOwlpen, painted for Wedgwood in 1928

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¶ Norman Jewson, photographed by his father-in-law,Ernest Barnsley, outside his cottage in Far Oakridge

BiographiesNorman Jewson

orman Jewson was born in 1884 of afamily of established timber merchants inNorwich, and spent all his early life in

East Anglia. He went to school in Norfolk andSuffolk and went up to Gonville and CaiusCollege, Cambridge. He served his articles in thearchitectural practice of Herbert [Bertie] Ibber-son in London, which he ‘disliked as a place tolive in permanently the longer [he] stayed there’.Ibberson had worked in the same office asGimson, Ernest Barnsley and Alfred Powellunder J.D. Sedding. Sedding worked in the‘crafted Gothic’ tradition, with a love ofhandicraft; like Morris, Philip Webb andNorman Shaw, he had been a pupil of G.E.Street.

Jewson describes, in his autobiographicalreminiscences, By Chance I did Rove, how, havingfinished his apprenticeship in 1907, he set outwith a donkey and trap on a sketching tour inthe Cotswolds, ‘a part of the country little knownat that time’. He had no idea that he would staythere for the rest of his life.

Ibberson had recommended him to visit theworkshops of Ernest Gimson, who soon tookhim on as an ‘improver’, or unpaid assistant, andput him to work at making sketches from lifeand studying the crafts of modelled plasterwork,woodcarving and design for metalwork, as for

Gimson, architecture and the crafts were vitallyinterdependent. He describes how, as part of histraining under Gimson, he was encouraged todraw a different wild flower every day fromnature, noting its essential characteristics andadapting it to a formal pattern suitable formodelled plasterwork, wood-carving orneedlework.

He soon became an invaluable member of thegroup, and a pupil, friend and close companionof Gimson in his later years. In 1911 he marriedErnest Barnsley’s daughter, Mary, and convertedfor himself a group of cottages at Bachelor’sCourt in Sapperton.

He supervised much of Gimson’s architecturaland repair work. He writes that he admired inGimson an assured distinction, traditional in theuse of the best craftsmanship and materials,where in design grace of form was combinedwith simplicity; these are the qualities of his ownbest architectural work. He set up in practice onhis own in 1919 and soon gained a reputation forthe sympathetic conservation and adaptation ofold buildings. His credo was clear:My own buildings I wanted to have the basicqualities of the best old houses of their locality, builtin the local traditional way in the local materials,but not copying the details which properly belongedto the period in which they were built… I hopedthat my buildings would at least have good mannersand be able to take their natural place in theirsurroundings without offence.

¶ Jewson’s wedding to Mary Barnsley in Sapperton, withErnest Barnsley, his father-in-law, right

N

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¶ Sketch by Jewson of Bachelor’s Court, Sapperton

He also worked confidently in a classical idiomin his country houses, when necessity or thespirit of place demanded it, as Shaw and Lutyensand, in the Cotswolds, Guy Dawber had done.The Lindens, Norwich (1921), and The GardenHouse, Westonbirt, are some of his mostsuccessful essays in a whimsical, vernacularclassicism, with characteristically fine plasterworkdetail and restrained use of mouldings. Hetravelled whenever he could in Italy, makingsketches of architectural details, lettering, farmcarts, landscapes and village scenes. Many ofthese are now at Owlpen.

As Ruskin had taught in the Lamp of Truth,working by hand was working with joy. And inaccordance with Ruskin’s advice to Sedding,Jewson always had either pencil or chisel in hishand, acutely involved in the simple craftprocesses of building, experimenting andpractising with delight, familiarizing himself withthe qualities of tested materials, tools andtechniques, rediscovering, reviving the fabrics,textures and disciplines of traditionalconstruction, from drystone walling in theCotswolds, and cob, which he used with successon his summer house at Lane End, Kilve, in theQuantocks, to twisted gut in a weather-clock setabove a row of simple almshouses.

He worked for a time with William Weir, askilful architect in the repair of old buildings andchurches, such as Salle, in Norfolk, on behalf ofthe SPAB, and The Priest’s House at Muchelney.He also assisted Ernest Barnsley, supervising thecompletion of Rodmarton Manor when Barnsley

died in 1925, most notably the chapel (1929).Rodmarton was Ernest Barnsley’s mostimportant work, ‘probably’, Jewson wrote, ‘thelast house of its size to be built in the oldleisurely way, with all its timber grown from localwoods, sawn on the pit and seasoned before use.’

In 1925, he purchased Owlpen, whose repairdescribed above is often considered hisoutstanding work. His other major architecturalrepair work was at Campden House (formerlyCombe House) outside Chipping Campden,where he demolished some untidy Victorianadditions and domestic offices, unifying with theskilled use of detail and materials a cluttereddesign of various dates to form a pleasing andcomfortable house, with terraced garden andsummerhouse.

He became established as a well-known‘gentleman’s architect’ in the Cotswolds betweenthe Wars, working on a number of distinguishedCotswold manor houses and farmhouses. Theyinclude Charlton Abbots, Cotswold Farm (withhis most extensive garden, on a hillside),Doughton Manor, Eycot House, Glenfall House(for Arthur Mitchell, also a patron of both Waalsand Griggs), Hidcote House, Iles Farm (for SirWilliam Rothenstein), Little Wolford Manor,Southrop Manor, Througham Court, andThrougham Slad (for William Cadbury). Heexecuted church repair work (Chalford, nearStroud, was re-ordered by him), and designs formemorials, inscriptions, headstones, andlettering; also for metalwork, as Gimson haddone, including sconces, chimney furniture andgates, and architectural leadwork.

He turned his hand to the woodcarving ofdetails such as finials and newels for his houses. Anumber of furniture designs are strikinglysuccessful, from the fine piano-case withmarquetry inlay, made by Waals, which hedesigned for Mrs Clegg of Wormington Grange,to the sturdy child’s chair with back splatsshowing humorous carvings of village characterswhich he made and painted himself, as well as anumber of toys, for his daughters.

He wrote two books: By Chance I did Rove hasbecome established as a minor classic of the

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background to the Gimson group and Cotswoldlife before the First World War, appearing inthree editions, and The Little Book of Architecture(1940) is a useful beginner’s guide to Englisharchitectural styles. He wrote a number ofpoems, illustrated for his friends, and woulddeclaim a Victorian peepshow in a whining, sing-song drone.

He did little professional work after 1940, andfelt increasingly at odds with modernism and thehistorical-artistic developments of the post-warperiod. David Gould wrote in his T i m e sobituary:His architectural work has a dignity and simplicityin keeping with the traditional Cotswold manner.His buildings look as if they had grown naturallyfrom the ground. He was equally skilled and sym-pathetic in the restoration of old houses, the mostnotable of which is the romantic and unique gabledmanor house of Owlpen, which he bought in adilapidated condition in [1925] and restored at hisown cost and, alas, ultimate loss. His friend F.L.Griggs, RA, inscribed and dedicated his etching ofOwlpen to him.

Norman Jewson, with Fred Griggs and the poetand essayist Russell Alexander, were a trio of friendswhose hearts beat as one in their regard and love forall that was finest in the English tradition. Theirappreciation of sturdy architecture and thetraditions of the English countryside was not thebackward-looking dream of the medievalist harpingupon a once golden age. They were realists whosedesire was to maintain the character of the Englishcountryside and its architecture and keep it aliveand free from hideous modern accretions.Traditional things, long tested and tried, were notto be indiscriminately cast aside.

Jewson was content to pursue his own unfashion-able path, never deviating from his high ideals andwhat he knew to be right. He produced manydelicate watercolours and a number of poems ofmuch felicity. Always courteous and with a charmwhich comes from a man at peace with himself, hewas a delightful companion, whether on a longramble through Sapperton woods, or at his owncandlelit table where he always had a fund of comicand entertaining reminiscences…

Fred GriggsFrederick Landseer Maur Griggs was born inHitchin, Hertfordshire, in 1876. He studied atthe Slade School and worked for two years1896–8 in the architectural office of C.E.Mallows, the architectural draughtsman. Helargely abandoned architecture for drawing andfrom 1900 worked on pen and ink illustrationsto 13 volumes of the Highways and Byways seriesof regional guides for Macmillan’s, beginningwith Hertfordshire.

He was closely associated with Gimson, whoseinterest in the traditional methods and materialsof building he shared, working in partnershipwith him from 1917 to 1919. He settled inChipping Campden where there was a Guild ofHandicrafts established by C.R. Ashbee. He livedat Dover’s House in the High Street from 1903;from 1927–37, he designed for himself a newhouse of the same name. In 1912 he became aCatholic and took up etching seriously,becoming a leader in the British etching revival,“the most important etcher who followed in thePalmer tradition” (K.M. Guichard, BritishEtchers, 1977). He produced a highly-wroughtbody of etched work, 57 prints technicallyunchallenged, depicting idealized Gothicbuildings and landscapes and suggesting an idyllof vanished dreams, vividly realized, evoking“silences of noons”, haunted by a hidden god,almost dehumanized.

He executed some architectural design work,mainly in and around Chipping Campden. Hewas an early champion of the cause ofconservation: an executive member of theNational Trust, the SPAB and the Council forthe Preservation of Rural England (whoseletterhead he designed). He founded theCampden Trust in 1929 with Norman Jewsonand others and did much to preserve the townand area, in particular Dover’s Hill, which hesaved from development in 1926. There is anextensive collection of his prints and drawings atOwlpen.

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¶ Gimson’s cottage at Sapperton by F.L. Griggs

Ernest GimsonGimson was born in Leicester in 1864, the son ofJosiah Gimson, engineer. He attended a lectureby William Morris in Leicester in 1884, andMorris recommended him to the architecturalpractice of J.D. Sedding in London. FromSedding he derived his interest in crafttechniques, the stress on textures and surfaces,naturalistic detail of flowers, leaves and animals,always drawn from life, the close involvement ofthe architect in the simple processes of buildingand in the supervision of a team of craftsmenemployed, as at Owlpen, direct. He met ErnestBarnsley at Sedding’s, and soon learnt the craftsof chair-making and plasterwork.

In 1889 he joined Morris’s SPAB. In 1890, hewas a founder member of the short-livedfurniture company, Kenton and Co., with SidneyBarnsley, Alfred Powell, W.R. Lethaby, MervynMacartney, Col. Mallet and Reginald Blomfield.Here they acted as designers rather thancraftsmen and explored inventive ways ofarticulating traditional crafts, “the common factsof traditional building”, as Philip Webb, “theirparticular prophet”, had taught.

Gimson and the Barnsleys moved to theCotswolds in 1893 “to live near to nature”. In

1900 he set up a small furniture workshop inCirencester, moving to larger workshops atDaneway House, at Sapperton, in 1902, wherehe stayed until his death in 1919. He strove toinvigorate the village community and,encouraged by his success, planned to found aUtopian craft village. He concentrated ondesigning furniture, made by craftsmen, underhis chief cabinet-maker, Peter van der Waals.

His architectural commissions include anumber of early works in and around Leicester,such as Inglewood (1892), The White House(1898), Lea and Stoneywell Cottages (andothers) at Markfield (1897/8); his own cottage,The Leasowes, at Sapperton (1903, with athatched roof, since burnt); Bedales Schoolmemorial hall and library; alterations to PinburyPark (with plasterwork) and Water Lane House(1908); cottages and the village hall (built underNorman Jewson in 1933) at Kelmscott; a cobhouse, Coxen, at Budleigh Salterton, Devon; andthe window for Whaplade Church, Lincolnshire.His architectural style is “solid and lasting as thepyramids… yet gracious and homelike” (H.Wilson, 1899).

Lethaby described him as an idealistindividualist: “Work not words, things notdesigns, life not rewards were his aims.” AsGimson stated in a correspondence preserved atOwlpen: “Life is commensurate with the numberof beautiful impressions that can be squeezedinto it. Let us have as many as we can.”

Ernest BarnsleyHe was born in Birmingham in 1863 into afamily of builders who (like the Manders) hadbeen japanners and varnish manufacturers. Hewas articled to J.D. Sedding, where he metGimson. He practised as an architect inBirmingham and later joined his brother, Sidney,and Gimson, in the Cotswolds. Jewson describeshis more urbane and hospitable character as a bonvivant and conversationalist. He made furniturein partnership with Gimson until 1905, when,after a quarrel, he turned to architecture in theCotswolds and for the SPAB. He converted hisown cottage at Upper Dorvel in Sapperton, with

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a three-story tower block loosely modelled onthat at Daneway, today the most attractive of thegroup’s houses. Rodmarton Manor was his mostimportant work, occupying him from about1912 until his death in 1926. It contains acollection of associated furniture and fittingswhich make it one of the great monuments tothe Sapperton group and the Arts and Craftsmovement.

Sidney BarnsleyHe was born in 1865 in Birmingham andarticled to Norman Shaw, a pioneer of the ‘OldEnglish’ vernacular revival who emphasised thesubtleties of craft detailing. He travelled inGreece in 1888 with R. Schultz-Weir to studyByzantine styles, in 1901 publishing together astudy of the church at Daphne. He designed ascholarly neo-Byzantine church at LowerKingswood, Surrey.

After the failure of Kenton and Co. in 1892, hemoved to the Cotswolds with Gimson, whom hehad met through his brother, Ernest. Jewsondescribes how he lived by high ideals, to theextent that “austerity was almost a religion”; he

preferred to make his furniture entirely on hisown, without assistance, rather than to designfor other craftsmen. His work is accordingly rareand Owlpen has a representative collection of hisvarious styles. He did not believe in delegatinghumble and unpleasant tasks to others; so that,Jewson wrote, “a great deal of his time was takenup by gardening and sawing and splitting woodfor the winter fires.”

His work as a cabinetmaker is of the higheststandard. He was an innovator in design, layingdown the principles of the ‘Sapperton’ style inthe years 1893–1900. His designs are lesselaborate and spindly than Gimson’s maturework, perfect in workmanship, subtle, almostShaker in their unremitting simplicity.

His architectural commissions includedBeechanger (for himself), Combend Farm (forAsa Lingard), St Loe’s (1911; for the artists,Henry Payne, who painted Owlpen, and his wifeEdith), and work at the memorial library atBedales School and at Rodmarton Manor, whichhe took over on Gimson’s and Ernest Barnsley’sdeaths respectively, until he himself died ninemonths after Ernest on 26 September 1926.

¶ The Sapperton Group at Pinbury, c. 1896.From left to right: Sidney Barnsley, Lucy Morley, Ernest Gimson (seated),Alice and her husband Ernest Barnsley, and their two daughters, Mary,who later married Norman Jewson, and Ethel.

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S e l e c t B i b l i o g r a p h yFamily HistoryDaunt, The Rev. John, Some Account of the Family of

Daunt, Newcastle, 1881; Scarborough, 1899Livro de Ouro de Ricardo Gumbleton Daunt, São Pãolo,

1918Mander, Sir G. Le M. (ed.), The History of Mander

Brothers, n.d. [1955]Mander, C. Nicholas, Varnished Leaves, 2004Wightwick Manor, National Trust Guide, 1993 (1973

ed. by James Lees-Milne)

ArticlesCountry Life, January 11 1913, 9; vol. 39, 302; vol. 51,

212; vol. 96, 328; vol. 111, 303Eberlein, H.D., ‘Owlpen Manor House, Gloucester-

shire’, The Architectural Forum, July and August 1927,185

Hussey, Christopher, ‘Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire’,Country Life, vol. 110, Nov. 2 1952, 1460, and Nov. 91952, 1544

Mander, C.N., ‘Owlpen Manor’, Interiors, March 1985————,’Owlpen Manor: interpreting the smaller

country house to the public’, Looking Forwards, ed. P.Burman and L. Schmidt, CD-ROM, 2001, 137-47

————, ‘Painted Cloths: History, Craftsmen andTechniques’, Textile History, vol. 28, no. 2, Autumn,1997, 119-48

————, ‘A movable feast of Painted Cloths’, CountryLife, Sept. 18 2003, 132–6

————, ‘Wightwick Manor and the Creation of theHouse Beautiful’, Architecture 1900, ed. P. Burman,Dorchester: Donhead, 1998

————, ‘The gardens at Owlpen Manor,Gloucestershire’, Garden History Society Newsletter, no.42, Winter, 1994, 23–6

Matley Moore, E., ‘The Painted Cloths of OwlpenManor, Gloucestershire’, Country Life, August 25 1944

Matley Moore, F.E., ‘Painted Cloths’, Transactions of theWorcester Archaeological Society, 3rd series, vol. 8, 1982

Musson, Jeremy, ‘Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire’,Country Life, vol. 194, no. 39, Sept. 28 2000, 106-11

[Tipping, H. Avray], “Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire”,Country Life, vol. 20, October 6 1906, 486

Transactions of the Bristol and GloucestershireArchaeological Society, vol. 35, pt. 1, 1912 et seq.

BooksBatsford, H., and Fry, C., Homes and Gardens of

England, 1932Comstock, F.A., A Gothic Vision: F.L. Griggs and his

Work, Oxford and Boston (U.S.A.), 1966, 1978Cooke, R., West Country Houses, Bristol, 1957

Cornwall, Rev. A.G., Extracts from the Reminiscences ofRev. Alan Gardner Cornwall 1798-1842, Devizes, n.d.

Delderfield, E.R., West Country Historic Houses and theirFamilies: vol. 3: the Cotswold Area, Newton Abbot,1973

Dichfield, P.H., The Manor Houses of England, 1910Drury, Michael, Wandering Architects, Stamford: Shaun

Tyas, 2000, 77-85Jekyll, Gertrude, and Weaver, Lawrence, Gardens for

Small Country Houses, 3rd. ed., revd, 1914Jellicoe, G.A., Gardens of Europe, 1937Jellicoe, G.A., and Shepherd, J.C., Gardens and Design,

1927Jewson, Norman, By Chance I Did Rove, 1951, 1973 and

1986————, The Little Book of Architecture, Oxford, 1940Kingsley, Nicholas, The Country Houses of Gloucestershire,

vol. 1, pp. 142-4, Cheltenham, 1989Kingsley, Nicholas and M. Hill, The Country Houses of

Gloucestershire, vol. 3, pp. 200-2, Chichester, 2001Lees-Milne, James, Some Cotswold Country Houses,

Wimborne, 1987Lycett Green, Candida, Country Life: 100 Favourite

Houses, 1999 [with chapters on Owlpen andWightwick]

Mander, N., Verity, S., and Wynne-Jones, D., NormanJewson, Architect: 1884-1975, Cirencester, 1987

Pagan, H.E., Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire, 1966,revised 1975

Rudder, Samuel, A New History of Gloucestershire,Cirencester, 1779

Sackville-West, Vita, English Country Houses, Collins,1941

Smyth, J., The Berkeley Manuscripts, ed. Sir J. Maclean,Gloucester, 1883-5

Tinniswood, Adrian, The Arts and Crafts House , MitchellBeazley, 1999, pp. 41, 66-9

Tipping, H.A., English Homes: Period III, vol. 1: LateTudor and Early Stuart 1558-1649, 1929

———, English Renaissance Homes, 1912Verey, D.C.W., The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire:

The Cotswolds (series ed. N. Pevsner), 1970 (3rd ed.,revised A. Brooks, 1999)

ManuscriptsGloucester Records Office: D.456 (Owlpen Manorial

Records) and D.979 (records of Daunt and Stoughtonfamilies of Owlpen)

Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, case file,1912-26

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I m p r e s s i o n s o f O w l p e n“A garden house more than anything else …carefully and reverently preserved… We may go along way before we find anything so quaint as thisold house, making its brave fight againstconsuming Time. . . There is surely an enduringcharm in such a garden . . . a pleasaunce of terracesand clipped yews, of woodland and distant views –a true old garden of England.”H. A. TIPPING, 1906

“Among little hillside gardens treated in a formalfashion, none is more delightful than that ofOwlpen Manor… with what modesty the housenestles against the hillside and seeks to hide itselfamidst regiments of yews.”GERTRUDE JEKYLL, 1914

“Owlpen Manor House … hidden away in the deepcountry … [although] comparatively small,possesses a great presence, the house and gardenbound together so that they form a single entity…and the fabric … practically unchanged since thetime it was built [in 1616]. The garden in which[it] is set … is one of the finest and most satisfyingthings of its kind anywhere to be found.”HAROLD EBERLEIN, 1927

“Not for the most explicit of Ordnance Mapswould I have forgone the folk directions given asfollows: ‘You must go along the green and down thehill by Fiery Lane until you come to Cuckoo Brook,then a little further on you will pass Horn Knep,after which you will go by Dragon’s Den; next yougo through Potlid Green; after that is Marling’sEnd, and that will bring you to Owlpen, but youmust take care not to miss the road.’ “To Owlpen I came … to the end of the world,a very secret place, where a small manor and a smallchurch are screened by an abrupt, wooded conicalhill at their backs and a massed guard of trainedyews in front. But in the winter, the many-gabledlittle manor is of so transparent a grey between thedusky shapes before and behind that it is owlishindeed in its seclusion, in its mysterious greynesswith the hill impending at its back and the softwater-meadows in front, and in the composure of abeauty that steals in so quiet a way upon the senses.

This rare Cotswold treasure…[was built] veryplainly and so sparingly of ornament that the slightdecoration at the apices of the gables are all that theeye picks out. It depends … upon line andproportion and the treatment of space… Howpompous and overgrown appear many anElizabethan and Jacobean mansion in comparisonwith the early Tudor of Owlpen whose architecturalcourtesy gently rebukes their over-bearingmanners!”H.J. MASSINGHAM, 1937

“Owlpen in Gloucestershire––ah, what a dream isthere! Owlpen, that tiny grey manor-house,cowering amongst enormous yews, yews that makerooms … dark secret rooms of yew hiding in theslope of the valley.”VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, 1941

“in one of the deepest of the valleys penetrating theCotswold escarpment . . . the vision [of Owlpen], isso out of the world that momentarily it seemsunreal, as if the descent from the wide plateau abovehad led one down out of time into the world oflegendary shades. . . long recognised as one of thetreasures of Cotswold scenery, [Owlpen] in itsincomparably romantic situation [is] a dream madereal, yet preserving, with all the substance of itsstructure and history, something of a dream's lovelyunreality.”CHRISTOPHER HUSSEY, 1951

“Of medieval origin, [Owlpen] has always beenconsidered one of the most picturesque manorhouses in the county… a nostalgic symbol foranyone who has known and loved this part of theWest of England and been separated from it duringthe world wars of this century. The drawings of F.L.Griggs . . . have given the romance visible andliterary form. Owlpen in its remote and beautifulvalley near the Severn estuary is the epitome ofromance.”DAVID VEREY, 1970

“By far the most perfect small Manor House, to me,in all of England.”FRANCIS COMSTOCK, 1976

I M P R E S S I O N S O F O W L P E N

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“The setting is unforgettable … shut off from thetwentieth-century world. All – manor house,outbuildings and church, against a backdrop ofwoods – are in stone and of a piece. There isnowhere quite like Owlpen in the Cotswolds or,indeed, anywhere else.”C.R. CROSHER, 1976

“Olla’s pen … a paradise on earth, steeped in peaceand timeless English beauty.”LEE PERSSON, 1983

“Owlpen’s secluded site in one of the deepestcombes of the Cotswold escarpment… The mainfront, its stone-tiled roof lines wonderfullyundulating, lacking any pretence of symmetry…yeta delight to witness, we admire on picturesquegrounds. Owlpen is traditional, dignified andillogically satisfactory. The interior is just asappealing … cherished and very much a home.”JAMES LEES-MILNE, 1985

“Owlpen … the epitome of the English village …Its character evolved through the slow passage ofcenturies of rural life.”HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES, 1989

“A breathtaking ensemble of truly English beauty.”HUGH MASSINGBERD, 1993

“Few English houses are more seductively beautifulthan this manor house of grey limestone, tuckedaway in a deep wooded valley.”GEOFFREY TYACK, 1994

“Owlpen … the most beautiful place in England.”FODOR’s Britain Guide, 2000

“Owlpen … elevated as a paradigm of the values ofEnglish civilisation.”SIMON JENKINS, 2003

¶ GARDEN PLAN drawn by Sydney R. Jones from Homes and Gardens of England by H. Batsford and C. Fry, 1932

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The Mander Family Tree (abridged)HENRY MANDER

(1601-1672)b. Tredington, settled Aston Cantlow, Warwks

m 1636 Anne Wheigham, of Aston Cantlow

SAMUEL(1648-1716)

of Lapworth Hall, Warwksm 1670 Mary Shakespeare, of Rowington, Warwks

ROBERT(1681-1749)

of Ireland’s Farm, Lapworthm 1708 Catherine Cotterell, of Bushwood Hall, Lapworth

THOMAS(1720-1764)

settled John St., Wolverhampton, as a merchant, post 1742m 1742 Elizabeth, dau. of Samuel Clemson, of Bridgnorth

BENJAMIN JOHN(1752-1819) (1754-1827)

baker and japanner, of Wolverhampton chemical mfr, of Wolverhampton, 1773 m 1776 Elizabeth Hanbury Read, m 1 1778 Esther Lea, of Kidderminster of Kidderminster

CHARLES BENJAMIN PARTON(1780-1853) (1785-1835)

varnish manufacturer, 1803 chemical mfr m 1 1812 Jemima Small, of Boston, Lincs

CHARLES BENJAMIN SAMUEL SMALL (1819-1878) (1822-1881) of The Mount (1862) of Glen Bank

founder partner in Mander Brothers 1845 founder partner in Mander Brothers 1845 m 1 1850 Sophia Weaver, of Chester m 1850 Mary Wilkes, of Wolverhampton

Sir CHARLES TERTIUS NEVILLE JACK SAMUEL THEODORE BENJAMIN HOWARD (1852-1929) (1862-1919) (1869-1927) (1853-1900) (1861-1912)

first baronet (1911) of The Mount builder of Wightwick Manor of Trysull Manor m 1882 Mary Le Mesurier, m 1879 Flora Paint, m 1892 Lilian Nelson, dau of H.N. Paint MP of Halifax, Canada sister of Mary Le Mesurier of Warwick

Sir CHARLES ARTHUR GERALD POYNTON Sir GEOFFREY LE MESURIER LIONEL (‘MILES’) (1884-1951) (1885-1951) (1882-1962) (1894-1950) of Kilsall Hall, Salop of The Dippons, Tettenhall Wood of Wightwick Manor actor and novelistm 1913 Monica Neame, m 1913 Nancy Hargreaves, m 1 1906 Florence Caverhill m 1 Princess Prativa of of Kent of Knightley, Staffs m 2 1930 Rosalie Glynn Grylls Cooch Bihar

Sir CHARLES MARCUS PHILIP FITZGERALD MERVYN C. JOHN G. G. (b 1921) (1915-1972) (1910-1978) (1932-1978) of Little Barrow, Glos of The Folley, Bridgnorth of Jersey, C.I. of Islington

m 1945 Dolores Brödermann, m 1942 Priscilla Waller m. twice, dsp of Hamburg

CHARLES NICHOLAS FRANCIS PETER PATRICK OLIVER NICHOLAS M. (b 1950) (b 1952) (1951-1982) (b 1943)of Owlpen Manor, Glos m 1990 Georgina Thring, m 1978 Gabrielle Weaver m 1986 Maria García, m 1972 Karin Norin, of Alford, Somerset of Madrid of Stockholm

LUKE FREDDIE(b 1994) (b 1996)

CHARLES MARCUS BENEDICT HUGO FABIAN SARRA(b 1975); m Claire Wylie (b 1977) (b 1981) (b 1987) (b 1973); m Stephen Earl

THEODORA (b 2004) SASKIA (b 2004)

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¶ Plan of the garden drawn by Gertrude Jekyll,from Gardens for Small Country Houses, 1914