Rougham Hall Tour

Today we joined a tour of the ruined Rougham Hall.

This was the listing....

Joyce asked if we were interested and I said yes so we booked tickets... and then a number of other members of the walking group did too. We were led by George Agnew, great grandson of George William Agnew who bought the hall and estate in 1904. He told us all about the history, which you can read about on the Rougham Estate website here, and his narrative followed that quite closely. The text in italics accompanying the pictures below is abridged and adapted from that website.

Here are a few of my photos.

We met in Roots café at Blackthorpe Barn.

Dawn and I didn't see any familiar faces at first, but that's because they were at a big table in an alcove round the corner.

We assembled outside as 10:30 approached and George counted off the names on his list. It was a bit drizzly throughout the tour and I was glad of my umbrella at times.

We took a path through the woods rather than the direct route as it was more interesting. George told us about the history of the estate at a couple of stops through the wood.

The audience listening in.... Here we were being told about the early history of the estate from the time of the Romans when it was on the route north from Colchester. The Saxon noble Ulfketel earl of East Anglia in the late tenth century gave the manor of Rougham to the newly formed abbey of Bury St Edmunds.  After the dissolution of the monasteries the manor passed to the Drury family and then, after the Civil War the estate was split and passed to the Davers family and Roger Kerington, who  had a new glamorous hall built at the heart of the estate in the years following the restoration of Charles 11 around 1680. The family name later changed to Kedington and the estate was reunited under Roger Kedington in the years around 1790. 

We heard more about this colourful character.... Roger Kedington was a vicar and had three wives and a mistress (only one wife at a time). Disappointed at not being made a bishop, he spent his energies on enlarging and reuniting the Rougham Estate and looking after his wives and mistress. When feeling in playful mood he would move in with his mistress Sarah Balls whom he called his shepherdess in a house built on the other side of the road from the hall which he called the Cottage. This cottage boasted its own icehouse and was quite spacious. At other times he returned across the road, put on his clerical robes and rejoined which ever wife  he had on the go at the time. He only had one legitimate child, a daughter called Jane Judith. 

We crossed the A14...

...and passed the cottages built on the site of Sarah Ball's cottage.

A big flock of geese huddled together in the drizzle.. Can you see the turkeys on the far side of the field?

Kedington died in 1818. His heir was his daughter Jane Judith and her husband, Philip Bennet from Essex. Philip was eager to spend his new found wealth on building a new hall, to the north of the main road under the direction the of the fashionable architect Thomas Hopper who also did work for the Prince Regent at Carlton House in London. 

We set out along the circular drive (about which more anon).

Here we turned off the drive into the "pleasure grounds" on a path that took us to the hall.

We have lived nearby for 25 years and never knew this existed.

The remains of the hall are fenced off as they dangerously unstable and can be visited only on tours like this.

The separate building with the clock tower is still lived in.

Once we were all inside the fence and in front of the building, George continued the story.

During the nineteenth century four generations of Philip Bennet lived at Rougham. They eventually sold the estate in 1893 to James Johnstone the owner of the London Evening Standard newspaper who gave it to his son Edwin for his 21st birthday present. Edwin and his wife Marion stayed for only 11 years but during that time they made huge changes to the estate, building cottages and houses, placing a clock on the stumpy tower of the gatehouse, building a generator house for the hall so supplying it with electricity and hot water. He didn’t forget the village community for whom he built a reading room where people could sit in the warm, read the papers and drink tea and he provided a large modern organ from Rougham Church which is still in use today. He had the hall gardens redesigned by George Paul the famous rose grower and designer who also redesigned the driveways into a circular shape to make the approach to the hall take longer. Then suddenly the newspaper that was paying for it all got into trouble and in 1904 the estate had to be sold again.

This time it was bought by George William Agnew, who had made his money as an art dealer in London, selling English paintings to the hugely rich industrialists of northern England and then to the even richer American industrialists from across the Atlantic. He immediately had the hall enlarged, which sounds a strange thing to do, but that hall had few bathrooms and toilets and limited bedrooms. The Johnstone family had no children, whilst George William had seven, all reaching marriageable age. Indeed it was the father-in-law of one of these who designed the extension, turning what was a glorified bachelor pad into a family home.

In September 1940 the Second Wold War was under way and Britain was on invasion alert. The park at Rougham Hall contained a munitions dump and a number of troops were camped in the park, largely to guard these vital supplies. There were armed guards on the gates, barbed wire and lots of comings and goings. It would not have been hard to mistake all this activity for signs of a military headquarters being set up. This is probably the message that reached Berlin because on the night of Monday 23 September 1940 a single bomber flew over Rougham Hall, dropping flares for a few minutes, before it dropped a bomb straight through the centre of the house and it exploded down in the cellar. 

One whole wing of the house vanished but miraculously no one was hurt. The butler, Mattins, was having his night off as it was a Monday. It was his job to wake the house in the event of an air raid. In his absence no one else felt that they had the authority to wake the house. Had he been there the standard procedure was for everyone to go down into the cellar, which was precisely where the bomb fell. They would almost certainly all have been killed. 

The night after the bombing, the English language radio broadcast from Berlin given by William Joyce, (Lord Hawhaw) is supposed to have said that the house of the richest Jew in Britain had been bombed the night before. Rushbrooke Hall in the neighbouring village was owned by the Rothschild family and it is possible that the Germans thought that they lived at Rougham rather than Rushbrooke. 

Following the bombing, life at the hall came to a grinding stop. Sir George, now aged 89 went to stay with family in Thurston and the hall lay open to the elements. It remains a ruin to this day.

This building is the hall's electricity generator house.

The coats of arms on this Oriel window are from Jane Judith's side of the family, maybe indicating she was the one with the money and influence.

The red brick used for the building was made locally and is known as Rougham Red.

Inside is quite a mess.

These metal beams are probably what is stopping the structure from collapsing completely.

The crater left by the bomb.

You can still see an upstairs fireplace.

We left the ruins behind...

...and headed to the site of the former rose garden built by George Paul.

The hedging has been left to grow into trees, but you can still see the lines of the hedge.

George said they are planning to leave it that way as it is rather atmospheric and in keeping with the Gothic nature of the ruins. I'm inclined to agree.

Then it was to the start crossing the A14 again...

...and returning to the barn.

Many thanks, George for the fascinating tour and great stories about the history of the estate and hall.

Alas there was a 50 minute wait at Roots café for a table so Dawn and I returned hope, while others went to the Ice restaurant on the local industrial estate.

Thanks Joyce for the suggestion and to the others who came along for the company.

You can find some more of my photos today here on Flickr.

You can read more about the history of the hall in this document. Another site, Lostheritage.co.uk also has some of the story, but is a little inaccurate. But does include a wonderful video of drone footage of the hall...