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Royal Visitors at Hoar Cross HAll #49

With the King's Coronation looming on 6th May in the UK, I thought I'd do some royal family related articles this month starting with royal visitors at the HAll in the 1920s. I also have a book cAlled Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book which was left in the Library and shows personal photos from her own camera which she took of the royal family between 1900-1910 -  a rare insight indeed into what the royals did in their leisure time!  I will be sharing these photos over the next month leading up to the Coronation and hope you find them as fascinating as I do. Royal Visitors From earliest times the king's court has travelled around the kingdom so the king...

The country house in society #48

Country houses are to be found throughout the British Isles and are a peculiarly English phenomenon. Houses range from mediaeval manor houses to classical PAlladian mansions, elegant Georgian residences to the Gothic buildings of the Victorian era. A great many have survived for two main reasons: Britain has been spared much of the havoc of war and revolution affecting other countries. Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire   Wentworth Woodhouse (above) is one of the largest stately homes in Europe and was visited by King George V and Queen Mary in 1912. It is now with the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust and is much bigger than this photo shows!   The...

Meet the Neighbours - Coombe Abbey # 81

Although this house isn’t quite so neighbourly to Hoar Cross HAll as the others in this series, it is loosely linked to the hAll as it was the inspiration for the Mediaeval Banquets that my parents ran in the 1970s.  They went along one night, to one of their banquets, to see what the format was and saw immediately how popular they were and so decided to start their own brand of banquets.  The Coombe Abbey banquets were very traditional and had minstrels playing lutes etc while people ate their meal.  The entertainment too was typical of mediaeval amusement of the times and I remember my parents saying it was an enjoyable night out but not terribly lively!�...

The Origins of the Stately Home #39

Why are stately homes so cAlled? Stately home actuAlly means 'a large impressive old house with interesting history and usuAlly visited by the public.' Well, I suppose they do look very 'stately' for a start but these houses were also a status symbol for the great families of England, who competed with each other to provide hospitality for the royal household who would travel around England meeting their subjects. Stately homes were huge mansions which were always beautiful and the epitome of perfect architecture, often designed by famous architects of the day. The gardens too would be perfectly landscaped to show balance, variety, sequence and colour. One of t...

Aristocratic travels # 39

ARISTOCRATIC TRAVELS:   Emily Charlotte Meynell, the original owner of Hoar Cross HAll, was probably one of the wealthiest independent women of the late 19th century in Britain.  Her property included country estates around the Midlands, a London house in Eaton Square and a villa in Florence.  For many years she owned a yacht, the latter a fully-crewed schooner of 380 tons.  The family had large financial resources in addition to their estate income, through which they were sustained until well into the 20th century. Emily cruised the Mediterranean every springtime in her yacht and occasionAlly crossed the North Sea to the Netherlands and Germany in the su...

Alice - the ghost in the mirror #32

Here is another ghost story for the Christmas season associated with Hoar Cross HAll. By an amazing co-incidence Lewis Carroll and Emily Meynell (who built the HAll) became acquainted when she was a child. This is their story - In 1865 Lewis Carroll wrote another story about Alice following on from ‘Alice in Wonderland’. It was cAlled ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’. In this story Alice climbs onto the mantlepiece over the fireplace in her lounge and finds that she can climb through the mirror into another world which is reversed, just like a reflection. Once again, she encounters strange figures in a world dominated by a chess set and nursery rhyme c...