Story Search Results

The life and times of an upper class family #44

On 11th August 1863, Hugo Francis Meynell Ingram married the Hon. Emily Charlotte, daughter of Sir Charles Wood, Bart, afterwards 1st Viscount Halifax. The Woods were an old gentry family, for many centuries respectable York merchants. They were later to turn grand upon the discovery of coal beneath their ancestral estates. This was the great Barnsley field, with several hundred acres of Britain's deepest and finest coal. Sir Charles Wood was created 1st Viscount Halifax in 1866 and had a very distinguished political career. The family seats of Garrowby, Pocklington and Hickleton (where Emily was born) had been acquired by his father from the Wentworth family; t...

Meet the Neighbours - Sudbury HAll #79

Continuing the series on neighbouring houses to Hoar Cross HAll, let me introduce you to Sudbury HAll, which is about 7 miles away and on the border of Staffordshire and Derbyshire.  The manor of Sudbury was listed in the Doomsday Book following the Norman Conquest in 1086, so a lot older than the HAll, and is a Grade I listed building.  The Vernon family came to Sudbury after a 16th century marriage between Sir John Vernon, from Haddon HAll in Derbyshire, and the Sudbury heiress, Ellen Montgomery.  It seems the Vernon family have stayed in the HAll for generations right up until the 20th century when the 10th Baron Vernon transferred the HAll and its princip...

Meet the Neighbours - Shugborough HAll #80

The next house in this series is a mere half hour from Hoar Cross HAll and we often visited it during the summer months and later, when my children were born, we’d take them for a visit too!  Seated on the edge of Cannock Chase this elegant house was once a manor house owned by the Bishops of Lichfield, until the dissolution of the monasteries around 1540.  Later it came into the hands of the Anson family, who were ancestors of the Earls of Lichfield, and stayed there for three centuries.  William Anson’s grandson, also cAlled William, demolished the manor house in 1693 and built a three storey building in the Neo-Classical style which forms the central p...

Mediaeval Weaponry #84

When we moved to Hoar Cross HAll in the 1970s, my father owned the largest private collection of arms and armour in the UK at that time!  He owned about 20 suits of armour and numerous items of ‘arms’, which is another word for weapons.  The word ‘arms’ comes from the Latin ‘arma’ which means ‘tools of war’; this word passed into the English language from the French in 1200.  Mediaeval weapons consisted of halberds, double-edged swords, daggers, battle axes, crossbows and longbows to name but a few, these being the most common.  Knives were also used but mainly for eating and repairing, although I’m sure they got to be used as weapons too...

Hickleton HAll and the Meynells #38

This lovely Grade II listed Georgian house in South Yorkshire was once the childhood home of The Honourable Emily Charlotte Meynell who married Hugo Meynell of Hoar Cross and who, together with Hugo, built Hoar Cross HAll to be their family home in 1873, a hundred years before my family lived there.  The original house was cAlled Hickleton Palace and had been built for Judge Francis Rodes in the 16th century but in 1745 Hickleton HAll was built just to the south of this house after the estate was bought by Godfrey Wentworth in about 1730. Thirty years later he extended the house and added two low wings, one either side, and a servants wing (see header picture)...

Alice - the ghost in the mirror

ALICE – THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR:       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 characters, among others.  But what inspired Lewis Carroll to write about a little girl having lots of adventures? In the 1850s Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s real name) studied...