Danny House Book

Transcription

Danny House Book

D anny H ouse
A Sussex Mansion through Seven Centuries
D anny H ouse
Danny from the north-east, 2012.
A Sussex Mansion through Seven Centuries
Colin and Judith Brent
Phillimore
Contents
2013
Published by
PHILLIMORE & CO. LTD
Andover, Hampshire, England
www.phillimore.co.uk
© Colin and Judith Brent, 2013
ISBN 978-1-86077-738-7
List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Illustration Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Introduction: Danny in Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
1. Danny Lodge: The Pierpoints, the Dacres and their Great Deer Park, 1239-1582. . . 1
2. George Goring: Courtier, Builder and Embezzler, 1582-94. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3. Danny Saved and Lost: Three George Gorings, 1594-1653. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4. Danny Truncated: Two Peter Courthopes, 1653-1725 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5. Danny in Shadow: A ‘Sanguine’ Jacobite and his Depressive Son, 1725-78. . . . 47
6. Henry Courthope Campion: Arcadia and Affliction, 1778-1811 . . . . . . . . . . . 63
7. William and Jane: The Bountiful Squire, 1811-55 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
8. William and Harriet: Castanets and Cottage Visits, 1855-69 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
9. William and Gertrude: Local and Imperial Service, 1869-1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
10. The Mansion, The Park and The Gardens, 1869-1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
11. The Great War, The PM and his ‘Darling Pussy’, 1914-18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
12.Sir William and Katherine: Gold Mines, Revels and World War, 1919-47 . . . 131
13. Danny Transformed: Private Schools and Stylish Retirement, 1947-2004. . . . 141
14. Danny Relaunched, 2004-12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
v
1 Danny House amid its fields in 1666.
List of Illustrations
1. Danny House amid its fields in 1666. .. .. .. .. .. .. vi
2. The Danny Estate in 1939. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
3. Danny House below Wolstonbury Hill in 1888. . .xvi
4.Scouts guarding the pyre in 1935. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. xvii
5. Roofscape below Wolstonbury. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xviii
6. Hamper’s plan of the Roundel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xix
7. Wolstonbury and Wilcombe Farm in 1666. .. .. . xx
8. Danny and its locality in the 1920s. .. .. .. .. .. . xxii
9. Danny residents on Wolstonbury in 2011. . . . . xxiii
10. The Great Park, Randalls and Hatches,
George Goring’s Little Park and the New Way . .xxiv
11. The pillow mound in Sandfield. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 2
12.An ancient oak in the former Great Park. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
13. The ‘wood of Daneghithe’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
14. The cross-legged knight in chain armour. . . . . . . . . . .4
15. The knight encased in defensive gear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
16. Herstmonceux Castle in 1776. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
17. The double-portrait of Lady Dacre
and her son Gregory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
18. The survey of 1582 . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 8
19. Brickwork adorned with a diaper pattern. .. .. .. .. 9
20. The north wing. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 9
21. The fireplace in the kitchen. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .10
22.Aerial view of Danny from the south-east . . . . . . . 12
23.A pedigree of the Gorings of Lewes
and Danny. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..14
24. The carved woodwork preserved
at Pelham House Hotel. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .15
25.Eastern front of the mansion. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..15
26.Elizabethan mansions in Sussex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16-17
27. Gables and busts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
28. Ground-floor plan of Danny in 1725. .. .. .. .. .. .19
29. The three turrets of the north range . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
30. ‘The Great Entrance’ in 1780. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .20
31. Plaster work in the luxury suite. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .21
32. The timber roof of the Great Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
33. The mansion, its entrance courts
and gatehouse in 1666. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
34. Danny Park on John Norden’s map
of Sussex. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
35. Colonel George Goring by Van Dyck . . . . . . . . . . . 26
36. Chimneypiece dated 1571. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
37. The broken effigies at Lewes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
38.A miniature of George Goring,
later Earl of Norwich . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .29
39. Louis XIII of France. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
40. Colonel Goring and the Earl of
Newport by Van Dyck. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
41.Sir William Campion by
Cornelius Jansen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
42. The armour of Sir William Campion . .. .. .. .. .. .34
43. Peter Courthope by Cornelius Jansen . . . . . . . . . . . 37
44.A pedigree of the Courthopes of
Cranbrook and Danny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
45. The mural tablet to Peter Courthope . .. .. .. .. .. .39
46. John Ray by an unknown artist. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .40
47.Sketches of snails, caterpillars and
wild flowers from Whitpaine’s map. .. .. .. .. .. .41
48. Peter Courthope’s achievement of arms. .. .. .. .. .43
49. Little Park Farm and carp pond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
50. The cartouche and title plate from
the 1907 pedigree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
51.A pedigree of the Campions of
Combwell and Danny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
52. Henry and Barbara Campion by unknown artist. . . 49
53. Charles I on trial in Westminster Hall. . . . . . . . . . . 50
54. The Apotheosis of Charles the Martyr. . . . . . . . . . . 51
55. The initials of Henry and
Barbara Campion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
56. The south elevation of the south wing. . . . . . . . . . . 53
57. The south wing from the south-east about 1820. . . 53
58. Capitals and pilasters on the south wing. . . . . . . . . 54
59. The sundial in the south garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
60. The staircase installed in the later 1720s. . . . . . . . . 55
61.A ground-floor plan of Danny as
remodelled in the later 1720s. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .56
62. Finely moulded roof-beams in the
south wing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
63.A barrel-vault in the cellar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
64. The great hall before 1871. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
65. The ‘chimney back’ in the Great Hall. .. .. .. .. .. .59
66. The coach house and the
Bowerbank fountain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
67. The south screen and the fireplace
in the Great Hall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
68. The estate map drawn by
Richard Budgen in 1783. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
69. Henry Courthope Campion by John Hoppner. . . 64
70.A remnant of garden wall by
Sandfield Pond. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..64
71. The sketch of the entrance court by
S.H. Grimm drawn in 1780. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
72. The ‘lawn’ and south wing sketched
by S.H. Grimm in 1782. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
73. The estate map drawn by William Figg
in 1826 . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .66
74. Danny and Wolstonbury Hill by H.F. De Cort. . . 68
75. The interior of the ‘plunge bath’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
76. The Carolina poplar in winter and summer . . . . . 69
77. William Campion attributed to
Sir Thomas Lawrence. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .70
78. The memorial to Priscilla Campion. .. .. .. .. .. .. .70
vii
viii
Danny House: A Sussex Mansion through Seven Centuries
79. Bridget Campion by John Hoppner. . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
80. The memorial window to William
and Jane Campion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
81. The Gothick ceiling in the
drawing room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
82.Archery in Danny Park about 1830 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
83. The Georgian fittings of the church . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
84. Memorial window to William Campion. . . . . . . . . . . . 82
85.A water-colour by Harriet Kemp of
Dale Park near Arundel. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .84
86. The Family dispersed across the east lawn . . . . . . . 85
87. The ‘new’ dining room. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
88. The dining room today . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .85
89. The Victorian library. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..86
90. The library today . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .86
91. The heraldic glass in the Great Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
92. William Bunney and two sons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
93. The altar piece in Hurst College chapel. .. .. .. .. .91
94. Colonel William Campion by Walter W. Ouless. .92
95. Walter Campion by M.E. Miller. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
96. Possibly Nanny Carter or the
Honourable Gertrude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
97. The Honourable Gertrude by George Richmond . .96
98. Kodak photographs of the Sudanese campaign . . . 98
99. The memorial window to Charles Campion. . . . . 99
100. William and his hounds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
101.A cage for hanging game. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
102. The Danny coach. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 103
103.A water-colour of the north wing
by Mary Campion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
104. The east front in the 1870s after the
removal of the oak. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
105. The grand central staircase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
106. The three carved heads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
107. The oak chimneypiece and the
Minton tiles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
108. The Great Hall today . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 108
109. The east end of the Victorian drawing room. . . . 109
110. The north-west corner of the drawing room. . . . 109
111. ‘The Danny Jewel’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
112. Grace Campion attributed to Peter Lely. . . . . . . . 110
113. The rustic gabled lodge . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 112
114. The sombre approach to the pond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
115.Sentinel elms along the drive . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 113
116. James and Caroline Bunney at their
gardener’s cottage. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 114
117. The garden laid out by ‘the wise lady’. .. .. .. .. .. 115
118. The east front by Thomas Cobb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
119.A new lawn mower proudly displayed. . . . . . . . . . 118
120. James Bunney and assistant. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 118
121. The horse-drawn fire brigade at Danny . .. .. .. .. 119
122. The tulip tree and the west front. . . . . . . . . . . . .120-21
123. Lloyd George and colleagues during
the Great War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
124.Edward Campion’s order to his
Seaforth Highlanders . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 124
125.Edward Campion’s trench map and case. . . . . . . . 124
126. The Armistice plaque in the great hall . . . . . . . . . . 127
127.Signatures and a paw mark in the
visitors’ book . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 128
128. Miss Frances Stevenson and
Lloyd George. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 129
129. Four generations of Campions in the
Great Hall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
130. The grave stone of Edward Campion . .. .. .. .. .. 132
131. William Campion by J. Henry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
132. Katherine Campion by P. Perrelet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
133. William’s uniform as Governor . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 134
134. Government House at Perth in
Western Australia. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 134
135.An estate ball at Danny House in the 1930s. . . . 135
136. The Danny Revels: the wedding
procession in the garden. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
137. The Danny Revels: wedding guests
on the terrace. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 137
138. Westminster boys in the billiard room. . . . . . . . . . 138
139.Simon Campion chatting with George Tupper. . . . 139
140. Helen Scott and her smiling staff . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 140
141.An auction in the Great Hall . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 142
142. Montpelier College football team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
143. Bowerbank’s discrete annexe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
144. Bowerbank’s ‘Jacobean’ dining-room. . . . . . . . . . . . 147
145. ‘Tudor’ leather shoes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
146. Richard Burrows and his
resident ram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
147.A garden party at Danny in 2007. .. .. .. .. .. 152-53
Acknowledgements
The involvement of the authors with the fascinating history of Danny House stretches
back several decades. Indeed in 1966, before her marriage, while still languishing as J.A.
Wooldridge, Judith compiled a catalogue of the Danny Archives, recently given to the
East Sussex Record Office by Simon Campion. But for his generosity, the documents
might well have been dispersed when the contents of the house were sold in 1984. Colin
in turn used them when researching his Georgian Lewes, published in 1994.
The authors would like to thank the many people who have helped to make this publication
possible. Richard Burrows, the owner of Danny House since 2004, has given it resolute
support, especially by seeking out expertise, illustrations and past inmates with stories
to tell. Ivar Graham, archivist and librarian at Danny House, entrusted to us materials
that he (and the late John Chidell) had garnered and arranged. Peter Campion loaned us
family photographs and papers, including a diary of the Omdurman campaign kept by
his great-uncle Edward. Juliet Clarke and Christopher Whittick researched documents
for us at the National Archives. Paul Stamper of English Heritage elucidated the deer park
and other landscape features. Ian Nelson and the Hurst History Study Group corrected
errors and extracted data from the formidable Borrer diary. Martin Williams mined for
us the archives of Hurstpierpoint College. Dr Florene Memegalos of the City University
of New York stiffened the story of the Earl of Norwich and his flamboyant son, Colonel
George. Barbara and David Martin checked our interpretation of their building survey
of Danny House. John Campbell supplied the framework for narrating the momentous
stay of Lloyd George, his ministers and his mistress in 1918.
For advice on specific points we are grateful to Stewart Angell (The Hurstpierpoint
patrol), Molly Beswick (brickwork), Emma and Katherine Campion (family history),
Jeremy Hodgkinson (Sussex iron masters), Dr Annabelle Hughes (Randalls), Brian Lodge
(the Canadians), Professor Maurice Howard (plasterwork), T.J. McCann (Sussex cricket),
Marjorie Penn (Francis Willughby), Sally Walker (Sussex Garden Trust), Roger White
(architectural features). We have drawn too on memories of their time at Danny House
recalled by John Duthie, John and Sally Grant, Anthony Harrison-Barbet, Audrey Holly,
Michael Smale and William Thomas.
For kindly supplying copies of documents, letters, maps, photographs, postcards,
paintings and drawings, we must thank Esther Bertram, Matthew Bristow (Victoria
County History/England’s Past For Everyone), the British Library, Jennie Burgess, Briony
Dessoutter, the East Sussex Record Office, Ian Hewitt, Charles Willis Fleming, Carole
ix
x
and Jon Lynskey, the National Archives, the National Monuments Record, the National
Portrait Gallery, the National Trust: Petworth House, Colin Prickett, Edward Reeves
photographers, John Sclater, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the
Sussex Archaeological Society, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the West Sussex Record
Office and Rendel Williams. We acknowledge, too, the permission of Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II to quote from material in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle and from
the Royal Collection Picture Library.
Illustration Acknowledgements
References to illustration numbers are in bold.
The authors and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce
their material. Any infringement of copyright is entirely accidental: every care has been
taken to contact or trace all copyright owners. We would be pleased to correct in future
editions any errors or omissions brought to our attention.
Anon. [William Smith Ellis], A History of Hurstpierpoint (1837) opposite p.17, 20
Anon., A short history of Government House (1980s), 134
Esther Bertram, 39, 53, 65, 77, 79, 91, 118 & front cover, 126, 132, 133, 147
Robert Willis Blencowe, ‘Extracts from manuscripts … at Danny and … Charlton House’,
Sussex Archaeological Collections, 10 (1858), opposite p.1, 86
Anthony Bower, 49
Colin Brent, 24b
British Library, 30, 71, 72, Addit. MS. 5672 ff. 31, 29, 30
Jennie Burgess, 116
Richard Burrows, 59, 66, 80, 88, 90, 93, 95, 99, 108, 125, 130
Peter Campion, 42, 98, 104, 109, 110
Country Style (the magazine of the Country House Association) number 2 (2000), 140
Danny House Collection (DHC), 4, 9, 22, 26a, 34, 39, 41, 53, 54, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70
(Frith HPP, 83), 76, 77, 79, 81, 87, 89, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 112, 113, 114,
115, 117, 118 & front cover, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 131 & front cover, 132,
133, 135, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 147
East Sussex Record Office, 1, 7, 33, 47, 48 DAN 2097, 2 ACC 8419/4, 16 ACC 9374,
18 DAN 1126 ff. 192-3, 28 DAN 2098, 50 DAN 6, 68 DAN 2103, 73 ADA 228/1,
85 AMS 6943/4/2, 124 DAN 488, 129 ACC 8419/13
William Smith Ellis, ‘Hurstpierpoint; its Lords and families’, Sussex Archaeological Collections,
11 (1859), pp.76, 77, 14, 15
Charles Willis Fleming, 64
Walter Godfrey, ‘A carved figure from Lewes’, Sussex Notes & Queries volume 2, p.21
(1928), 24a
William Hamper, Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1806, p.897, 6
Ian Hewitt, 103
xi
xii
T.W. Horsfield, The history and antiquities of Lewes and its vicinity (1824), volume 1,
plate 20, 37
T.W. Horsfield, The history, antiquities and topography of the county of Sussex (1835),
volume 2, facing p.244, 82
David and Barbara Martin, An Archaeological Interpretative Survey of Danny House,
Hurstpierpoint, Updated Report, Project Ref 3118 (2010), 19, plate 59, p.55; 29,
plate 7, p.19; 58, plate 9, p.20; 61, p.71
National Archives, 13 C66/242
National Portrait Gallery, 17 & front cover, 46, 123, 128
National Trust, Petworth House, 40 & front cover
J. Norris, Notes on the Church of the Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint, p.11, 83
Colin Prickett, 3
Edward Reeves, 52, 30385-6
Royal Collection, 38 RCIN 420106
John Sclater, 92
Sotheby’s Catalogue (2010), 35
Sussex Archaeological Society, 26 b c d e Baxter Collection 1063, LEWSA VR 1272,
1902, 1393; 57, Grangerised edition of T.W. Horsfield, The history, antiquities and
topography of the county of Sussex (1835)
The Tatler, 138, 139, number 2035, 26 June 1940
Victoria & Albert Museum, 111 M.97-1917
Victoria County History/England’s Past For Everyone (Matthew Bristow), 5, 11, 12, 21,
25, 27, 31, 32, 36, 45, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 63, 69, 75, 78, 80, 94, 97, 105, 106, 107,
112, 127, 131 & front cover, 143, 144, 145
Weiss Catalogue (2007), 43
West Sussex Record Office, 74 MPD 264
Nos 8 and 10, drawn by Esther Bertram, are based on Ordnance Survey Maps reproduced
by permission of Ordnance Survey on behalf of HMSO.
Preface
I was fortunate to be able to purchase Danny House in 2004 to provide a wonderful home
for my children, to take on the responsibility of conserving a beautiful historic building
and its environment, and to sustain a special community with its unique lifestyle. Visitors
often tell me that Danny is an all too rare part of what still makes England special. The
house breathes history, yet is comfortable, despite being about 420 years old. It is still
lived in and cherished by some 35 people and about 3,000 people each year come through
its doors to visit friends or to attend the many private parties and fund-raising events for
charity that the house hosts. Unlike other stately homes of England, you the reader could
one day make Danny your home, enjoy the benefits of having staff at your service, and
find it less expensive than the true cost of living in your current home. And by choosing
to live at Danny you would be helping to conserve part of England’s heritage.
Friend and archivist Heather Warne introduced me to Colin and Judith Brent in
2004 and they generously volunteered to write a history of Danny. The project entailed
five years of wide-ranging research, which, remarkably, was completed without their
having access to the internet. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with them and learned
much from the experience. I wish to thank them for what they have achieved – the first
comprehensive history of Danny.
This book will not only enable those of us who already love Danny to appreciate it all
the more, but will make Danny and its secrets more accessible to everybody. Ownership
of Danny carries a responsibility, and this book will help me and future custodians,
stakeholders and fellow owners, best conserve it for posterity.
Ian Nelson and the Hurst History Study Group have not only helped with the research
of this book, but have also generously donated half the cost of its publication. These funds
were raised from the sale of exemplary books which the Study Group itself compiled on
the history of its village and parish. This contribution is much appreciated.
Through revealing its history, I believe Danny can be best cared for and loved into
the future.
Richard Burrows
Danny House
xiii
2 The Danny estate in 1939.
Introduction:
Danny in Context
3 Danny House below Wolstonbury Hill in 1888: water-colour, artist unknown.
The visitor to Danny House leaves New Way Lane to follow the drive laid out for the
‘delight’ of the Cavalier Lord Goring. His grandfather bought the capacious manor of
Hurstpierpoint from Gregory Lord Dacre in 1582 and transformed its feudal hunting lodge
at Danny into a stately E-shaped mansion. But the Civil War brought the Cavalier financial
ruin. So in the early 1650s the manor was messily split up and sold. Peter Courthope, a
Kentish entrepreneur, acquired the mansion, 262 acres of the former hunting park, and
also adjacent Warren Farm in Pyecombe. The marriage of Peter’s great-granddaughter took
the mansion and its truncated estate in 1725 to Henry Campion, a Kentish landowner,
whose male descendants steadily expanded their landed acreage from 1778 till the 1870s
and hung onto most of this enlarged estate till 1983.
Lord Goring’s drive descends past ancient oaks and the site of the earliest known cricket
pitch in Sussex, to ornamental woodland first planted in the 1780s. The trees shroud Sandfield
Pond where clay for the now mellowed Elizabethan bricks of the mansion was dug. Beyond
the woodland the mansion comes memorably into view, serenely set below Wolstonbury
Hill with its twin copses long known as Campion’s Eyebrows. The topographer E.V. Lucas
saluted the ‘bold eminence’ in 1921 as perhaps the noblest in the South Downs, by virtue of
its isolation and conical shape. Generations of villagers in Hurst have admired it from their
Wealden ridge and instinctively climbed it when inspired to kindle a Bonfire and Rejoice.
After the Peace of Amiens in 1802 Henry Campion sent up faggots and ten cheeses. At the
coronation of George V in 1911 the kindling was delayed till aged Colonel William Campion
ambled up on his elderly hunter. At the Royal Jubilee in 1935 the pyre was closely guarded
at night by the First Hurst Scout Troop. From 1850 High Church pupils from Nathaniel
Woodard’s Hurst College also toiled up to sing a hymn
of praise on Ascension Day. And most momentously, in
October 1918, while assessing in Danny House President
Wilson’s Fourteen Points for an Armistice with Germany,
Prime Minister Lloyd George often ascended to drink in
its ‘mountain air’.1
A century or so earlier an unidentified Georgian poet
also extolled the view from the summit northward beyond
Danny House [‘the lord’s hall’] and far across the Weald:
4 Scouts guarding the pyre in 1935.
xvii
xviii
From whose fair brow
The bursting prospect spreads immense around;
And snatched o’er hill and dale, and wood, and lawn,
And verdant field, and darkening heath between,
And villages embosomed soft in trees,
Your eye excursive roams;
Wide stretching from the lord’s hall,
To where the broken landscape by degrees,
Ascending ends with Surrey’s hills.
The panorama also impressed the pioneer botanist, John Ray, an honoured guest at
Danny House in the 1660s, who cited it as evidence for the Wisdom of God embodied
in his Works of Creation.2
And one summer day in the 1880s the prospect from Wolstonbury delighted Richard
Jefferies, the great prose-poet of the Sussex scene:
You may lie on the grassy rampart, high up in the most delicate air – Grecian air, pellucid
– alone, among the butterflies, and the humming bees at the thyme, alone and isolated;
endless masses of hills on three sides, endless weald or valley on the fourth; all warmly lit
with sunshine, deep under liquid sunshine like the sands under the liquid sea, no harshness
of man-made sound to break the insulation amid nature, on an island in a far Pacific of
sunshine.
Unless of course village lads were bumping down the steep slopes on sledges and tin trays.3
Jefferies also observed that the massive Southdown rampart demarcated ‘two climates’,
a double England, two countries side by side. In early spring the chalk slopes, dipping
southwards towards the Channel, were still hard, harsh, flowerless almost grassless, bitter
5 Roofscape below Wolstonbury.
Introduction: Danny in Context
xix
and cold, whereas the woods and fields to the north, below the rampart, were already warm,
soft, with primroses and fern, willows budding and birds already busy: he had admired
them in the lanes about Danny, ‘that curious old mansion with its windows, reaching
from floor to roof ’. Indeed he daringly compared the scramble from Wolstonbury to
the scarp foot below with the descent from the Alps into Italy – ‘from harsh sea-slopes,
made dry with salt as they sow salt on razed cities that naught may grow, to warm plains
rich in all things’.
‘Rich’, though, was a roseate view of the sullen sour Wealden clays that spread northward
beyond a very narrow strip of fertile upper greensand along the scarp foot. Indeed, till the
turnpike trusts set to work in the 18th century, the usually sodden state of these Wealden
fields reinforced the heavy use made of the great east-west ‘highway’ along the Southdown
rampart which skirted the summit of Wolstonbury. John Ray’s opinion of the view was
recalled and endorsed by Gilbert White who admired it while riding from Selborne rectory
in Hampshire to visit his Aunt Tooke and her tortoise Timothy at Ringmer near Lewes. And,
like Ray and Jefferies, he admired the abundant Natural History – the ring-ousels crowding
the bushes near Devils Dyke one autumn, but gone the next; the sheep white-faced west
of Bramber bridge, black-faced to the east. As befitted its iconic status, the National Trust
bought Wolstonbury and the woodland fringe below from the Danny estate in 1990. Much
of it also became a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Thereabouts, too, in the 1860s the
great botanist, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin’s friend and co-researcher, gathered
orchids with Miss Mitten, a granddaughter of a butler at Danny and soon to be his wife.
From Neolithic times the chalk land of the South Downs sloping towards the sea was
the scene of intensive cultivation and settlement. Indeed, Wolstonbury itself was famed for
its Antiquities. In 1806 William Hamper supplied The Gentleman’s Magazine with a plan
of the Roundel on its summit, an ancient ‘camp’ with a ditch enclosing a tumulus. Some
place-name experts link this barrow to Wulfstan, a pagan Saxon war-lord now long-forgotten.
Sadly, by 1862 resolute digging for raw flints had destroyed the tumulus and the Roundel’s
south entrance. Some time earlier skeletons, ‘each with a warlike weapon by their side’, were
unearthed on the summit, along with Roman coins, broken shields, spurs, swords and ‘celts’ –
tools of flint and bronze. In 1929 the eminent Sussex archaeologist, Cecil Curwen, excavated
Romano-British pottery in a ditch which ran inside the bank and suggested to him it was
an Iron-Age enclosure for penning cattle or a hill fort of unusual design. However in 1984
Owen Bedwin speculated that the Roundel
had served as ‘a henge’ – an enclosure created
in the Bronze Age as a conspicuous site
for sacred ritual, and ringed perhaps with
wooden posts. So, maybe Lloyd George, that
famed ‘Welsh Wizard’, had sensed the vibes
from a Celtic sanctuary. A later survey in
1994 traced an earlier field pattern beneath
6 William Hamper’s plan in The
Gentleman’s Magazine.
7 Wolstonbury and Wilcombe
Farm mapped by Robert Whitpaine
in 1666.
xxi
‘the henge’. Older still were the fossils dug from a marl pit below Wolstonbury by a trainee
surgeon, Richard Weekes, including ‘a Nautilus as large as your head nearly’ – later, in
1845, he took the landowner, William Campion, to court over a locked door into the
rebuilt parish church.4
Though familiar to the villagers of Hurst, Wolstonbury, with the fertile arable fields on the
greensand at its base attached to Wilcombe Farm, formed the northern fringes of Pyecombe
parish. Indeed the isolation and conical shape of its northern bastion might explain the Saxon
place-name pic cumbe, if interpreted to mean ‘a valley’ dominated by ‘something that thrusts
itself forward’. Pyecombe itself was a Southdown parish with a village and church set high up
amid the chalk. Wilcombe Farm, annexed to the Danny estate about 1606, was depicted on a
marvellous map made by Robert Whitpaine in 1666, which also showed ‘Woollsenberry’ where
grazed a flock of 310 sheep belonging to Wilcombe Farm. Besides yielding wool and mutton,
the flock was valued for its manure. After the harvest the sheep were folded each night on
the stubble of the farm’s wheat and barley fields; serving as ‘a moving dunghill’, they fertilised
the soil before the autumn sowing. Whitpaine also sketched rabbits ignoring a huntsman to
invade the arable – a warren was recorded in 1662. Wolstonbury also abounded in chalk and
flints. Chalk was used to sweeten the sour acidic clays and sands of the Weald to the north.
Flints served to stabilise the atrocious ‘bottomless’ Wealden roads. Until New Way Lane was
laid out in the 1670s, carts carried chalk and flints past Danny House, though whether freely,
‘as of right’, was hotly disputed. Later on, the sprightlier inmates of Hurst workhouse were
marshalled up ‘the hill’ by their beadle to dig out the more promising flints – to the detriment,
already noted, of the Roundel and Wulfstan’s tumulus.5
Since Saxon times the union of a large sheep flock and of nearby wheat and barley fields
fertilised by its dung, as depicted by Whitpaine in 1666, had shaped the layout of Southdown
farms, whether on the high chalk as at Stanmer or on the scarp foot below as at Firle and Wiston.
This union in turn fixed the geography of the local manor and parish. Initially, strips within
the open fields were rotated among family farmers, who shared a communal flock, though
by the late 18th century enclosed farms were the rule. By then, too, family farms had usually
given way to larger-scale grain production for distant markets in London and overseas, which
grew ever more profitable from Tudor times. Intensive farming left no space for woodlands
or commons, or for any but essential craftsmen. This sheep-corn husbandry was widespread
across the chalk lands of England, until the drastic ploughing up of sheep pastures during the
Second World War. Increasingly it bred a race of prosperous yeomen, employing labourers
living-in. Their barns and buildings often clustered in the village street, close to a squire and
parson whose authority they found easy to accept. Their parishes had become classic ‘closed’
communities where order and stability reigned.6
Despite its Southdown backdrop and the inclusion of Warren Farm, the Danny estate
was rooted in the Low Weald. Initially the site of the mansion was a hunting lodge in
a 400-acre Great Park created by the Pierpoints on the southern edge of their massive
Wealden manor of Hurst. This they received after the Norman Conquest from William
of Warenne, the newly minted Lord of Lewes Rape. Being at least two miles wide and
nearly six miles long, Hurst manor roughly coincided with Hurst parish itself which
xxii
xxiii
It was a world, not of affluent sheep-corn yeomen, but of insecure peasants and small
holders, and of craftsmen exploiting local materials – tanners, glovers, brick makers,
charcoal burners and wood workers. Elsewhere in the Weald, from the 16th to the early
18th centuries, the smelting and forging of iron also flourished.
Wealden folk in general were more scattered, mobile and diverse than their affluent Southdown
neighbours solidly settled in compact sheep-corn communities, and were less amenable to
the authority of magistrates, squires and parsons. Quakers, Baptists, and then Methodists
flourished. And whereas from Tudor times the Southdown population stagnated, as family
farms gave way to larger, more efficient units, population in the Weald increased. Small-scale
livestock farming remained viable, craftsmen still plied their skills and incomers still settled
on commons and elsewhere. Indeed, Southdown farmers came to rely on Wealden labour to
gather in their bountiful grain harvests.8
Typically therefore, in Hurst parish, the number of inhabitants rose from 1,104 in 1801,
to 2,118 in 1841 and 2,827 in 1871. Hurst village, with its cross roads, church and rectory,
its blacksmiths and wheelwrights, builders and plumbers, grocers and shoemakers, alehouses
and inns, its Baptist and Methodist chapels, had long been the service capital of the sprawling
parish. Turnpike roads and the arrival of the railway at Hassocks in 1841 further stimulated
its commerce. Hundreds arrived by train en route to its Chinese Pleasure Gardens. Nathaniel
Woodard founded a High Church College. In the 1850s and 1860s a weekly cattle market
thrived. By then the acreage of the expanded Danny estate lapped the southern fringes of this
thriving village, though already for centuries the fortunes of both had been closely interlinked.9
8 Danny and its locality in the 1920s.
sprawled across 5,000 acres. The Great Park sloped down from a bridle path (still extant)
below Wolstonbury, then across gravels and sodden gault clay, to a disintegrating east-west
Roman road. Beyond it demesne lands sloped north up to the manor-house, the church
and village which crowned a low ridge, with an inspiriting view back to Wolstonbury
and the South Downs. Beyond the village the manor continued deep into the clays of
the Low Weald struggling on towards Twineham, Bolney and Cuckfield.7
These harsh Wealden sands and clays, sometimes water-logged, sometimes baked hard,
were never naturally fertile. They underpinned a tangled landscape of small fields, copses,
streams, scattered farmsteads, commons and twisting lanes – the product of a strenuous
piecemeal colonisation from Saxon times of ancient forest. The farms were usually small.
The husbandry focused on beef cattle, dairy cows and small crops of oats and wheat,
diversified by keeping pond-bred carp and, from Tudor times, by tending hop gardens.
9 Danny residents in 2011 enjoying the panorama from Wolstonbury.
1
Danny Lodge: The Pierpoints, the Dacres
and their Great Deer Park, 1239-1582
10 The Great Park, Randalls and Hatches, George Goring’s Little Park and the New Way.
By the mid-15th century the site of Danny House was occupied by a ‘lodge’, a base for
the hunting of deer within an encircling Great Park. Both the lodge and its Park lay in
the manor of Hurstpierpoint and were surveyed for Gregory Fiennes, Baron Dacre in
1569-70, along with a Little Park of 132 acres, alias the ‘Home Park’, which lay near the
former manor house and the parish church. In the Little Park grazed 18 stags, 80 young
deer and the Baron’s geldings; in its two-acre pond were 200 carp and tench ‘fit for the
lord’s house’. But by 1570 Danny Lodge was the Baron’s manorial as well as his hunting
base. Its Great Park of 409 acres lay a mile or so to the south of Hurst village, between an
old Roman road called Bedlam Street and the foot of Wolstonbury Hill. The soil of this
Park was mostly sodden infertile Gault clay, only fit for timber and rank pasture, though
its ponds, and the sluggish rills that gurgled towards the Washbrook stream, did refresh
the deer and any seasonal ‘guest’ cattle driven there. Forty stags and 260 ‘rascals’ [young
deer] grazed in 1570 and ‘40 couple of conies’ [rabbits] nibbled within a fenced warren.
A survey of the former Great Park made in 1582 for George Goring reveals that 120 acres
were devoted to ‘wood grounds thickly set with oaks, ashes and beeches of great bigness
and age’ – a shelter for the deer in winter and a haven for the does when fawning. The
other 289 acres (apart from the rabbit warren) were open pasture, described as ‘lawns
and other places thinly set with oaks and under woods’, with ‘maples, hazels, thorns etc’
– ‘Lawnes’ lingered as a field-name, west of Danny House, into the 18th century. These
open pastures were the setting for the ‘chase’ and for the kill, a sometimes solemn occasion
when carcases were ritually cut up and venison allotted according to social rank. On the
lawns the ladies could also admire the flight of the Baronial falcons. In 1582 the warren
was specifically located at ‘Sandhills’, probably the outcrop of light Folkestone clay on
the Park’s north-eastern fringe mapped in 1666 as Sandfield, where remains of a pillow
mound, once housing rabbits, survive.10
The Great Park itself was dismantled soon after 1570 and largely converted to agriculture.
But its boundaries can be retrieved, though its likely perimeter has left no clues on the
ground. In the mid-15th century timber from trees felled on the manor was used to make
‘pales, posts and rails’ to repair the fence pale of ‘the Home Park’ [The Little Park], whereas
thorns were cut down in ‘the park of Danye’ and used ‘to hedge the dykes of the same’.
So, it seems, an ephemeral barrier of thorns sufficed to reinforce the ditches defining the
Great Park. Fortunately most of the Park’s former boundary was described in 1670 by
elderly witnesses during a legal dispute about tithes. Decades earlier, ‘very ancient men’
1
2
11 The pillow mound in Sandfield.
had divulged to them that the pale on the east was ‘against’ the highway from Randidles
down to Stroods End [now New Way Lane], and then ‘against’ lands of the copyhold
called Dapps. (This boundary was used in 1675 when ‘the highway’ was extended south
to Dapps orchard – hence New Way Lane.) On its southern side the pale followed ‘the
whapple way’ [now a bridle path], ‘near the foot of the hill leading from Clayton to
Newtimber’, which was also Hurst’s boundary with Pyecombe – beyond it lay the corn
fields of Wilcombe below the slopes of Wolstonbury Hill. The pale then turned north
along the parish boundary with Newtimber, leaving ‘the copyholds of Newtimber manor’
to the west, until it veered east, then north, against ‘a piece of land called Randalls’. The
Luxfords had owned this 80-acre freehold and its 15th-century farmhouse since at least the
1590s and were keepers of the Park in the 1570s. So maybe this tenement, neatly filling
the gap between the Park perimeter and the boundary with Newtimber, had long been
the keeper’s allotted abode. Maybe, too, the keeper of the Park ‘gate’ had occupied the 20acre copyhold, north of Randalls, called Hatches, which faced across Bedlam Street to the
road coming south from the original manor house by the church. ‘Hatch’ is derived from
the Old English haece, meaning a
gate to a paled enclosure; hence
Chuck Hatch was a ‘creaking gate’
to Ashdown Forest.11
The elderly witnesses in 1670
omitted, though, to describe
the Park boundary between
Randalls and the ‘highway’ near
Randidles, now New Way Lane.
But this stretch is shown on Robert
Whitpaine’s meticulous map of
the 282 acres of the former Great
12 An ancient oak in the former Great Park.
Park owned in the 1680s by Peter
The Pierpoints, the Dacres and their Great Deer Park, 1239-1582
3
Courthope at Danny House. The remainder, listed as ‘the Riddens, the Lawnes, the Great
and Little Clayes’, belonged by then to Thomas Luxford at Randalls. On Whitpaine’s map
the Park boundary continued north against Hatches (‘Chatfield’s land’) to its north-west
corner by Bedlam Street to the west, which still marked the course of the former Roman
road, alias the Greensand Way. Cottages occupied the bank of the Roman causeway north
of Hatches. At the corner the boundary turned east, keeping just south of the Roman
road as far as ‘the highway’ near Randidles. It was bordered to the north in the 1680s by
two copyhold farms called Maresford and Megrams Bank, names recalling the course
of the road. Along this stretch in the 1930s Ivan Margary found traces of the road bank
and the ditches either side. ‘A derelict hollow way’, formerly a lane, marked the line of
the southern ditch as far as a ford over a stream flowing north. Nearby, once stood a
‘Roman’ building, probably a pottery kiln. East of the ford Margary found remains of a
bank, ‘a slight terrace on the shoulder of the hill’ just before New Way Lane. From there
the road had been slightly re-aligned, towards Stonepound Corner, where a large Roman
cemetery was eventually laid out. Near Randalls Farm a pavement set with red brick
tesserae, covering a hypocaust, evidently from a Roman villa, was disturbed in 1857-8.12
The Great Park itself owed its origin to the prestige of the Pierpoint family. Soon after
1066, William of Warenne, the wealthy new Lord of Lewes Rape, bestowed the sprawling
manor of Hurst on Robert of Pierpoint, ‘possibly a lieutenant-general in the Conqueror’s
army’. Initially the manor house, with its dovecote, its Home Park and teeming fishpond,
stood in the village near the church. Tradition states that a Sir Simon de Pierpoint fought
as a crusader at the siege of Acre in 1191. Certainly a Sir Robert de Pierpoint served as
Steward to William, the 5th Earl Warenne, sometime after 1202. But by 1239 his son,
Sir Simon, and the Earl were locked in a lawsuit over hunting
wild beasts across the lands of Hurst manor. William claimed
the sole right to hunt anywhere in his Rape, though conceding
he had allowed Simon’s father, as a personal favour, to hunt
across the manor. But Sir Simon asserted it was his ancestral
right to do so. A jury found in William’s favour; only the Earl
13 The ‘wood of Daneghithe’
could hunt ‘the buck, doe, hind, hare, fox, goat, cat, or any
mentioned in the royal
confirmation of 1333.
other wild beast’ across the manor. But as a consolation Earl
William graciously gave Sir Simon a goshawk, and authorised
him ‘to enclose his wood of Daneghithe’ within the manor
and to hunt within it. This dispute was not documented till 1333, when the concession
was confirmed by the 7th Earl to a later Sir Simon. At that date the enclosure ‘within
the dykes’ was described as ‘the wood of Danye and the demesne lands bounding the
wood … to the amount of 17 furlongs … measured by the perch of 20 feet’, wherein Sir
Simon and his heirs could keep ‘beasts, wild and others’, as they wished. A length of 17
furlongs suggests perhaps a perimeter of 2.57 miles enclosing 170 acres, under half the
409 acres of the Great Park surveyed in the 1570s. If so, the boundary of the enclosure
maybe ran from Hatches at the park ‘gate’, south to Foxhole, east to Dapps, excluding
the arable fields on the gravels north of Wilcombe Farm, then north to the Roman road
4
and back to Hatches. Within this area, any ‘lodge’, if located where Danny House now
stands, would have been centrally sited. The extra acres added after 1333 were annexed
perhaps once the Black Death and later bubonic plagues decimated the local peasantry
and slackened demand for corn land.13
The meaning of the place name ‘Danye’, used in the 1333 confirmation, is not entirely clear.
The component, ‘dan’, probably derives from denn, meaning ‘a woodland pasture, especially
a swine pasture’. And indeed it is very plausible that an oak wood there, flourishing on the
sour sodden clay, was used before 1239 to fatten the demesne pigs. The second component,
‘ye’, is less easily explained. Most commonly it derives from eg, meaning ‘island’ – in this
case perhaps a swine pasture on ‘raised dry land in a marsh’. But in what sense the wood
at Danny was set in ‘a marsh’ seems unclear, as firm ground stretched southwards across
gravel and chalk towards Wilcombe. Unhelpfully the variant ‘Daneghithe, copied in 1333,
from the 1239 grant, seemingly links the swine pasture to a ‘wharf’ or loading place, an
unlikely amenity at Danny, and so that name has been dismissed as ‘corrupt’. (The authors’
own hunch that ‘ghithe’ might be a misreading of ‘hays’, a variant of haeg, meaning ‘a deer
enclosure’, has not satisfied expert opinion – though at Wrotham in Kent the eastern deer
park of the Archbishop was written as ‘Easthay’ in 1283 and as ‘Easteye’ somewhat later.)14
In 1264 a Sir Robert de Pierpoint joined his overlord, the 6th Earl Warenne, to fight
and lose the battle of Lewes – his ransom set him back 700 marks. His perhaps is the
weathered recumbent effigy in Hurst church of a cross-legged knight wearing chain armour
of ‘about 1260’. A shield guards his left arm, his right hand grasps a sword-hilt, his feet
rest on a lion. In 1280 a Sir Simon de Pierpoint unwisely forced his villein, Hildebrand
Reynberd, to serve as his reeve on an estate at Upwick in Hove which he held from the
bishop of Chichester. Whereupon Hildebrand with 53 henchmen attacked him and
his house there, torching it in three places, killed his falcon, maltreated his palfrey and
made him swear he would refrain from further demands – an incident that tradition
had transposed to Hurst and advanced to ‘about 1450’. In 1304 a Sir Simon was also
summoned to join Edward I’s army mustering at Portsmouth to sail to Gascony, and
in 1333 had his privilege to hunt wild beasts at Danny confirmed. His, possibly, is the
14 The cross-legged knight wearing chain armour.
5
15 The knight encased in defensive gear.
mutilated effigy in the church resting on an altar tomb decorated with quatrefoil panels.
The knight is encased in defensive gear of ‘about 1340’, complete with bascinet, gorget,
close-fitting gypon with scalloped lower edge, baudrick and plate-armour with knee-caps
to the legs; his head rests on a helm with a lion crest, his feet (once broken, now restored)
on a recumbent lion. Elaborate iron railings with embattled tops and candle-spikes
defend the tomb.15
Sometime after 1359 the Pierpoints became extinct in the male line and the manor house
at Hurst doubtless lost status when a string of heiresses took the manor to husbands sited
elsewhere: to Sir William Bowett, to Sir Thomas Dacre and to Sir Richard Fiennes who married
Joan Dacre. Sir Richard’s father, a wealthy and much-hated Royal Treasurer, died in 1449,
after building a suavely expensive brick castle at Herstmonceux, thereafter his family’s chief
residence in Sussex. During Cade’s Rebellion in 1450 the assets of some rich royal officials were
16 Herstmonceux Castle in 1776, a water-colour by James Lambert senior.
6
17 The double-portrait of Lady Dacre and her son Gregory.
molested and just possibly the manor house at Hurst suffered. But the tradition that it was
burned down seems a garbled version of the Upwick riot back in 1280. Intriguingly, though,
the rebel leader was perhaps a local man – a John Cade of Hurst, yeoman, was residing in the
household of Sir Thomas Dacre in 1448 when he murdered a pregnant woman and had to
flee the country, forfeiting his horse, gown and bed. Molested or not, it seems that by 1465
the manor house near the church was neglected, at least periodically, in favour of a hunting
lodge set deep within the Great Park. Estate accounts for the 1450s reveal men repairing the
pale of ‘the Home Park’ (the Little Park) and digging out thorns in Danny Park to barricade
the ditches – the deer grazing limited the ‘guest’ cattle munching there in the summer, though
pigs rooting under the oaks brought in 8s. a year. But in 1465 a court roll specifically noted
that an ox, being ‘the best beast’ at Danworth Farm, and owed to the lord of Hurst manor as
a heriot, was delivered to his household, ‘now at Danny’. Presumably by then the lodge was
a substantial structure.16
Hunting, however, brought the Fiennes family a very nasty tumble in 1541. A degenerate
Henry VIII, distrusting the Old Nobility, contrived the brutal hanging at Tyburn of
7
Thomas, the 24-year-old 9th Baron Dacre, allegedly for killing a gamekeeper during a
poaching spree. His titles were forfeited to the Crown, but his widow Mary, a daughter
of Baron Bergavenny, clung to the estates – her brother had also been executed, for
‘conspiracy’. Short of money, she contrived a showy tomb at Herstmonceux for Thomas
and his father by salvaging effigies of two knights from recently destroyed Battle Abbey.
Her tenacity paid off in 1558 when the ever-shrewd Queen Elizabeth graciously restored
Gregory, her son, as 10th Baron Dacre. The fashionable Court artist, Hans Eworth, duly
painted a celebratory double portrait – his ‘acknowledged masterpiece’, now acquired for
the Nation. The austere battle-worn matriarch occupies the dominant position, while
the eager young Baron glows amid costly furs and jewelled chains – affordable perhaps
from his marriage to Anne Sackville, whose wealthy father, Sir Richard ‘Sackfill’, was
the Queen’s trusted cousin and adviser. Residing at Stourton House in Westminster, the
devoted young couple delighted in the fashionable whirl of London and the Court. But
Gregory also found time for his Great Park at Danny, part of which had been rented out,
probably after the mishap in 1541. In 1564 Thomas Luxford, then living at ‘Danny’,
and quite probably the keeper of the Park, agreed to give up his lease of ‘Dannie lands,
Bablands and Broomefield’, 100 acres in all. He was also to supply oats, wheat-straw and
up to six ‘oxen, steers or cattle’ when Gregory ‘keeps house at Danny Lodge’.17
But what relation had the footprint of Gregory’s lodge to the ground plan of the stately
mansion that George Goring of Lewes created after he bought the manor and Great Park
of Hurst from Gregory in 1582? The survey of Gregory’s Sussex estates in 1569-70 made
no mention of a manor-house near the church – so presumably it had been abandoned.
Instead the lodge at Danny was enthusiastically commended as ‘a fair [good] mansionhouse [built] of timber, where the [park] keeper lieth, who hath the custody thereof.’ The
site of the lodge was moated, ‘two parts with water, the other part dry’, and was 180 feet
long and 80 feet broad. The entrance porch was on the east front, being ‘12 feet long, and
eight feet broad, of four storeys; the hither [top] storey used for a lodging, newly built’.
The hall was entered from the porch and lay to its south. It was ‘43 feet long, and 24
feet broad, having no other storey’ (being an open hall). ‘At the highest end’ of the hall,
the southern, was ‘a fair parlour, 28 feet long and 20 feet broad’, with a storey above. It
had ‘two fair bay windows, [fitted] with transoms, embowed with timber-work, [each]
containing 21 lights, 7 below each transom’. One window was 10 feet wide, the other
nine feet. ‘Adjoining’, presumably north of the hall, were ‘certain other edifices, used for
lodgings, of two storeys, [including] a kitchen with scullery and larder, and an outhouse of
two storeys, all covered with tiles in good repair.’ This substantial but sprawling structure,
with its communal hall and ‘fair’ parlour lit by elaborate bay windows, must surely have
predated 1541, since only the top storey of the porch was singled out in 1569-70 as ‘newly
built’ – presumably by Gregory to give the keeper a better view of the restored Great Park.
‘Half a furlong’, south of the lodge, the survey noted ‘a spring of water, always continuing
but slow’, which ‘with little charge may be carried to the house’ – perhaps the spring still
bubbling beneath an existing domed late-Georgian red-brick structure – a well-head or
plunge bath, or both – at the crest of ‘the Burmah Road’.18
8
9
19 Brickwork adorned with a diaper
pattern in blue.
18 The survey of 1582.
In 1582, after its sale to George Goring, the lodge was surveyed afresh in some
detail. It was then described as ‘a capital [principal] mansion’ and ‘a convenient house
meet for a gentleman of reasonable calling’. It was built ‘after the old manner’ – again
suggesting it predated 1541 – being constructed of brick and timber and roofed with
‘large and thick stone called Horsham slate’. There was a moat of ‘good sweet water’
on three sides, a paled [fenced] garden west and north, and within the moat a paled
courtyard. A porch ‘in the middle thereof ’ led into a ‘screen’ passage with on its south
side ‘a fair hall’, 40 by 24 feet. Beyond, in a cross wing to the south, was ‘a fair dining
parlour’, 28 by 22 feet, on the ground floor, also two other ‘parlours or chambers’, with
fireplaces, three other rooms and two ‘houses of office’ (privies). On the upper floor,
up two sets of stairs, were seven more chambers, four with fireplaces, and two ‘privies’.
All these ‘diverse convenient rooms and lodgings’ had ‘large lights’ (windows) to them.
‘At the lower [north] end of the hall’ were a buttery, pantry and dresser, and a kitchen
beyond was equipped ‘with a great range, two ovens and an oast to dry malt’. ‘Next’
were a larder and milk house, and ‘a great parlour heretofore used for a privy [private]
kitchen’ with a fireplace and privy. Over these rooms extending north of the hall, up
three sets of stairs, were seven more chambers, two with fireplaces, and a final privy. So
many convenient chambers and fireplaces, stairs and privies, though marring perhaps
the ‘good sweet’ water of the moat, doubtless gratified the glittering hunting parties
that Gregory chose to lodge there.19
Both surveys reveal how close the footprint of the sprawling lodge was to the ground
plan of the stately mansion that Gregory’s successor, George Goring, was soon to build.
Set within the medieval moat, the location and dimensions of his porch, open hall and
‘fair’ dining parlour were those of Gregory’s lodge. But Barbara and David Martin have
noted nonetheless that the lodge was described in 1569-70 as built of ‘timber’, but in 1582
as built of ‘brick and timber’. So maybe Gregory modified, and perhaps extended it, soon
after 1570. And indeed they have identified, to the north of the open hall, existing stretches
of fabric quite plausibly dating back to the 1570s. Such perhaps is the brickwork, adorned
with a diaper pattern in blue, which graces the lower section of the external wall north
of the porch and continues along the south wall of the north wing – the only surviving
stretches of surface gaiety: a similar pattern
occurs at Herstmonceux Castle. If this wing
was already matched by a south wing, as
seems likely, then the lodge, with its central
porch, had perhaps acquired an ‘E’ shaped
entrance front – a Courtier’s tribute to his
Queen? Moreover, the lower two storeys of
the back part of Goring’s north wing have
internal walls of clunch which incorporate a
doorway with a depressed arched head, an entrance perhaps to cellars stretching southwards.
On the north these two storeys are still lit by low ‘mean’ wooden-framed windows, which
flank the most westerly of three square, gabled, turret-like projections, facing north across
the now vanished moat. Their lower brickwork may date back to the lodge and housed
perhaps ‘the three sets of stairs’ leading to seven chambers, two fireplaces and a privy.
(The turrets are strikingly similar to three which dominate the back wall of a hunting
lodge erected after 1540 by Lord Williams at Beckley Park in Oxfordshire.) And finally
a western fireplace, capped by a three-centred brick arch 10 feet wide, which survives
from Goring’s kitchen, would not, according to the Martins, be ‘out of place in the early
16th century’.20
But despite the sprawling convenience of his lodge, unwelcome intruders were spoiling
Gregory’s sport. Such that in 1576 the exasperated Baron alleged that a local gang,
20 The north wing.
10
11
received over £8,000 and lands in Middlesex. Intriguingly, the new owner of Danny
Lodge in 1582 was George Goring, the very Justice of the Peace who Luxford alleged
had master-minded there the assault on the Philisteans at Court Bushes. But local roughs
apart, perhaps Gregory needed some ready money. Life at Court was proving expensive.
In 1572 he shone in the costly entourage ushering the English ambassador into Paris
to ratify the Confederacy of Blois. In 1575 he paid £3,000 for a mansion in Chelsea
previously owned by Sir Thomas More. And he remained an assiduous Courtier till his
death, being sumptuously interred in 1594 at Chelsea, rather than obscurely amid his
ancestors at Herstmonceux.22
21 The fireplace in the kitchen.
flamboyantly self-styled ‘Philisteans’, famed for their ‘lewd and idle lives’, were killing
his deer, his rabbits, his swans and cygnets, destroying eggs and poaching his fish ponds.
Indeed their braggart leader, Thomas Luxford – a relative of his keeper at Danny’s Great
Park – had sworn ‘by the piteous wounds of God’ to give the deer in the Home Park
‘little rest’. And in fact his Philistines, ‘arrayed in warlike manner’ with bows and arrows,
long staves and skull caps, had brazenly hunted there and abducted the deputy-keeper
– Luxford boasting of it the next day at a Lewes tavern, in a ‘most proud, disdainful
manner, as in glory of the work’. These local roughs, allegedly, also attacked Gregory’s
farm servants peaceably tending some copyhold fields at Court Bushes in Hurst. Luxford,
though, filed an audacious counter-claim: Gregory’s men were the aggressors at Court
Bushes, after being egged on at Danny Lodge by a Justice of the Peace – George Goring
no less – who scolded the keeper there for not supplying better arrows and authorised
the elimination of Luxford – ‘if I say kill him, you can kill him’. In 1577 Gregory further
complained that four Southdown ‘gentlemen’ plus a posse of ‘yeomen’ had broken into
Danny Great Park and killed five deer. Perhaps this well-heeled irruption was the final
straw. Gregory dismantled the Great Park soon after: its 289 acres of lawns and under
woods were partitioned by rails, hedges, ditches and quicksets into meadows, arable
fields and pastures.21
Then in January 1582 came a more dramatic break with the past. Gregory disposed of
the lodge and the dismantled Great Park, along with the manors of Hurst, Westmeston
and Streat – estates held by his ancestors since the Norman Conquest. In return he
2
George Goring:
Courtier, Builder and Embezzler, 1582-94
22 Aerial view of Danny from the south-east.
George Goring, who bought Danny Lodge in January 1582, was very much a rising
man. A younger son of Sir William, a landowner with an estate at Burton Park, near
Duncton in West Sussex, he trained to be ‘learned in the law’ and married Mary Everard,
heiress to half of Ovingdean manor near Lewes. A keen supporter of the young Queen
Elizabeth and her Protestant religion, Goring was elected an MP for Lewes borough in
1559 and again in 1563. He served as Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in 1572, and as a local
Justice of the Peace he tangled with Hurst’s Philisteans at Court Bushes. After buying
part of Houndean manor near Lewes in 1575, he rebuilt his residence in the town as ‘a
house of stone’. The two corner turrets of his south faÇade still lurk beneath a coat of
Georgian brick that graces what is now the stylish Pelham House Hotel. Superbly carved
oak woodwork dated 1579 also survives there. Two coats of arms celebrate the marriage
of George and Mary, and of his brother Henry to her sister Dorothy. More fetching
perhaps are the undraped caryatid figures crowned with baskets of fruit and flowers. Amid
them a bearded man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and high-collared coat, clasps a jar
with IHON HATHORN inscribed upon it. The carving is metropolitan in quality, and
a London carpenter of that name died in 1577 – so doubtless the woodwork is his, but
posthumously installed in Goring’s new ‘house of stone’.23
By 1579 Goring, an evident admirer of metropolitan chic, was active at Court, where
his father, Sir William, had served as a Gentleman of Edward VI’s Privy Chamber.
Indeed, in 1581 Goring joined the annual Accession Day pageant at Whitehall
Palace when members of Queen Elizabeth’s gilded entourage paraded and jousted
before her. The next year he also agreed to pay Gregory Fiennes over £8,000 for ‘the
capital mansion’ of Danny and for the manors of Hurst, Westmeston and Streat.
He probably borrowed heavily to do so, which suggests that the Queen had already
chosen him to be the next Receiver-General of her Court of Wards, a lucrative post
he duly filled in 1584. Why she favoured him so markedly is unclear. At all events
the sale by Gregory, himself a long-established Courtier, was amicable, for in 1594
his widow made Goring’s son one of her executors. Acquiring Danny Lodge and
three manors edged Goring further into the landed elite of Sussex. Indeed, by 1584
he was at odds with Lord Buckhurst and Lord Montague, both county magnates,
over electing the county’s two knights of the shire. Meanwhile his eldest son, George
(momentously it turned out) married Anne Denny, daughter of a wealthy landowner
in Essex. In 1585 George junior duly fathered a son, also George – a future Earl of
13
14
George Goring: Courtier, Builder and Embezzler, 1582-94
Gorings of Lewes and Danny
Sir William
of Burton
d.1554
Sir Henry
of Burton
1521-94
=
=
Elizabeth
Dau. of John
Covert d.1558
= Mary Dau.
George of
Lewes and
of William
Ovingdean d.1594
Everard
Dorothy
Dau. of William
Everard
George of
Danny
d.1602
Anthony Stapley
1590-1655
=
Mary
=
Dau. of
Edward Neville
Baron Bergavenny
Anne
d.1637
George
1608-57
=
=
Lettice Dau. of
Richard 1st Earl
of Cork
Henry Denny
of Waltham Abbey
Anne
Edward
1st Earl of Norwich
1569-1637
George
1st Earl of
Norwich (2nd creation)
1585-1663
Honora
d.1614
Charles
2nd Earl of Norwich
c.1615-71
=
James Hay
favourite of James I
1580-1636
Diana = Sir Thomas
Covert
23 A pedigree of the Gorings of Lewes and Danny (owners in red).
Norwich – and was elected in 1593 an MP for Lewes. So when Goring died a year
later his dynasty seemed safely entrenched at Danny.24
Moreover, by then, an impressive new mansion was arising there, though ‘not fully
finished’. Goring’s survey in March 1582 had conceded that the capacious hunting lodge
was ‘a convenient house meet for a gentleman of reasonable calling’. But such an irregular
structure, ‘after the old manner of building’, with its jumbled staircases, sprawling service
rooms and four-storeyed look-out porch, could hardly serve as the country seat of a rising
Courtier – even if its entrance front was, at least roughly, ‘E’ shaped. Goring required a
prestigious, state-of-the-art mansion, designed within and without to publicise the wealth
of his household, dazzle tenants and neighbours, upstage rivals in the Sussex elite, and
perhaps, one God-given day, welcome his gracious Benefactress, the Queen. He could,
of course, have built it where the manor house of Hurst once stood, near the church
and the Little Park. Instead he chose the site of the lodge set in the privacy of the former
Great Park. Indeed his architect retained the footprint of Gregory’s ‘fair parlour’, open
hall and entrance porch facing east – Doctor Andrew Boorde had advised in 1549, that
‘the principal and chief prospects [should] be East and West … for the south wind doth
corrupt and doth make evil vapours’. And north of the hall stretches of ground-floor
brickwork, sometimes diaper-patterned, were perhaps preserved, facing the courtyard
and in the bases of the three turrets looking north.25
Whatever constraints the footprint of the former lodge imposed, Goring’s architect,
adhering to a master plan, set about a phased rebuilding to create an impressive three-storeyed
brick mansion with stone dressings and tiled roof. Its (almost) symmetrical main faÇade,
24 The carved woodwork preserved at Pelham House Hotel: (a) a bearded man and (b) an undraped
caryatid.
25 Eastern front of the mansion.
15
16
(c) Parham.
(a) Danny.
(d) Wiston.
26 Elizabethan mansions in Sussex.
(b) Glynde.
(e) Wakehurst.
17
18
Danny House: a sussex Mansion through seven Centuries
now very certainly ‘e’ shaped, with north and south ranges boldly projecting, survives
intact, looking exactly as it did when skilfully sketched in 1666 by Robert Whitpaine
on a map of the Danny estate. Ian nairn, writing in the Buildings of England, hailed its
‘monumental’ grid of mullion-and-transom windows as the ‘apogee’ of a ‘sober’ design
peculiar to sussex, pioneered at Wiston and at Parham in the 1570s. Doubtless Goring
was well aware of them, for both mansions lay just below the southdown route between
Lewes and Burton, his father’s estate. The Victoria County History found room for a detailed
description of the faÇade. ‘The east front … has two bay-windows on either side of the
porch, the two to the south, lighting the Great Hall, having four tiers of lights rising two
stories in one, with three transoms. above these are blanks to the upper story. The other
bays have a window to each of the three stories, divided by a transom; all are of four lights
in the width and one light in each splay. The moulded jambs and mullions, &c., are of
stone, and there are moulded labels. The bays have gabled heads with moulded copings,
the kneelers of which are carried on scrolled brackets … The middle (gabled) porch-wing
has a round-headed entrance flanked by half-round shafts with moulded square capitals
and bases; above these are enriched pedestals to an upper order, which has fluted Ionic
shafts, flanking the first-floor window, and a pediment … The inner side of the north
wing has two bay-windows, like the others … The inner face of the south wing also has
two bay-windows, with lights taller than those of the north side. The east ends of the two
wings are gabled and have bay-windows of two stories with sloping roofs, but otherwise
like the others; the third story has a five-light window’. nothing disturbs the unity of
this monumental faÇade, not the tall windows of the Great Hall, or the porch with its
‘meagre pediment’, or the four maltreated busts set in roundels on the flanking bays.26
as for the rebuilding itself, structural evidence, especially the roofing, reveals it was
carried out in phases – first the ‘service area’, then a luxury suite in the north wing, initialled
GMG and dated 1593, next a new porch and an entrance bay (‘the screen’) adjoining
Gregory’s open hall, then a new Great Hall itself. Tree-ring analysis dates the timbers used
to 1585-98. But work probably halted in 1594 when Goring’s death revealed him to be
27
Detail of gables and busts.
George Goring: Courtier, Builder and embezzler, 1582-94
28
19
Ground-floor plan of the mansion, as it was standing in August 1725.
heavily in debt to his Benefactress. Moreover, a survey of his ‘whole estate’ made in 1595
described Danny as ‘not fully finished’. so perhaps a phase five, to replace Gregory’s ‘fair
parlour’ and rooms in the south wing beyond the Great Hall, was still incomplete – no
structural evidence survives there. at Parham sir Thomas Palmer’s two-year-old grandson
laid the foundation stone in 1578. If the future earl of norwich, born in 1585, officiated
at Danny, he brought the dynasty no lasting good fortune.27
The first phase, the ‘service area’, north and north-west of the existing porch, saw the first
two bays of the showpiece faÇade emerge, their lower storey perhaps incorporating existing
diapered brickwork. Their windows lit a front passage (linking the cross-passage to the
north wing), and possibly a large room above, perhaps used as a dining room. Behind the
passage were three service rooms (one now the spice Room), connecting on the west with a
capacious kitchen, probably of one storey, where remnants of a massive hearth remain. The
same roofing also covered the three storeys and garret forming the back of the north wing.
Its ground floor may have kept from Gregory’s day some internal walls made of clunch, also
a doorway with a depressed arched head, and the three low ‘mean’ wooden windows which
still flank the western of three square, gabled, turret-like projections – possibly remnants of
the lodge’s three sets of stairs at its service end.28
To the north of the service area the second phase delivered a self-contained, lavishly
decorated, luxury suite in the north wing, perhaps retaining from the lodge its ground plan
and diapered brickwork. a single lofty chamber occupied each storey, and the spacious
20
29
The three turrets of the north range.
31
30
‘The Great Entrance’ at Danny, drawn by S.H. Grimm in 1780.
Plaster work in the luxury suite.
32
The timber roof of the Great Hall.
21
22
garret above has been variously interpreted as a chapel or a long gallery devoted to exercise.
The suite was served by a turret staircase and by a discreet entrance from the inner court.
Until the 1980s a fine stone fire-place with tapering pilasters and enriched Ionic caps
stood in the lower chamber. (See 138) Expanses of ribbed plaster ceiling still adorn the
upper chamber and the garret. They are patterned with squares and curves, stars and
crosses, foliage pendants, lily flowers and marigolds; roundels contain a rampant lion, a
cock and a lion’s mask, and panels carry the date 1593 and the initials of Goring and his
wife Mary (GGM). Strap-and-jewel ornament enriches the soffits of two windows. The
turret staircase also survives intact. It begins as a spiral of oak treads and risers; its plaster
ceiling, segmental and barrel-vaulted, has a starred entablature and lions and lion masks
in the tympana. The stair continues as a straight flight with steps of solid oak baulks. Its
ceiling is a ribbed plaster rectangle with a classical profile labelled DIUS AUGUSTUS
(divine Augustus) in the central roundel, and flowers, an eagle, a cock and a grotesque
mask elsewhere. (Not directly linked to this ‘private’ suite was a turret further west; by
1725 two lavatory chutes in the thickness of the wall emptied from it towards the moat.)29
Phase three rebuilt the entrance passage next the open hall (the ‘screen’) and also the
entrance porch, which now had three storeys, whereas its predecessor had four and
included the ‘lodging’ and lookout for the park keeper. This new, less prominent, porch
suited the discipline of the emerging east faÇade. During phase four a Great Hall arose,
on the footprint of the old. It still rises through two storeys lit by immense bay windows,
though an early-Georgian ceiling masks Goring’s splendid five-bay roof. Its braces and
main rafters are finely finished with scroll and ovolo moulding. By contrast with Parham,
no space was made for a long gallery, linking the wings of the house above ground level.
(But sometime after Goring’s death a bold cupola, sketched by Robert Whitpaine in
1666, was set into the Hall roof.) By the 1580s, of course, wealthy Elizabethans dined
in private, though at Christmas and other public ‘feasts’ they resorted to the Great Hall
where normally the servants ate and lounged. It also lingered as a symbol of status, an
impressive ‘room of entrance’, through which awe-struck visitors were ushered towards
the family state rooms beyond.30
At Danny these state rooms were in the south wing, but perhaps not ‘fully finished’ by
1594. No traces of them remain, for in 1728-31 the entire interior was ruthlessly gutted
and its south front rebuilt. But a ground-floor plan of the mansion made in 1725, and
Whitpaine’s sketch made in 1666, both show three massive chimney stacks punctuating
the south wall. The western stack heated a Great Parlour, seemingly built on the foot
print of the lodge’s ‘fair parlour’, with on the north an entrance to a Great Staircase, itself
also accessible from the Great Hall. This capacious Stair leisurely rose to a second storey.
So, in line with Parham and other Elizabethan mansions, there was a processional route
for Goring’s cooked meats and other delicacies to be carried in ceremonial state from the
kitchen, through ‘the screen’, into the Great Hall, where the servants would pay them
due homage, and then up a stately staircase into a Great Chamber. This suitably splendid
dining room, ‘the ceremonial pivot of the house’, was normally above the Great Parlour
and so at Danny probably shared the western chimney stack. The public grandeur in the
23
south wing doubtless balanced the luxury of the private suite in the north. And even if the
state rooms were ‘unfinished’ in 1594, the wealth of Goring’s grandson probably ensured
their sumptuous embellishment sometime before the 1630s. But clearly Danny was unfit
to receive the Queen when she progressed to Sussex in 1591 to savour a stunning reception
at Cowdray House staged by Lord Montague.31
Whitpaine’s map also shows, besides a still-extant dovecote, a ceremonial Approach to the
house in 1666. This accorded with Sir Francis Bacon’s advice published in 1625 that a palace
should have three forecourts: ‘a green court plain, with a wall’; a second, ‘more garnished’,
with ‘little turrets on the wall’ and a third ‘to make a square with the [palace] front’ – giving
a foretaste of grandeur to come. Danny offered a charming variant of this: an outer court, a
fairy-tale gatehouse, and a grand inner court. Gatehouses, usually lodging a guardian-porter,
were ‘quite old-fashioned’ by the 1590s, so quite probably Goring built it, and indeed laid out
the whole Approach. The gatehouse sported three miniature gables above an entrance arch
flanked by exuberant angle-turrets with bulbous lead-covered onion domes. A ‘delightful’ twin,
‘Elizabethan’ in date, still enlivens the approach to Cuckfield Park. Sadly, Danny’s gatehouse
was demolished before 1674, though its lurking foundations perhaps underpinned the belief
that Danny Lodge had stood to the east of Goring’s mansion. The 1666 map also suggests
33 The mansion, its
entrance courts and
gatehouse in 1666.
24
the inner court was grassed, with a wide stone path to the porch, passing ‘an ornate and
disproportionately large sun dial’. (see 59) But probably not laid out till after 1652 was the
straight tree-lined avenue shown leading eastward from the gatehouse. not shown on the map,
though, were two ‘common ways’, two public roads, claimed during a bitter legal dispute in
the 1670s to converge on the outer court of Danny from the north-east and the south-east.32
To a thrusting Courtier ornate formal gardens were as needful as a ceremonial approach,
a stately faÇade, a Great Hall, a Great staircase, a Great Chamber and a luxury suite. on
the 1666 map the approach lay east of the house, the moat, bordered by the wagon road
from Hurst, to the north, and various outbuildings – probably stables, laundry, dairy, washhouse, smithy and slaughter-house – and perhaps a kitchen garden, to the west. But exactly
to the south of the inner court, the mansion and its outbuildings, stretched a neat rectangle
of planted trees, tidily divided into three enclosures – almost certainly the framework of
tripartite formal gardens, dismantled after the Civil War. The middle enclosure, walled in
brick, was carefully aligned to be overlooked by the Great Parlour and the Great Chamber in
the south wing, which had in 1725 a convenient ‘garden’ entrance. Probably this enclosure,
if the principal pleasance, was adorned with intricate ‘knots’, clipped topiary and statues,
and maybe with a fountain or water features, fed perhaps by the spring of sweet water,
‘always continuing but slow’, noted in the 1569-70 survey. Large matching gateways in
the middle of the brick walls led to the east enclosure and to a ‘new orchard’ on the west.
all three were bounded to the south by a narrow strip of ground, perhaps the remnant of
a raised viewing terrace. To their east in 1666 were what seem to be rectangular ponds, the
remains maybe of a ‘canal’, possibly fed from the moat. exactly south of the ‘terrace’ lay an
‘old orchard’ and then an ‘ash Croft’, with more ‘ponds’ to the east. Perhaps by 1594 this
ambitious garden grid had been laid out, if not already stocked and embellished. elaborate
gardens there were reinstated in the 1720s, only to be swept away 50 years later. according
to J.B. Burke, writing about 1850, these were ‘a series of terraced gardens, rising upwards
towards a grove of venerable trees’.33
Goring also required an elegant deer park and, after his purchase, a new 150-acre
park was duly paled within the former Great Park, west of the mansion. This new
Little Park and the Home Park near the
church were approximately plotted on
John norden’s map of sussex published
in 1595. Like the formal gardens, the
Little Park was dismantled before 1666.
Indeed, Whitpaine’s map shows, just west
of ashcroft and the orchards, some 63
acres of ‘park’ divided into six enclosures,
formerly the site of ‘a great wood’ where
34 Danny Park on John Norden’s map of Sussex,
augmented by John Speed in 1610.
25
the deer sheltered, when not grazing with dappled grace amid ‘lawns’ and copses further
west. (see 10) Goring’s purchase also included the site of a 20-acre rabbit warren at
‘sandhills’, seemingly the ‘sandfield’ plotted in 1666 – traces of a pillow mound survive
there and rabbits still resolutely burrow into its well-draining Folkestone Beds. (The
tradition that the three-acre sandfield Pond to the south was dug to provide clay for
the bricks used to build Danny seems confirmed by a field bordering it being referred
to in 1649 as ‘stubbs’ alias ‘Brickhost croft’, suggesting that a memorable brick ‘oast’ or
kiln had been sited there.) Besides a deer park, a necessary adjunct of seigneurial status
was a pigeon-house, though the lofty one, shown in 1666, perhaps post-dated 1652. a
humbler, maybe older, structure still stands near Little Danny.34
In his estimate of the value of Goring’s ‘whole estate’, made in 1595 after the ReceiverGeneral’s death, Lord Treasurer Burghley commented that Danny House was ‘not fully finished’
and had cost, ‘as may appear, £4000’ – an enormous sum. In the 1560s sir William More,
who served twice as sheriff of surrey and sussex, spent less than half that on his ‘very grand’
house at Loseley near Guildford. Perhaps £4,000 was an exaggeration – likewise the £2,000
allegedly spent on Goring’s town house at Lewes. But clearly materials were not skimped while
implementing the master-plan for Danny. The splendid brickwork, the exuberant plaster,
the finely crafted roof of the Great Hall, these far outstripped the rubble, the render and the
knotted oak shamelessly used by sir Thomas Palmer to build Parham on the cheap in the
1570s. That Goring spent lavishly also became shockingly clear when the Crown auditors
examined the official accounts of the Queen’s deceased Receiver-General. They found Goring
had so mismanaged her money flowing through the Court of Wards that his estate owed
nearly £20,000 – hence the official posthumous audit of his estate. and how would his shortchanged Benefactress react? unlike Danny House, did Goring’s dynasty now rest on sand?35
3
Danny Saved and Lost:
Three George Gorings, 1594-1653
Dire indeed might have been the consequences for the Receiver-General’s family, faced with
a debt of almost £20,000 owed to the Queen. In 1597 she imprisoned their neighbour, Sir
Thomas Shirley, and confiscated his estates, for misappropriating £35,000 while Treasurer
of her armies in Flanders and France – much of it was spent on his splendid mansion at
Wiston. But Elizabeth chose to be merciful to her errant Receiver’s son and heir. She let
George repay the debt in instalments – Lord Burghley, her tireless High Treasurer, reckoned
his assets to be worth £18,264. It helped perhaps that George’s brother-in-law, Edward
Denny, had married Burghley’s granddaughter, and that Anne Dacre, Lord Gregory’s childless
widow, who died in 1595, left him three manors in Yorkshire. Indeed George admitted
that, but for her, ‘I might have wanted meat to put into my mouth’. She also left his wife
Anne ‘a chain of pearl’ and gowns ‘of velvet, or cloth of gold and silver, or laid on with gold
lace’. George himself received ‘household stuff worth £200’, which was ‘to remain in his
house at Danny for his son’. So perhaps the Dacres, clearly close friends of the Gorings,
had apartments there. And perhaps the ‘stuff’ included the ‘elaborate chimneypiece of oak’
dated 1571, now in an upper bedroom, and the archaic cupboard standing beside it, with
processing kings and soldiers carved on its doors.36
George, moreover, was still welcome at Court. Indeed, as a Gentleman Pensioner he escorted
the Queen on state occasions. And her favourite, Sir Walter Raleigh, allowed him and a Sussex
associate, Herbert Pelham, to prospect – fruitlessly as it turned out – for iron on his Irish estates
in Munster. So despite his debt, George clung on to Danny. Indeed, he was re-elected an MP
for Lewes borough in 1601 and died in 1602 owning property in several counties besides
Sussex. Moreover, a costly tomb was erected at St Michael’s church in his Lewes constituency.
Despite its casual demolition in 1748, an alabaster tablet survives, displaying George’s coat of
arms. And in Thomas Horsfield’s History of Lewes is an engraving of the broken effigies of a
kneeling bare-headed son and a chicly bonneted daughter, and also a note of the heart-warming
Latin verse formerly incised upon it, which translates as:
The day of death is the birth of eternal life,
Death is a seedbed from which life grows abundantly.
This sanguine sentiment was echoed in George’s will – he ‘nothing doubting’ but that
his Lord God, having made him ‘a reasonable creature’, would receive his soul ‘into his
35 Colonel George Goring by Van Dyck.
27
28
36 Chimneypiece dated 1571.
glory and place it in the company of the
heavenly angels and blessed saints’.37
Though the Queen thoughtfully reduced
the widow Anne’s debt repayments, possibly
her very rich brother, Edward Denny, chipped
in to fund George’s costly tomb, especially
as in October 1602 he helped her to buy
Wilcombe Farm with its pasture for 310
sheep on Wolstonbury Hill, which bordered
the Danny estate to the south. But still better,
by a dazzling twist of fate Denny’s wealth was
soon to trigger a dramatic upsurge in her
family’s prospects. In January 1607 a grand
masque was staged at King James’s Court to
celebrate a marriage dear to that monarch’s
susceptible heart. The nuptials united his
adored but impecunious Scottish favourite, comely James Hay (later to be Earl of Carlisle)
with a suitably succulent heiress – with Honora, the only child of Edward Denny (soon to be
Earl of Norwich). And prominent in the masque was the comely ‘Master Goring’, the widow
Anne’s eldest son and Honora’s first cousin, still fresh from his studies at Sidney Sussex College
in Cambridge. Intelligent, sprung from three generations of Courtiers, and with a charm crisply
confirmed by a surviving miniature, ‘Master Goring’ swiftly blossomed as Hay’s protégé at
James’s flamboyant Court. Knighted in 1608, made a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber
in 1611, he was soon supplying his easily tickled monarch with ‘fooleries’ and fiddlers, with
‘antic dances’ and bawdy songs. Typically he caused the King’s two principal Fools, mounted
‘on the back of the other fools’, to tilt at each other, ‘til they fell off together by the ears’. And
in 1618 at a Newmarket feast he delighted James and a fresh
favourite, Lord Buckingham, by having ‘four huge, brawny
pigs’, served up, ‘piping hot, bitted and harnessed with ropes
of sausages, all tied to a monstrous bag-pudding’.38
With such heart-felt backing at Court, Goring was
repeatedly elected an MP for Lewes borough in the 1620s.
Indeed in the House of Commons he was seen as chief
spokesman for the King and for Buckingham. Being a
plausible diplomat and a loyal confidant, he also joined
Buckingham and Prince Charles at Madrid in 1623 where
they memorably failed to secure for the Prince the hand of the
37 The broken effigies at Lewes.
Danny Saved and Lost: Three George Gorings, 1594-1653
29
38 A miniature of George
Goring, later Earl of Norwich.
Spanish Infanta. However, after busily shuttling between London and Paris in 1625, Goring
did clinch Prince Charles’s marriage with Henrietta Maria, the sister of Louis XIII. Abidingly
grateful, she made him, when Queen, her Vice-Chamberlain and Master of Horse – they enjoyed
racing their state barges down the Thames, urged on from the river bank by cheering crowds of
Londoners. An adept Courtier, George became Baron Goring of Hurstpierpoint in 1628 and ViceChamberlain of the King’s Household in 1639.
Royal favour also secured him a fast growing
income. Besides official posts in Wales and the
Peak District, with a chance to dabble in local
coal mines, he profited from state regulation
of commerce – from the export of butter, the
making of gold thread, the sale of tobacco, and
the licensing of taverns. By 1641 he was netting
an ‘astronomical’ £26,000 a year.39
This income, though, was soaked up by
a sumptuous lifestyle at Court requiring
a prestigious London mansion. Thus at
‘Goring House’ in 1632 the Baron staged
39 Louis XIII of France, artist unknown.
30
a masque for the Queen – which his friend, the poet Will Davenant, teasingly disparaged
to her in verse: ‘What though the Owner of the Building knows/That to your influence he
entirely owes/His preservation … must he needs select this rude/Dull way to trouble you
with gratitude?’ A tease indeed, given that Goring’s ‘musicians’ also performed at Trinity
College in Cambridge and his ‘players’ at St Mary’s Guildhall in Coventry. Goring House
itself (now the site of Buckingham Palace) was a spacious gabled mansion looking east
across St James’s Park. Its formal gardens included a fountain, a raised viewing terrace,
shady arbours and tunnels formed of willow or lime, and a ‘prospect’ mound planted
with trees. Goring himself added a 20-acre pasture and a Mulberry Garden (now the
nucleus of the Palace grounds). He also laid out a bowling green and a maze, similar to the
Queen’s at Wimbledon. In 1638 he owed £150 to the Royal Gardener, John Tradescant
of Lambeth – payment due perhaps for work at Goring House. And when Tradescant
added to his ‘Ark’ of rarities, now cherished in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, various
items from South America, were they perhaps relics of a rather futile expedition that
Goring organised in 1633 to colonise the mouth of the Amazon?40
And maybe Tradescant supplied plans and plants for the tripartite formal garden at
Danny, the frame of which survived in 1666. But, sadly, evidence for Goring’s presence
at his mansion is scarce. His cousin Honora’s glittering marriage in 1607, of course,
transformed his standing in Sussex, prompting the august county peer, Baron Bergavenny,
to accept him as a son-in-law. Mary Neville dutifully bore him a son, George, in July
1608, and at least nine more children. And doubtless Danny was a focus for this growing
family. His daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, were baptised at Hurst, and in 1621 Goring
penned a letter there fending off a diplomatic mission to Paris by citing his ‘good wife’s
great belly within a month of her time’ – she duly bore him Edward, their last child. Yet
Goring never used his great wealth to enlarge his modest estate in Sussex. Anchored at
Goring House, close to the pageantry and profits of the Court, he felt no need to expand
a local power-base. Quite what mark he made on the fabric of Danny is unclear. It was
‘not fully finished’ when his grandfather, the errant Receiver-General, died in 1594, so
maybe the state rooms in the south wing – the Great Parlour, the Great Stair and the Great
Chamber – were still incomplete. If so, and if his debt-ridden father merely patched them
up, then doubtless Goring embellished them with a Courtier’s ostentation – though sadly
the gutting of the south range in the 1720s wiped away all trace of its earlier decor. And
maybe Goring placed above the central bay of the roof of the Great Hall the polygonal
lantern-like cupola sketched in 1666. (See 33) It was capped by an onion dome covered
in lead or grey tile, rather matching the angle-towers of the ebullient gatehouse below,
and served as a sunny belvedere, ideal for savouring a delicate desert course of spices, wine
and sweetmeats, while admiring a pleasing ‘prospect’ of dappled deer, verdant woodland,
and waving wheat below ‘the hill’. And maybe, when the cupola was erected, the barrelvaulted plastered ceiling was inserted in the roof of the Great Hall, which followed the
curve of the arch braces above and was itself replaced in the 1720s.41
Though the breezy belvedere has gone, Goring did orchestrate a ‘new way’ which still
serves as the drive from Danny House to Hurst village via New Way Lane. In 1666 it was
31
plotted as ‘the way that leadeth towards Hurst Town’. This new exit was possible because
after 1604 his family either owned or erected a rabbit warren at Wilcombe, making
superfluous the one located at ‘Sandhills’, alias Sandfield. So Goring’s new road could
traverse his demesne, from the outer court of Danny, past Stubbs Field, over a ‘wain’
bridge at the tail of Sandfield Pond, and through Sandfield to a ‘gate’ at its north-east
corner. Previously, a tortuous ‘old way’, described in 1674 as ‘right deep and noyous so
that people cannot have their carriages thereon’, had veered from the outer court across
Stubbs, over the stream feeding Sandfield Pond and through Dapps copyhold to a road
‘gate’ near Bearstake. Goring’s ‘new way’ also extended southward from Danny, ‘up to
the barns’ (the site of Little Danny) and then ‘up’ to the lane under Wolstonbury Hill.
This in turn replaced an ‘old way’ veering south-east from the outer court across demesne
fields towards Dapps orchard. The status of this ‘new way’ was later the subject of bitter
dispute. The estate map in 1666 firmly labelled each stretch of it as ‘not a high way’ and
some witnesses gathered at Hurst’s Royal Oak in 1674 agreed. Samuel Bland, a Cambridgetrained lawyer, residing at Danny between 1625 and 1642, insisted that Goring made it
for his private use; the nine gates between the Sandfield and ‘the hill’ were usually locked;
carts loaded with chalk were charged 2d. to use it. But Widow Crowche, aged 82, flatly
disagreed: it was made ‘sixty years since’, ‘in lieu of the old common highway’ which was
then ‘stopped up’. Widow Mary Moore, aged 72, reinforced Widow Crowche: Goring had
assured his tenants it was a way ‘in which he took much delight’, and made as much for
the benefit of the parishioners of Hurst as for his own. Others testified that carts bringing
flints from ‘the hill’, or ‘laden with wood and faggots out of the Wild [Weald] of Sussex’,
had freely used it. But whatever its legal status, if Goring did express ‘delight’ in his ‘new
way’, was it an aesthetic response? Did the sparkling vista across the Pond, and the massy
sandstone outcrops in Sandfield, remind him of romantic Arcadian scenes painted by
Inigo Jones for the Court masques which he so admired and indeed commissioned?42
Goring’s involvement with Danny, however, slackened in 1629, when his eldest son,
George, came of age. A highly gilded youth, educated at Cambridge and on a Grand
Tour amid ambassadors and embassies, he married that year Lettice Boyle, a daughter
of the wealthy Earl of Cork, and a sister of Robert, the pioneering chemist. She duly
arrived from Ireland with a hefty dowry of £10,000. For his part Goring settled the Danny
estate on the wedded couple – hopefully to serve as a stately, if bucolic, haven for another
growing family. But Lettice bore no children. And by 1633 the spendthrift George owed
£9,000 – a debt, which his fond father lamented, ‘almost breaks my back’. Marital discord
and separations ensued. Indeed, in 1636 the Earl of Cork complained of Lettice being
deserted at Danny, ‘solitary and alone in a country house’ and Lettice for her part alleged
ill-usage by her mother-in-law, ‘as bad as bitter words can make it’. His relatives, hoping to
distract George from incessant spending, bought him an English regiment then fighting
for the Dutch against the Spanish. He led it with dashing courage at the siege of Breda
in 1637, though ‘lamed’ for life there by a wound to the ankle. Undaunted, he returned
to fight in Northumberland against invading Scottish Covenanters in 1639, causing the
Cavalier poet, Richard Lovelace, to salute him as a war hero ‘whose glories shine so brave
32
40 Colonel Goring (right) and the Earl of Newport by Van Dyck.
and high’, and to neatly unite him with Lettice ‘whose eyes wound deep in Peace as doth
his sword in wars’ – a signal that the pair had reconciled. The Court painter, Van Dyck,
also paired him with the Earl of Newport in two stylish double portraits. Both soldiers
superbly shimmer in velvet, fine linen and steel – the handsome Colonel Goring’s level
stare not quite masking the ‘wit’, so ‘natural, sharp and flowing’, that a hostile Earl of
Clarendon later credited him with in a partisan History of the Great Rebellion.43
The invading Covenanters, of course, were the catalyst for the outbreak of the English
Civil War in 1642. Unsurprisingly, Lord Goring proved a steadfast Royalist. So did Doctor
Swale, his choice as rector of Hurst. Lawyer Bland later claimed that Lord Goring allowed
Swale free passage along his ‘new way’, having ‘a special kindness’ for him. And indeed, as
33
a fervent royalist he warned his parishioners that ‘they must bare whatever their sovereign
please to lay upon them, though to the death’. Moreover, his memorial in Hurst church
still proclaims that his expulsion from the rectory in 1644 was ‘sola in Regem fidelitatis
causa’. But the fervent monarchism of Swale and his patrons was a minority view in
eastern Sussex, shared by few of the Justices of the Peace who gathered at the quarter
sessions in Lewes. Indeed an anti-Court and Puritan ‘faction’ there was headed by Thomas
Pelham, Herbert Morley, and Anthony Stapley (Lord Goring’s brother-in-law!). This
faction triumphed locally at elections in October 1640 for the Long Parliament which
lingered on till 1653. The same masterful Puritan trio secured eastern Sussex as a solid
Parliamentary bastion once the Civil War erupted.44
After impending Civil War forced the Court to quit London, Lord Goring accompanied
Queen Henrietta to the Dutch Netherlands, pawned the royal jewels there and bought
20,000 muskets for the King’s cause. In 1644 he secured at Paris a royalist alliance with
France and was created Earl of Norwich – the title borne by his deceased uncle Edward
Denny. Back in England by December 1647, the war seemingly lost, he surfaced near
Rochester in May 1648 to command a royalist rising in Kent. But General Fairfax seized
Maidstone and the London militia blocked any advance on the capital. Crossing into
Essex, Goring was overtaken by Fairfax and hotly besieged in Colchester. This hindered
the General from marching north to reinforce Cromwell, who awaited an invading army
of Scottish royalists, which he duly routed at Preston in August. As the siege at Colchester
dragged on and the townsfolk grew hungry, ‘The Lord Goring told them they must eat
their children’ – so Parliament’s propaganda claimed. After the town surrendered, two
royalist commanders were shot. But Goring, after languishing in the Tower of London, was
tried by the House of Commons in March 1649 and avoided execution by the Speaker’s
casting vote. Allowed to return abroad, he
shuttled about the Spanish Netherlands,
between Brussels, Breda and Antwerp,
serving Charles II’s Court in exile till the
Restoration in 1660. (Another royalist
commander at Colchester, Sir William
Campion, died leading a sally. His ultraTory grandson acquired Danny in 1725
by marriage and deeply cherished there his
memory and his armour.)45
Colonel Goring meanwhile fared even
worse than his father. Historians still debate
his tortuous conduct in the run-up to the
Civil War – during the Army Plot and while
Governor of Portsmouth, and though finally
declaring for the King, he surrendered the
41 Sir William Campion by Cornelius Jansen.
34
42 The armour of Sir
William Campion.
beleaguered naval base in August 1642. But later he blossomed as an intrepid and astute
cavalry commander, repulsing Fairfax in battles at Seacroft Moor and Marston Moor and
Cromwell in skirmishes at Newbury and Burford. By January 1645 his prestige was such
that he led 3,000 ‘horse, foot and dragoons’, plus artillery, from the still-royalist West in
a sudden attack on Fareham in Hampshire, as a prelude to invading west Sussex, where
he believed that ‘well affected persons’ would ‘declare for the King, and that Kent would
do the same’. But despite raids on Aldershot and Arundel – and Danny almost within
his grasp – lack of money and supplies forced him to retreat. And although in March the
King made him commander of his forces in the West, the royal cause was all but lost after
Naseby, and in July General Goring was duly defeated by Fairfax and the New Model
Army at Langport in Somerset. In November 1645 he left Devon for France, never to
see England again. It was in the West that he antagonised the royalist civilian adviser,
Sir Edward Hyde, later Lord Clarendon, who in his History charged him with a talent
for ‘dissimulation’ and a ‘most supine negligence’ that encouraged his troops to inflict
‘horrid outrages’ on civilians – charges also still debated by historians. Less controversial
was his adjutant’s verdict: ‘he strangely loved the bottle, was much given to his pleasures,
and a great debauchee’ – yet ‘he was as good an officer as any [that] served the king’.
And indeed, back on the Continent, his military prowess attracted a command and a
pension, from the King of Spain.46
As for General Goring’s Danny estate, it was menaced even before his family’s political
ruin began. In March 1641 he appointed trustees to manage it and hopefully pay off
his massive debts. The Civil War then wiped out his father’s income from sinecures,
tobacco, butter, gold thread and taverns. Parliament meanwhile requisitioned Goring
35
House in London, causing his wife Lettice and Lady Goring to settle at Danny – any
‘bitter words’ between them hopefully forgotten. Nearby at Lewes presided their powerful
Puritan kinsman, Anthony Stapley, and he secured maybe for Lady Goring her pass to
travel to the King’s headquarters at Oxford in March 1643 – she departed in style, with
a coach, six horses and six saddle horses. The next month, aged 32, the childless Lettice
died, again ‘solitary and alone in a country house’. And though she was buried in the
‘Danny chancel’ at Hurst, no memorial survives nor any record of one. Possibly Lady
Goring never returned, being interred in Westminster Abbey in July 1648. Meanwhile
in 1643 asset-stripping of the Danny estate began, with the felling of timber in the now
dismantled Little Park. And when Lord Goring contrived to pass briefly through in 1644,
en route to his relations at Burton Park, he instructed his Hurst lawyer, Ralph Beard, to
begin ‘the freeing of copyholds’ on the estate. He also lamented that Sir Thomas Covert at
Slaugham, though the father of his ‘precious’ grandchildren, refused to lend him money.
Soon after, the financial plight of both father and son required more drastic measures.
Rapidly the estate was split into lots which were mortgaged, re-mortgaged and then sold
outright. From this awesome legal tangle, a wily Parliamentarian from the Weald of Kent,
Peter Courthope, emerged by 1653 as the buyer of Danny House and 263 acres of the
former Great Park, also of Wilcombe Farm and the Goring town-house at Lewes. The
Luxfords, the freeholders at Randalls, bought another 132 acres of the former Great Park,
just west of Danny House. Also sold off were the demesne fields south of Hurst village
and the former Home Park by the church.47
Meanwhile, in May 1652, an ‘impoverished’ General Goring paused from besieging
at Barcelona Catalan rebels against the King of Spain, and wrote to his brother Charles
affirming his ‘just’ claim to some remnants of the Danny estate – ‘offals’ as he picturesquely
called them – ‘to which I am made so great a stranger’. He even talked of returning to
London, ready and willing to wrestle any such scraps from his ‘villainous’ trustees. But
thereafter his health broke down and rumour had it that he became a Dominican lay
brother. Certainly English Jesuits buried him at Madrid in July 1657. By then shortage
of cash hindered his still energetic father from pursuing the King’s business in Brussels
– ‘it rained so fast and my boots [were] so thin’. After the Restoration, though, in 1660
he regained his sinecures in Wales and the Peak District, and received a pension of
£2,000, before expiring in 1663 at a hostelry in Brentford bound for the Court and being
buried beside his wife in Westminster Abbey. His makeshift will jumbled up debts – to
relatives, Courtiers, a Lewes attorney and London tradesmen – stretching back 20 years
and totalling £11,500, which he entreated the King to settle by posthumously paying his
pension for two and a half years. After his son Charles, the 2nd Earl of Norwich, died
without children in 1671, his executors conveyed the lordship of Hurst manor and the
advowson of Hurst rectory to John Shaw, a London merchant – perhaps the ‘offals’ of
his Danny estate that fuming General Goring had on his mind in 1652.48
4
Danny Truncated:
Two Peter Courthopes, 1653-1725
Peter Courthope was in his 70s when he bought Danny House, having prospered as a
cloth merchant and ironmaster in the Weald of Kent. Indeed, his accomplished portrait
by Cornelius Jansen depicts the level stare and sumptuous lace collar of a satisfied
entrepreneur. His brother Nathaniel, though, had been more intrepid still, hoisting
the English flag in 1616 over Pulo Run, an island in the East Indies abounding in
nutmeg and mace. But ruthless Dutch rivals plundered his spices stowed aboard The
Swan and killed him when they captured Pulo Run in 1620. Dutifully, his brother
Peter acquired, and preserved at Danny, a list of his plundered cargo and a copy of his
will made in the East Indies – his ‘blacke Boye’, Will, stationed at Macassar, was to
be sent home to friends in Bantam ‘and let go free’. Peter, who was Puritan as well as
affluent, also helped to fund Parliament’s military campaign in Kent during the Civil
War, meticulously noting the loans made, as he put it, ‘for the Service of the State’.
‘Subscriptions’ totalled £230 and cash for cavalry horses, some ‘completely armed’,
£155; sundries included ‘foot armour’ £4 13s. 4d., ‘a broad gilt sword’ £2, and 10s.
for hay, oats and shoeing. Later, in the 1650s, his younger son Alexander went into
partnership with Browne & Foley to cast guns in Kent for England’s wars against the
Dutch, who had plundered and killed Uncle Nathaniel.49
Despite his deep Kentish roots, Peter chose in his 70s to migrate to mid-Sussex, drawn
perhaps by a clutch of close relatives there. Back in 1618, as his second wife he married
Jane, the widow of Ninian Burrell of Cuckfield, and in 1630 his eldest son Henry wedded
Anne, Jane’s daughter by Ninian. Peter was already located at Isfield in 1649, when he
paid £500 for the Goring town-house at Lewes. By 1650 his local prestige was such that
he could fittingly serve as the new Republic’s High Sheriff of Sussex. And by 1653 he
acquired Danny House, 262 acres of the former Great Park, and Wilcombe Farm with
its warren and sheep pasture on Wolstonbury Hill – an estate memorably mapped in
1666 for his grandson by Robert Whitpaine. But the elderly Peter’s tenure of this new
‘earthly estate’ was brief. With a suitably Puritan turn of phrase his epitaph, on a plain
mural tablet in the former ‘Danny chancel’ at Hurst, recorded his death on 15 August,
‘in the year of Salvation restored’, 1657. Forty shillings for a funeral sermon, and as much
for the parish poor, were scrupulously allowed for in his will. This massive document
ran to 40 pages, each signed and sealed – in stark contrast to Lord Goring’s valedictory
43 Peter Courthope by Cornelius Jansen.
37
38
Danny Truncated, Two Peter Courthopes, 1653-1725
39
45 The mural tablet to Peter Courthope.
Courthopes of Cranbrook and Danny
Alexander Courthope
of Cranbrook d.1608
Nathaniel
killed in East Indies
1620
Ninian Burrell
d.1614
Walter
1600-73
Thomas
b.1632-
=
(2) Jane Burrell
widow
Anne
1604-91
Timothy
1642-1717
John
1673-99
=
=
Peter of Goddards Green
& Danny 1577-1657
=
(1) Elizabeth
Sharpey
Henry of Goddards Green
dvp 1642
Peter of Danny
1639-1725
Barbara
1676-1755
=
=
Philadelphia Dau. of John Stapley
1652-76
Henry Campion of Danny
d.1761
44 A pedigree of the Courthopes of Cranbrook and Danny (owners in red).
list of jumbled debts totalling £11,500. As a seasoned Puritan, Peter felt able ‘to forsake
this earthly tabernacle in full assurance and confidence that all my sins, original and
actual, are fully pardoned and remitted by and through the merits of Jesus Christ, my
only Saviour and Redeemer’. The bulk of ‘such estate’ in Kent and Sussex as God had
‘blessed’ him with, along with ‘a great thick silver cup’ once his father’s, he left in trust
for his grandson Peter, whose father Henry had died in 1642. But he instructed his three
executors to sell the Lewes town-house and also required them to keep exact accounts
and copy them twice, ‘duplicatively’, into separate books.50
At Trinity College Cambridge, meanwhile, his grandson Peter was forging lasting
friendships with two men later illustrious in the annals of English science. Francis Willughby,
a fellow student, was heir to lucrative coal-pits and Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire,
while John Ray, a young lecturer, was a blacksmith’s son from Essex. Having watched his
mother deftly mixing medicinal herbs, Ray himself was busily classifying the local Cambridge
flora, a prelude to his encyclopaedic books exploring ‘God’s Creation’, which brought
him European fame and the respect of Linnaeus. And letters sent to Peter at Danny, and
carefully filed, reveal that Ray’s passion for Natural History had infected both students.
In 1658 Ray thanked Peter for sending a small plant ‘growing on your downs’. Could he
also send him an iron retort ‘for conducting useful experiments’, as illustrated in Glauber’s
Philosophical Furnaces? Perhaps Ray hoped to tap the skills of Peter’s uncle, Walter Burrell,
an ironmaster at Cuckfield. Willughby in turn wrote that Peter’s new caterpillar should be
exposed to the sun, once the warm weather came, though he could offer no advice on ‘her
diet’. In 1660 his two well-heeled disciples helped Ray publish his Latin Catalogue listing
558 species of plant growing in and around Cambridge. After Peter graduated, Ray sent
news in June 1661 of a ‘feverish distemper’ afflicting a new pupil, Timothy Burrell, Peter’s
cousin and Walter’s seventh son. He
survived and duly embraced Natural
History. In October Ray warned Peter
to guard his own ‘thin body’ against
a bout of ague – as for remedies, he
distrusted Doctor Budgen’s ‘sneezing
powder’, and indeed the new-fangled
‘Jesuits’ bark’ (quinine),‘so slippery
and ambiguous a medicine’. But he
praised in passing Peter’s masterful
English prose, so ‘handsome, proper
and elegant’.51
Ray wrote again in November
1661, promising to ‘wait upon’ Peter
at Danny, once College business
allowed. And there indeed in February
1662 he signed as a witness to a major
settlement of Peter’s property. He was
also intrigued, like Richard Jefferies
two centuries later, by the several ‘sorts
of fern’ growing nearby. And he tried
his hand at grafting, but performed,
he confessed, ‘very sinisterly’. From
Danny he progressed to Cuckfield to
his pupil Timothy, who promised to send on to him a specimen of a rare ‘sort of hairy
wood-grass’. In April Ray wrote from Cambridge remarking on the Cardamine impatiens
that he saw growing lustily ‘all along the ditches’ on his ride back to London. In May
he asked Peter for details of the vacant headship of Lewes grammar school, having a Mr
Hunt of Pontefract in mind. More sombrely, his letters in August chart his expulsion
from Trinity College after refusing to accept the restored Anglican rituals – his previously
taking ‘so many oaths and subscriptions’ had taught him ‘to disgust such pills’. So in
September, though he had thought of taking up ‘my quarters with you for the best
part of this winter’, he wrote to Peter from a country-house near Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
Between tutoring the children there, he studied the ‘famous Sea Pease’ on the shingle
beach, and duly killed and ‘cased’ both a bittern and a curlew that he spied disporting
in a nearby creek. He also urged Peter to travel the next spring into Europe with himself
and Willughby to examine its Natural History. And Willughby wrote to assure him that
‘The King of France’s designs [for war] will not at all obstruct us, there being enough of
the world that won’t be in his power to disturb’.52
40
41
46 John Ray by an unknown artist.
47 Sketches of snails, caterpillars and wild flowers from Whitpaine’s map.
But Peter was too preoccupied to travel, too undecided whether to settle at Danny
or sell it. So in April 1663 his friends departed without him on an epic three-year tour
through the Netherlands, the Rhine valley, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Padua, Genoa,
Naples, Sicily, Switzerland and southern France. Their mission was ‘to reduce the several
Tribes of Things to a Method; and to give accurate Descriptions of the several Species,
from a strict View of them.’ Willughby ‘undertook the Birds, Beasts, Fishes and Insects’;
Ray ‘did the Vegetables’. After his return, Ray visited Timothy Burrell, possibly in 1666,
and certainly from November 1667 until the spring of 1668, the year Peter was elected to
the Royal Society. Doubtless Ray was also at Danny that winter, renewing acquaintances.
Indeed, in January 1674 he wrote tendering his ‘very humble service’ to a string of Peter’s
Sussex relations – to his ‘much-honoured’ mother, to Mr Oliver, Mr Bill, Mr White and
Sir John Stapley – all ‘known to me as though I had named them’. He also dedicated to
Peter ‘a small trifle’ which he published ‘chiefly to gratify’ Peter’s cousin, Thomas Burrell
(Timothy’s brother), who paid for it. And indeed A collection of English words, not generally
used, with their significations and origin ‘sold very well’. It included a detailed account,
replete with technical terms, of iron-making at the furnaces and forges of Sussex, supplied
by his ‘honoured friend’, Walter Burrell. And perhaps, while at Danny, Ray admired
the sketches of snails and caterpillars, of honeysuckle and wild flowers, adorning the
exemplary estate map drawn by Robert Whitpaine in 1666 – also the rabbits shown
straying unofficially from Wilcombe warren to nibble the adjacent corn fields.53
After Willughby died in 1672, Ray slowly wrote up their research notes and in 1693 duly
appeared his monumental Synopsis animalium quadrupedum et serpentini generis, which
he fondly dedicated to Peter and Timothy as ‘the last survivors of his early associates’. In
1695 he was still answering Timothy’s queries, about hawks expectorating and insects
breeding in the bodies of live animals. That year too Ray’s list of plants, distinctive to
Sussex, appeared in a new edition of Camden’s Britannia. Timothy in return sent a
remedy for Ray’s running sores, ‘a diet drink’ that a local ‘poor woman’ concocted by
boiling up in ale fresh oak bark, root of ribwort and cinquefoil oak leaves – apparently it
cured ulcers that baffled London physicians. Whether sampled or not, Ray died in 1705
and the Sussex cousins loyally subscribed £7 of the £50 needed for a monument in his
native parish to their ‘worthy friend’ and ‘revered’ tutor. Later that century, another great
naturalist, Gilbert White, was wont to traverse the crest of the South Downs above Danny,
en route from his rectory at Selborne to his Aunt Snooke and her tortoise at Ringmer.
And pausing on the crest at Plumpton Plain, he used to recall the fond reminiscence of
visits to Danny that Ray published in his Wisdom of God in the works of Creation – his
conviction that the noble view from the Plain, of the Weald on one side and the Downs
and ocean on the other, was ‘equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of Europe’,
during his epic three-year tour with Willughby.54
Ray’s friendship with Peter endured despite theological differences. Such had been
Ray’s distaste for the restored Anglican rituals that he quitted Trinity College. But Peter’s
own epitaph in the former ‘Danny chancel’ at Hurst, composed after his death in 1725,
applauded him as a devout Anglican. Indeed it claimed that ‘in his infancy, and even
in the midst of anarchy and confusion [the Civil War], he imbibed loyal and orthodox
principles’. And he asked no reward, ‘but that of a good conscience, when our Church
and Monarchy were restored’ [in 1660]. Yet during that dire ‘confusion’ Peter’s Puritan
grandfather had steadily funded Parliament’s war effort in Kent – the armoured cavalry
horses, the ‘broad gilt sword’ etc. – and went on to serve as the Republic’s High Sheriff in
Sussex. So maybe, after his father Henry died in 1642, the infant Peter imbibed his loyal
‘principles’ from his widowed mother Anne. His epitaph insisted, too, that ‘he preserved
[them] to the last, unmoved by fear of danger or hope of sordid gain, with a steadiness …
imitated by few’. And indeed, as a loyal disciple of ‘our Church and Monarchy’, he did
42
enlarge the silver communion chalice used at Hurst. And in 1705, at the election of two
knights of the shire for Sussex, he staunchly voted for the Tory candidates, Sir George
Parker and Mr Lumley. A family with an even more rampant Republican past to bury
were the Stapleys, Peter’s neighbours across the Downs at Patcham. The Puritan Anthony,
who married Lord Goring’s sister, also in 1649 signed the death warrant of King Charles
the Martyr. But fortunately John, his son and heir, flirted with plans for a Cavalier rising
in Sussex in 1657 and was generously dubbed a baronet by Charles II in 1660. This in
turn cleared the way for Peter to marry John’s daughter Philadelphia in 1667.55
Peter’s marriage surely signalled that he was now ‘settled’ at Danny. Moreover, in 1666
he paid Robert Whitpaine, a local surveyor, to draw the exemplary estate map depicting
the sheep-run on Wolstonbury Hill and the fields of Wilcombe below, as well as Danny
House and 262 acres of the former Great Park. But the 42 acres labelled ‘Parke’, just west
of the house, were in fact the site of the ‘great wood’ in the Little Park, dismantled in the
1640s. When Peter in 1688 bought another 18 acres of this ‘Parke’, a parchment strip
showing them was attached to the map. Otherwise the fields plotted in 1666 broadly
equate with those listed in documents splitting up the estate in 1649-53. And maybe their
layout dated back to the conversion of the Great Park to agriculture, its partitioning with
‘quickset hedges, posts and rails’, before its sale to George Goring in 1582. Exceptionally,
though, East Lane, listed in 1649-50, seems to have been divided before 1666 into Pigeon
House Field and New Mead, with a straight avenue of trees between them, aligned with
the ebullient gatehouse and the entrance porch of Danny. So presumably Peter, or his
grandfather, devised this vista – and perhaps built the lofty pigeon house shown on the
map, an amenity not listed in 1649-53. Peter was certainly credited in 1674 with having
grubbed up great stands of trees on high banks enclosing the Stubbs Field. But thereafter
it seems that the fields Whitpaine plotted in 1666 survived intact till transformed in the
1780s into a landscaped park embodying the precepts of Capability Brown.56
In the corner of his map Whitpaine included the invaluable sketch of Danny House
itself, its orchards, gatehouse and breezy belvedere. He also highlighted a current
dispute between Peter and some neighbours by firmly labelling as ‘not a highway’ the
road from Hurst through the Sandfield, past the gatehouse, and up via the barns to
the fields of Wilcombe. Yet in 1674 witnesses at the Royal Oak in Hurst, including
Arthur Luxford, a ‘gentleman’ who grew up at Randalls Farm, advanced a wealth of
anecdote to affirm that Lord Goring had laid out the road for his, and the public’s,
convenience, and that Peter and his grandfather had denied the public access. They
also claimed that Goring’s new road replaced two inconvenient public highways which
formed ‘an exact triangle leading from Bearstake, lying north-east of Danny House’,
up to its outer court, ‘and thence to Dapps House which is directly south-east … so
that it is almost as near Bearestake to Dapps House as to Danny House’. No traces of
these appear on Whitpaine’s map. And indeed, other witnesses, among them Samuel
Bland, a lawyer residing at Danny in Goring’s time, stoutly denied, again with abundant
anecdote, that Goring’s road had ever been public or that two older public ways ever
existed. Yet in 1675 Peter conceded half his opponents’ case. Lord Goring’s Way was
43
48 Peter Courthope’s
achievement of arms from
Whitpaine’s map.
to remain private. But with the assent of local JPs he laid out a new and ‘commodious’
way (New Way Lane), 30 feet broad and 205 rods (3,382 feet) long, which led ‘direct’
from near ‘Bearstakes’ south to ‘Dapps orchard’ – perhaps the earliest documented
by-pass in Sussex, and still visible as a trimly uniform stretch of lane. (See 10) This
‘New Way’, Peter acknowledged, replaced ‘a common highway … in places right deep
and noyous so that people cannot have their carriages thereon’ – formerly the public
roads converging, as alleged, on the outer court of Danny.57
After settling the New Way Peter expanded his Danny estate. In 1683 he bought the 80acre Hautbois Farm, just across the New Way, in 1688 the 18 acres of former ‘Parke’, and in
1701 Ham Lands, North Wickham and Hassocks, some 190 acres to the north-east in Hurst
and Clayton. But seemingly he made few changes to the mansion, though a witness at the
Royal Oak in 1674 did refer to the ‘late’ gatehouse. That same year John Ray alluded to an
apparently flourishing social life at Danny when sending greetings to Peter’s father-in-law, Sir
John Stapley, and to three prosperous brothers-in-law resident in Lewes. Henry Bill was county
Treasurer for Charitable Purposes. John Oliver owned two thriving inns, the White Lion and
the Bull. And Benjamin White, a Leyden-trained physician, numbered in his fashionable
practice Mrs Timothy Burrell and Lady Pelham; he also lent heavily to hard-up gentlemen
along the South Downs. But Peter’s wife Philadelphia died in 1676 and he never remarried.
So her death perhaps deadened any incentive on his part to modernise the mansion, to make
more domestic, for instance, the highly ceremonious State Rooms in the south wing.58
A further blow was the death in 1699, aged 26, of Peter’s only surviving son. John, a rising
politician, died a few days after being elected an MP for the local borough of Bramber. Party
politics there in the 1690s are difficult to decipher, for its fewer than 40 electors were mostly
in the pocket of two or three wealthy outsiders. So although John filled a seat vacated by Sir
Henry Furnese, a Whig merchant from London, he possibly shared his father’s ‘loyal and
44
45
just off New Way Lane, a well-drained sloping pasture, once a rabbit warren. (Thomas noted
a sixth match ‘in our bank field’, possibly an alias – the Sandfield bordered a copyhold called
Megram’s Bank.) Peter’s field indeed is the first identifiable ground in Sussex where cricket was
played, and regularly played. There were single matches ‘at the Dicker’ in 1677, ‘at Lewis’ in
1694, ‘in Sussex’ in 1697 and in 1702 when brandy was drunk while the Duke of Richmond
‘plaid at Cricket with Arundel men’. But where the pitches were is unknown. Thomas’s diary
takes up the story with ‘a Cricket Match’ in May 1717, away matches at ‘Dungton Gate’
(Hassocks) in June and at Bolney in April 1718 and the home match in June 1719. Later, in
1721, the home team stormed to victory against Henfield, Cowfold and Steyning, the last
match ‘won at one inning’. Like several early pitches, most famously Broadhalfpenny Down
in Hampshire, the Sandfield offered very uneven ground with sandstone outcrops overlooking
the Pond. Fifty years later, it was still the venue where the Gentlemen of Hurst clashed with
the Gentlemen of Lindfield, ‘for a Guinea each’ in July 1772.60
49 Little Park Farm with its capacious carp pond surveyed in 1569-70.
orthodox’ Tory principles. Certainly they were shared by Henry Campion, the wealthy Kentish
landowner who married Peter’s only surviving child, Barbara, in 1702. Thereafter, ageing
and mildly sociable, Peter fitfully figures in the detailed diary kept by Thomas Marchant,
a yeoman fish-farmer at Little Park Farm near the church. Peter is mentioned dining out
with the Rector and with Mrs Beard, the attorney’s widow, and attending a ‘club’ of village
notables at the Swan. He invited Mrs Marchant to Danny one afternoon in July 1719 to
celebrate his 80th birthday. She and Thomas also dined there the following Christmas. More
prosaically, after evening prayer, Peter dropped in to discuss parish business with Thomas,
who also sold him 100 ‘store’ tench for his Danny ponds, but regretted paying him 14s.
for a whip – ‘a fool and his money parted’. Perhaps Peter shared his Puritan grandfather’s
eye for a bargain as well as his longevity.59
Marchant’s diary also suggests that Peter was an early patron of village cricket in Sussex.
The first match Thomas noted at Hurst was held on 4 June 1719 and the pitch, which also
hosted five later home matches until June 1727, was in Peter’s estate, at ‘Danny Sandfield’
5
Danny in Shadow:
A ‘Sanguine’ Jacobite and his
Depressive Son, 1725-78
50 The cartouche and title plate from the 1907 pedigree.
What proved to be for Danny a decisive dynastic union was sealed in June 1702 by the
marriage of Henry Campion and Barbara Courthope. Indeed, it was flamboyantly reenacted there in 1935 during two crowded days of Revels and Pageant – the bridegroom
being played by Simon Campion, who duly inherited the estate in 1951. But though
Henry was a devoted husband, his wayward politics doubtless gave Barbara many anxious
moments before, and after, her father Peter died at Danny in 1725. A sumptuous pedigree,
compiled in 1907, traced Henry’s remoter ancestors to Campion Hall in Essex, and then
further back by three ‘royal descents’ to King Edward III, and also for good measure to
‘cadets of the Counts of Champaigne’. Closer and more prosaic, though, was Henry
Campion, a younger son and prosperous mercer in Elizabethan London, whose house
property there included what became the site of the Condemned Cell at Newgate Prison,
rented out to the Lord Mayor for £50 a year. Henry’s son, William, moved up into the
landed gentry by acquiring an estate at Combwell near Goudhurst in Kent, owned before
the Dissolution by Augustinian monks. And William’s grandson emerged as an ardent
Royalist during the Civil War. Valiantly defending Boarstall House, an outpost guarding
King Charles’s headquarters at Oxford, he yielded it with the full honours of war only in
June 1646 when the city itself capitulated. Undaunted, Sir William then joined the illfated South-Eastern Rising led by Lord Goring and perished leading a sally from besieged
Colchester in 1648. His epitaph rightly hailed him as ‘constant to his Prince, whose cause
he chose, and in whose service he died’. His battle armour was later to grace the Great
Hall at Danny till the Great Dispersal in 1984. His son William, entering Trinity College
Cambridge in 1655, became ‘the chamber-fellow’ of Peter Courthope – a chance which
forwarded maybe the momentous union in 1702 between his eldest son Henry and Peter’s
only daughter. Elected an MP for Seaford in 1689 and for the county of Kent in 1701,
William was a steady Whig supporter of William III and died in September 1702.61
The marriage of William’s son to the heiress of Danny consolidated his political prospects.
But Henry’s public career proved less steady than William’s. His portrait reveals the
slightly petulant stare of an enthusiast and indeed his devotion to the Stuart cause was to
become almost as perilous as his grandfather’s fatal sally from Colchester. Elected an MP
in 1708 for East Grinstead, he was a leading spokesman for the ‘October Club’, a group
of ultra-Tory MPs and peers zealous for the Anglican Church, for a Peace with Louis
XIV’s France and the exposure of Whig corruption. Doubtless with his Tory father-inlaw’s backing, he was elected an MP for Sussex in Queen Anne’s last parliament in 1713.
47
48
Danny in Shadow: A ‘Sanguine’ Jacobite and his Depressive Son, 1725-78
49
Campions of Combwell and Danny
William Campion of Combwell
d.1615
Sir William of Combwell and London
1585-1640
Sir William of Combwell
1613-48
William of Combwell
1639-1702
Henry of Combwell and Danny
d.1761
Elizabeth dau. of Edward
Patheriche c.1702-63
=
Henry Francis
1802-09
Barbara Courthope
1676-1755
William of Combwell & Danny
1707-78
Henry Courthope
1734-1811
Wiliam John
1770-1855
=
=
Henrietta Heathcote
d.1771
William of Lewes
1738-1818
= Jane Dau. of Francis
Bridget
Motley austen d.1857 1769-97
William John = Harriet Dau. of Thomas
1804-69
Read Kemp 1807-1900
Henry
1711-43
Katherine
1713-78
=
George Courthope
1712-83
Edward of Chichester
1740-1808
Priscilla
1781-95
[William] Simon = Lilias May
1895-1976
Dau. of D. Scott Portious
(1) Deborah Kennett = [William] David
b.1924
1922-2000
Katherine Ann
b.1944
James = Sandhya
b.1952
Edward
Blaxland 1873-1916
George Courthope
1737-1828
George Edward Jane Bridget Frances Henrietta = Rev Augustus
1816-41
1799-1840
1809-78
Pack
Rev Charles
Heathcote 1814-88
= Noel
=
Frances Elizabeth
1778-1804
Col. William Henry = Gertrude Dau. of William Brand [Charles] Walter Frances = John George Florence
1836-1923
Visc Hampden 1844-1927
1839-1926
1829-1913 Blencowe
d.1912
Sir William Robert = Katherine Mary
Frederick Henry
1870-1951
Dau. of William Byron 1872-1957
Frances Barbara
d.1813
Charles
1876-1901
=
John George Dodson
Mary Georgina = Ferdinand
1st Lord Monk Bretton d.1874
Ernest Tower
Mary Gertrude Alice (Elsie) = Charles Phillimore
1871-1949
1878-1965
b.1880
Wilfred
=
(2) Patricia Ainsworth Lambert
1925-88
Emma Caroline
b.1957
Tarun Sai David
b.1996
51 A pedigree of the Campions of Combwell and Danny (owners in red).
In the Commons he voted against a £100,000 reward for the capture of ‘the Pretender’,
James Stuart, the exiled son of the deceased James II, and sought to hinder George, the
Elector of Hanover, succeeding the childless Queen Anne on the throne. After her death,
but before George’s coronation, Thomas Marchant hints in his diary at furtive, possibly
Jacobite, goings-on at Hurst. Thomas, three neighbours and ‘a Frenchman’ met Henry
at Danny and agreed to meet again at Nut Knowle, a local farm in Woodmancote,
though Mrs Susan Courthope ‘promised’ Thomas she would ‘prevent the above mentioned
journey’. Yet he did gather with Henry, Mr Hay, John Bateman (the curate), John Hart
(the schoolmaster) and ‘a Frenchman’, at Richard Whitpaine’s in West Town. Then in
May 1715, after the coronation, Henry sent Thomas five pamphlets, and on 10 June, ‘the
Pretender’s birthday’, the yeoman spent a convivial evening at Danny, when Henry also
paid him 39s. for 12 bushels of beans. Were toasts drunk to the Pretender, alias James III,
by then holding his Court in France? Were the pamphlets inflammatory? Why did Susan
52 Henry and Barbara Campion by an unknown artist.
Courthope seek to prevent the conclave at Nut Knowle? And who was ‘the Frenchman’?62
Jacobite goings-on or not, such was Henry’s known partiality for the Pretender that in
July 1715 Marchant noted local talk of his having sailed from Shoreham to join James in
France. In fact Henry was still angling in Thomas’s pond at Little Park Farm and attending
the parish church. Soon after, though, risking his fortune, if not his life, he slipped away
to Cornwall, to help prepare the ground for ‘a Western Rising’ against King George,
before crossing to France. There indeed, on 19 August, the Pretender’s chief adviser,
Lord Bolingbroke, alerted him to the imminent arrival in Paris of ‘8 6 17 20 14 19 18’
(alias Campion) – ‘one of the most considerable and most zealous of your servants’. In
October Henry was poised at Cherbourg to sail back to Cornwall, to announce that an
invasion force led by the Duke of Ormonde was on its way. But sustained bad weather in
the Channel caused the Western Rising to be called off. Thereafter Henry drifted about
the Continent for almost five years. At Brussels in October 1717, after mildly defending
Bolingbroke’s character, he was forced into a duel by Mr Ratcliffe, a drunken fellow
Jacobite, and suffered ‘three bad wounds in the body, but none of them mortal’. In June
1718 he met a doubtless appreciative Bolingbroke at Charleville and reported on troop
movements at Sedan. Next October he stayed four days with the Duke of Berwick near
Paris. Unsurprisingly, by then, he was pondering ‘a return to England on account of
the uneasy situation of my family affairs’. But not till May 1720 did the Pretender, now
resident in Rome, inform Ormonde that ‘honest Harry Campion’ (compressed by then
to ‘193’) had just left him, armed with a ‘Commission’ which ‘will I hope settle such an
unanimity and concert betwixt my friends in England and me, as will frustrate all the
vain attempts of mine enemies on this side of the sea’. In August Henry duly arrived in
London and on 3 September Marchant noted that five Hurst notables went part of the
way to meet him on his journey ‘home’ to Danny – Henry ‘having been away 5 years
50
and 6 weeks’. Thereafter Thomas’s diary shows him steadily socialising again with his
neighbours.63
Quite what tortuous political course Henry was steering is unclear. In November 1721
he still risked writing to the Pretender, as his ‘faithful humble servant’, bemoaning the
‘excess of caution and variety of Schemes’ displayed by his ‘several partners’ – the Pretender’s
other ‘correspondents’ in England – while admitting he was himself ‘perhaps naturally
too sanguine and impatient of delay in everything where I engage’. Small wonder that in
February 1721 his prudent father-in-law Peter had chosen to leave his estates at Danny
and elsewhere in trust for Henry and Barbara’s eldest son. And did Henry’s ‘partners’
in sedition include his neighbour, Sir Harry Goring, who fled into exile in 1722, after
plotting to recruit a battalion of Sussex brandy smugglers and link them up with an
invasion force of émigré Irish soldiers to be headed by the still indefatigable Ormonde?
Did Henry meddle with this crack-brained treason? Or by then had he made his peace
with the Whig government of King George, perhaps promising on his side to abstain from
public life – a peace brokered perhaps by that amiable Sussex godfather, Thomas Pelham,
Duke of Newcastle? Or did the government deem him too ‘sanguine and impatient’ to
be worth arresting? Certainly the memory of his escapades lingered long in mid-Sussex
– thus in 1796 at a Lewes election, when his grandson William flaunted his loyalty to
the throne, a local Radical reminded him, with only slight exaggeration, of his descent
‘from a man who had been constrained to fly his country as a Jacobite traitor against the
present royal family’.64
That a ‘peace’ was made is suggested by Henry admitting privately in 1739 that he had
long practised the ‘sloth of retirement’ from ‘party zeal’. Moreover, by then, his son Henry’s
53 Charles I on trial in Westminster
Hall, by or after Edward Bower.
51
54 The Apotheosis of Charles the
Martyr, possibly painted by Jonathan
Richardson the Elder.
career in the East India Company was being furthered by the ‘powerful interposition’ of the
Duke of Newcastle’s equally amiable brother, Henry Pelham, soon to be Prime Minister.
Also, in October 1745, Campion could assure the Duke of his loyalty to George II and his
dislike of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s campaign in Scotland – though he was so distant from
public life, he could not venture to Lewes to say so at a County Meeting. Henry’s epitaph
at Hurst duly made the best of his absence from public office: ‘Amidst the praise of abilities
which would adorn the highest station, he sought domestic happiness in retirement from
the busy world’. And it shrugged off his not being a JP: ‘In his behaviour he maintained a
personal dignity which no pomp of titles could confer, a dignity founded in true greatness
of mind’. He was ‘A minister of justice and peace to his neighbours, acting with an authority
which the King’s commission cannot give, [having] the reputation of superior knowledge
and integrity’. Indeed, his ‘ambition’ in his retirement, ‘his unenvied honour’, was ‘to excel
in acts of piety and beneficence, in the exercise of every patriarchal virtue’.65
But though renouncing ‘party zeal’, Henry piously preserved at Danny mementoes of
his grandfather’s devotion to the Stuart cause – the letters Sir William received from King
Charles, Prince Rupert and Thomas Fairfax while valiantly defending Boarstal House,
and the armour he wore at the fatal sally from besieged Colchester. Henry also alluded to
his ‘steadfast loyalty to King Charles, in whose glorious cause he was at last killed’, on a
stylish monument, possibly by Francis Bird, that he erected in Goudhurst church. And
quite probably Henry installed the two portraits of King Charles the Martyr still hanging
at Danny. One derives from sketches that Edward Bower made while present at the trial
52
53
55 The initials of Henry
and Barbara Campion
and the date 1728 on a
rainwater collar-head.
in Westminster Hall. Seated on a red velvet-covered chair, the King wears a black gown
with the large Garter star and ‘the lesser George’. His expression is strained but courageous
– ‘for once the official mask has slipped to reveal the man’. His refusal to remove his tall
black hat proclaims his contempt for Parliament’s makeshift Court of Justice. The second
portrait, The Apotheosis, painted after his death, is smartly stylised and attributed by some
to Jonathan Richardson the elder. Attired in sumptuous robes of state, the King is attended,
as befitted a Martyr of the Church of England, by two fluttering cherubs bearing aloft a
heavenly crown of stars. Also at Danny are portraits of the royalist Earl of Craven, and of
three of Henry’s fellow ultra-Tories in Queen Anne’s Parliament – Lord Lichfield, Sir Watkin
Williams Wynn and William Shippen – all probably copied from originals by Michael Dalh.
Another, of James II as a child, was sold in 1984. And surely Henry acquired the various
Vindications of King Charles the Martyr, the Merveilles de Rome (1717) and the Life of the
Duke of Ormonde (1736), which reposed in the library till 1984 – also ‘the touch pieces
for the King’s Evil’ – testaments to the healing powers of anointed Stuart monarchs, still
displayed in the drawing room in 1939.66
Though Henry was only one of four trustees that prudent Peter Courthope chose to
act for his eldest grandson William, Henry effectively took charge at Danny in 1725 and
soon loomed large in Thomas Marchant’s diary. The new squire discussed with him the
building of a gallery in the church and lent his wife ‘a chariot and four’ to convey her to a
funeral at Rusper; he acted with the yeoman fish-farmer as a pall bearer at Newtimber and
joined him in carousals at the village ‘club’ – a robust disregard of class distinction that
amazed ‘A.D.’, a contributor to Country Life in class-conscious 1913. And though having
no public office to live up to, Henry undertook major building works at Danny between
1728 and 1731 – the initials HBC still adorn stretches of external lead piping. Fittingly,
too, the remodelled faÇade of the south wing still displays his conservative, ‘ultra-Tory’,
architectural taste. It memorably blends local red brick and white Portland stone to embody
the warmth and ‘movement’ of late-Stuart English Baroque. Its nine bays are unified by four
giant pilasters – one at each end and two framing the five middle bays which project slightly
forward. They support a stately panelled parapet and above, originally, were five dormers,
56 The south elevation of the south wing.
symmetrically placed with alternate pointed and dome-topped gable roofs. So the faÇade
is reassuringly ‘Queen Anne’ in style. Not for Henry the new-fangled ‘Whig’ Palladianism
of the chill stone mansion that the Duke of Newcastle’s relatives were erecting over the
Downs at Stanmer – its austere classicism disturbingly reminiscent of the Roman republic.67
57 A drawing of the south wing from the south-east, showing the original dormers.
54
55
58 Capitals and pilasters
on the south wing.
Henry paid a ‘Mr Saunderson’ 10s. 6d. in April 1728 for ‘a draught of the new building
designed at Danny’. The recipient of this slender sum was probably John Sanderson, a
young architect living in 1725 at Covent Garden, who went on to design Kelham Hall
in Nottinghamshire and Stratton Park in Hampshire. Payments in the surviving accounts
chart the progress of his south wing: in August 1728 for drink ‘upon the foundations
being laid’, in September for ‘putting in the first keystone’, in October for ‘framing’
the roof, in February 1729 for sash windows (brought from Greenwich) and the ‘large
wire’ they needed, in May for ‘framing 3 ground floors’ and fetching stone to secure the
cornice, in August for cleaning the new front. Much of the skilled work was done by Mr
Batterson and his team of London bricklayers. The building materials also included lead
and Baltic deals shipped from London, an ash tree carted from Combwell, local oak and
elm, and ‘ship timber’. £39 was spent on ‘faggots and making and burning bricks and
tiles’ – perhaps Sandfield Pond was excavated further.68
As for the interior of the south wing, even the ultra-Tory Henry could dispense with
a grand processional way for cooked meats from the kitchen up a Great Stair to a Great
Chamber above a Great Parlour. More intimate private apartments were organised around
a new central staircase rising through two storeys. The
spaces were remodelled, the floor levels adjusted, the
roof rebuilt and the cellar reinforced with barrel-vaults.
New axial chimney stacks replaced the three formerly
punctuating the south faÇade and £47 was spent on
two tables and five chimneypieces. The three rooms
on the ground floor, serving by the 1850s as dining
room, drawing room and library, were largely lit by the
new sash windows facing south. Some bay windows
were ruthlessly blocked and Mr Roger Mortimer was
59 The sundial in the south garden.
60 The new
staircase.
paid two guineas to paint ‘sham windows’, perhaps to preserve externally the Elizabethan
symmetry. And the space of the redundant Grand Stair was floored to form two west-facing
rooms with a gable above. The building accounts, meanwhile, mention a little parlour, a
great parlour, a withdrawing room, a best bed chamber, a second bed chamber, ‘my new
study’, dressing rooms, a smoking room, a north chamber, two closets and two back stairs.
The new staircase, still splendidly visible from the Great Hall, swings elegantly round,
with two twisted and one columnar walnut baluster to each tread – the handrail is oak.
Seemingly the carpentry was metropolitan. Payments were made for ‘the freight’ of a
56
57
62 Finely moulded
roof-beams in the
south wing.
61 A ground-floor plan of the remodelled mansion.
walnut tree, for a ‘model’ of the staircase, to ‘Goodman Ifold’ for turning 96 balusters and
to Widow Ward for carving 36 brackets, and to the Lewes merchant, Ambrose Galloway,
for ‘the carriage’ of the woodwork, presumably by sea from London. The ground-floor
walls of the stairwell still retain raised and fielded panels and a moulded dado ‘in typical
early 18th-century style’.69
Henry also renovated the gardens fronting the south wing. To be ruthlessly replaced by
naked ‘lawn’ sometime before 1782, they were recalled in 1852 as ‘a series of terraced gardens,
rising upwards towards a grove of venerable trees’ – a formality befitting Henry’s Baroque
faÇade. Two ‘great steps’ were built, a ‘canal’ was dug and stopcocks were fitted to a fountain.
Still surviving is a sundial dated 1725, now mounted on a weathered pedestal, possibly the
one depicted by Whitpaine in 1666, and bearing the inscription:
Amidst ye fflowres
I tell ye hours.
An orchard was also laid out, with a ‘south aspect wall’, 137 feet long, sheltering
peaches, nectarines, apricots and cherries, and with plums, apples and pears elsewhere.
Mr Greening at Brentford supplied 150 gooseberry and currant trees. A new
greenhouse was equipped with four iron stoves and grapes were among the plants
bought ‘for espalier’. To the west of these gardens Henry laid out a formal 15-acre
‘Park’, adorning with firs the walks leading north-south and east-west and planting
coniferous ‘abeals’ elsewhere.70
Besides re-building the south wing, Henry updated the rest of his mansion. But maybe
it was his allegiance to ‘patriarchal virtue’ which prompted him to preserve its grand
Elizabethan east faÇade intact – no sash windows marred its ancestral ambience, whereas
at Parham House Sir Cecil Bisshopp was inserting them wholesale. But quite when, prior
to 1781, the breezy belvedere crowning the Great Hall was removed and a clock and a
bell cupola installed on the entrance porch, remains uncertain. No relevant costs appear
in Henry’s accounts. However, he did enclose the entrance court with ‘walls’ and ‘gate
piers’, as sketched by Samuel H. Grimm in 1781 – substitutes for the ebullient, longdemolished gatehouse. Inside the mansion in 1728, though, the Great Hall was given a
cool Classical tone. The present flat plaster ceiling replaced a barrel vault. On the floor
Thomas Dunn laid paving slabs ‘with black dots’ (removed by 1870, some now rest in
the walled garden). The panelling was renewed. At the north end Joseph Wood ‘framed
the floor for the screen’; at the south end men were paid for ‘cutting down the wall …
and turning arches’ which opened onto the well of the new staircase – preparations for
63 A barrel-vault
in the cellar.
58
59
65 The ‘chimney back’ in the Great Hall.
Elsewhere the open space between the
former Great Stair and the ‘lower end’ stair
was built up and given a gabled roof, making
a fourth on the western faÇade. And perhaps
because the Great Hall was being gentrified,
carpenters ‘framed’ a new ‘servants hall’ lit
with transom windows. The kitchen was
supplied with an up-to-date copper and
the butler enjoyed a new ‘dressing room’ in
which to carve the meat. Other re-organised
service rooms were served by a new ‘lower
end’ stair, in the north range, which retains
its early 18th-century turned balustrade.
A laundry and drain were built in 1730,
a wash house and coach house, with ‘two
floors over’, in 1731. The latter, severely
modified, sports a clock face similar to that formerly on the entrance porch.72
Seemingly this ambitious building campaign, costing over £3,000, strained Henry’s
finances – 50 years later, the rental income from the Campion estates in Sussex,
Kent, Essex and London was approximately £2,000. Indeed, in 1741 he admitted
being in debt, despite ‘a retreat of almost five years’ recently made for economy’s
64 The Great Hall before 1871: water-colour by an unknown artist.
the present matching w
hite-painted screens, each with two round-headed openings.
The joiner Charles Edwards also supplied a cornice ‘down to the Triglyphs’ and
carved two pediments – probably for the doorways adorned with interlocked Cs still
flanking the fireplace. Mr Mortimer painted the cornice and the stucco. Henry also
installed a fireplace in the Hall – presumably the present limestone chimneypiece
with its open segmental pediment which appears in a water-colour sketch made
perhaps in the 1860s or earlier. Ian Nairn admired the piece as ‘very simple, large,
and strictly architectural’, Roger White as an ‘absolutely convincing’ product of
‘provincial classicism’; both dated it to ‘about’ 1728. For his fireplace Henry bought
an iron ‘chimney back’, paying two guineas to Mr Legas – probably the John Legas,
ironmaster, working Lamberhurst Furnace near Combwell. His impressive ‘back’,
doubtless the present one, shows the sea-god Neptune aloft on a pedestal in a pool
shared with two spouting sea-horses and a clambering mermaid – whelks, mussels
and clams festoon the frame.71
66 The coach house and the Bowerbank fountain.
60
sake to Whiligh, the Sussex home of his son-in-law, George Courthope, facetiously
dubbed his ‘house-keeper’. In 1727 he was selling barley to his yeoman neighbour
Thomas Marchant. But his debts perhaps intensified his efforts to farm the Danny
estate for profit. His accounts reveal constant experiments. He introduced clover and
rape, turnips and ‘nonesuch’, into his arable rotations. He spread lime and horse-dung.
He crossed his Southdown sheep with specimens from Leicestershire. He piped water
to the ‘hovel’ where he fattened his cattle. He grew hops and brewed his own beer. He
also farmed fish. Indeed, in December 1760 he stocked 14 ponds and stews, including
‘the moat’ and ‘the canal’, with 162 carp and 146 tench. And, as a breeder of oysters, he
pondered the impact of the hard frost in the Thames estuary, which his own sheltered
beds at Burnham Water in Essex had escaped. A final economy perhaps was to forbid
pallbearers, escutcheons and other showy expense at his funeral held in 1761.73
But Henry’s economies did not eliminate ‘his acts of piety and beneficence’. Indeed,
his epitaph in the former ‘Danny chancel’ soothingly affirmed that ‘His charities to the
poor, secret and silent as the dew of Heaven, dispensed a blessing well placed, which the
profusion of greater wealth seldom bestows’. But hardly clandestine were the ‘80 stone
of beef ’ distributed to ‘the poor’ in 1741, or the £40 expended in 1760 on ‘cloth’ for
50 men and ‘linsey’ for 49 women, or the £125 given in 1749 towards building a Pest
House at Bedlam Street for the isolation of smallpox cases – the two up, two down,
cottage serving that laudable purpose till 1877. Henry also paid £6 a year till 1751 to
support a parish school master; thereafter he paid the rent charged on a new subscription
school built at Bedlam Street, which still flourished in 1819. Doubtless Dr John Burton,
a frequent traveller through Sussex in the 1740s, had such ‘beneficence’ in mind when
he described Danny as ‘the happy mansion of Henry Campion … at once the glory and
reproach of county squires!’74
Fortunately trust funds left by prudent Peter Courthope helped pay for the chests
of port wine and the ‘foreign silver’ dispatched to India to assist private trading by
Campion’s younger son, Henry, while he carved out a career in the East India Company
there – following the footsteps of its founder-member, Peter’s great-uncle, the intrepid
Nathaniel, ‘nutmeg’ Courthope. Young Henry duly reported back on his voyage out in
1739: the ship was loaded with young ladies going out ‘to get husbands’, and the hills and
valleys of the island of Saint Helena were very ‘like the middle part of our Downs’, except
for the swarms of rats and mice. At Fort Marlborough, though, he found the intense
heat as irksome as selling cutlery and coarse cloth to the locals, a ‘poor, miserable set’.
But meanwhile in London, his amiable ‘patron’, Henry Pelham, soon to become Prime
Minister, was securing his transfer to up-market Madras with the rank of Junior Factor.
Before news of this arrived, however, Henry’s career, like Nathaniel’s, was savagely cut
short. While fetching fresh water for his storm-battered freighter on the shore of Orissa,
he was seized and incarcerated by a ‘piratical Jentoo King’, ‘the rajah of Connica’. Though
ransomed by the Company, Henry was so badly ‘afflicted in Body and Mind’ that he died
soon after. His estate was proved at Calcutta and his grieving parents received £978 10s.
in 1748, along with ‘Silk Furniture’ for Barbara’s bedchamber, a present from his fellow
61
67 The south screen and the fireplace in the Great Hall.
traders. Herself plagued by a ‘scorbatick humour’ of the legs, Barbara passed away in
1755 – her epitaph applauding ‘a woman truly pious and virtuous, an affectionate wife
and parent, a generous and charitable neighbour’.75
Though memories of Henry’s Jacobite escapades still enlivened a Lewes Borough election
in 1796, they could hardly hinder his politically blameless elder son, William, from
playing a part in public life befitting his landed status, once he inherited Danny in 1761.
And money, perhaps, was less of a problem. After leaving Trinity College Cambridge, he
married in 1727 Elizabeth Partheriche, a Cambridgeshire girl who brought him £3,000
and bore him three sons, Henry, William and Edward, and a daughter Frances who
tidily married her cousin, George Courthope. The younger children were provided for
in 1758 by selling Campion lands in East Anglia for £7,000. And £3,000 were allotted
to them from the £9,000 that their brother Henry received when he married Henrietta
Heathcote in 1768. Yet William, a substantial squire, dogged by no sullied political past,
never entered public life to serve as a Justice of the Peace. Possibly his mental health was
to blame. In 1741 his father worried that ‘his constant and uncommon gaiety has made
me apprehensive of a relapse into his earlier disorder’ – doubtless melancholia. And
indeed, after escorting his sister to Bath in 1743 – Katherine suffered from severe attacks
of colic – he became ‘very dispirited’. Troubling changes of mood persisted. In 1769 he
was ‘sometimes pretty well, but relapses again’. Meanwhile his accounts suggest that
domestic life at Danny was kept soothingly humdrum till he died in 1778 aged seventyone. His epitaph, perhaps over-ambitiously, described him as ‘a man of lively and strong
parts, improved by extensive classical learning, and an intimate knowledge of the Holy
Scriptures, his favourite study’.76
6
Henry Courthope Campion:
Arcadia and Affliction, 1778-1811
68 The estate map drawn by Richard Budgen in 1783.
Henry Campion, a 44-year-old widower, succeeded his reclusive father in 1778 and,
as befitted a confident and prosperous landowner with main-stream political views, he
promptly entered public life as a Justice of the Peace for Sussex. He also cemented his
local influence by expanding the Danny estate – static since 1702, apart from the 12
acres of Hatches copyhold at Bedlam Street added by his grandfather. Firstly he tidied
up the approach from Hurst by acquiring two small copyholds which straddled the old
Roman road, north of the Sandfield – Megrams Bank, bordering New Way Lane, where
the lodge to the drive now stands, and Maresford, a bundle of pastures to its west. Both
duly appear on the estate map delicately drawn in 1783 by Richard Budgen, a Lewes
surveyor. More decisively, from the Burry family, Henry then bought Foxhole Barn and
130 acres of the former Great Park sold away from Danny after the Civil War, and also
Randalls, the 60-acre freehold bounding Foxhole to the north, with its dovecot, fish
pond and venerable farmhouse – once the abode of the Luxfords, keepers of the Great
Park. These purchases pushed the estate westward to the Newtimber border and set
Danny securely within a spacious domain of field and woodland. Thereafter, before he
died in 1811, Henry also annexed the copyhold at Dapps and a malt house and defunct
‘tavern’ at Hatches, and boldly thrust the estate northward to the very edge of Hurst
village by acquiring Washbrook Farm and Townland, another 160 acres. He also bought
the Lordship of Hurst manor from the Shaw family, though they kept the patronage of
the rectory. These exertions consolidated Henry’s status as the indisputable ‘squire’ of
Hurst, by restoring the prestige of Danny, territorial and seigniorial, which the ruin of
the Gorings so sadly shattered in the later 1640s.77
Although he expanded the estate and built the stable, described as ‘new’ when insured
in 1812, Henry seems to have left his ancestral mansion little changed. But, as the 1783
estate map reveals, the adjacent fields farmed till 1761 by his grandfather had been partially
transformed into a landscaped park, a fashionably Arcadian setting for the residence of an
aspiring landowner and Justice of the Peace. Predictably, the new park conformed to the
model long popularised by Capability Brown. Thus by 1783 Henry’s mansion was free of
archaic clutter – gone were his grandfather’s terraced formal gardens and enclosed entrance
court, his fish-farmed stretches of medieval moat. And safely distant from the house
was the new walled garden sloping up from the north shore of Sandfield Pond – where
ivy-choked fragments of brick still remain. Freed of clutter, Henry’s windows by 1783
commanded serene vistas across gently rolling greensward to new serpentine plantations
63
64
of trees, with ‘the hill’ slumbering on the
southern horizon for good measure – vistas
hopefully reminiscent of the idealised Roman
landscapes exquisitely painted by the much
admired Claude Lorrain. Only to the west
did newly established greenery crowd quite
close to the house. And by happy chance,
a sketch drawn by Samuel H. Grimm in
1780 establishes that Henry, not his reclusive
father William, removed the clutter. It shows
the entrance court still enclosed by robust
gate piers and high curving walls, and the
ancestral moat still lapping it to the north.
Yet by 1783 the entrance lay open to the
greensward and the moat had shrunk to a
puny pond. And presumably Henry had
also launched the re-shaping of the adjacent
fields, which at least till 1761 were much as
Robert Whitpaine plotted them in 1666.78
As for the formal gardens, so lovingly
69 Henry Courthope Campion, attributed to
renovated by his grandfather, their site is
John Hoppner.
starkly labelled ‘Lawn’ in 1783, and indeed
a sketch by Grimm in 1782 shows relentless
grass surging up to the south wing – a drastic change lamented somewhat by J.B. Burke
in 1852 – ‘in the spirit of improvement of last century, the terraces were levelled, the
gardens were removed, and the green park was brought under the very windows’. Also
vanished by 1783 was the formal ‘canal’ – only the serpentine was now acceptable. As
70 A remnant of
garden wall by Sandfield
Pond.
Henry Courthope Campion: Arcadia and Affliction, 1778-1811
71 The sketch of the entrance court by S.H. Grimm drawn in 1780.
72 The ‘lawn’ and south wing sketched by S.H. Grimm in 1782.
65
73 The estate map drawn by William Figg in 1826.
68
for the emerging greensward, the estate map reveals that a Great Mead of 58 acres, east
of Lord Goring’s Way, had absorbed Cant Mead, Pigeon-house Field, New Mead, West
Stubbs and Stubbs. Some great oaks were spared, but not the archaic pigeon-house (still
standing in 1754), nor the regimentally straight, tree-lined approach to the entrance
court. To the west of Lord Goring’s Way three fields had merged to form The Grove. And
another splendid estate map drawn by a second Lewes surveyor, William Figg, reveals that
by 1826 this greensward had absorbed five fields further west to re-emerge as The Groves,
covering 49 acres. There, and in the Great Mead, workaday ponds were now duly prettified.
And by 1783 this evolving Arcadia was already mostly bordered by the obligatory belt of
trees, with walks winding artfully through them. These also skirted the southern fringe of
Sandfield Pond, manicured to enhance its rustic allure, with glimpses of the new garden
beyond. West of the mansion the walks bordered the former 15-acre ‘Park’, once rigidly
ruled with straight avenues of conifer, but fast becoming by 1783 a romantic mixture of
shrubbery and grove. And J.B. Burke noted how the walks were punctuated by outward
vistas towards ‘the rich scenery of Sussex’. Indeed from one raised stretch that survives the
74 The view of Danny and Wolstonbury Hill drawn by H.F. De Cort in the 1790s.
69
shapely chimney stacks of Randalls can still be savoured.
And maybe the wooden ‘Tudor’ casement adorning the
farmhouse at Dapps was grafted there to enhance another
‘vista’. Highly picturesque, too, was a southern prospect
painted from a rock-strewn Sandfield in the 1790s by a
Flemish artist, Hendrik Frans De Cort – Arcadian park and
ancestral mansion nestle below majestic Wolstonbury, its
austere slopes now graced by twin groves, alias ‘Campion’s
Eyebrows’.79
De Cort also depicted a trim pedimented pavilion,
possibly associated with a domed brick structure still
standing at the summit of the Burma Road above the south
wing. Probably late-Georgian in date and long thought
to be a ‘truncated’ ice house, recent scrutiny has shown it
to be a well head, sheltering a tank of piped spring water
– perhaps the useful spring noted as ‘always continuing
75 The interior of the ‘plunge bath’.
but slow’ in Lord Dacre’s survey. Quite possibly it served
as a plunge bath – an amenity popular with energetic
late-Georgians such as Henry Campion. It could even have been built to stimulate his
depressive father, William. Also standing till the 1980s, on the south-east edge of the
South Lawn, were shattered remnants of a once celebrated Carolina poplar. In 1913
an authoritative textbook hailed it ‘the most remarkable tree in Europe’ and included
a map of its offspring ramifying across 150 yards. A claim it was ‘old’ when Henry’s
heir, William John, first knew Danny would place it among the earliest specimens in
England. Venerable and still flourishing near the house are a tulip tree and a swamp
cypress – the latter with the largest bole recorded in Sussex.80
Doubtless Henry’s ability to buy up local farms and convert corn fields into sylvan
greensward owed something to his father’s reclusive regime. Moreover, in 1783 his uncle,
John Partheriche, left him and his siblings £14,500, plus the sale price of a smart London
house. And, indeed, his two brothers duly prospered. William became a partner in a
76 The Carolina poplar in winter and summer.
70
77 William Campion, attributed to
Sir Thomas Lawrence.
wine business at Oporto and leased for
his retirement fashionable ‘Pelham House’
in Lewes, the nucleus of which George
Goring built before buying Danny from
Lord Dacre. As an ardent Tory, William
incautiously meddled in a bitterly fought
election at Lewes in 1796, by denouncing
the Radical candidate as ‘a well-known
supporter of Jacobins’ – only to be himself
vilified as ‘a sort of mongrel personage, half
Squire, half Visitor’, with a head ‘as round
and brainless as one of his Portuguese
onions’ and, even more woundingly, as
‘descended from a man who had been
constrained to fly his country as a Jacobite traitor against the present royal family’ –
political memories were long in mid-Sussex. Meanwhile, William’s Chichester-based
brother, Edward, with a Lewes partner, Henry Blackman, was supplying much of midSussex, including the Lewes Freemasons,
with wine and coal. Indeed Edward sold his
share of the business in 1804 for £10,000.
Clearly the brothers fared better in Trade
than did ‘nutmeg’ Courthope or their
uncle Henry.81
Clearly, too, family ties with Danny
remained strong. Indeed, each brother
chose to bury ‘the Remains’ of a cherished
child in the ‘Danny chancel’ at Hurst.
Moreover, the epitaph of William’s
daughter Priscilla, who died in 1795,
praised her ‘modest, humble, sweet and
docile mind, her compassionate and
affectionate heart [which] gave the fairest
promises of a life not unworthy of the
amiable and excellent virtues of the muchbeloved and respected House of Danny.’
The memorial to Edward’s only child,
78 The memorial to Priscilla Campion.
79 Bridget Campion, attributed to John Hoppner.
71
72
Frances Elizabeth, who died in 1804, bears an exquisitely carved Lamp of Remembrance
and records the anguish of her ‘afflicted Parents … to whom her ever submissive, dutiful
and affectionate behaviour endeared her beyond the Power of Language to express … For
her Benevolence and Purity of Heart, Firm Faith in the ever Blessed Redeemer, Sincere
Piety and Devotion to God, They Trust She will receive in the Great Day of Account that
Inestimable and only Enduring Praise, The Approbation of her Merciful Judge. Consoled
by this animating Hope under their Severe and Deeply Regretted Loss, they bow with
Religious Resignation to the all wise Decree of Him who Gave and hath Taken Away.’ In
the mansion, meanwhile, still hangs William’s portrait, attributed by some to Sir Thomas
Lawrence. Certainly his Life and Correspondence by D.E. Williams, published in 1831,
was added to the library, where books on Art were otherwise few.82
Perhaps the paucity of Henry’s own family commitments itself eased his finances. After
his wife died in 1771, he remained a widower. His only son, William John, married
into an agreeably wealthy Kentish family – rich cousins disliked by Jane Austen – while
Bridget, his only daughter, who died in 1797, stayed a spinster. And her lifestyle was
hardly lavish, if her epitaph in the Danny ‘chancel’, fulsome even for a Campion, can
be relied on: ‘In times too much addicted to dissipation and trifling amusement, her
life was spent in one continued course of improvement in useful knowledge … and
[a] constant … practice of the Heavenly precepts … being uniformly actuated by …
a singular filial affection and compliance, a kind and beneficent attention to the poor,
a truly just and generous concern for the happiness of every rank and condition of her
fellow creatures’. An imposing if chilly portrait of her, perhaps by John Hoppner, survives
– prominent beside her are a Bible and a volume of Metastasio, an Italian dramatist of
blameless sentiment whose works also reposed in the library.83
As an emerging public figure and Justice of the Peace, Henry dispatched a weighty
letter in 1783 to the Sussex Weekly Advertiser proposing a cautious Reform of the
Parliamentary franchise. Not ‘every member of the community’ had ‘an absolute natural
claim’ to the vote – it was not ‘a birthright of the people’. But the moral authority of
Parliament would be increased if some copyholders and more freeholders were added
to the county electorate. And very decayed parliamentary boroughs might be abolished
and their seats allotted to ‘principal trading towns’ – doubtless he envisaged teeming
smoke-filled Birmingham replacing deserted wind-swept Old Sarum. Sadly, the shock
of the French Revolution delayed Reform till 1832 and indeed at the Royal Oak in
1793 Henry assisted the setting up of a local Association to support the King and the
Constitution and to protect Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers –
hopefully there no one raked up his Jacobite grandfather. More cheerfully, as a handson local squire he sponsored Rejoicing in the village after the signing of the Peace of
Amiens with Napoleon in 1802. Grace Weekes, a local surgeon’s daughter, bubbled
with excitement: ‘We are going to have illuminations tonight … three candles in each
of our windows … Mr Campion is carrying faggots up the hill and has ordered ten
cheeses to be carried up, and I don’t know what all.’ Sadly, the Peace quickly collapsed.
Instead Napoleon gathered a massive invasion army about Boulogne and suddenly
73
coastal Sussex teemed with regiments and Volunteers. And as Miss Weekes’s father
grimly noted, Mr Campion himself recruited ‘a troop of horse … consisting of about
40 men, young farmers principally’. On ‘the hill’ meanwhile soldiers now guarded a
beacon of faggots and straw, so that if the unspeakable French did land, its blazing
would suitably ‘alarm the country’. And Henry’s carts were made ready to evacuate
local women and children ‘to different parts nearer London’. ‘Admission ticket B’, for
instance, signed by ‘Superintendent’ William Borrer, authorised Mrs Randell and her
two children at Randidles Farm to board the wagon marked ‘No 9’ and be carted to
safety by William Currenden.84
7
William and Jane:
The Bountiful Squire, 1811-55
80 The memorial window to William and Jane Campion.
Henry died in 1811 in his late 70s – his epitaph tersely stating: ‘Right dear in the sight
of the Lord is the death of his Saints’ – a marked contrast to earlier florid effusions in the
‘Danny chancel’. His son, William John, studied at St Mary’s Hall in Oxford, became
a Commissioner for New Shoreham harbour in 1795 and was married shortly after to
Jane Austen, the daughter of a wealthy Kentish squire. By 1802 they were settled at
Danny with the widower Henry. That same year Jane’s namesake and second cousin was
penning Sense and Sensibility. But though her never-finished novel Sanditon was set on
the Sussex coast near Eastbourne, and though her father’s education was overseen by
Jane Campion’s grandfather, a visit to Danny seems unlikely since in 1807 she caustically
remarked that the ‘ill-gotten wealth’ of her Kentish relatives ‘can never prosper’. As for
the young couple, quite probably they, rather than the widower Henry, chose to install
the ‘Gothick’ ceiling in the drawing room – its delicate plaster ribs and pendants being
spared when the dining room and library were given a ponderous Tudor make-over several
decades later. Jane herself in 1827 was praised by a London architect, J.N. Repton, for
proposing a new servants’ hall and ‘dressing room for brushing coats’ in the yard west
of the butler’s pantry, allowing the dining room bell to be more speedily answered, and
a knife-and-shoe room to be reached under cover. If ever built, Jane’s hall later gave way
to a Baronial structure with robust mullions and ceiling timbers (now Apartment 20).85
Apart from a new servants’ hall, the couple’s willingness to leave the faÇades of their
mansion untouched was prompted perhaps by its increasing fame as an icon of Romanticism,
a jewel of the Picturesque. In 1852 J.B. Burke saluted Danny as one of the finest specimens
of Tudor domestic architecture, with its ‘immense hall’, ‘innumerable oriel windows’
and ancient brickwork ‘mellowed to a deep reddish purple hue’. Burke also extolled the
Arcadian glamour of the maturing landscaped park, ‘literally crowded with magnificent
timber’ – though by 1826 an enclosure also admired by Burke, as ‘a most beautiful and
extensive flower garden’, had replaced the naked ‘lawn’ previously lapping the south wing.
Thomas Horsfield in his History of Sussex also noted a fountain and a fine horse chestnut
nearby whose ‘beauty in the spring season, when in full blossom, must be ravishing’.
Danny indeed by the 1830s was famed for its blooms. At a Show of the Hurst Horticultural
Society the gardener exhibited ‘a wonderful Fuchsia Fulgens’, and at a Dahlia Show he
unveiled a Salvia Patens with ‘slender hooded blooms in spikes of glorious blue’.86
William continued his father’s consolidation of the Danny estate south of Hurst village
by annexing three copyhold farms at Randidles, Wanborough and Breachlands – about 180
75
76
81 The Gothick ceiling
in the drawing room.
William and Jane: The Bountiful Squire, 1811-55
77
78
82 Archery in Danny Park.
acres in all. Only Tott and Little Washbrook still eluded purchase. Elsewhere he retained the
Campion farms and oyster beds in Kent and Essex and the house property in London which
included the condemned cell at Newgate prison. In 1855 rents yielded over £5,000 and
sales of timber £3,809. As befitted his entrenched landed status William, like his father, was
appointed a JP for Sussex and in 1819-20 served as High Sheriff for the county. And socially
the Family at Danny grew more exclusive. In the 1720s the ultra-Tory Henry Campion
had chosen to carouse at the village ‘club’. William’s own great-uncles were wine merchants,
albeit wholesale. But his own offspring were resolutely genteel – though, sadly, the eldest,
Henry Francis, ‘a child of the greatest promise’, died in 1809 in ‘melancholy’ circumstances
– ‘a spark from the fire, communicating to his night-dress, it instantaneously burst into
flames, by which the child was so much burnt, that he only survived the accident a few
days’. The next son, however, William John, wedded Harriet Kemp. And her father, though
a popular Radical-Whig MP and amateur Evangelical preacher, was also the wealthy Sussex
landowner who developed the Kemp Town estate just east of Brighton. William’s other two
sons, meanwhile, pursued careers untainted by Trade. Charles dutifully inspected Anglican
schools in the Chichester diocese while officiating for 40 years as rector of Westmeston, a
nearby parish below the Downs. After Charles’s father bought the living, R.C. Carpenter, the
talented architect of Lancing College, rendered the rectory house more modishly ‘Gothick’.
The military career of his brother George, meanwhile, was sadly cut short. He died in 1841
sailing to India to join his regiment, the Light Dragoons, being interred below a granite tomb
in St George’s burial ground at Cape Town. As for William’s daughters, Frances Henrietta
wedded the Reverend Augustus Pack, but Jane Bridget never married – though shrewdly
‘shooting at 60 paces’, she did win a grand archery contest at Firle Place. An engraving
depicts this elegant pastime also underway at Danny – sofas shaded by a striped Turkish
Tent command a view of the butts on the ‘East Lawn’.87
79
Though resolutely genteel, William as a conscientious squire exuded Benevolence.
He gave £25 to ease the Irish Famine, £100 to build the Sussex County Hospital at
Brighton, and cash to ease the plight of debtors in Horsham gaol. Locally his charity
was unremitting. Money and surplus spectacles for the aged poor were reinforced
in winter with beef and flour, soup and bread, blankets, coats and coal. Pennies
were bestowed on children bringing flower garlands to Danny on May Day and
subscriptions made to local Friendly Societies, to the curate’s Book Club and to his
Mothers’ Lying-in Fund. William’s annual ten guineas to Hurst’s new National School
brought 140 pupils gratefully processing to Danny in 1834 to honour his birthday –
as they consumed ever more roast beef, plum pudding and strong beer, their toasts
waxed a trifle raucous. William was, too, a thoughtful employer. As a ‘kind Master’
he executed the will of a footman, Thomas Blandford, who left money in the Bank
of England’s Three and Five Per Cent Funds to his sisters, and his ‘watch and seals
and appendages’ to ‘his esteemed fellow servant, Mistress Elizabeth Head’. William
also built Townfield House in Hurst village for his retired butler, William Mitten,
and left him £100. His will also rewarded the 20 labourers on the home farm at Little
Danny; nine had toiled over twenty years and received £10 each. Meanwhile, less
benevolently, he paid his gamekeeper £5 for every poacher caught and convicted – the
estate’s pheasants ate ‘myriads of acorns’ gathered each autumn from the ancestral
oaks. Also to pursue his sport, William subscribed £26 a year to the East Sussex
Hunt. Indeed, scores of riders now mustered picturesquely on the ‘East Lawn’. His
enthusiasm, perhaps, accounted for a rumour, current in the 1920s, that an ‘ancient’,
but mislaid, newspaper cutting had reported an owner of Danny turning his hounds
on an aged female farm labourer suspected of poaching his rabbits – in the style of
a serf-owner on the Russian steppes.88
A charge of ‘feudal’ tyranny, hurled against William by the dynamic local surgeon,
Richard Weekes, has a firmer context, however. In 1827 ‘Dick’ inherited Little Washbrook
Farm and a smart ‘Mansion House’ in the High Street. There he fired off a cannon
during National Rejoicings and launched an air balloon which landed near Harwich.
He installed, too, his collection of urns and fossils, including perhaps the ‘Nautilus
as large as your head nearly’, the ‘large Ammonia’, and the ‘palate of the fish sulcus’,
all dug from a marl pit below Wolstonbury in 1801. And indeed, Thomas Horsfield
in his History of Sussex gravely applauded his ‘preserving industry, elegant taste and
scientific acquirements’. The restless surgeon dabbled, too, in ‘development’ and turnpike
roads – the Brighton Patriot, a Radical newspaper, damning him as a ‘builder of hovels
for the parish poor’. William, however, as a powerful turnpike trustee, intervened to
squash his scheme to site a toll gate by New Way Lane. The squire also won a sharp
legal battle over 12 cartloads of sand removed by Dick from a field of William’s by a
turnpike road. Rather desperately Dick argued that the field was manorial common
‘waste’ and, being a tenant of Hurst manor, he could remove the said sand – adding
abusively that William, as the manorial lord, ‘should be better employed than in acting
up to the vile Tyrannical system of the barbarous feudal times’.89
80
In truth the dynamic surgeon had long nourished a grudge against William. Back in
1802 when his sister Grace enthused over faggots, cheeses and the Peace of Amiens, Dick
and his brother Hampton were still trainee surgeons. Their father Richard, meanwhile,
doctored and inoculated the servants at Danny, and hoped one day to physic the
Family. Indeed, in January 1802 Dick confided to Hampton, ‘we are getting in a little
at Danny now … Mrs [Jane] Campion desired to see my father when he came to see
one of the servants and had some conversation with him (what a wonder!)’. Better still,
in March, Grace informed Hampton, ‘there was a very beautiful young lady staying
at Danny a few days ago by the name of Moreland. She sprained her foot and Papa
was sent for and attended her in her own room. A few days after, Dick called and was
introduced in to the parlour’. But by April the mood had soured, especially towards
William, the heir apparent. Hampton wrote dismissing him as a ‘proud puppy’. In
June Dick reported that the physicians – ‘the Gentlemen’ – treating him for dysentery
had so ‘lowered him’ he needed carrying from room to room. And in December Dick
glimpsed him in Hurst with his hounds and rejoiced he was mounted on Bull, a horse
his father Richard had sold him – a horse which ‘is, was, and ever will be, a fool’. But it
was at least consoling that Dick’s other sister, Mary Anne, had ‘got in’ as a close friend
of Widow Newnham at Newtimber Place, allowing him to excavate ‘urns and patirae’
on her land at Beeding Hill.90
More decorous than the spate with Dick about sand was a polite warning by William’s
lawyers to another manorial tenant, Nathaniel Borrer, about felling trees on his copyhold
land at Broad Lane. Borrer, of course, was a gentleman, resident at Pakyns manor to the
west of the High Street. His affluent father had raised a troop of horse to repel Napoleon
83 The Georgian fittings of the church sketched by William Hamper in 1799.
81
and subscribed £100 to the County Hospital at Brighton. Nathaniel himself in 1835
‘generously’ released five acres of land for a village Allotment Club. More momentously,
he bought the presentation to the rectory at Hurst and awarded it to his son, Carey
Hampton, in 1841. Educated at Eton and Oxford, the young parson proved a strenuous
High Church man who was to officiate as rector for 57 years. His first target was the parish
church, musty, cramped and gallery-ridden, a sad reminder of Georgian inertia and lack
of High Purpose. To his delight the Archdeacon also damned it as ‘a miserable piece of
patchwork’ and so, between them, they master-minded its demolition. In its stead arose
a lofty cruciform edifice in Charles Barry’s best Early Decorated style, costing £7,500
and capable of seating 691 adults and 344 children. As the ‘squire’ William gave £1,200,
the rector £1,000, the patron £500, Anglican sources £830 and the parishioners £1,700,
via a compulsory church rate which met bitter complaint – the rector ‘alone preserved a
calm demeanour, his opponents meanwhile [were] in a state bordering on fury’.91
Had William bought the living, he might well have installed Charles there, rather
than at Westmeston. But squire and rector remained cordial. Indeed in lieu of the
demolished ‘Danny chancel’, William was allotted the new north transept and a vault
beneath. And when his new seat there turned out to be disconcertingly higher, wider
and more comfortable than any other, the rector piously hoped it would be ‘scarcely
observed from the rest of the church’. But William’s insistence, that the door into his
transept from the churchyard was solely for the Family’s use, caused Dick Weekes to
fulminate afresh at another ‘Tyrannical’ act, and to take his grievance to the Diocesan
Consistory Court which allowed William nonetheless to keep the door locked. It
proved the surgeon’s last assault – at his funeral in 1847 the rector tactfully dwelt on
his prompt response to the sick and injured. William himself died in February 1855,
his funeral delayed because ‘the roads were so slippery, horses could scarcely walk’.
His widow Jane, who died two years later, was unkindly observed by Dick’s nephew,
surgeon George Weekes, during a ‘Dinner and Ball’ at Danny – she was seated ‘in a
low invalid chair in black … apparently in her dotage, in the corner of the room for an
hour or two, when she disappeared from the gay scene’. In the new ‘Danny transept’
their children placed a memorial window depicting the Crucifixion – the entire church
meanwhile was being glazed in glowing colours by John Hardman of Birmingham to
tell the Gospel story of Christ’s redemptive mission.92 (See 80)
8
William and Harriet:
Castanets and Cottage Visits, 1855-69
84 The memorial window to William Campion in the chapel of St John’s College, Hurstpierpoint.
The heir to Danny in 1855 was another William John. A graduate of Christ Church
College Oxford, he served briefly with the Fifteenth Hussars and was already a JP for
Sussex and a Deputy Lieutenant. In 1829 he wedded the talented Harriet Kemp. Her
father Thomas, a versatile Sussex landowner, had married Frances Baring, a banker’s
daughter. By the late 1820s Kemp was extremely active as a popular Radical-Whig MP
for Lewes Borough, as a zealous preacher to an up-market Evangelical sect with chapels
at Lewes and Brighton and, adjacent to that burgeoning resort, as the developer of the
palatial Kemp Town estate. While dining with Kemp there at Sussex Square in 1827 a
susceptible French poet much admired Harriet’s many accomplishments – her playing the
piano and the harp, her singing airs by Rossini and Thomas Moore’s enticing Come Rest
in this Bosom. He admired, too, ‘a collection of landscapes and flower-pieces designed by
her’. Harriet’s wedding at Brighton entailed great public rejoicing, and at Lewes church
bells pealed, a band paraded and public houses were ‘thrown open’. She maintained her
affection for flora whilst residing with William in Hampshire. Indeed the Horticultural
Society of London awarded to their gardener, William Bunney, its medal, struck at the
Royal Mint, ‘for the best Exhibitions during the year 1839’ – it displayed a sleekly clad
nymph bearing flowers and grapes, with four colleagues floating Flaxman-like behind her.
That same year, Harriet’s fond father, writing from Nice and missing Brighton’s ‘nice sea
smell’, assumed she ‘ran away with all the prizes as usual’, but hinted he might upstage
her, florally, with ‘a new idea from Geneva’. And a sustained enthusiasm for designing
‘flower-pieces’ might explain a diary entry by the ever terse Parson Borrer in 1865 – ‘After
prayers with Mrs Campion about carving’ – slightly amplified, 20 years later, as ‘Wood
carving began under Mrs Campion’s kind direction to boys at [the National] school’.93
William’s reign at Danny was nourished by a long agricultural boom. He himself kept
impeccable stock on the home-farm at Little Danny – Alderney dairy cows, Southdown
sheep and plump Devonshire steers – besides a formidable array of ladders, harnesses, rakes,
rollers, carts, ploughs, drills, crushers and cribs. At Hurst every Tuesday, meanwhile, local
farmers, potters and tradesmen transacted market business at the New Inn, smoking their
long ‘churchwarden’ pipes. ‘The street would be lined with horses and carts from miles
around.’ And indeed, in 1855 the Hurst Cattle Market Company leased the Campion
coach house on Church Green as its base. That December, Parson Borrer, after seeing
the cattle show, attended the ‘Market dinner’, with ‘W. Campion in the chair’. William’s
purchase for £7,050 of Tott Farm and its 66 copyhold acres in 1857, and of Bearstake
83
84
William and Harriet: Castanets and Cottage Visits, 1855-69
85
86 The Family dispersed across the east lawn.
85 A water-colour by Harriet Kemp of Dale Park near Arundel.
and 16 acres in 1869, also squared off the Danny estate south of Hurst village – Mary
Anne Jenner stayed on as his tenant at Tott. As squire of Hurst, William kept Danny
and its grounds accessible. In February 1863, for example, children came to collect
soup for their families; in May the wedding of the Prince of Wales was celebrated on
‘the hill’, and in June a Review of the Volunteers in the Royal Sussex Regiment was
held in the park. William’s staff at Danny, listed in the 1861 census, also befitted his
status. Enumerated were a butler, two footmen, a coachman, a groom, a housekeeper,
a lady’s maid, three house maids, two laundry maids, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid
and a dairy maid. And though William’s five children had flown the nest, a visiting
daughter, her husband and child accounted for a third footman, a second lady’s maid,
a nurse and a nursery maid.94
Two photographs taken by Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson, sometime before 1859, display
William and the Family, first assembled on the porch steps and then dispersed across
the East Lawn. R.B. Utting adapted the second for an engraving which embellishes an
article by Robert Willis Blencowe in Sussex Archaeological Collections. Doubtless William
was mindful of his mansion’s picturesque value when he promptly sought to improve
it. In August 1855 an engineer from Southwark recommended raising by two feet the
dam between the first and second ponds in the park, to facilitate a supply of piped water
to the house, including to ‘the upper closets’. And in November 1856 surgeon George
Weekes admired the ‘new’ dining room with its ormolu chandelier and its hearth (still
in place) enriched by a ‘raised fixed stone’ fender and ‘encaustic glazed tiles’. Presumably
William inserted on its north wall the ‘new’ fireplace, and its robust neo-Tudor surround.
Probably, too, he extended the room, and the whole south wing, westward, and installed
the heavily mullioned neo-Tudor window, the sturdily ribbed plaster ceiling and the
sombre panelling still adorning the room. The library has similar panels. A sizeable oak
tree, excluding light from its eastern bay window, was felled in August 1870. William’s,
too, maybe, was the new servants’ hall in the yard west of the butler’s pantry, with its bold
mullions and baronial timbered ceiling. And William, or possibly his father, sometime
after 1829, placed the heraldic glass in the Great Hall emblazoned with coats of arms
borne by Campion wives. They begin with Margaret Cordall who died in 1599 and
87 The ‘new’ dining room.
88 The dining room today.
86
87
89 The Victorian library.
91 The heraldic glass in the Great Hall.
90 The library today.
conclude with Harriet – Gules, three garbs within a bordure engrailed or. The Campion
arms – Argent on a chief gules, an eagle displayed or – glow in the border.95
Of William’s three daughters, Florence and Frances wedded local landowners who
were also Liberal MPs – John Dodson sat for East Sussex and John Blencowe for Lewes
Borough – while Mary married the village curate, Ferdinand Tower. Walter, William’s
younger son, became a barrister and pursued a legal career in the House of Commons, first
as Secretary to the Speaker, and then as an Examiner of its draft legislation. Meanwhile,
his elder brother, William Henry, progressed from Eton to the Seaforth Highlanders and
served in the Crimea. While campaigning ‘on the open brae’, he resourcefully devised a
portable oven – a coffee tin plastered with mud to bake apples and ‘other wonders’. He
also assisted in capturing the Redan, the mighty fortress protecting Sevastopol. Then,
during a protracted voyage to India, where Mutiny was simmering, he heard the regimental
band play in the Botanical Gardens at Cape Town and lassoed sharks near Mauritius.
Once disembarked at Bombay, he took part ‘in the siege of Kotah and the pursuit of
the rebels under Tantia Topee and Rao Sahib’. His letters home tell of constant marches
by night to avoid the heat, and endless shooting by day of pigs, partridges and snipe.
Sadly, during a jungle skirmish, he lost a prized sporting gun and a much loved horse,
whose ‘enlarged fetlock’ he was tenderly cherishing – he never became a close chum of
88
92 William Bunney and two sons.
his three camels. Though not ‘a Victoria Cross man’, he fondly dreamed of a mention in
dispatches. Leaving the army in 1863, and being Danny’s heir-apparent, William Henry
was promptly made a JP, serving thereafter on the local Bench for 60 years. He became,
too, a stalwart Volunteer in the Royal Sussex Regiment.96
Harriet’s part in improving the mansion is unclear. But her passion for plants and ‘flower
pieces’ perhaps fuelled the creation of a new kitchen garden covering almost three acres just
to the east of Little Danny. In 1842 its predecessor still blossomed to the north of Sandfield
Pond. But by 1874 the new garden, with high walls and ‘glass ranges’, gardener’s house
and orchard en suite, was neatly apparent on the Ordnance Survey map. Seemingly it was
constructed about 1860, for in August 1908 the vines in ‘the early Vinery’ were reckoned
to be ‘nearly fifty years old’ by James Bunney, the head gardener – he was sheltering there
with a contributor to Garden Life from a shower of ‘almost tropical violence’. James’s
father, William, had been Harriet’s prize-medallist in 1839 and by 1871 was residing at ‘the
Gardener’s House’, after a spell at Sutton Hall near Newick. The ‘House’ still stands, an
ornately rustic, gabled, tile-hung dwelling, with a pretty watch-tower and belfry overseeing
the trim horticultural domain below. (See 116) William used the kitchen garden’s lavish
facilities to specialise in ‘stove plants’ – alpine strawberries, grapes and melons. He was widely
respected as a judge at exhibitions, even those of the Royal Botanic Society held at Regents
Park. And he died in 1881, aged 72 it seems, after falling from a ladder in the peach house.97
In the 1860s the village of Hurst was itself the scene of strides in botanical science. The
High Street pharmacist, William Mitten, was the son of the butler at Danny previously so
prized by William’s father. Being also a skilled amateur botanist, Mitten used his leisure
hours in 1864-5 to classify the many mosses and lichens collected in South America by a
plant hunter lodging nearby, Richard Spruce, a close friend of Alfred Russel Wallace. In
1858 that great naturalist, while recovering from a fever in the East Indies, had conceived
a theory of ‘natural selection’, that ‘the survival of the best fitted in every generation’ of
89
animals and plants was the key to their evolution. He sent a summary to Charles Darwin
who duly alerted the London Linnean Society, before publishing in 1859 The Origin of
Species, summarising his own lengthy research into ‘natural selection’. Returning home in
1862 with two birds of paradise for the Zoological Society, Wallace united with Darwin
to defend their theory from bitter attacks by ‘creationists’. And maybe his ‘un-Christian’
stance caused a Miss Leslie to abruptly jilt him. Still extremely upset, he arrived at Hurst
to join Richard Spruce and met Mr Mitten and his daughters. Quite soon they were all
placidly botanising together amid the orchids, dyer’s broom and giant cowslips nodding
in the woods below ‘the hill’. He duly wedded Annie, the eldest Miss Mitten, who clearly
could cope with ‘natural selection’. Indeed, it was at Treeps, her family home in the
High Street, that Wallace wrote in 1867-9 his best-selling natural history of The Malay
Archipelago, dedicating it to a delighted Darwin. Two hundred years earlier, of course,
the rich flora of the Danny estate had intrigued the great naturalist, John Ray.98
Harriet, like her father Thomas, was as committed a Christian as she was a gardener.
In the 1830s she bound up her Essays on the Bible and assembled details of charitable
institutions at home and abroad. On the Danny estate she steadily pursued Good Works,
aided perhaps by a copy of The Cottager’s Visitor (1827), later listed in the library. Thus in
1865 a villager at Bedlam Street assured George Jupp, the local gamekeeper’s son settled by
then in New Zealand, that during a long and fatal illness Jupp’s brother had ‘everything he
wished for from Danny’. Indeed ‘Mrs Campion visited him often and went to see him after
his death, which was a great comfort to your dear Friends’. Earlier George had written to
Harriet that he was ‘doing well’ in his ‘new and bountiful country’ and sending her details
of its plants and trees. When a painful accident prevented her from replying in person,
her brother-in-law Charles wrote from Westmeston rectory. Signing himself ‘ever your
friend and well-wisher’, he conveyed her ‘best wishes’, along with much local news, and
promised George a packet of ‘useful’ garden seeds, as well as flower seeds ‘to remind you of
old England’. Given Harriet’s devotion to Good Works, it was unsurprising, perhaps, that
her third daughter, Mary, married Ferdinand Tower, the village curate.99
In 1856 Harriet paid ‘Madden’, a local homeopathic doctor, to attend a sick woman in the
village. He prescribed a small white powder dissolved in eight dessert spoonfuls of water, to be
taken four times a day for 12 months. Scoffing in his diary at such a remedy, surgeon George
Weekes dismissed her condition as ‘simple debility and hysterical haemoptysis’ which time
alone would cure. The scoffing George was a nephew of the belligerent Dick who died in 1847.
But being a tireless social climber he was loath to re-ignite the family feud with Danny. While
a surgeon in the Royal Sussex Militia Artillery he had fraternised with local gentry – claiming
them as ‘brother officers’. And he rebuilt his High Street house as a smart double-fronted villa
and re-branded it Carey Hall, with the Weekes coat of arms preening above the porch. In
November 1856 he also chronicled a pleasing visit to Danny, to a Dinner and Ball celebrating
the safe return from Sevastopol of ‘Harry’ Campion, the son and heir. The park was prettily
illuminated, with calico lanterns, patriotically coloured red, white and blue, hanging from
the ancient oaks. The dancing was in the ‘new’ dining room, ‘freshly floored and renovated’,
and well lit by an ormolu chandelier. Mirrors reflected the many wax candles; artificial roses
90
nestled in festoons of evergreen, and encaustic tiles glowed in the hearth. ‘Niebours Band’
mustered castanets, a piano, a violin cello, a tambourine and ‘occasionally a cheerful horn’.
Dinner was served in the warm and spacious Great Hall, ‘very pleasing and noble’; delicacies
loaded the tables and champagne bountifully flowed. When dancing resumed, ‘Mr Campion’
led off in a Sir Roger de Coverley, as befitted the patriarchal occasion.100
On balance surgeon Weekes was satisfied. True he doubted (wrongly) that Harry was ‘ever
under fire or actually engaged with the Russians’ – he heard ‘he was on the sick list’. And
the dancing area was very crowded – not only were the estate tenants there, with ‘their wives
and the nubile portion of their families’, but so were ‘the inhabitants of Hurst generally’ – ‘a
crush Ball’ in fact. But Colonel Paine from Patcham, ‘late of my old regiment’ – sporting
a full beard made fashionable by returning Crimean veterans – presented him to Mr John
Dodson, who presented him to his parents-in-law and to Harry – all ‘very agreeable’. And
Parson Borrer, Weekes’s cousin, introduced him to Mr Gordon from Newtimber Place
– a sporting squire ‘not fond of dancing or company’. The very next day Weekes and his
daughter, Georgina Julia, drove their dog cart back to Danny to observe the Southdown
Hunt. Tiresomely, an unsporting fox skulked in undergrowth for an hour, before being
killed near Muddleswood Gate. But a second, quite quickly disturbed, was soon dispatched
in Newtimber Holt ‘after a short but sharp run’. Weekes meanwhile chatted happily with
Captain Bethune, once briefly his brother officer at Chichester Barracks. Next day, Mrs
Weekes left a card at Danny. But later, rather sparse, diary entries down to 1871 make no
mention of further social contact. It hardly helped perhaps that Weekes was a fervent Tory.
In 1857 his diary damned as ‘the Rabble, the Huzza mobile’ the Liberals gathered at Lewes
to support Mr John Dodson’s election as Liberal MP for East Sussex. But made a Deputy
Lieutenant in 1858 by the Conservative Duke of Richmond, he delightedly wore his new
uniform and silver spurs to the Queen’s ‘Birthday Drawing Room’ at St James’s Palace. And
in 1862, as a new Commissioner of Assessed Taxes, he blissfully sat with the JPs at Cuckfield
Petty Sessions, ‘within the rail’, with his hat on. When his diary more fully resumes in 1871,
his rage at not ‘getting in’ at Danny becomes painfully apparent.101
By contrast terse Parson Borrer and his children were often at Danny, to dine, shoot rabbits
and rooks and admire the Christmas tree. It helped of course that William, like Harriet, was a
committed Christian and indeed, like Borrer, a High Churchman. Both gave steady support
to St John’s College at Hurst which Nathaniel Woodard set up in the High Street in 1850,
soon after he launched Lancing College. Both were boarding schools ‘for the education of the
middle classes on Church of England principles’. St John’s moved to its present site in 1853
with much ceremonial – with embroidered banners and choristers clad in surplices – ritual
deplored by many local residents as the rankest ‘Popery’. Undeterred, William subscribed to
the College building fund and to a sumptuous altar piece in the immense chapel. He donated
prizes and invited visiting bishops and charismatic preachers to dine at Danny. The boys also
played cricket on ‘the Danny lawn’ – ‘that billiard table of a wicket in front of the Hall’, where
Walter, the squire’s younger son, captained scratch sides against them. One pupil recalled,
too, the luncheon in the Great Hall – ‘Whenever I smell pineapple or boraged claret cup my
mind shoots to that hospitable board’. Another was more critical:
91
93 The sumptuous altar piece.
But Danny Park has left its mark
Hard by my orb of vision,
Where cricket ball met facial wall
In violent collision.
Oh stiff and stark in Danny Park
Would I could find the schemer,
Whose art unsound laid out that ground
And gave me Emphusema!102
Doubtless, too, William applauded the annual College procession to the summit of
‘the hill’ on Ascension Day – in 1859 the boys showed ‘a courage, worthy of the Alma’,
charging up the slope and chasing coconuts down. Probably, William also added to the
library at Danny Pusey’s Sermons (1852-3) and Neale’s Holy Eastern Church (1850),
both classics of High Church exegesis. Harriet for her part presented a Union Jack and
a corps colour when the College formed its cadet company in 1860, while their eldest
son Henry was briefly crammed there for his army exam, paying £10 for a special room
and extra meat. Small wonder, then, that William was praised after his death in 1869
as the College’s ‘best friend’ during ‘its early days of difficulty’, or that its pupils lined
the route for his funeral. And to his memory, a lofty three-light window in their chapel
was filled by Messrs Clayton and Bell with stained glass depicting saints and scriptural
scenes – their colours reinforcing the ‘great excelsior’ achieved by the chapel’s architect,
R.H. Carpenter. Harriet, meanwhile, energetically lived another 30 years. By 1871 she
resided in fashionable Mayfair with her unmarried barrister son Walter. Returning to
Danny, she resumed her ‘kind direction’ of Parson Borrer’s school boys carving wood
and in 1891 subscribed to a ‘Piece of Plate’ celebrating his 50th year at the rectory.103
9
William and Gertrude:
Local and Imperial Service, 1869-1914
94 Colonel William Campion by Walter W. Ouless.
William Henry inherited the Danny estate in June 1869 and in September married
Gertrude Brand from Glynde Place near Lewes. Fifty years later the couple gracefully
retired to 31 The Drive in Hove, after celebrating the Golden anniversary of a ‘long
and happy’ union. Pleasingly, Gertrude numbered among her remoter ancestors the
Pierpoints, the medieval lords of Hurst – her father, Henry, the second son of the 21st
baron Dacre, being descended from a sister of the Gregory Fiennes who sold Danny
to George Goring in 1582. Henry Brand himself was a leading Liberal MP, for Lewes
Borough and then for Cambridgeshire, and served with unruffled ‘suavity’ as Speaker of
the House of Commons from 1872 till 1884, when he was created Viscount Hampden
– Gertrude becoming thereby an ‘Honourable’. And by 1881 William’s barrister brother,
Walter, was employed as Speaker Brand’s secretary and lived in South Street, Mayfair,
between Lord Lucan and Florence Nightingale. In mid-Sussex, meanwhile, Gertrude’s
cousins, the Freeman-Thomases, were reinforcing William’s relatives, the Dodsons and the
Blencowes, to form a close-knit alliance of landowners who rallied at Danny to promote
Charitable Endeavour. And as the 1881 census also reveals, the Campion line itself had
fast proliferated there. The heir, ten-year-old William Robert, was absent and baby Joan
had yet to arrive, but Frederick, Edward, Charles, Mary and Alice, were at home. The 18
household servants, all unmarried and mostly under 30, included a butler, two footmen,
two grooms, a housekeeper, two lady’s maids, two house maids, a kitchen maid, a scullery
maid, a stillroom maid, a nurse, three nursery maids and a ‘tea’ governess. To ease the
running of this complex, expanded household, a broad ‘Elizabethan’ staircase was installed
west of the entrance porch, probably after a serious fire in 1884, to give better access to
the bedroom corridors, the Nursery suite and the Bachelors’ Wing.104
The ‘nurse’ enumerated in 1881 was ‘Nanny’ Jenny Carter from Brighton, who was
later identified as a pivotal presence in the Family by Charles Phillimore who married
Miss Alice. For though she ruled the five younger children ‘with a rod of iron’, she
sweetened her discipline ‘with a love almost maternal’ and became ‘an object of very
great affection’. Indeed, by 1908 she had risen to be a ‘much liked and respected’
housekeeper. ‘Her little bedroom with its oil stove, where she always sat between tea
and dinner, was a safe place to find one or two of the sons or daughters of the house’ –
akin perhaps to the snug abode of Nanny Hawkins beneath the cupola at Brideshead.
But despite her ‘extremely sane, kind and wide outlook on life’, Jenny Carter could
be endearingly artless. When Joan confessed on a train to forgetting her morning
93
94
William and Gertrude: Local and Imperial Service, 1869-1914
95
he also embraced Imperialist Conservatism, chairing the East Grinstead Constituency
Party from 1885 till 1906 and hosting on his lawns the summer fete of the local Primrose
League. When County Councils were set up William was duly elected in 1899 for the
Hurst division and swiftly created an Alderman. As ‘an earnest churchman’, he also busily
engaged in diocesan work, supported the Additional Curates Society and befriended Hurst
College. And by purchasing the living of Hurst, after Parson Borrer belatedly expired in
1898, he reunited the rectory with the Danny estate. Also at Hurst he attended the Parish
Vestry and the Workmen’s Club, and presided over the Cricket Club.106
As William’s obituary also acknowledged, his wife Gertrude did ‘splendid work for the
Church in Sussex, being ‘a familiar and honoured figure at all kinds of diocesan gatherings’,
and of course at Hurst’s own Temperance Society, Women’s Union and Parish Room. She
also continued, as Charles Phillimore observed, the hands-on Good Works of Harriet, her
cottage-visiting mother-in-law. ‘She was not at all put out when, at the end of reading a
chapter of the Bible to old Kidd, the bed-ridden octogenarian shepherd, who remembered
the old days of smuggling on the Sussex coast, he only remarked: “I likes a bit of rabbit”.
Needless to say, she saw that he had rabbits sent to him’. Moreover, in 1883 at Chichester
House in Hurst High Street Gertrude ‘and some friends’ – including the ‘cousinhood’ –
launched a Diocesan Training Home for Workhouse Girls. Linked with the Girls’ Friendly
Society, it groomed them for domestic service – some indeed reached the ‘first rank’. A
familiar sight was the donkey cart delivering dirty laundry from Danny. The Home also
served as a refuge if the girls were out of work or recovering from illness. On its behalf in
August 1884 a monster two-day bazaar over-spilled the Great Hall at Danny. Some stalls
abounded with genteel needlework – floral bouquets, embroidered dolls, sumptuous tea
95 Walter Campion by M.E. Miller.
prayers, Nanny told her to ‘say them quick, before you read the Daily Mail’. And apropos
of a visit to ‘the Happy Valley’, a popular beauty spot on the Isle of Wight, she remembered
‘over here, dear (pointing to one side) … a rock where (in lowered tones of deep respect)
Wesley wrote Rock of Ages’.105
William, meanwhile, in his local public life embodied ‘a fine type of the old school of
English country gentlemen’, according to his obituary in the Sussex Daily News in 1923 – a
species imbued with ‘robust common-sense’, breadth of outlook and ‘old-fashioned courtesy
of manner’. Appointed a JP in 1863 after campaigning with the Seaforth Highlanders,
William later chaired the magistrates’ Bench at Haywards Heath, retiring from it a few
weeks before his death. ‘He always sought to temper justice with mercy’, though in cases
of ‘savage cruelty’ to hapless children and animals he was ‘as stern as the circumstances
called for’. Being a Crimea and Mutiny veteran, he also joined the Volunteers linked to
the Royal Sussex Regiment and devotedly served from 1897 as Colonel of the Second,
later the Fourth, Battalion, whose drill hall at Hurst summoned enthusiasts from much
of mid-Sussex. Like most late-Victorian landed gentlemen (but unlike his Sussex cousins)
96 Possibly Nanny Carter or the Honourable Gertrude.
96
97 The Honourable Gertrude by George Richmond.
cosies and baskets sewn with fern and moss. Others offered Florentine china, live guinea
pigs, local cream cheese and signed photographs of Speaker Brand. Playing melodiously
on the sunlit lawns were the bands of the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Royal Irish
Dragoon Guards. And hard-fought was ‘a menagerie race’ contended for by a pig, a goat
and a hedgehog, a turkey, a goose, a rooster and a duck. Soon after the bazaar, William,
Gertrude and Miss Spooner, the matron, sponsored the baptism of seven girls from the
Home. And in a letter to The Times in 1895 Gertrude spelt out to the Nation the vision
of the Girls’ Friendly Society – ‘the promotion of purity of life, dutifulness to parents,
faithfulness to employers, temperance and thrift’. In all, she supported Chichester House
‘self-denyingly’ for 38 years.107
Though benevolent, Gertrude maintained Class Distinctions. Indeed, early on, she parried
fresh attempts by surgeon George Weekes to fulfil his family’s long-cherished ambition to
‘get in’ at Danny. In September 1871, as his diary reveals, she invited him and his daughter,
97
Georgina Julia, ‘by card’ to witness her Cottagers’ Show, where cash prizes were awarded
for deserving vegetables, fruit, flowers, and needlework. After duly admiring there ‘a wasps’
nest entire, dug up, under a glass light – a curious structure and composition’, a delighted
Weekes was allowed by a ‘very agreeable’ Mrs Campion to view the Hall, ‘lately boarded
with polished oak’. But in June 1872 came a cruel setback. Gertrude sent him another ‘plain
white visiting card’ with ‘cricket at Danny on Saturday – Hurst v. Danny’ written on it.
Weekes felt ill-used – ‘a notice to attend if you like … I have been once or twice [lumped]
with the hoi-polloi from a similar notice or card’. Was he not a Deputy Lieutenant, the
owner of 125 Wealden acres at Cowfold, and welcome to shoot at Bolney Place any time
he pleased? Had not Georgina Julia assisted with bazaars at Eastbourne held on behalf of
the United Kingdom Benefit Association for Reduced Ladies? And ‘the card’ proved to be
no mere oversight. Despite Weekes giving William Campion a lift in his wagonette on 1
August, Georgina Julia received four weeks later a paltry ‘printed circular’ curtly announcing
the next Cottagers’ Show at Danny. She did not attend and Weekes died in 1884, seemingly
still languishing ‘outside’.108
Like their parents, William’s four sons set out to serve Queen and Country. The eldest,
William Robert, achieved fourth-class honours in History at Oxford, married Katherine
Byron, daughter of the Reverend the Honourable William Byron – a distant kinsman of
the poet – and joined the Stock Exchange, restoring the Family’s link with Commerce. As
a Liberal-Unionist (a Conservative in all but name) he advocated Imperial economic and
military co-operation, and entered Parliament in 1910 as MP for the Lewes Division. His
brother Frederick, also an Oxford graduate, but destined for the priesthood, sailed to Sydney
in 1895 to tutor the children of his uncle Henry, the 2nd Viscount Hampden. Writing
home to uncle Walter, now Examiner of Legislation to the House of Commons, Frederick
admired the genial Henry’s ‘gigantic success’ as Governor of New South Wales – ‘pinching
pigs’ at agricultural shows, buying dolls at charity bazaars ‘from the prettiest stall lady’ and
extolling ‘moral backbone’ to the Young Men’s Christian Association. And despite ‘woman
suffrage’ and their other ‘socialistic’ legislation, the colonists were ‘unanimously loyal’ to
England. True they were brash, without manners or artistic feeling and always ‘on the spree’
– ‘Not a man, woman or child is left at home on Saturday afternoon’. But they ‘would
do anything which calls upon their courage or chivalry’ – a verdict tragically vindicated
in 1915 amid the slaughter at Gallipoli, where Frederick was to serve as chaplain to ‘the
Fourth Sussex’. He was himself already a Sydney Volunteer – ‘to keep me in discipline and
to equip me for a curate’s work among boys’. But his vocation was soon to take a sudden
twist. While out shooting the meagre local game, he noticed the ‘spiritual destitution’ of the
Aborigines. After his ordination, therefore, he launched the Bush Brotherhood of the Good
Shepherd, a still-flourishing Mission to the Out-Back. And before returning to Sussex in
1909 to be rector of West Grinstead, he married Noel Blaxland whose grandfather, the first
‘free settler’ in New South Wales, planted its first vineyard and pioneered a route through
the Blue Mountains.109
Meanwhile Frederick’s younger brother, Edward, an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders,
their father’s regiment, kept a vivid diary of the Sudanese campaign which destroyed near
98
98 Two of Edward’s
Kodak photographs of the
Sudanese campaign.
Khartoum ‘the whirling Dervishes’, the followers of the Mahdi who ‘murdered’ intrepid
General Gordon there in 1885. In February 1898 ‘wild enthusiasm’ in Edward’s Mess at
Cairo greeted the order to ‘mobilise’. ‘A lot of the darlings came to see us off … Shepherd’s
Hotel cheered us vociferously’ – would the darlings in the Sudan be ‘dark and dusky’, he
wondered. The regiment duly advanced 1,500 miles up the Nile by rail, barge, Cook’s
steamer Ramses the Great, and camel. At Philae Edward was baffled by the great temple
– its ‘hieroglyphics, figures etc’, but much amused by a colour-sergeant being nastily
nipped taking a fish off a hook. After a dust-storm ruined his rations, leaving him three
boiled eggs, came ‘a rough uncomfortable camel, a hard saddle and 6 hours ride’. Then
at Kenur, 200 miles from Khartoum, the Seaforths, whose kilts bewildered the natives,
built their first stockade to repel night attack and heard General Gatacre deliver ‘what is,
I believe, his usual idiotic speech … what fine fellows we all are … and such like slush
99
ad infinitum’. And then, after days of ‘perspiring, beastly cursed inaction’ and nights of
bitter cold, on 8 April the Seaforths attacked some entrenched Dervishes near the river
Atbara, artillery having rendered their position ‘an inferno of shrieking shell and bursting
shrapnel’. Survivors were bayoneted.110
There followed four hot months of dust, flies and fever at Darmali, a ‘mud-housed
God-forsaken place’ by the Nile, where General Gatacre, ‘idiotic as usual’, ordered endless
sweltering pointless fatigues. ‘Nigger songs’, an Indian Club team and a gymkhana on
Waterloo Day did little to lighten Edward’s ennui, though he did shoot some sand grouse
and pigeons, plus a vulture and a scorpion – the local gazelles having quickly fled the area.
Finally, on 13 August the Seaforths began the march towards Khartoum, beset by dust
and heat, and obliged by General Gatacre’s ‘infantile childishness’ to sleep ‘fully dressed
and accoutred’ at night. Then at dawn on 1 September they waited in entrenchments
by the Nile near Omdurman, with the Lancers, Guards and Warwicks on their left, the
Camerons, Lincolns, and ‘Native Regiments’ on their right, all eyes scanning the open
desert. ‘Then all of a sudden we saw their banners in the distance and knew they were
really coming – coming to the slaughter, for it could be nothing less, over this level plain
– no finer field of fire could be imagined … I suppose no-one in the Anglo-Egyptian
army will ever again behold such a magnificent spectacle as this advance of the dervishes
– on they came, long white lines – line behind line – banners waving … a grand display
of fanatical bravery, such an utter disregard of death … here and there one could see
their emirs boldly riding far in front to, by
their own dauntless courage, inspire the
same in their men – shells were bursting
all around them, but they didn’t seem to
mind a bit and came sweeping on – a grand
finale to Mahdiism.’ And then indeed the
maxim guns and the massed rifles began
their ‘devilish fire’ and slaughter ensued.
In Omdurman itself ‘the stench was awful
… the filth past all description’. But in the
ruins of Khartoum Edward did retrieve ‘one
of Gordon’s round shot which I mean to
make into a letter weight’. A letter to Danny
then charted his return down the Nile: ‘As
we got nearer civilisation, luxuries appeared
– at Daklida bread and Rosbach [beer],
at Halfa potatoes and chickens, at Shellal
ice, at Luxor an omelette for breakfast in
a first-class hotel, and this morning roll
and butter in one’s own mess [at Cairo].’111
99 The memorial window to Charles Campion.
100
Edward’s younger brother, Charles, joined the Imperial Yeomanry, but died at Vlakfontein
in South Africa fighting the Boers in 1901. His large memorial window in the chancel of
Hurst church, depicting the Crucifixion and designed by Charles Eamer Kempe, displaced
a sumptuous Ascension, made by John Hardman as the climax of the new glazing scheme –
thenceforth the church had two Crucifixions. The expelled Ascension now illumines a church
in Ontario. Kempe was a relation of Charles’s grandmother Harriet and a prolific designer of
stained glass and church fittings, who left his workshop and craft-filled mansion at Lindfield
to Walter Tower, another grandson of Harriet. Later a pretty birdbath made of terracotta
was set up in the churchyard in memory of Charles ‘who passed his happy boyhood among
these Sussex Downs … and obeying the first call of his country in her hour of need, found a
soldier’s grave on the South African veldt’.112
But while Edward and Charles were fighting in the Sudan and South Africa, their
parents, somewhat disconcertingly, were resident in Hove, having leased out Danny, its
gardens and shooting for five years in 1897. This abrupt economy was required perhaps
by falling returns from their landed property. In 1881 William farmed Little Danny
and its 272 acres, with 16 labourers and three boys. His tenants, of course, employed
many more. Indeed, at his Harvest Home in September 1884 ‘100 sat down to a hot
dinner’ after a cricket match. And in the 1870s, when farming was still buoyant, William
bought land in Essex and the Dyke Farm at Poynings, also a ‘Patent BB No. 2 Plough
with two wheels and steel breast’ from the Britannia Iron Works at Bedford. But the
price of British farm produce sagged once cheap imported grain and canned meat began
flooding the domestic market. In May 1879 William returned to his tenant farmers ten
per cent of the rent paid at the half-year audit in March. He also issued a rallying call:
‘I do not pretend to hold out hopes that prices either of wheat or fat stock, will go back
to what they were a few years ago … Where we have grown three quarters of wheat we
must grow five … when we have fattened one Bullock we must fat two … But I look
with hope and confidence to the enterprise, patience and perseverance which has never
yet deserted the English cultivator of the soil.’ Sadly, though, wheat and fat stock could
no longer sustain local agriculture. In 1880 the ‘late Hurst Cattle market’ vacated the
Campion coach house on Church Green. And in 1882 two ‘old-established cultivators’,
Henry and Samuel Beeching, quitted the estate farms at Randalls and Washbrook. Other
valued tenants later sold up as the agricultural depression persisted.113
Some salvation, though, stemmed from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.
Local farmers used Hassocks station to supply fresh milk, lamb, fruit and vegetables to a
bourgeoisie, replete with shares and government bonds, now mustering in the metropolis and
select coastal resorts in Sussex. Indeed Randalls and Washbrook were advertised in 1882 as
‘well suited for combining Dairy Farming and Sheep Feeding, with either Nursery or Market
Garden purposes’. New ‘cultivators’ with dairying skills duly arrived. The Harvey family moved
from Cornwall to Randalls and, being staunch Methodists, also revivified Hurst’s Wesleyan
Connexion. Experienced market gardeners were more locally available – like Frederick Peskett
who lived on the Danny estate at Breachland Cottage in 1871. Hassocks station also prompted
a profitable flow of day-trippers to its Chinese Gardens. One September, 700 members of a
101
Philanthropic Society marched to them, headed by ‘the Railway Band’ – their day out was
crowned there by ‘an eruption of Mount Vesuvius’. Thanks in part to the station William also
sold off building plots in the 1880s for houses fronting the High Street and a newly laid out
South Avenue. Later he sold three acres for a cemetery – Parson Borrer’s price for a piece of
Church Field having proved too high.114
William, nonetheless, chose in 1897 to lease out Danny, its gardens and shooting for five
years, at an annual rent of £600, and withdraw with Gertrude to genteel suburbia, to 31 The
Drive at Hove. Doubtless this abrupt departure of the Old Order unsettled both tenants
and neighbours, especially as the new occupier stemmed from the new bourgeoisie. Leopold
Bernhard Bonn brought his own servants with him from 22 Upper Brook Street in Mayfair.
A rich German-Jewish banker, based in London since 1870, he had largely funded the
building of the Metropolitan District Railway. And maybe his sojourn at Danny confirmed
a taste for rural life, for he later purchased ‘a first-class hunting estate’ in Warwickshire.
More memorably, he also became hard-of-hearing and accordingly promoted a National
Bureau to further the General Welfare of the Deaf, later the National Institute for the Deaf.
But the Family duly returned ‘home’ to Danny in 1902, reinforced by Mr Grimson, an
awesome new butler. Years later Gordon Tulley fondly recalled an ensuing servants’ New
Year Ball that he attended as a lad of 16: he danced a polka with the Honourable Gertrude;
Bill Walker played the piano and Fred Furlonger the fiddle; John Pearsey, Captain of the
Fire Brigade, served as Master of Ceremonies. Small sales of land nonetheless continued
till 1914 – grazing ground near Pevensey, building plots at Station Road, Cranbrook, and
also in Kent a copse ‘noted for woodcock’, and a pasture where cattle rested en route to
Ashford market.115
100 William and his hounds.
102
103
102 The Danny coach.
101 A cage for hanging game.
Despite the retreat to Hove, William remained ‘a fine type of the old school of English
country gentleman’, becoming in 1899 chairman of Haywards Heath Petty Sessions and in
1902 a Companion of the Order of the Bath. Indeed, Charles Phillimore remembered him
as the ‘absolute king of his neighbourhood’. Thus at a Rejoicing on ‘the hill’ for George V’s
Coronation in June 1911, some neighbours, ‘including ex-Cabinet Ministers’, wanted to
get the Bonfire started. But ‘nothing would induce the country people to have a match put
to the pile till the Squire appeared riding up the Downs on his old hunter’. (The evening
before, boys from Hurst College had struggled up with blazing torches, through wind and
rain, to sing the National Anthem.) Gertrude, meanwhile, had launched the Sunshine
Convalescent Home for Women and Children, with her friend, the crippled Sister Maud,
as Matron. The patients, mostly from Sussex and London hospitals, occupied a large villa
on the Danny estate with splendid views towards ‘the hill’. There in April 1913 Princess
Alexander of Teck laid the foundation stone of a new chapel and planted two rose bushes,
before lunching at Danny. And in July an ‘Elizabethan Fayre’ was held at Danny to aid the
Home and Chichester House: the stalls were cunningly disguised as half-timbered Tudor
houses, and Dolly Lawrence-Smith, the local ‘suffragist’, presided with aplomb as Gloriana,
the Virgin Queen.116
Being an archetypal ‘country gentleman’, William was a keen sportsman. He enjoyed
golf at Pyecombe, County cricket at Hove, and village cricket now played on a pitch
with a thatched pavilion set amid ancient oaks on the northern edge of the park. As for
the skating parties on Sandfield pond, Gordon Tulley remembered the long skirts and
fur-muffs, the bowler hats and curling moustaches, ‘proudly sported’. But hunting and
shooting were William’s primary passions, as they had been during the Mutiny – though
he did quit the chase to greet Edward VII when the King-Emperor paid a surprise visit to
Danny, the chauffeur stopping in New Way Lane to ask Esther Funnel for directions. The
Boxing Day meet of the Southdown Hunt was a great occasion at Danny: ‘eager hounds,
handsome horses, riders in their colourful coats, quaffing inevitable stirrup cups’, gathered
on the East Lawns. And William persevered into his mid-70s, even though his ‘seat in
the saddle had come to depend on balance rather than grip’. Unabashed, he once rode
eight miles home, soaking wet from being thrown into an icy stream, merely remarking,
‘If I have not learnt how to fall at my age, I never shall’. As for shooting, ‘the ceremonial
counting of the pheasants, laid out in the stable yard, was a ritual that nothing could be
allowed to interrupt’. Though informed that Gertrude had slipped on a rug and hit her
chin hard on a window sill, he scarcely paused – ‘she is so careless about falling’ – before
continuing, ‘seventy, seventy-one’. Out shooting, he also playfully asserted his seniority
over his brother Walter. When the now retired Examiner to the House of Commons
stirred from his post at a covert to aim at higher birds, William would threaten: ‘If my
brother won’t stay in his place, I shall send him home.’ A cage for hanging game was
later mistaken by a school boy in the 1950s as intended for wild beasts brought back
from Africa.117
10
The Mansion, The Park
and The Gardens, 1869-1914
103 A water-colour of the north wing by Mary Campion.
Given Danny’s much publicised picturesque value, and indeed their own patriarchal
lifestyle, it was only to be expected that William and Gertrude would seek to preserve
their mansion’s ancestral ambience largely intact – though in May 1870 a venerable oak
screening the south-east window was felled and in 1871 the inquisitive surgeon Weekes
noted that the Hall ‘had been lately floored with polished oak [and] the white and black
stone taken up’. However on 7 June 1884 the mansion ‘had a very narrow escape from
destruction’. About 11 o’clock on that Saturday night, Gertrude, ‘on retiring to rest’,
heard ‘the roaring of fire within the walls’. A large oak beam in a chamber above the
kitchen had been ignited from a flue serving an over-heated hot-plate below. Prompt
action by household and farm servants, using an ‘extincteur’ and hose, reinforced an
hour later by the Hurst fire brigade, contained, then vanquished, the flames. Seemingly,
the damage prompted William and Gertrude to commission a broad central staircase
rising from a new entrance ‘lounge’, formed from two service rooms next to the cross
passage behind the porch. Quite possibly Charles Eamer Kempe was the designer, using
craftsmen employed by Norman and Burt of Burgess Hill. Suitably ancestral are the
finely carved heads of a Cavalier and two Ladies gracing the solid carpentry of this new
‘Elizabethan’ ascent. Probably, too, the low square lantern on the roof, which still lights
it, was inserted and the cupola removed from the entrance porch – a photograph taken
about 1880 by Russell and Sons of Portsmouth shows it still in situ. Also atmospheric
are the Minton tiles in the ‘lounge’, showing scenes from ‘Early English History’ and
designed by John Moyr Smith sometime in the 1870s, which adorn a re-set 17th-century
carved oak chimneypiece with an over-mantel of two bays. The ‘Tudor’ woodwork of
the inner porch, dated 1884, matches the staircase.118
The broad new staircase gave surer and statelier access to a labyrinth of upper rooms
and allowed the Family to be duly distanced from house maids and other staff treading
back stairs and corridors. The layout of these upper rooms was probably that still followed
by an inventory made in 1939, though with fewer bathrooms and WCs. On the first
floor, the Family occupied five bedrooms in the south wing, and their guests seven
elsewhere, close to three bathrooms, three WCs and a strategically sited housekeeper’s
sitting room. Above, on the second floor, the female staff occupied six bedrooms in the
south wing, and the footmen two facing west. Also facing west, with its own corridor,
bathroom and back stairs down to the billiard room, were the three bedrooms of the
segregated Bachelors’ Wing, where, as decorum decreed, slept unmarried male guests
105
106
The Mansion, The Park and The Gardens, 1869-1914
107
106 The three carved heads.
104 The east front in the 1870s after the removal of the oak.
105 The grand central staircase.
duly distanced from temptation. Another suite on the second floor, in the north wing,
nurtured the Family children – a ‘play’ landing and WC, the Nursery with tiles in the
fireplace depicting nursery rhymes, the Schoolroom and the ‘chapel bedroom’ beyond,
reserved for a (usually) cherished ‘Nanny’.119
As for the semi-public ‘reception’ rooms on the ground floor – the Great Hall, the
drawing room, dining room and library – photographs taken before 1914 show them
furnished as befitted a venerable Stately Home – an ambience fully savoured by ‘A.D.’
[Alice Dryden] writing for Country Life in
1913, and explored, more reminiscently
in 1927, by Frances Wolseley for Sussex
County Magazine. For her – the sensitive
only child of Sir Garnet, Queen Victoria’s
bluff Commander-in-Chief – the fragrance
in the Great Hall mingled ‘lavender, thyme,
verbena, and perhaps the sweet scent of fir
cones on a winter’s day’. And assuringly
ancestral were ‘the high-backed chairs
and comfortable couches covered with
old-world tapestry’, the fire-screen with
its touch ‘of Eastern decoration’, the oak
settle, heraldic glass and Neptune fireback.
Nostalgic, too, were the relics of the Stuart
cause once cherished by Henry Campion,
the wayward Ultra-Tory – the armour of
his heroic grandfather slain at Colchester,
still loading the chimneypiece and, above it,
the Apocalypse portrait of the Martyr King,
107 The oak chimneypiece and the Minton tiles.
108
109 The east end of the drawing room.
110 The north-west corner of the drawing room.
108 The Great Hall today.
cherubs supporting his Heavenly Crown – also other portraits, of James II as a child, of
Queen Anne and four members of Henry’s October Club. Frances also admired those
of James Hay and Honora Denny, ‘dressed in becoming fashion, with touches of red,
white and blue ribbons in her hair and on her gown’ – their nuptials, of course, sparked
George Goring’s glittering career at King Jamie’s Court.120
On leaving the Great Hall, Frances doubtless studied Hoppner’s likeness of pious Miss
Bridget in the Baroque stairwell before reaching the drawing room. Often the scene of
an elaborate five o’clock tea, this south-facing room exuded that ‘feminine delicacy’
already identified as needful by fashion-expert Robert Kerr in 1864 – with its white and
gold wainscot, graceful ‘Adam’ fireplace and delicate Gothick ceiling, its slender Louis
Quinze chairs and sofas swathed in chintz, its Italian cabinet set with lapis lazuli and
precious stones, its knick-knacks thickly strewn. And Frances also admired 23 Family
portraits hanging in gilded or ebony frames, progressing from frozen-faced Elizabethans
to relaxed Henry Courthope Campion ‘in a grey suit and white satin waistcoat’. Cornelius
Jansen had fluently painted puritan Peter Courthope and royalist Sir William Campion.
And in a crowded showcase nearby Frances spied the very miniature depicted by Peter
Lely in his portrait of Sir William’s widow, Grace. Also inventoried there in 1939 were
109
110
111 ‘The Danny Jewel’. A pendant, made about 1550, in the shape of a ship,
with a semi-circular section of a narwhal’s tusk mounted in enamelled gold,
suspended by three chains from a ring. Owned by the Campion family before the
First World War, it was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1917.
and Bulwer Lytton, ‘Bronte’ and George Elliot, Prescott and Motley. Less ponderous
was the library gracing the morning room in the north wing, which served as a secluded
sitting room for the ladies. Listed there in 1939 were ‘58 volumes various’, the Illustrated
London News, the Fossils of the South Downs and 17th-century studies of Roman coins and
inscriptions. Adjacent was the billiard room. After dinner, the gentlemen often donned
smoking jackets and adjourned there to play a few frames, savour cigars and a tray of
spirits, and discuss topics of which ‘ladies were expected to be ignorant’. At Danny in
1939 they could also examine Horses in Stable painted by C.B. Spalding (1866) and
Salome with John the Baptist’s Head on a charger – artist unknown. There, too, were shelved
113 ‘modern’ novels and biographies, with almost 300 works from the 18th century
or earlier – La Seconda parte della vite di Plutarco (1551) being bound in ‘vellum’. And
some books there, the History of Magick (1657) maybe, Juvenal’s Satyrs (1647), Letters of
a Turkish Spy (1692), a Secret History of White-Hall (1697) and Arabian Nights (1788),
were perhaps specifically reserved for gentlemen, likewise odd volumes of Amelia, Pamela
and ‘Congreve’.122
Suitably ancestral, too, was Lord Goring’s way still leisurely winding through the romantic
timbered park. Frances Wolseley had left ‘the sheltered high-banked lane’ at the rustic
gabled lodge, crossed the Sandfield with its ‘fine old oak trees’, dipped to ‘the sombre
mystery of the approach to the pond’, and rejoiced at the liberating view beyond of ‘the
great rounded hill of Wolstanbury’ with its wooded hollows ‘known to the neighbours
as Campion’s Eyebrows’. And the mansion itself, of course, was embowered in bloom.
Indeed, when E.V. Lucas witnessed Twelfth Night in the gardens, it was ‘difficult to believe
that Shakespeare had not the spot in mind when he wrote it’ – perhaps it was the ‘12th
Night at Danny’ seen by terse Parson Borrer in August 1890. Later the gardens were at
their blazing zenith in August 1908 when Alfred Wilcox described them for Garden Life.
After admiring the great elms in the park, ‘those green-robed sentinels of mighty woods’,
Mr Wilcox was met at the equally ‘mighty’ Carolina poplar and its circle of offspring
by James Bunney, smartly clad in suit and watch-chain. Head gardener since 1881, his
‘great knowledge’, ‘sterling character’ and ‘artistry in arranging floral decorations’ had
brought him ‘a countywide reputation’. Royalty indeed had relished his table displays
at Danny. A noted exhibitor, he also judged for the Royal Horticultural Society and
32 other Societies and Shows. Moreover, since 1889 his meticulous measurements had
appeared annually in Symon’s British Rainfall. And he supplied Gertrude with flowers for
her ‘Church work’ and charities – much favoured for altar vases were Cynthias (double
white Pelargoniums), Ostrich Feather Asters and hardy white Peas. Himself immersed in
‘Church work’, as chorister, sides-man, church warden and parochial church councillor,
Bunney also served Hurst village as an umpire for the Stool Ball Club, as Provincial Grand
Master of the Odd Fellows and chief marshal on ‘Hospital Saturday’, besides distributing
parish charities with ‘rare tact and kindliness’.123
Beyond the Carolina poplar, Bunney first conducted Mr Wilcox to the Rock Garden
recently laid out on the ‘stiff heavy soil’ of a field, now planted with Miss Jekyll Nigellas,
Alpines and Crimson Rambler roses climbing up tree stumps. Wilcox next admired
112 Grace, the wife of William
Campion, attributed to Peter Lely.
ivory boxes, gold watches, mourning rings, brooches ‘with hair’, a Roman toga pin, an
Edward VII Coronation Stick, and ‘touch pieces’ to do with ‘the King’s Evil’ – more
Stuart relics presumably. By contrast, the Family dining room exuded, as Robert Kerr
recommended, a ‘masculine importance’ – dark panels, recent Family portraits, a sober
ribbed ceiling and massive mullions. Also sombre, above the Neo-Tudor fireplace, hung
Bower’s mournful study of King Charles the Martyr on trial. For her part, Frances
preferred the view through the mullions to ‘an opening in the tall elm and beech woods,
where moss-carpeted vistas are full of restful shadows on still summer evenings’. From
the dining room, of course, a discreet back passage led to the ‘domestic offices’, to the
servants’ hall, the pantry and butler’s pantry, the house maids’ sitting room, store rooms
for china, glass, plate and linen, the kitchen and chef ’s room (now the Spice Room), the
furnace room, meat larder and scullery.121
As for the library, its fireplace displayed Delft tiles and in the over-mantel a ‘16thcentury’ coffer panel of carved Adige cypress wood. And impressively ancestral were
the books, nearly two thousand of them, many ‘morocco bound’, embracing Theology,
History and Antiquities, Law and Politics, Travel, Sport and Agriculture, Classical and
European Literature. The oldest included Orlando Furioso (1519), Camden’s Britannia
(1586), Donne’s Devotions (1627), Smith’s Virginia (1653) and Muffet on Food (1655).
More recent were the collected works (102 volumes) of Dickens and Thackeray, Disraeli
111
112
113
113 The rustic gabled lodge.
114 The sombre approach to the pond.
115 Sentinel elms along the drive.
the ‘very effective’ beds flanking the terrace outside the south wing – very ‘bright’ with
fuchsias, salvias and Miss Nightingale Heliotropes – and then the Yew Hedge Garden with
its hyacinths, antirrhinums, ‘very suitable for amateurs’, and Miss Mappin geraniums, ‘a
very good doer’. Beyond, in the Rose Garden, were massed the best Hybrid Teas, and in
greenhouses nearby basked the Lord Napier Nectarine and the Princess of Wales Peach.
Doubling back to the lawn, they passed the tulip tree and ‘a wheel bed’ of geraniums
(among them Souvenir de Charles Turner) and reached the Wild Garden, ‘taken in’
only three years earlier. Its roses and honeysuckles, ‘all hanging carelessly together’, were
reinforced in October by scarlet-leaved Oaks, Golden Elms and Liquidambars. Next they
ascended the Walk, its horse chestnuts and oaks towering above lilacs, laurels and roses,
and arrived at Bunney’s ‘pretty’ cottage overlooking the kitchen garden, glass ranges and
orchard. Driven by a sudden storm ‘of tropical violence’ into the Vineries, they examined
the Alicante grapes, Violette Sepor figs and Barcombe Champion tomatoes. In the garden
Mr Wilcox noted sweet peas, chrysanthemums and border carnations, among them the
Duchess of Fife and Sir Walter Scott. As for his ‘wall fruit’, Bunney listed over 40 varieties
of plum, pear and apple – his Pitmaston Duchess pears sometimes weighed almost two
pounds. He commended, too, his Ne Plus Ultra peas, Royal Sovereign strawberries,
Warrington gooseberries and Raby Castle red currants. Mites on the black currants were
picked off ‘the moment we see them’. His Scarlet Runners grew ‘quite twelve feet high’. 124
Clearly the Rock Garden and Wild Garden were among the ‘effective additions’ praised
114
115
Wilcox noted no orange pots, sundial or white tubs, maybe the work was done soon after,
possibly creating ‘the Dutch garden’ noted by a national Inland Revenue survey in 1914.125
But who was the ‘wise lady’? Neither the ageing Gertrude Campion nor her daughter,
Alice, seems likely. ‘Elsie’ was a robust Conservative, keen on turkey-rearing and Tariff
Reform, and captained the estate stool-ball team, the Danny Daisies, against their archrivals, the Newtimber Nettles, led by the Honourable Doreen Buxton, the daughter of
a Liberal cabinet minister. Moreover, in 1908 Elsie married Charles Phillimore – Hurst
duly celebrating with flags, bunting and an arch of evergreens wishing her ‘GOOD
LUCK’; lists of guests and presents overflowed two packed columns in the Mid-Sussex
Times. A more plausible ‘wise lady’ was her spinster sister, Mary, a leading light of the
Sussex Arts Society. She was also a close friend of Frances Wolseley, who in 1906 rented
from Mary’s uncle five acres of raw chalk at Glynde called Ragged Lands as the site for a
pioneering College to shape Lady Gardeners. She and Mary then gathered ideas for its
layout by touring the terraced vineyards and villas of Italy. So perhaps Danny’s formal
garden with its Florentine orange pots was a by-product. Being the official ‘ornamental
draughtsman’ of the College, Mary designed its stationery and also illustrated Frances’s
influential book, Gardens Their Form and Design, published in 1919. Intriguingly, a
close mutual friend was that archetypal ‘wise lady’, Gertrude Jekyll, with at least 166
garden commissions to her credit in Surrey alone. No evidence links her with Danny’s
formal garden and the half-moon herbaceous bed ‘following’ Wolstonbury’s ‘soft velvety
116 James and Caroline Bunney at their gardener’s cottage.
by ‘A.D.’ in 1913, and were probably made after the Family’s return from Hove in 1902.
But seemingly Mr Wilcox in 1908 made no mention of a ‘formal garden’ fronting the south
wing, the design of which Frances Wolseley in 1927 credited to a ‘wise lady’ who ‘levelled
an oblong near the house’ and placed symmetrical beds in the smooth turf ‘to hold the
roses and the mauve violas that flourish with a stone sundial in their midst’. She also placed
‘handsome orange pots’ from Florence along the wide paved walk and gave ‘height of colour
amidst the beds’ by using white wooden tubs of square shape to hold pink roses. ‘Through
their branches we perceive a half-moon shaped bed on rising ground above some grass steps,
wherein bold yellow herbaceous plants flourish, and then beyond this, again, following the
same curved line, there rises the soft velvety crown of the hill fort of Wolstanbury’. Since Mr
117 The garden laid out by ‘the wise lady’.
116
118 The east front painted by Thomas Cobb in 1906.
117
118
119
121 The horse-drawn fire brigade at Danny.
119 A new lawn mower proudly displayed.
120 James Bunney with a young assistant near the lodge.
crown’. But since ‘the garden uniting the house with surrounding nature’ was always
her overriding aim, the ‘wise lady’ – whether Mary or not – was seemingly a disciple. 126
Mary at all events was also an authoress. Indeed Mr Wilcox’s allusion to ‘sentinel’ elms
was drawn from her ‘charming sketch’ of Danny published in Country Home a month before
his visit – the photographs were by Annie Mitten’s sister, Flora, a qualified pharmacist
since 1883. Mary’s sketch enshrined an image of the romance-laden country-house very
dear to Edwardian Romantics – a sheltered secluded mansion below the South Downs,
hardly touched by time or change, where the hoot of the motor was seldom heard. What
stories, Mary suspected, might its mellow bricks tell, ‘were they endowed with speech
by some wizard spirit’ – not indeed tales of ‘heated voice and hasty duel’, but stemming
rather from ‘the gay days of the Stuarts, when plumed and splendid cavaliers ruffled
it in its halls, whilst fair ladies sighed and loved’. Moreover, ‘dim legends are still told,
unverified by fact, of how the martyr King hid – some say here and some there – when a
fugitive for his life’. The mournful Trial portrait of him ‘in a Roundhead hat’ reminded
her of a poignant couplet lurking in ‘an old miscellany’:
Can this be he! Could Charles the good, the great,
Be sunk by Heaven to such a dismal state?
And of course Danny’s ‘most precious possession’, far outstripping the Italian cabinet
inlaid with lapis lazuli and precious stones, were letters the Martyr King wrote to loyal
Sir William Campion, whose burnished armour still sanctified the Great Hall.127
But redolent of Olden Time, too, was the virtually intact Elizabethan north wing
120
121
122 The tulip tree, the west front and outbuildings.
with its Chapel Room and intricate plaster ceilings. And near the foot of its corkscrew
staircase was a cross, ‘deeply cut’, prompting the ‘serious belief held by some that beneath
lie a skeleton and much treasure’. Of course, the mood of the mansion varied. ‘In the
sweltering days of summer, it stands an island of mellow red amidst the surrounding
green’. But ‘in the drear December days the cruel north-easterly wind whistles and
moans round the gables, like the shrieks of lost spirits’. Mary, though, believed that
‘our imaginations are busiest with the unwritten history of the past, when the dark
outline of the house is silhouetted against the evening sky, and only the long windows
filled with light; or when the moon rises over the downs to the east, making the sentinel
elms cast long shadows like delicate lacework across the green to the house … Then
the spirits of the past come forth and hold high revel … Inmates rise before us from
the days of the plume and the ruffle, to the days of the hoop and crinoline’. And one
indeed, so her nephew Simon later recalled, was wont to roam the Nursery suite. He
and his siblings, playing there, viewed as ‘perfectly normal’ the presence, now and then,
of ‘a young man in a Cavalier costume’.128
11
The Great War, The PM
and his ‘Darling Pussy’, 1914-18
123 Lloyd George and colleagues during the Great War, by Sir James Guthrie.
Sadly for Danny, an Indian summer of idyllic seclusion, rose-tinted romance and everexpanding gardens came to a brutal close in August 1914. The Great War drastically
disrupted civilian life. In Hurst villagers flocked to join the army and 78 ‘died for the
Empire’. Horses were requisitioned, rationing imposed, and Emergency Orders for
evacuation in the event of invasion echoed those issued in 1804 when Napoleon’s legions
massed at Boulogne. William Campion was himself a casualty of new regulations – being
summoned before his own Bench of Magistrates and fined half-a-crown for failing to
register as an ‘alien’ his elegant French visitor, Madame Veaux. Otherwise he was active
as Honorary Colonel of the Fourth Territorial Battalion of the Sussex Regiment, ‘the
Fourth Sussex’ – B Company had its Drill Hall at Hurst. Indeed, his epitaph (he died
in 1923) claimed, rather obscurely, that his ‘last work on earth was associated with the
despatch of Sussex Territorials to active service in France’. Also on the Home Front, the
dauntless Gertrude, ably seconded by Flora Mitten, set up a Women’s Institute, while
her Sunshine Home became the ‘Sunshine Auxiliary Hospital’ for soldiers wounded in
France. Her daughter Mary, whose Danny Daisies defeated the Newtimber Nettles in
August 1914, organised the Hurst branch of the British Red Cross (VAD) and then at
Rouen recreation for convalescent troops, earning an OBE.129
Meanwhile William’s three sons and his grandson, Simon, were enmeshed in a war
which killed Major Edward, the career soldier. Truculently, in April 1915, when his
men were dug in at the Ypres Salient on the Western Front and facing their first poisongas attack, the veteran of the Sudanese War sent a message along the line: ‘Remember
no Seaforth Highlander ever has left or ever will leave his post. Whatever damnable
engine-of-war the enemy use, the Seaforths will stick it out and will have their reward
in killing the enemy’. Gassed a few weeks later, he died from its effect in 1916 aged
43. Meanwhile, his eldest brother William Robert had vacated his seat in Parliament
for the Lewes Division to take command of the Fourth Sussex, his father’s beloved
Battalion. His brother Frederick, the former Bush-Brother, joined him as Battalion
chaplain and his wife Katherine organised at Danny a depot for Battalion comforts
– carbolic soap, insect powder, jellies, tobacco, matches and chocolate. After a brief
stop in Egypt ‘the Fourth’ landed at Sulva Bay on 8 August 1915, to join an ill-fated
Gallipoli campaign designed to seize the Dardanelles and threaten Istanbul. The very
next day William and his men advanced towards a baptism of fire – one treacherous
gulley they nick-named, with black humour, ‘The Devils Dyke’. Twenty-two men were
123
124
124 Edward Campion’s order to
his Seaforth Highlanders.
125
Edward Campion’s
trench map and case.
The Great War, The PM and his ‘Darling Pussy’, 1914-18
125
killed by relentless shelling and sniping from the Turkish defences, before the mutilated
Battalion was withdrawn to the Corps reserve. Further ravaged by dysentery, it returned
to egypt, whence William was invalided home. Thereafter, on 8 and 9 august, the
survivors met to remember ‘epic days, friendship, sorrow and joy, service and sacrifice
in a distant theatre of war’. simon Campion’s health also suffered while serving with
the seaforths in Mesopotamia – indeed he later restricted himself to helping his father
and managing the estate.130
suitably reinforced in egypt, the Fourth sussex advanced through Gaza to capture
Jerusalem, before transferring to the Western Front, where William, now recovered, took
command and gained his Dso. But a shell killed his fellow officer, Captain Weekes
MC, whose grandfather ‘Dick’ and great-uncle George had so yearned to ‘get in’ at
Danny – a feat finally achieved by the Captain’s father, arthur – the magistrate indeed
who fined Colonel William for failing to declare Madame Veaux. a barrister educated
at Harrow and oxford, he flourished in the Bengal Civil service and then loomed large
at Hurst as a JP, County Councillor and Chairman of the Parish Council. and on May
Day morning he gave an orange and a bright new penny to any child bringing to his
Mansion House in the High street a posy of spring flowers – and to aged ‘Crazy Jenny’,
a stranger with wild flowers stuffed in a dusty hat, who swung a hand bell, danced a jig
and croaked an incoherent song. Fittingly, therefore, at a fund-raising held at Danny
in 1916, Daisy Randell identified the ‘village celebrities’ as Colonel Campion, admiral
Beaumont and arthur Weekes. When Weekes died in 1917, Walter Tower supplied a
memorial east window in st Lawrence’s chapel.131
Briefly though, the grim stoicism of wartime Hurst was brightened by the ebullience of
the Prime Minister, the mercurial David Lloyd George. In July 1917 sir George Riddell,
who owned the News of the World and keenly admired ‘the Welsh wizard’, leased Great
Walstead Place near Lindfield to allow the P.M. to relax, free from fear of air raids. The next
year, for that same patriotic purpose, he rented Danny from mid-July till mid-october and
Daisy Randell was to vividly recall L.G.’s local impact, his very musical voice, his ‘habitual
twinkle’. Her father, a Hurst builder, enjoyed ‘a long talk’ with him during a reception
he gave in July for local Liberals. and in august the P.M. hosted ‘a grand party’. on the
lawn at Danny the sussex yeomanry Cadet Band assisted the dancing and patriotic songs,
while amid the marquees and refreshment tents promiscuously strolled Cabinet Ministers
and convalescents from the ‘sunshine Hospital’, staff officers in dazzling uniforms and the
Randells in their sunday best. ‘Good to see you again, Mister Randell,’ the P.M. crooned,
bowing slightly over his wife’s hand and grinning at Daisy and her sister – ‘Very charming,
daughters, very charming’. and maybe, not since edward VII’s chauffeur enquired of esther
Funnel the way to Danny, had a village maiden received such expert appraisal. Meanwhile,
L.G. was often in the High street, popping into shops, greeting Mr Randell yet again,
raising his hat to Daisy – the perfect politician.132
amid these public festivities, relays of Very Important Persons were closeted in the
mansion as the Great War jolted towards an armistice. In July 1918 the Central Powers
– Germany, austro-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey – were still undefeated by the allies –
126
Britain, France and Italy. In 1917 Lenin’s Russia had deserted the Allies, but the United
States, led by President Wilson, had joined them. Indeed, on 13 July Sir Maurice Hankey,
the Cabinet Secretary, observed L.G. at Danny ‘very rampageous still about getting more
Americans’, to stiffen a beleaguered Western Front. Next day, he noted that the P.M.,
Borden, the Canadian premier, and Smuts, his South African counterpart, climbed ‘the
high hill on the Downs at the back of the house’. But whereas the P.M. and Borden
returned ‘covered with perspiration and forthwith had to bathe’, Smuts, the ex-Boer
commander, took Wolstonbury in his stride. After dinner they met in the Great Hall
with Viscount Milner, the War Secretary, and Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial
General Staff – the speedometer of his official motor-car registered versts, being built
for the Tsar but undelivered. Their worry was that General Foch, the Supreme Allied
Commander, was massing the new American troops behind the French armies, leaving
the British line dangerously thin. But they left it to General Haig to protest if he thought
fit. The Germans, in fact, attacked the French line near Chateau Thierry the very next
day and were thrown back – it proved their last major offensive. The following weekend,
20-21 July, L.G. was ‘very busy preparing suggestions for a dispatch to President Wilson
regarding Japanese intervention’ – an attempt to restore an Eastern front now the Russians
had withdrawn. ‘With his legs cocked up in the window seat of the dining-room’, he also
absorbed a report from General Wilson.133
Then on 8 August, ‘a black day for the German army’, the British with 456 tanks
broke through near Amiens, forced a retreat and smashed enemy hopes of victory on the
Western Front. And naturally, by 14 August, L.G., exuding ‘energy and enthusiasm’, was
discussing possible Peace terms at Danny with Smuts and Lord Reading, the Ambassador
to the United States. After a fortnight with his family at home in North Wales, the P.M.
returned to Danny and with the war going well thought of calling a general election.
Locally he inspected anti-submarine defences at Shoreham and fussed over a picnic at
Beachy Head – ‘how the tea was to be made, what sort of kettle we should take with
us’. Unscheduled, though, were the ten days he subsequently spent in Manchester Town
Hall, laid low by the influenza sweeping a war-torn world. ‘Still with a respirator’, he was
back at Danny on 21 September, destined for a busy convalescence. This extended his
stay till 15 October, as William Campion, lodged at Chichester House in Kemp Town,
informed carpenters due to repair windows in the south wing. The PM’s visitors included
Winston Churchill, the Minister of Munitions, and Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times
and the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, the fate of Europe was being decided on battlefields
far distant from the re-stabilised Western Front. In Syria General Allenby destroyed the
last Turkish army and cleared the way to Damascus. In the Balkans the Allied advance
from Salonika caused Bulgaria to sue for peace. And indeed, on 27-8 September terms
for such an Armistice were agreed at Danny by L.G., Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, A.J. Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Reading and General Wilson. Next
day the stream of good news prompted the P.M. ‘to dance a hornpipe’. The Allies were
now poised to invade an exhausted Austro-Hungary and Germany’s armies were already
over-stretched. Indeed, on 4 October the German government appealed to President
127
126 The Armistice plaque in the Great Hall.
Wilson for an Armistice and a negotiated Peace.
After more conferences at Danny, on shipping
and the campaigns in Italy and Turkey, L.G.
spent 4-9 October in Paris, anxiously discussing
with Allied leaders the Fourteen Points that
President Wilson was proposing to offer
Germany as the price of Peace. Back at Danny
on 12 October, and despite a refreshing drive
to Brighton along the coast, the P.M. used
‘awful language’ when roused from his bed
and told that Wilson was agreeing Peace terms
without further consultation. Next morning
he was still ‘declaiming against Wilson’s action’
while climbing ‘the hill’ with Riddell and Lord
Reading. Nonetheless, after lunch, a ‘conference’
was held in the Great Hall, which a plaque
still commemorates: ‘In this room a meeting
of the Imperial War Cabinet was held on the
13th October 1918 at which the following
were present: – Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar
Law, Mr. A.J. Balfour, Viscount Milner, The
Earl of Reading, Mr. W.S. Churchill, Admiral
Sir R. Wemyss, General Sir Henry Wilson,
Lt.-Col. Sir M.P.A. Hankey, Mr. Philip Kerr.
A cable was sent to President Wilson authorising him to proceed with negotiations for
an Armistice with Germany.’ In actual fact the Imperial War Cabinet had disbanded in
August. Nor was the ‘conference’ a formal meeting of the War Cabinet, of which only
L.G. and Bonar Law were members – indeed, absent members later complained that
vital decisions were taken there without them.
Nonetheless the conference in the Great Hall was momentous. Crucially, his colleagues
rejected the P.M.’s fears that unless the German Fatherland was invaded, and German towns
bombarded, there would be no lasting ‘humiliation’ of Prussian Militarism, such as Rome
inflicted on Carthage after the Second Punic War – delenda est Carthago. And without
that, L.G. argued, ‘In a short time the Germans would say that these miserable democrats
had taken charge [the Kaiser having fled] and had become panic-stricken, and the military
party would get into power again’. As indeed it did in 1932, in fruitful alliance with Herr
Hitler and his National Socialists. But the P.M.’s colleagues argued that Wilson’s Fourteen
Points would require Germany to evacuate all occupied territory, surrender its colonies,
cede Alsace-Lorraine to France and German Poland to ‘an independent Polish State’.
Moreover, the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would enjoy ‘self-determination’
128
129
128 Miss Frances
Stevenson and
Lloyd George.
127 Signatures and a paw mark in the
visitors’ book.
and the Turkish empire be dissolved. so
the ‘war cabinet’ sent President Wilson a
cable merely requiring that, before any
armistice, Germany must accept Peace
terms that ‘in the opinion of experts’,
naval as well as Military, ‘would make the
resumption of hostilities by the Central
Powers impossible’. The cable also sought
clarification of Point Two – ‘absolute
freedom of navigation upon the seas …
alike in peace and in war’ – conceivably
a threat to Britain’s maritime supremacy.
so ended the fateful conference and a
complacent Riddell could note: ‘after dinner, this being our last day at Danny, L.G.
proposed my health in a delightful little speech.’ The armistice duly arrived on 11
november, in the nick of time for William Campion and his Fourth sussex, poised on the
Western Front in Belgium to go ‘over the top’ and assault entrenched German positions
at dawn on 12 november.134
But amidst these awesome affairs of state, private passions were threading the corridors
of Danny. Mary Campion in 1906 ended her ‘sketch’ for Country Home with a lyric touch:
‘Those who have lived and loved within its walls never leave it; and herein lies the charm of
association, of personality, in an old house. They come to us, these far-off airy visions of the
past, of dainty ladies and splendid gentlemen, like a soft sentiment of romance, intangible,
half real, like the whiff of lavender from a long-closed drawer.’ To this aroma L.G. added a
fresh fragrance. Besides the signatures left by the Great and the Good in the Visitors’ Book
at Danny (which Colonel William stipulated was always to remain there) were those of Mrs
Margaret Lloyd George and Miss Frances stevenson – along with the paw print of L.G.’s
pet dog. Miss stevenson also appears, unflatteringly, in Daisy Randell’s reminiscences. ‘The
entire village’ knew that L.G.’s routine was to climb ‘the hill’ before breakfast and work on
War Cabinet papers. sometimes a shower of rain would send him scuttling back down to
Danny, leaving documents behind – whereupon, ‘his long-suffering secretary’ was often
seen ‘grunting up the steep slopes to retrieve them’.135
The reality was far different. attractive, intelligent and half-Italian, with a Classics degree
and Liberal views, Miss stevenson became L.G.’s private secretary in 1911 and his mistress in
1913, though 26 years his junior. The affair, though passionate and persistent, stayed secret.
L.G. would not leave his wife or ruin a political career rooted in Welsh nonconformity. But
some ardent notes survive written to her at Danny while she languished upstairs with inflamed
kidneys. Variously she was his ‘darling Pussy’, his ‘dear little girl with the cold in her “dose”’,
his ‘sweet loving fond thrilling little worry’, and he, ‘ever and ever your old Dai’, ‘your very
jealous old Lover’, ‘a Doting old man who is Father, lover and husband all in one’. Did she
adore him as much as ‘a grilled kidney swimming in fat’? He even envied her ‘cold’ – ‘in the
dead of night I should have crept down to the lips & had a great time – pressing their softness
and then scampering along those pearly teeth – then touching the top of the tongue’. and while
recovering she was doubly desirable, as ‘the little pink sofa girl with the blue dressing gown’
and as ‘a little love in pink with braided hair falling on each side of the sweetest face you ever
saw nestling on a pillow’. He had drifted unfulfilled through life’s ‘marshes plains mountains
for half a century’, but henceforth (in private at least), they would ‘walk alongside arm in arm
or arm around waist as long as we can’. a playful memo, penned before he left for Paris in
october, suggested she act as if she was ‘right down glad to get rid of an old bore’ – though
in truth, ‘whatever luggage I leave behind, Pussy will be with me, for the little witch has done
her own packing long long ago & she never leaves the valise whatever is taken out or put in’.
such was the newest ‘soft sentiment of romance’ soon to enrich ‘the whiff of lavender’ from
Mary Campion’s ‘long-closed drawer’.136
12
Sir William and Katherine: Gold Mines,
Revels and World War, 1919-47
One Thursday in September 1919, amid ‘blurring sheets of rain’, many ‘friends and neighbours’
with their families – tenant farmers, estate workmen and villagers – thronged to Danny
to meet William and Gertrude ‘At Home’ and share their Golden Wedding celebrations.
After a ‘friendly’ hand-shake, the guests duly admired the wedding gifts – the ‘admirable’
pencil portraits of the couple from the Family, the gold inkstand from the tenants, the gold
pins and sleeve-links from the workmen, the golden bowl from Hurst’s loyal tradesmen.
William himself had received a gold and tortoiseshell casket from Officers of the Fourth
Sussex, and Gertrude a finely bound hymn book from the ‘Sunshine’ staff, a bouquet from
the Women’s Institute, a handsome Bible from the Mothers’ Union and a gold-mounted
walking stick from the Girls’ Friendly Society. Doubtless these tributes loaded the massive
oak refectory-table hewn from estate timber to mark the anniversary. Before tea, everyone
‘settled down’ in the Great Hall to enjoy scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Katherine
Campion was at the pianoforte, her younger son Wilfred played Bottom, while Winnie
Tugwell, Ivy Berry and Maggie Stringer reinforced a ‘charming’ troop of local fairies. The
Rejoicing ended at 6.30 when the drums of the Fourth Sussex sounded the Retreat. The
hosts themselves then retired to The Drive at Hove where William died in 1923 in his 88th
year, having just resigned from Haywards Heath Petty Sessions after 60 years of service.137
Gertrude soldiered on to unveil in the Campion transept a memorial wrought from
Derbyshire alabaster to the 78 Hurst men who died in the Great War. Above it hung a
crucifix from ‘the battlefields of France’, sold by a soldier to a Brighton curiosity shop.
In the churchyard lies a second memorial to her son Edward – a rugged sword, set in
a cross, with urns at each corner of the surround. Next to it, and set up after Edward’s
death, stands a shapely birdbath, also of terracotta, dedicated to his brother Charles, ‘who
found a soldier’s grave on the South African veldt’ in 1901. Details of their design, the
lettering and the foliage decoration, suggest the taste of their artist-sister Mary. In 1928
she was to paint murals, skilfully depicting scenes from the farming year, for a room in
Hove library which Frances Wolseley endowed to celebrate her soldier father, Sir Garnet,
and also the glories of rural Sussex. Other murals by Mary enlivened tearooms in Oxford
and the restaurant at Bush House, the BBC’s London HQ. In 1938 she also unveiled
at Ardingly a memorial to Frances, her cherished friend – a hoop of Sussex-forged iron
adorned with ears of corn, clover leaves and red apples. And with farm produce in mind,
she wrote to The Times in November 1939 warning the authorities against prematurely
129 Four generations of Campions in the Great Hall (left).
131
132
Sir William and Katherine: Gold Mines, Revels and World War, 1919-47
131 William Campion by J. Henry, presented
in 1924 by ‘constituents and friends in the
Lewes Division’.
130 The gravestone of Edward Campion.
rationing butter. ‘We people of England are always ready to cooperate, but we resent
coercion’. Instead posters urging patriotic restraint were needed. ‘Once people realise
this is a commodity hardly come by, which costs the lives of Englishmen and the loss of
English ships, cooperation would be only too ready.’138
Once his parents retired to Hove in 1919, their eldest son William resumed his duties as
Conservative MP for the Lewes Division and took charge of the estate. Shaken by wartime
taxation, many landowners were selling farms and woodland – indeed his relative, Lord
Monk Bretton, resident at Coneysborough Place near Lewes, sold 1,156 acres north of
Hurst village. William avoided this. But in May 1920 the Court Circular in The Times
revealed that Major and Mrs Paget had arrived from Paris at Danny Park ‘which they
have taken for a time’. This economy was to be neatly sustained for seven solid years once
William became Governor of Western Australia in May 1924 and sailed on The Majola
to Fremantle with Katherine and their son Simon, who served as his ADC. Doubtless
the Family had departed by July 1924 when a tourist disparagingly noted on a postcard
from Hurst: ‘This lovely old Place [Danny] is not kept up properly and is let to people
who take PGs [paying guests]’. But maybe, by the date of this damning remark, the
mansion was already rented to Captain and Mrs Almack. If so, their brochure strenuously
set the record straight. Danny was ‘not in any sense a hotel’. Rather it was run ‘entirely
as a Country House Party with its attendant amenities and ways’ – listed were its five
133
132 Katherine Campion by P. Perrelet, 1937.
bathrooms and billiard room, the tennis and squash courts, a staff schooled ‘in private
service’ and a first-class French chef doing full justice to a stream of fresh produce from
the dairy and kitchen garden. Three cars were for hire and a fourth sped to the golf links
each morning. Full weekly board in summer cost five guineas ‘or upward’, but was fixed
at three for ladies’ maids and chauffeurs. Not till June 1931 did William step down as
Governor and return on the SS Naldera. But by then the ‘Country House Party’ had
folded. Indeed by October 1929 the mansion was rented by Mr van Swinderens, an
eminent Dutch diplomat, whose family, that month, paid Cecil Curwen to excavate the
inner ditch of the prehistoric ‘camp’ on ‘the hill’ – William cabling his consent from
Government House at Perth. Also very agreeably, in September 1930 they invited Mary
Campion and Frances Wolseley to tea.139
When dispatched in 1924 to Western Australia by the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsey
Macdonald, William entered an Imperial arena familiar to Sussex landowners. His uncle,
Viscount Hampden, had governed New South Wales. His cousin, Freeman FreemanThomas, from being ADC to Lord Brassey (his father-in-law) at Government House in
Melbourne, rose to be Marquis of Willingdon and Viceroy of India. And his neighbour,
Sidney Buxton, whose daughter captained the Newtimber Nettles, became GovernorGeneral of South Africa. Even while MP for Lewes William had championed economic
and military cooperation within the Empire. And installed at Perth he proved a popular
Governor of a rough-and-ready State where the leisurely shearing of sheep mingled with
frenetic bouts of gold mining. ‘Bald, with prominent blue eyes’, he was viewed, like
his father before him, as ‘the pattern of an English gentleman’. He mixed amiably with
local politicians, both Labour and Nationalist, ably assisted by Katherine, sometimes
at the pianoforte. He helped the Duchess of York to plant a Weeping Fig in 1927 and
134
presided with dignity at the State’s centennial Rejoicings in
1929. And endearingly, too, Government House at Perth
had overtones of Danny. Designed in 1861 by the local
Comptroller-General of Convicts in a cheerily debased
Elizabethan style, its exterior relied heavily on transoms
and mullions; inside highly polished jarrah wood prevailed,
though the thrones were crafted from English beech. And
suitably relaxed was the Saturday Guest Night staged in
its ballroom by the local TOC H in May 1931 to say fond
Farewell to William, now a Knight Commander of the
Order of St Michael and St George. The festivities kicked
off sharp at 7.40 pm with twenty minutes of ‘Community
Singing’. His parting gifts included a set of hand-painted
dishes depicting the Donkey Orchid and other native flora
of a grateful State.140
Two months later, after an afternoon at Lord’s, there
ensued Sir William’s ‘triumphant home-coming’ to Danny.
At the lodge in New Way Lane Rovers, Scouts and Wolf
133 William’s uniform as Governor.
Cubs tied ropes to his car and hauled it up the drive
between cheering well-wishers – players also scampered
from the cricket pitch to doff their caps. Loyal and expectant before the mansion were
massed the tenant farmers, the Parish Councillors, the clergy, the local tradesmen, the
134 Government House at Perth in Western Australia.
135
135 An estate ball at Danny House in the 1930s.
Fire Brigade (with engine), the Girl Guides and Brownies, also Miss J. Weekes from the
Mansion House and retired James Bunney from Sunny Cot. Once he alighted, a floral
benediction floated from an upper window as 80-year-old Nanny Carter blissfully released
an armful of roses, and then C.F. Tulley, owner of the village ‘department store’, stepped
forward to extol their restored squire’s ‘devoted’ service to Parliament, to the Fourth
Sussex and to the Empire. Responding, Sir William revealed that Western Australians and
Sussex men shared a motto – ‘Won’t be druv’. But just as ‘the Sussex man, his confidence
secured, could be led … so could the Australian.’ As for the future, he hoped, with Lady
Katherine’s aid, to ‘live the life of a country gentleman’, ‘be of some little use in a quiet
way’ and ‘do a little bit as well’ as his parents before him. Hardly had the loud applause
died away, before an aircraft dipped low in salute – piloted by Viscount Ratendone, heir
to the Marquis of Willingdon, it added a ’30s touch to an otherwise perfect patriarchal
occasion.141
And indeed ‘of use’ the Campions were. Sir William, like his father, chaired the Bench
of magistrates at Haywards Heath. He presided at the local British Legion and led the
Remembrance on Armistice Day. An active Anglican, he served as people’s churchwarden
and chaired the Governors of Hurstpierpoint College. He attended the House of Laity in
the Church Assembly and Bishop Bell’s committee to raise money for new churches in
Sussex. New Year’s Day in 1934 found him at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion lighting ‘a lantern’
at a ball given by the Society for the Welfare of the Blind. And though the ‘Sunshine
Home’ was now run by the Church Army, and Chichester House had closed, along with
the workhouses that supplied it, Lady Katherine became chairman of the New Sussex
136
Hospital for Women – organising its two-day Christmas bazaar – and deputy president
of the Lewes Division of the British Red Cross. Sir William also presided over the Sussex
County Cricket Club and the Weald Tennis Club at Hassocks. And the pitch at Danny
still hosted matches every Wednesday and Saturday in summer, Maurice Tate and other
County players taking part. The local side captained by Simon included Harry Schofield,
father of Paul the actor and master of the National School. Simon’s siblings, Wifred,
Dorothy and Barbara, also ‘entered enthusiastically into village life’. Other sports resumed
– skating on Sandfield Pond, the steady shooting of rabbits and game, and days out with
the Southdown Hunt. Indeed the Lawn Meet at Danny on Boxing Day, with its ritual
distribution of cherry brandy, sloe gin, mince pies, sausage rolls and cake, best publicised
the return to patriarchal routine. Moreover, Queen Mary paid a tightly planned visit
one very wet Wednesday afternoon in 1934. After being ushered round – and doubtless
appraising the furniture – she sat bolt upright in the dining-room, conversed until tea
was served, smoked a single cigarette and promptly departed at six.142
But even Queen Mary’s visit was eclipsed by the Revels held at Danny for two days
in June 1935 to celebrate the Jubilee of George V and also raise money to enhance ‘the
youth of the nation’. Fittingly, the local Scouts built a massive bonfire on ‘the hill’ and
guarded it at night. Hurst focused mainly, though, on the Revels – the proceeds paying
for new classrooms at the National School to accommodate secondary pupils. But the
elaborate pageant, an Art Form very popular in the ’30s, also celebrated Danny. Scores of
participants, some in flamboyant Queen Anne costume, were marshalled to re-enact the
fateful union in 1702 between Barbara Courthope and Henry Campion. Simon played
the bridegroom, a distant Courthope cousin the bride. After wrangling family lawyers
finalised the marriage settlement there followed a stately wedding ceremony, the cutting
of an enormous cake and a closing medley of madrigals, dances and folk song. Vida
Herbison, meanwhile, in lace-trimmed habit and tricorn hat, was precariously mounted
side-saddle on Marcus, and when a wag blew a hunting horn, her bold stallion bolted,
taking in his stride ‘the ha-ha as if it were an Irish bank’, several flower beds and an old
lady in a bath chair.143
These pre-war years were ‘really lovely days’ according to Mr Arnold who arrived in 1931
from the Marquess of Salisbury’s household at Hatfield to succeed Mr Grimson as butler.
The country-house rituals were still scrupulously preserved. Each bedtime he proffered a
nightcap from a grog tray laden with whisky, brandy and gin. And on Christmas Night,
as a prelude to a ‘superb’ meal, he bore into the Great Hall head-high a massive turkey
on a silver salver, the assembled Family clapping and shouting ‘fizz, boom, bang’ – a
turkey cock in its pride proper being the Campion coat-of-arms. After the meal a festively
decorated oak chest, full of presents, was carried in, and amid shouts of ‘how lovely’ or
‘just what I wanted’, discarded wrappings rose higher and higher. Besides the butler, junior
house servants – there were still nine of them – appreciated Sir William and Katherine.
Wages were paid during the two or three months each year they were absent in Holland
– perhaps with the Swinderens? Moreover, Sir William insisted that his chauffeur should
ferry a house maid, Rita Dalrymple, to a new post at Newton Park near Bath, where a
137
136 The Danny Revels: the wedding procession in the garden.
bibulous irascible earl demanded that his bootlaces be ironed daily. And ‘Bill’ Thomas,
a miner’s son from depressed South Wales, was fondly reminiscent of his days at Danny.
After humping crates of soft drinks in the Valleys, he was trained as a male servant and
dispatched, complete with a short striped jacket and thick black trousers, to toil as a
general ‘dogsbody’ in a dismal Sussex boarding school. Moving on to Danny in 1938 as a
‘houseboy’, he uncomplainingly stoked boilers, chopped wood, washed up and scrubbed
floors from 7.30 am to 10 pm. He and the other servants ‘still had our little jokes and as
a team got on very well together’. Encouraged by Katherine, he was quickly promoted to
footman – the silver buttons on his splendid velvet tailed jacket bore the turkey crest, but
his bow tie was white, whereas Mr Arnold’s was black. Sir William also arranged driving
137 The Danny Revels: wedding guests on the terrace.
138
138 Boys in the billiard room, with the still
extant stone fire-place.
lessons. Meanwhile he relished the
woodland orchids and Max Miller at
the Theatre Royal in Brighton. So when
War came in 1939 Bill left ‘dear old
Danny’ with much reluctance.144
But despite the restoration in 1931
of patriarchal routines at Danny – the
grog tray, the Revels, the Boxing Day
Meet – away in London Sir William was
bonding, precariously, with a seasoned
cosmopolitan financier. Claude Albo
de Bernales was born in London in 1876. His wealthy father was Basque, his mother
American. Modishly educated at Uppingham and Heidelberg University, he joined a gold
rush in 1897 to Western Australia, where he manufactured mining machinery, bought up
gold fields at Kalgoorlie and Wiluna, attracted foreign investment and built a ‘Spanish’
mansion at Perth which eclipsed its cheerily Elizabethan Government House. In the
late 1920s he also ‘fostered a close alliance’ with Sir William, while negotiating a loan of
£300,000 backed by the State government. This alliance persisted when Bernales later
settled in London, raised millions from new investors and founded several companies,
which Sir William chaired, including Anglo-Australian Gold Development. In 1935-6,
indeed, the allies returned to Perth and triumphantly toured their then burgeoning mines.
But in 1939 this investment empire collapsed and after angry shareholders in their Great
Boulder Proprietary Gold Mine accused its directors of taking ‘excessive compensation’,
a Board of Trade investigator doubted that they (the said directors) had ‘done their duty’.
Maybe Sir William was merely an amiable, too-trusting figure-head. How much he, his
family and friends, gained or lost is unclear. (The Board of Trade also alleged that Bernales
owed tax on profits of £1,382,000 from share dealing – an evasion Lord Beaverbrook avidly
pursued in his Daily Express.)145
Patriarchal routines at Danny, of course, were finally shattered by the Second World War.
The Family confined itself to the south wing ‘for the duration’ and from September 1939
to April 1940 – as the Tatler magazine cosily put it – extended ‘hospitality’ to Westminster
School. Though evacuated to Hurst College, the headmaster and two assistants were
‘billeted’ at Danny, while sixth formers cycled over for lessons and to enjoy the amenities.
Thus the Tatler’s morale-boosting series, ‘Country Homes in Wartime’, pictured nattily
attired prefects relaxing in the billiard room and admiring the sundial on the south lawn.
For good measure Simon was snapped at the Home Farm, leaning on a tractor fuelled with
faggots, in amiable converse with its dusty driver, George Tupper. Sadly though, during
this time of otherwise Phoney War, hostilities flared up between the co-habiting public
schools. Wealthy Westminster, it seems, would not reimburse cash-strapped Hurstpierpoint
139
139 Simon chatting with George Tupper.
for unforeseen extras – medicines,
telephone calls, daily cheese and
break-time buns – estimated in May
1940 to have cost £1,500 – there was
talk of legal action.146
After Dunkirk, of course, Danny,
except for the south wing, was
required by the Military. Coastal
Sussex became a war zone braced
for a German invasion. The mansion
now housed officers while other ranks
occupied tents and Nissen huts in the park. By the autumn of 1941 these makeshift facilities
were full of Canadian infantry. First to arrive were the Seaforth Highlanders – a mere
coincidence, presumably, that Simon, his uncle Edward and his grandfather had served
with their British equivalent. Then on 6 August 1942 came Le Regiment de La Chaudiere.
Some days later, after apples were stolen from the orchard, the men were mustered on
parade and duly berated. This fierce discipline, and the watchful eye of Mr Arnold, who
multi-tasked as butler, barrack warden and ARP controller, could account for Danny’s
plaster ceilings and back-staircases surviving the war intact. More positive, perhaps, on 16
August, were an open air Mass on the forecourt and an inspection by the Canadian Air
Minister. Sadly though, by October steady rain, clinging mud and defective latrines had
lowered morale: ‘C’est mort’ agreed a visiting General. And despite ‘a coloured troupe,
mostly girls’, at the Chinese Gardens, and dances in the Great Hall fleshed out by ladies
ferried in by army lorry from Hurst, morale was further depressed by training the local
Home Guard and by exercises on the Downs to repel an ever less likely German invasion.
After Le Regiment thankfully redeployed to Scotland in the summer of 1943, thoughts
turned to the Liberation of Western Europe and British Commandos tidily trained on
the estate for an Invasion of Normandy, whereas luckless Stanmer Park way over ‘the hill’
was mangled by manoeuvring tanks.147
Amid the deepest secrecy the Danny estate hosted other war work. In 1940 six men
from the local Home Guard were recruited into a ‘Resistance’ Patrol. A market gardener,
a baker, a farmer and two builders were led by Percy Tulley from the ‘department’ store.
Trained to handle weapons and explosives, they were expected, if the Germans overran
Sussex, to live off the land while blowing up railway lines and ammunition dumps. ‘In
a small private wood to the north of Wolstonbury Hill’, the Royal Engineers built them
an underground hideout of timber and corrugated iron, linked by a field-telephone to a
lookout a few hundred yards away, with a clear view of the Clayton-Stonepound road.
The Patrol’s training included mock attacks on Danny House, which presumably the
Canadians and the Commandos were alerted to the likelihood of.148
13
Danny Transformed: Private Schools
and Stylish Retirement, 1947-2004
140 Helen Scott and her smiling staff at Danny House in 2000.
Terse Parson Borrer had noted in October 1895: ‘Bill Campion’s child christened in London
– Simon by name, after the first Campion Sir Simon’ – a very remote ancestor in medieval
Essex. Yet sadly in a sense baby Simon was to be the last Campion. Though fraternising
with a ghostly Cavalier in the Schoolroom, playing Barbara Courthope’s bridegroom in the
Revels, and running the estate in the war, Simon also oversaw the Family’s final departure
from Danny. The mansion survived the Canadians intact, but the cost of its staffing and
upkeep in Mr Attlee’s Age of Austerity could not be sustained. Accordingly, in January 1947,
during a bitter winter, some of the Family silver was auctioned in the Great Hall while the
momentous move was made to Little Danny, formerly the Home Farm (and thereafter
to The Ham). Sir William was still spry enough in 1949, two years before his death, to
preside as Chairman of the Governors over the complex flurry of High Church ceremonial
that celebrated the Centenary of Hurst College – ‘Five bishops will robe in the sanatorium
[and] albs may be borrowed from Saint Bartholomew’s, Brighton’ – though doubtless the
Countess of Athlone and the Archbishop of Canterbury were to robe less communally.149
Fortunately for Simon the empty mansion was quickly occupied by Montpelier College,
a boarding and day school for boys, formerly housed since at least 1936 at 25 Montpelier
Crescent in Brighton, and moved by a new headmaster to Danny in the summer of 1947.
Captain Robert St Lawrence Willmore Costello, B.A. (London), formerly of the Canadian
Commandos, vividly impressed Anthony Harrison-Barbet, a nine-year-old boarder. ‘Tall
and languid [and unmarried], he had a black patch over one eye – no doubt the result of a
war wound’; he ‘spoke with what seemed an affected drawl’ and kept ‘splendid motor cars’
in the converted coach house. In March 1948 he also drew up suitably audacious plans to
adapt the mansion for a hundred pupils, aged from eight to eighteen, roughly half of them
day boys bussed in from Brighton. The Great Hall with its War Cabinet plaque remained
sacrosanct. But the white-and-gold drawing room was to be Costello’s reception room,
the book-lined library his study; the dining room a chapel, the servants’ hall a cinema,
the butler’s pantry a bursar’s office; day boys would eat in the billiard room, boarders in
the morning room, and beyond the scullery were to be a changing room, a laboratory
and serried rows of stark WCs and urinals. Planned on the upper floors were class rooms,
masters’ bedrooms, a sick bay, a matron’s room, a scholars’ library and billiard room, and
dormitories bracingly labelled Frobisher, Drake, Nelson, Wellington and Churchill. And
maybe the Captain’s plans were largely realised, for ‘alterations’ did take place. Indeed, a
cutting of uncertain provenance, dated 1949, reported that, due to their ‘heavy expense’,
141
142
Danny Transformed: Private Schools and Stylish Retirement, 1947-2004
143
142 Montpelier College football team in 1949.
141 An auction in the Great Hall, possibly of Family silver.
only the parents rallying to raise ‘a large sum of money’ had saved the College from closure
– ‘Seldom has confidence in a headmaster been so readily and so practically displayed’, was
its unctuous conclusion.150
Harrison-Barbet, moreover, recalled the College with affection. True, the masters were
all bachelors and, apart from kitchen staff, the only females were an amiable Welsh
matron and a Secretary, efficient Miss Sinden, sister of Donald, then a budding actor.
And conditions were Spartan, with meagre coal fires, little hot water, few wash-basins
and a tap in the changing-room. But the food was good, the teaching excellent, the
staff ‘dedicated and kind’, and the sport low-key and relaxed – the school colours being
blue with yellow trimmings. An advert also claimed that ‘visual education’ was ‘fully
integrated with the curriculum’. And there was ample free time. After wearing his red
cassock to Sunday service, Harrison-Barbet could roam freely and collect shell casings
from the former tank training grounds beyond ‘the hill’. And unsupervised use of the
laboratory allowed him to mix copper turnings with nitric acid to produce a billowing
brown cloud of toxic gas which dispersed undetected, however. Sadly though, early in
1950, after lights-out, he was wakened in his dormitory (called ‘Campion’ it seems) by a
commotion in the forecourt below. Looking out, he spied the headmaster being carried
unconscious on a stretcher to a police car. Captain Costello had just swallowed laudanum
in the open-access laboratory, after being confronted with evidence of his ‘abusing’ several
pupils. His suicide attempt failed and he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment at
Lewes Assizes in March.151
Harrison-Barbet was withdrawn, but remembered the College being rebranded reassuringly
as ‘Wolstonbury’. Its prospectus now claimed that the school had begun at Brighton in
1830 and, indeed, had ‘furnished Dickens with the original of Dr Blimber’s Academy in
Dombey and Son’, but added archly, ‘The tradition has been preserved, but the methods
changed’. It listed six Governors, all Brighton residents, along with 25 men ‘kindly’ willing
to vouchsafe for the new, married, headmaster, Major F.J. Danby-Hunter B.Sc. – among
them a baronet, an admiral, ten senior army officers (two in Weapons Research), a police
superintendent in Burma, a professor in British Columbia, the Reverend Oakshott in
Chile and Carl Spitzer in Ohio. The College also sported a new crest and motto, servi et
defende replacing spes sibi quisque, and new school colours, dark maroon and dark green.
Two Matrons now checked the ‘excellent’ sanitation and ‘extensive central heating’. And
the Inter-Denominational teaching aimed to be ‘stimulating’ but free of cramming,
despite specialist teachers and scholarship classes. Pupils also enjoyed fresh vegetables
and pasteurised milk from Grade ‘A’ cows, could tend plots in the formal garden and
join a Scout Troop. The intention was to mould ‘happy, healthy and useful citizens’,
imbued with ‘a spirit of service and a sense of responsibility’. Danby-Hunter, though,
soon departed – and maybe it was relevant that in 1931 a Captain F.J. Danby-Hunter,
after ‘operating’ a girls’ school in the Far East, set up St George’s College for boys in
Vancouver, but left ‘under a cloud’ – being fond of ‘sherry and the ladies’. His successor at
Danny, a Mr Harris, moved the pupils to the vicinity of Horsham in 1954 – the youngest
boarder, Michael Smale, being ritually roasted at the fire in the Great Hall on the day of
departure. (By then a skilful pupil had cut out and pocketed ‘Mr. W.S. Churchill’ from
the Armistice plaque nearby.)152
Simon was to bleakly inform his friend, Lord Euston, in March 1955 that both schools
‘went bankrupt’ – a convenient half-truth perhaps. His search for a new tenant, meanwhile,
was proving ‘pretty much of a headache’ – in the mid-1950s scores of empty ancestral
mansions were facing decay, even demolition. Usefully, Lord Euston was Chairman
144
of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and, recognising Danny’s great
architectural merit, he helped secure a repair grant from the Historic Buildings Council,
applauded by Country Life in July 1956. But more momentously Danny had been sighted
by Rear-Admiral Bernard Wilberforce Greathed, a retired commander of naval dockyards,
then ashore at North Court in Hassocks. His recently launched Mutual Households
Association Limited aimed to lease or buy ‘historic’ country houses, and convert them
into unfurnished flats for ‘active’ retired persons who had ‘given service to the Crown,
Country, neighbourhood or neighbours’, and wanted ‘a degree of gracious living’, with
communal catering, cleaning and laundry services supplied by resident staff. To Simon’s
delight, the Rear-Admiral identified Danny as ideal for his first flagship ‘household’ and
in September 1956 the MHA duly leased the mansion and eight acres of garden and
grounds for 30 years, at an annual rent of £350, the Association paying for repairs and
insurance. Cuckfield Rural District Council meanwhile agreed Improvement Grants to
create 20 apartments upstairs, leaving the ground floor free for communal sitting and
dining rooms, a kitchen and staff quarters. Weekly rents averaged £4-£5 per person, and
a cash down-payment of £300 was returnable on vacating, minus 3 per cent per annum.
The Campion armour, portraits and ancestral furniture remained, adding distinction to
the public rooms. In July 1957 Simon’s neighbour at Firle, Lord Gage, as President of
the National Federation of Housing Associations, declared the ‘household’ open and
by March 1958 the flagship was full – indeed Simon himself was a resident till 1964.153
Other cash-strapped landowners meanwhile were besieging the MHA, desperate to
save their stately homes from dereliction or worse – heartened no doubt by Rear-Admiral
Greathed’s declared intention to berth 2,000 appreciative ex-public servants in 100 gracious
households. And indeed, by May 1959 picturesque Otterden Place in Kent was ‘open’ and
Pythouse, a majestic Palladian pile in Wiltshire, was under conversion. But by then the
MHA was also heavily in debt and the Rear-Admiral resigned. Sadly, his book-keeping
and his engineering were both unreliable. At Otterden, perhaps with a battleship in mind,
he proposed fitting a lift into a back staircase, leaving only 18 inches for the stairs; at
Pythouse a costly cold storage chamber and his own intricate heating system, re-using old
pipes, both failed to function. The MHA was snatched from liquidation by Mr Barkell
Taylor of Croydon, a hard-headed consultant, whose artful delay in settling its bills was
sometimes deplored at AGMs as ‘caddish’. Under his deft guidance seven more ‘historic’
houses were acquired – an initiative praised by Marcus Binney in his otherwise doomladen lament, The Destruction of the Country House. Indeed, Good Queen Bess had visited
Gosfield Hall and eminent architects had designed, wholly or in part, Swallowfield Park,
Aynhoe Park, Albury Park ‘with 63 chimneys’, Great Maytham Hall and Flete. The least
happy choice, perhaps, was Ford Manor in Surrey, built in 1868 – Ian Nairn deemed it
‘a rock-hard stone pile’, ‘over-confident to a fault’ – and fittingly, maybe, it was renamed
Greathed Manor as a tribute to the MHA’s intrepid founder.154
Association life at Danny in the early days was variously viewed as ‘like a country-house
weekend party, except that one does not leave on Monday morning’, or again, as ‘a doit-yourself, up-market, commune where everyone joined in the washing up and cookery’.
145
Any ‘mucking in’ was doubtless exaggerated. But residents regrouping there from the army,
navy and colonial civil service could enjoy a social life reminiscent of the mess or the club,
and as toughened survivors of World War and Austerity they took in their stride remote
bathrooms, long corridors and steep stairs – as indeed did the Honourable Bruce Ogilvy,
a relative of the Queen. Thus with enthusiasm they laid out the ‘Burmah Road’, a path
descending from the plunge-bath through clumps of bamboo down to the ha-ha. They
enjoyed a game of croquet, often taking the form of an ‘Octogenarians’ Match’. Suitably
seasoned spinsters were, of course, welcomed. Outstanding, perhaps, was Dr Isobel Glasgow,
born in 1901 and resident from 1963 till 1997. An Ulsterwoman, orphaned early, she put
herself through medical school in Belfast and parried deep suspicion as the only female
doctor in County Down – one father promised to shoot her if the child she delivered was a
girl. After serving in India with the Royal Medical Corps, she ‘enjoyed an illustrious career
in Tropical Medicine’. At Danny she took one alcoholic drink a day and smoked one cigar
every Christmas. The mansion’s ‘common’ rooms, replete with Campion heirlooms, and
its grounds, also hosted local events, quite apart from being open to the public at least
18 days each year, a condition of the HBC’s grant in 1956. There were art shows and
puppet-theatres; an engineering firm laid out a miniature railway, and the Hurst Players
revived the Danny Revels and staged Love throughout the Ages – ‘beginning with a caveman’,
it attracted over-flowing audiences.155
Residential life at Danny in the late 1970s also stirred the muse of Lieutenant-Colonel
Ronald Cox. His robust verse saluted the female domestic staff, ‘a dedicated cheerful
smiling band’ armed with ‘snarling Hoovers’, ‘dressing chairs like Guardsmen from the
right’, serving up ‘tender veal or roasted mutton, with peas and buttered cabbage’, or
‘mash-bangers, fish-pies, macaroni-gratin’. He admired ‘cruise-happy Madame Christine’,
steaming past St Kilda: ‘You frighten the sea birds, the seals you bewilder’. He encompassed
the tedium of long winter afternoons:
Some play at Bridge and have their tiffs;
Some Scrabble deep in gloom;
While others snooze by ‘goggle box’,
Warm in the hot Spice Room.
And sombre was his mood in 1977-8 during ‘this winter of our discontent’ when
Militancy was rife:
For Colonel Mac has grave grim doubts
That all may yet be lost,
Unless they shoot wee Wedgewood Benn
And string up David Frost.156
Happily, of course, such ‘grave grim doubts’ dispersed, once Mrs Thatcher was elected.
But new worries loomed as the ending of the MHA’s lease of Danny in September 1986
drew nearer, with no certainty of renewal. Indeed repairs were skimped, ‘brambles, weeds
and nettles’ ravaged the grounds, rampant bamboo choked the Burmah Road. Worse still in
1983 took place the shattering sale of the freehold of Danny to Ian Burgess, a local ‘developer’.
146
Simon Campion had died in 1976 and his only son David (Eton and Cambridge), a signals
officer in the North Atlantic during the war, had been managing the Danny estate which still
spread across 2,000 acres. But his only son, James, renounced the life of a ‘country gentleman’.
Choosing ‘the rugged path’ of helping the poor in India, he left to run an isolated medical
centre about 100 miles north of Madras – a fitting sequel to his family’s long engagement
with Empire. His departure clinched David’s decision in 1980 to auction the estate, apart
from the 350-acre Ham Farm where he lived, and Tott Farm, already sold to Mr Burgess.
The auction failed. But in July 1983 Mr Burgess paid £1,250,000 for the remaining farms,
for 218 acres of woodland and for Danny and most of its contents. Afterwards, Mr Burgess
confided to local journalists that, though ‘not a social do-gooder’, he had ‘a dream for the
stately pile’ and intended to ‘turn back the clock’ to the days when it was central to village
life, so that ‘the expansive grounds will again buzz to the sounds of horse shows, fairs, balls
and other community activities’. Danny was to become ‘an attraction’, though bereft of its
more collectable paintings. Cornelius Jansen’s portrait of Peter Courthope (estimated price
£4,000-6,000) and The Apotheosis of Charles I (£2,000-3,000) were among the long-cherished
heirlooms removed to Sothebys for sale in July 1984. Gone, too, from the Great Hall was
Sir William Campion’s long burnished armour, though his Boarstall letters were among the
rich collection of family and estate archives that Simon had given to the East Sussex Record
Office in 1966.157
So despite Mrs Thatcher at Number 10, an Orwellian gloom doubtless pervaded Danny
as 1984 unfolded – until ‘a bolt out of the blue’ landed. On ‘a red-letter day’ for the
Country Houses Association (as it had become) an anonymous donor – a lady living
in South Africa – gave it in excess of £1,000,000 to purchase Danny and its grounds,
and help fund its refurbishment. Inevitably the 16 residents then endured four years
of upheaval while apartments were redesigned to include that essential of the ’80s, a
bathroom en suite. Seeing themselves ‘as akin to survivors of the London Blitz’, they later
impressed on newcomers ‘that the serenity of the present had been won by the sacrifices
of the past’. In the grounds the ha-ha was rebuilt, the Burmah Road reopened and a pond
created below the restored plunge-bath. A few paintings sold at Sothebys, including The
143 Bowerbank’s discrete annexe.
147
144 Bowerbank’s ‘Jacobean’ dining-room.
Apotheosis, were bought back, and also the oak table given to William and Gertrude at
their Golden Wedding. But in 1986-7 the CHA’s proposal to build new apartments, to
replace those lost to bathrooms and a new dining-room, sparked what the local press
headlined as a PLANS WAR AT PEACE TREATY SITE. Council officers, and the Royal
Fine Arts Commission, rejected as ‘out of scale’ a T-shaped, two-storey extension, all
too visible from ‘the hill’. But they approved a discrete single-storey annexe in the north
courtyard, designed by Christopher Bowerbank with blank lunettes above the windows
and tall chimney stacks, playfully capped. He also laid out there an elegant fountain and
converted the coach house. (See 67) Mr Burgess meanwhile had voiced complaints from a
public gallery about unseemly gas tanks, the felling of trees and the size of the car park.158
The CHA itself, however, was disturbed by aspects of Bowerbank’s ‘Jacobean’ diningroom, formed in the North Wing from apartments, previously the Morning Room and the
Billiard Room. His design was stylish enough – the ribbed plaster ceiling copying motifs from
the Chapel Room above, the wall panels inspired by the Kederminster Library at Langley
church near Slough, and the pillared fireplace of Portland stone based on a drawing by the
Renaissance architect, Sebastiano Serlio. Nor were materials skimped. The oak floorboards
were cut into uneven widths to achieve ‘authenticity’. Each wall panel was crafted from
three planks, so it would split in time and give ‘a distressed appearance’, while the colours –
dull green, dirty cream, dark brown – were fixed by an expensive tinted glaze. And delicate
sconces dispersed a soothing glow from mirrored backs. But Bowerbank teased his clients
about the slate design on the Serlian fireplace (repeated on the basin of his fountain) being ‘a
cabbalistic device’, ‘deeply relevant to its position’. A floating eye painted on the north wall,
with the warning ‘Deus videt’ (God sees), ‘made up for its sunless orientation’. Meanwhile,
residents deplored as a slur on their loyal culinary staff a line from the Roman poet Juvenal
sited by the exit door to the kitchen – Occidit miseros cranite repetita coquos translates as ‘the
148
145 ‘Tudor’ leather shoes found during repairs in the 1980s.
cook will be the death of the unfortunate [diners] by serving them with rehashed cabbage’
– as a protest the residents kept the door open to hide it. That the CHA – a ‘difficult’ client
– was ‘not amused’ was even noted gleefully in 2002 by his obituary-writer in the Daily
Telegraph: Bowerbank, a wealthy bachelor, owed his first design opportunity, new offices for
the record company of the Rolling Stones, to his escorting Marianne Faithful. Indeed, he
embraced the ‘haut, beau and demi mondes’ – spanning without effort Princess Margaret,
Mayfair and Notting Hill – when not watching birds in ‘the stark wilderness of Orkney’.159
Bowerbank apart, little seemed to ruffle the residents once refurbishment, ably directed by
the Administrator, John Grant, was completed in 1989. New elegancies arrived with the en
suites and promoted a ‘stylish’ living – the cuisine was now a far cry from the Basic British
that satisfied Ronald Knox in the 1970s. Thus in 2001 the CHA’s glossy house magazine,
Country Style, featured the Head Cook, Hungarian-born Helen Scott, and her five staff, all
smiles despite the slur on their cabbage. Residents could relish Red Cabbage with Hungarian
Pork, Roast Cod in Serrano Ham, and creamy Dobos Cake with a unique caramel topping,
while Pot-roasted Poussin with Cranberries now enriched the Black-Tie Dinner in the Great
Hall on the Saturday before Christmas. Firmly displaced were Cox’s ‘mash-bangers, fishpies and macaroni-gratin’. The furniture residents brought tended to be ‘old, well-loved and
warped’, neither institutional nor cheap. And some inmates were seriously well-off. John
Duthie arrived in 1995 after ‘some years of lotus-eating in a mid-Victorian manor in Devon’,
and duly encountered Louisa Legh, the widow of a high official at the Bank of England, Sir
Stephen Brown, a former President of the Confederation of British Industry, Peter Rigden,
the retired director of an up-market car-sales franchise, and Brigadier McQueen, ‘a cerebral
staff officer’. But the ‘style’ did not inhibit a civilised communal life. Bridge and croquet
149
still flourished. Some residents tended a flower bed – ‘cloches are allowed, and all kinds of
botanical experiments are carried on in quiet corners’. Octogenarian Vera Dabson-Webb
hung her walls with paintings of Danny executed on ‘hazy days’. Dr Glasgow, now in her
mid-90s, still practised the violin, though the late John Chidell, a Cambridge classical scholar,
no longer researched Danny’s intricate history or harassed Bowerbank to justify his Latin.160
Clearly in January 2003 residents had reason to applaud a statement in the CHA’s
48th annual report that its trustees viewed ‘the future with tempered enthusiasm’. Yet the
following December the same trustees declared their intention ‘to cease the residential
accommodation business’ at Danny and their other properties – due to ‘the falling demand
for the particular serviced apartments offered, the increasing age-profile of the residents,
the increasing regulations surrounding the business and the significant level of losses that
all of this has produced’ – trends not apparent, it seems, the previous January. Residents
had until ‘mid-2004’ to find other accommodation. But as an editorial in Country Life
indignantly pointed out, the deposits which many residents had put down years before,
when repaid, minus 3 per cent per annum, would ‘in property terms represent only a
fraction of their original value’, leaving little hope of them finding even ‘a simple cottage
nearby’. In February 2004 their dilemma was also dwelt on by an article, ‘From the manor
torn’, in the Daily Telegraph. A happy resolution, however, was in the offing.161
14
Danny Relaunched, 2004-12
146 Richard Burrows and his resident ram.
Admiral Greathed’s original concept – the saving of fine old houses by turning them into
retirement homes for colonial servants and servicemen – was a brilliant one, and for many
years the nine houses prospered. But from the ’90s doubts had been expressed by those
claiming some knowledge of such matters – was the Country House Association as well
managed and financially stable as it should be?
On Thursday, 3 December 2003 all doubts were finally removed when the residents at
Danny (the same thing was happening at seven other houses, the events being carefully
synchronised) were invited to a meeting in the white drawing-room at 12 noon. As they
waited, the staff emerged looking thunderstruck, and the reason soon became clear: a
Mr Wu informed them in a few words that CHA had gone into administration, and that
they had a little over six months in which to find a new home.
Advertisements appeared in Country Life and elsewhere, and for two months there
was a constant coming and going, as various people came to view the property, one
even arriving on the South Lawn by helicopter. Meanwhile, the residents pursued their
search for alternative accommodation with greater or lesser success, as no one had much
hope that a buyer would want them to remain. While many may have secretly prayed
for a white knight to appear, there seemed small chance of that actually happening in
the real world. So it was a happy surprise when, towards the end of February, Richard
Burrows announced to another gathering in the white drawing-room that he intended
to buy Danny, and that all residents were invited to stay, on similar terms to those
they had enjoyed under CHA. They now knew that their tenure was secure, and on
1 April 2004 Richard took possession of Danny, moving with his family into part of
the south wing.
In spite of the extensive refurbishment carried out between 1985 and 1989, little had
been done subsequently. So Richard undertook a programme of his own, including
the repair of windows in the south wing and opening up others on the east front.
He has also bought much of the historic parkland that provides the setting for the
house, as well as establishing a flock of sheep to help conserve Wolstonbury Hill and
the Southdown landscape that frames Danny. He has spent time and energy, too, on
furnishing the house with suitable antiques, even managing to buy back paintings sold
by Mr Burgess in 1984. Danny has also become a venue for concerts and lectures open
to all. Previously visitors to Danny asking their way in Hurstpierpoint would be met
with a blank look. Now it has become a part of village life, as in the Campions’ time.
151
152
147 A garden party at Danny in 2007, oil by Paul Brown.
Danny Relaunched, 2004-12
153
154
Of the original eight houses (Greathed had already closed its doors as the lease was due
to expire) Danny is the only one still to offer the style of living at which CHA aimed.
Apartments are rented, rather than bought or leased, so that the only call on capital is
for a deposit of six months’ rent, and the monthly rent is truly inclusive, as it covers
the apartment, three meals a day, heating, lighting, cleaning, maintenance and counciltax. There is access to 100 acres of parkland in the South Downs National Park, and a
weekly bus-service takes residents shopping in one of the nearby towns. Transport is also
provided to theatres, concerts, Glyndebourne, and gardens and houses open to the public.
All round, it is really the life of Riley, with activity – dancing, keep-fit classes, bridge, a
book club and gardening – if it is wanted, or a quiet life for those who prefer that. What
Richard Burrows has done is to take the CHA lifestyle and refine and improve it; to
restore to Danny its place in the village; and, because he is on the spot, rather than in a
remote office in London, to give the house and grounds the care they need and deserve.
A staff (resident ratio of 1:3) ensures that service is ever-ready but unobtrusive. To live
at Danny in the 21st century is to enjoy the sort of gracious living that was experienced
by our forefathers and would be hard to find elsewhere.
Endnotes
Abbreviations in footnotes:
ACC:Accession in East Sussex Record Office
ADA:Adams MSS in ESRO
AMS:Additional MSS in ESRO
DAN:
Danny MSS in ESRO
ESRO:East Sussex Record Office
Martin:
David and Barbara Martin, An Archaeological Interpretative Survey of
Danny House, Hurstpierpoint, Updated Report, Project Ref 3118 (2010)
Nelson, Hurstpierpoint: I. Nelson, ed. Hurstpierpoint – kind and charitable (2001)
Nelson, Weekes:
I. Nelson, ed. The Weekes Diaries (2005)
ODNB:
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Packham, Memorial Tablets:
R.A. Packham, An Inventory of Memorial Tablets … in Holy
Trinity Church and St Georges Chapel, Hurstpierpoint (1988)
SAC:
Sussex Archaeological Collections
TNA:
The National Archives
VCH:
The Victoria County History: Sussex
WSRO:
West Sussex Record Office
I ntroduction : D anny
in
C ontext
1E.V. Lucas, Highways and byways in Sussex (1921), 199.
2 ‘Woolsonbury Nymphs’, a poem written before 1785, quoted in William Smith Ellis, The Parks
and Forests of Sussex (1885), 80; Gilbert White, The natural history of Selborne (1951), 138, 167,
170.
3 Richard Jefferies, The life of the fields (1884), 118-20.
4 Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1806), 897; A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton, The place-names of Sussex,
2 (1929-30), 287-8; E. Cecil Curwen, ‘Wolstonbury’, SAC 71 (1930), 237-45; O. Bedwin, ‘Aspects
of Iron Age Settlement in Sussex’, in B. Cunliffe and D. Miles (eds.), Aspects of the Iron Age in
Central Southern Britain, Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 46-51; Miles Russell,
Wolstonbury Hill, Pyecombe, West Sussex, research design for an archaeological survey (1994); J.M.T.
Ford, The Weekes Family Letters (1987), 5, 8, 9.
5 Mawer and Stenton, op. cit., 287-8; B.J. Mitten, Guide to Hurstpierpoint and its neighbourhood
(c.1906), 16.
6 Peter Brandon, The Sussex Landscape (1974), passim.
7 VCH, VII, 172-7.
8 Brandon, op. cit., passim.
9Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, passim.
1: D anny L odge : T he P ierpoints ,
the
D acres
and their
G reat D eer P ark , 1239-1562
10 William Smith Ellis, ‘Hurstpierpoint: its Lords and families’, SAC 11 (1859), 65-6; DAN 1126,
ff. 192-3; DAN 1602; DAN 2097.
155
156
11Essex Record Office, D/DL M68; DAN 2071-9; TNA E134/22&23 Chas 2/Hil 4&Trin 7; ADA
7 p. 111; Mawer and Stenton, op. cit. 367.
12DAN 2097; DAN 1238; ADA 11 p. 42; Robert Willis Blencowe, ‘Roman remains in the
neighbourhood of Hurst-pier-point and Danny’, SAC 14 (1862), 178-81; I.D. Margary, Roman
Ways in the Weald (1949), 172; Anon, ‘Roman Pavement at Danny’, SAC 10 (1858), 210.
13Anon [William Smith Ellis], A History of Hurstpierpoint (1837), 1-5, 15; L.F. Salzman (ed.), ‘Feet
of Fines for the county of Sussex’, Sussex Record Society, 2 (1903), 93-4; L.C Hector (ed.), ‘Curia
Regis Rolls of the reign of Henry III’, vol.16, 575; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1354-8, 18; TNA C66/242.
14 Mawer and Stenton, op. cit., 274; Richard Coates, ‘Some notes on Danny’ in Some Place-names of
the Downland fringe (1990), 27-9 and personal information from the author; Jayne Semple, ‘The
medieval deer parks of Wrotham’, Cantiana, 128 (2008), 179-182.
15T.W.Horsfield, The history, antiquities and topography of the county of Sussex, 1 (1835), 245; VCH, II,
185, VII, 78, 266.
16 Rev. Edmund Venables, ‘The castle of Herstmonceux and its lords’, SAC 4 (1851), 125-202; David
Calvert and Roger Martin, A History of Herstmonceux Castle (1994), 5-7; I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s
Rebellion of 1450 (1991), 78-9; Essex Record Office, D/DL M68; DAN 1036.
17 Calvert and Martin, op. cit., 8-10; Art Quarterly, Autumn 2008, 19; Jan Broadway, ‘Gregory
Fiennes tenth Baron Dacre’, ODNB; TNA SC6/EDWVI/459, SC6/ELIZI/2216; AMS 679/2/29.
18Anon [William Smith Ellis], op. cit., 16-17; Martin, 4-7.
19DAN 1126 ff. 192-3; Martin, 7-9.
20Martin, 9-13; Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire
(1974), 448 and plate 52.
21 TNA STAC 5/ B9/6, D19/28, D29/6, L23/39; J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of assize records:
Sussex indictments Eliizabeth I (1975), 137; DAN 1126, ff. 192-3.
22DAN 1127; Broadway, op. cit.
Chapter 2: George Goring: Courtier, Builder and Embezzler 1582-94
23 P.W. Hasler, The history of Parliament; the House of Commons 1558-1603, 2 (1981), 209; Colin
Brent, Pre-Georgian Lewes (2004), 227-9.
24 Florene S. Memegalos, George Goring (1608-57) (2007), 5-6; DAN 1127; DAN 1126 ff. 122-7;
Brent, op. cit., 229.
25 W.H. Godfrey, ‘The estate of George Goring 1595’, Sussex Notes and Queries, 1 (1926), 21-2; DAN
1126 ff. 192-3; Andrew Boorde, A compendious regiment or a dietary of helth (1549).
26DAN 2097; Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner, The buildings of England: Sussex (1965), 517-8; VCH,
VII, 173.
27Martin, 10-13; M.C. Bridge, The tree-ring dating of timbers from Danny House, Hurstpierpoint,
West Sussex (Oxford dendrochronology laboratory report 2009-11); Godfrey, op. cit., 21-2; Jayne
Kirk, Parham: an Elizabethan House and its restoration (2009), 30.
28Martin, 28-34.
29Martin, 35-42; VCH, VII, 172-4.
30Martin, 22-8; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (1978), 81-118.
31DAN 2098; DAN 2097; Martin, 42-3; Girouard, op. cit., 81-118.
32 Paula Henderson, ‘The gardens, orchard and park at Danny in Hurstpierpoint: an analysis of the estate map
of 1666’, SAC 148 (2010), 145-56; Nairn and Pevsner, op. cit., 478-9; Horsfield Sussex, 244; DAN 2071-3.
33 Henderson, op. cit., 152-4; J.B. Burke, Visitation of seats and arms [c.1852], 24.
34 TNA E134/22&23CHAS2/Hil 4 & Trin 7; DAN 1150; [pillow mound] Identified by Paul Stamper,
English Heritage 2010; DAN 1144.
35 Godfrey, op.cit., 21-2; Kirk, op. cit., 31, 39-40; Hasler, op. cit., 209-10.
Chapter 3: Danny Saved and Lost: Three George Gorings 1594-1653
36 J.V. Pennington, The Wiston estate, Sussex, M.A. thesis, Brighton Polytechnic (1989); Godfrey, op.
cit., 21-2; Hasler, op. cit., 209-10; DAN 1126 ff 122-127; VCH VII, 174.
Endnotes
157
37 TNA PROB11/100/3-4; Hasler, op.cit., 209-10; Brent, op. cit., 231; T.W. Horsfield, The history
and antiquities of Lewes and its vicinity, 1 (1824), 280.
38DAN 1256; Memegalos, op. cit., 7-9.
39 Barbara Donagan, ‘George Goring, first earl of Norwich’, ODNB; Memegalos, op. cit., 9-23.
40 Memegalos, op. cit., 35-6; Records of Early English Drama: Patrons and Performers, 2003-07; Jane
Brown, The gardens at Buckingham Palace: an illustrated history (2004), 20-22; Prudence Leith-Ross,
The John Tradescants (1988), 114-6, 179.
41 Memegalos, op. cit., 12; Martin, 26-8.
42DAN 2071-73.
43 Memegalos, op. cit., 25-36, 40-63, 66-7, 73-4.
44DAN 2073; Brent, op. cit., 297-8, 302.
45 Donagan, op. cit.; Memegalos, op. cit., 127-8,132-6, 142-60. 331-41, 346-60.
46Ibid, 143-319.
47DAN 1132; Memegalos, op. cit., 142; DAN 1133; British Library, Add. MS 5683 ff. 395-6; DAN
1136-75.
48 Memegalos, op. cit., 348-60; Donagan, op. cit.; TNA PROB11/310/54-5; VCH VII, 175-6.
Chapter 4: Danny Truncated: Two Peter Courthopes 1653-1725
49 Judith A. Wooldridge, The Danny Archives: a catalogue (1966), plate III; Alsager Vian, revised by
H.V. Bowen, ‘Nathaniel Courthope’, ODNB; DAN 158, 273; DAN 140; Henry Cleere and David
Crossley, The iron industry of the Weald (1995), 184, 195.
50 Wooldridge, op. cit., xv; Sussex Archaeological Society Library, Thomas Woollgar, Spicilegia, 4,
appendix, 342-4; Packham, Memorial Tablets; DAN 1157-63; TNA PROB11/268/220-4.
51 G.S.Boulger, revised by Michael Hunter, ‘Francis Willughby’, ODNB; Scott Mandelbrote, ‘John
Ray’, ODNB; DAN 344-5; Cleere and Crossley, op. cit., 184; DAN 2229; DAN 353; DAN 350-1.
52DAN 352; DAN 1176-7; DAN 355-63; DAN 2230.
53DAN 361; Mandelbrote, op. cit.; Boulger, op.cit.; DAN 364; Robert Willis Blencowe, ‘Extracts
from manuscripts … at Danny and … Charlton House’, SAC 10 (1858) 31; E. Straker, Wealden
Iron (1969), 44; DAN 2097.
54AMS 6585/3-6; Mandelbrote, op. cit.; White, op. cit., 167.
55DAN 346; Packham, Memorial Tablets; DAN 140; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 40; W.C.Renshaw,
‘Miscellaneous records of the county of Sussex’, Sussex Record Society 4 (1905), 44.
56DAN 2097; DAN 1191; DAN 1144, 1150; DAN 1126, ff. 192-3; DAN 2071.
57DAN 2071-9.
58DAN 1226-7; DAN 1191; DAN 1381; Brent, op. cit., 333-4, 343, 352.
59Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D.W. Hayton, The history of Parliament 1690-1715, vol.
2 (2002), 691, vol. 3 (2002), 753; Anthony Bower, ed., A fine day in Hurstpierpoint: the diary of
Thomas Marchant 1714-1728, Hurst History Study Group (2005), 12, 82, 117, 144, 156, 181-2,
197.
60 Bower, op. cit., 97-8, 133, 176, 232-4, 259, 280; Timothy J. McCann, ‘Sussex cricket in the
eighteenth century’, Sussex Record Society 88 (2004), xxx-xli, 1-5, 83.
Chapter 5: Danny in Shadow: A ‘Sanguine’ Jacobite and his Depressive Son 1725-78
61DAN 6; R.W. Blencowe, ‘Extracts from manuscripts … at Danny and … Charlton House’, SAC
10 (1858), 1-13; DAN 35-139; Cruickshanks et al., op. cit., vol. 2, 456.
62Ibid., 453-6; Bower, op. cit., 1, 2, 27, 30.
63Ibid., 34-5, 213, 217, 237, 248, 260, 273; Calendar of the Stuarts belonging to HM the king preserved
at Windsor Castle, Historical MSS Commission (1902-20), vol. 1, 395, vol. 5, 106, vol. 6, 529,
vol. 7, 444; Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite Movement 1688-1716 (1948), 172; Royal Archives, SP/
Main/46/129.
64 Royal Archives, SP/MAIN/55/110; TNA PROB 11/602/269-71; Cruickshanks et al., op. cit., vol. 4
(2000) 72-3; P.K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English people (1989), 113, 115-6; Brent, op. cit., 193.
158
65DAN 404; TNA SP/36/71-2; Packham, Memorial Tablets.
66DAN 35-119; John Newman, The buildings of England: West Kent and the Weald (1969), 287;
A.C. Cox, ‘Portraits of King Charles I seated at his trial’, Northamptonshire Museums and Art
Gallery Journal 7 (June 1970), 3-15; Anon [John Chidell] Danny: a brief guide to the house, 9-14;
Catalogue of auction of British Paintings 1500-1850, Sotheby Parke Bernet and Co, 11 July 1984;
Inventory of furniture and effects at Danny House, 5 April 1939, ACC 2933/2/602.
67 Bower, op. cit., 282, 284-6, 291; Martin, 20-1; Nairn and Pevsner, op. cit., 461, 517-8.
68 Howard Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects (1995), 845-7; DAN 2199, pp. 313,
316, 318, 322, 324, 328.
69 [Chidell], op. cit., 5-6; Martin, 14-15, 42-51; DAN 2199, pp. 221, 225, 230, 232, 336.
70 British Library, Add. MS. 5472, f. 30; Burke, op. cit. 24; DAN 2198, front flyleaf; DAN 2199,
front flyleaf, pp 225, 230, 236, 280.
71 Kirk, op. cit., 76-9; Martin, 22-4; DAN 2199, pp. 236, 239; British Library, Add. MS 5672, f. 29 ; DAN
2199 pp. 230, 234, 315, 321; Nairn and Pevsner, op. cit., 518; Roger White, personal communication;
[John Bloe thought the chimneypiece ‘modern’, VCH VII, 173]; DAN 2198 p. 238; [Mr Mortimer’s
nephew, born at Eastbourne, was the celebrated Romantic artist, John Hamilton Mortimer].
72Martin, 15, 32, 52; DAN 2199 pp. 225, 228, 238-9, 313, 335.
73ACC 7560/69; DAN 406; Bower, op., cit., 288; DAN 2199-2201; TNA PROB11/865/137-9.
74DAN 2198, 2201; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 178, 320; W.H.Blaauw, ed., ‘Extracts from the “Iter
Sussexiense” of Dr John Burton’, SAC 8 (1856) 265.
75DAN 401-2, 405-6, 409-10, 415, 418; ACC 7560/39; Packham, Memorial Tablets.
76DAN 151, 406, 408, 411, 636-7; ACC 7560/70; ACC 9065/3/7; Packham, Memorial Tablets.
Chapter 6: Henry Courthope Campion: Arcadia and Affliction 1778-1811
77ADA 8, 171; DAN 1610; ADA 11, 42; DAN 2103; ESRO MOB 633; DAN 153-5; VCH, VII,
175-6.
78DAN 2064, 2103; British Library, Add. MS. 5672, f. 29.
79DAN 2103; British Library, Add. MS. 5672, f. 30; Burke, op. cit., 24; ACC 7560/69; ADA 228/1;
WSRO Mitford MS., MPD 264.
80 R.G. Martin, ‘Ice Houses in Sussex’, Sussex Industrial history, 24 (1994), 19; plunge-bath identified
in 2010 by Paul Stamper of English Heritage; H.J. Elwes and A. Henry, The Trees of Great Britain
and Ireland, 7 (1913), 1867.
81DAN 706; Brent, op. cit., 53; ACC 3780.
82 Packham, Memorial Tablets; [Chidell], op. cit., 13; ACC 2933/2/602.
83 Packham, Memorial Tablets; [Chidell], op. cit., 10.
84 Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 23 January 1783; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 218; Ford, op. cit, 149-50;
Nelson, Weekes, 5; Eva Daisy Ellis, Daisy: growing up in a Sussex village 1897-1919 (2003), 121.
Chapter 7: William and Jane: The Bountiful Squire 1811-55
85DAN 29, 153-5; information on Jane Austen (writer) from Elizabeth Proudman; DAN 1769.
86 Burke, op. cit., 24; ADA 228/1; Horsfield Sussex, op. cit., 244; Colgate, op. cit., 187, 235-6.
87ACC 2933/1/4/2; ACC 2933/2/602; DAN 30; unidentified newscutting in The County of Sussex
27 (scrapbook by unknown compiler) in Sussex Archaeological Society library; DAN 2173; W.T.
Pike, ed, Sussex in the twentieth century (1910), 182; DAN 430; Colgate, op. cit., 152-3.
88Ibid., 132, 151-2, 186-7, 283-4; TNA PROB 11/1688/5-6; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 309-10; DAN
1829; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 122.
89 Ford, op. cit., 5, 8-9; Colgate, op. cit., 107, 134, 181-2, 192-3, 269; Horsfield Sussex, 243.
90 Ford, op. cit., 5, 8-9, 105, 141-2, 150, 159, 176, 196, 242.
91Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 257; Colgate op. cit., 132, 202; John Norris, Holy Trinity Hurstpierpoint:
notes on the church (1993), 3-7, 14-15.
92Ibid, 15-16; DAN 2172-3; Colgate, op. cit., 280-1, 289-90; Journal of Rev. C.H. Borrer (henceforth
Borrer), WSRO Addit MS 17735, 3 Feb 1855; Nelson, Weekes, 12; Norris, op. cit., 12-13.
Endnotes
159
Chapter 8: William and Harriet: Castanets and Cottage Visits 1855-69
93 Brighton Gazette, 22 January 1829; Antony Dale, Fashionable Brighton (1967), 60, 74; DAN 442;
Borrer, WSRO Addit MS 17736 and 17739, 4 August 1865, 30 December 1885.
94Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 261-3, 268-9; Borrer, WSRO Addit MS 17735, 13 December 1855; ADA
12 p. 90; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 326.
95National Monuments Record, B.E.C. Howarth-Lomas BB 83/607-8; Robert Willis Blencowe, ‘Extracts
from manuscripts … at Danny and … Charlton House’, SAC 10 (1858), opposite 1; DAN 1772;
Nelson, Weekes, 12; Borrer, WSRO Addit MS 17736, 18 Aug 1870; [Chidell], op. cit., 7-8.
96DAN 476-85; Anon, Sussex: historical, biographical and pictorial (1907) [unpaged].
97Alfred Wilcox, ‘A notable Sussex garden: interview with Mr J. Bunney at Danny, Hurstpierpoint’,
Garden Life, 3 October 1908; information on the Bunney family from Jennie Burgess.
98 Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: a life (2001), especially 182-3, 187-99.
99DAN 428, 430; Jupp letters in possession of Carole and John Lynskey, New Zealand (transcripts
in Danny House library).
100Nelson, Weekes, iii-iv, 10-13.
101Ibid., 12-19, 21-2.
102Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 340; Peter King, Hurstpierpoint College 1849-1995 (1997), 1-16, 34; R.M.
Hill, ‘Fifty Years Ago – And Three’, The Hurst Johnian (1910), 136; ‘W’, ‘Ode To The Danny Park
Ground’, ibid. (1892), 146.
103 King, op. cit., 23, 34, 48, 51-2; Nairn, op. cit., 68; Borrer, WSRO Addit MS 17739 and 17740,
30 December 1885, 18 January 1891.
Chapter 9: William and Gertrude: Local and Imperial Service 1869-1914
104 ‘Historical Associations of Danny’, Sussex County Magazine 8 (1934), 274; Mid-Sussex Times, 9
September 1919; Sussex Daily News, 5 December 1923; A.F. Pollard and H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Henry
Bouverie William Brand’, ODNB.
105DAN 490.
106 Sussex Daily News, 5 December 1923; Anon, Sussex: historical, biographical and pictorial (1907)
[unpaged]; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 54; VCH, VII, 178.
107 Sussex Daily News, 5 December 1923; DAN 490; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 360; Sussex Express, 9
August 1884; East Sussex News, 5 September 1884; The Times, 10 April 1895.
108Nelson, Weekes, 25-6, 62, 71, 73, 77.
109 Letter from Frederick Campion to uncle Walter, 17 May 1897, in possession of Peter Campion;
Ruth Teale, ‘Frederick Henry Campion’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition.
110 Manuscript diary: ‘Nile Campaign and Capture of Omdurman,1898’, kept by Edward Campion,
in possession of Peter Campion, 27 February-13 April.
111Ibid, 8 May-13 September.
112Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 359, plate xviii.
113ACC 2933/2/602; Sussex Express, 16 September 1884; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 259, 264-5, 268-9.
114Ibid, 51, 266, 269, 279, 352-3.
115Anne Pimlott Baker, ‘Leopold Bernhard Bonn’, ODNB; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 53; Hurstpierpoint
Parish Magazine, January 1967; ACC 2933/2/602.
116 Sussex Daily News, 5 December 1923; DAN 490; King, op. cit., 148; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit.,
129-31; Mid-Sussex Times, 29 April 1913; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 132-3.
117 Hurstpierpoint Parish Magazine, January 1967; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 99-100; DAN 490.
Chapter 10: The Mansion, The Park and the Gardens 1869-1914
118 Borrer, WSRO Addit. MS 17736, 18 May 1870; Nelson, Weekes, 26; Sussex Express, 10 June 1884;
[Chidell], op. cit., 6.
119ACC 2933/2/602; Mrs Audrey Holly’s reminiscences of the refurbishment in 1986.
120A[lice] D[ryden], ‘Danny, Sussex, the seat of Mr William Henry Campion’, Country Life 22 (March
160
1913), 418-24, [Our thanks to Christopher Whittick for identifying ‘AD’ as Alice Dryden – see
Brian Dix, ‘Henry Edward Leigh Dryden’, ODNB]; Viscountess Wolseley, ‘Historic Houses of
Sussex: no. 1 – Danny’, Sussex County Magazine 1 (1927), 457-61.
121 Girouard, op. cit., 292; Wolseley, op. cit., 460-1; ACC 2933/2/602.
122 Wolseley, op. cit., 460; ACC 2933/2/602; [Chidell], op. cit., 6; Girouard, op. cit., 293-8.
123 Wolseley, op. cit., 457; Lucas, op. cit., 200; Borrer, WSRO Addit. MS 17740, 7 August 1890;
Wilcox, op. cit., 9-10; ‘A grand old man of Hurstpierpoint’, unidentified newscutting in Danny
House library.
124 Wilcox, op. cit., 9-11.
125 ‘AD’, op. cit., 424; TNA IR/58/40360.
126Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 124-5; Mid-Sussex Times, 8 December 1908; Diana Crook, Ragged Lands
(2002), 8-46.
127 Mary G. Campion, ‘Danny’, The Country Home (July 1908).
128 Ibid; Vida Herbison, ‘Hurstpierpoint’, Sussex Life (June 1979), 27.
Chapter 11: The Great War, the P.M. and his ‘Darling Pussy’ 1914-18
1 29Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 157-8, 178-9.
130DAN 488; K. Grieves, ‘Sussex in the First World War’, Sussex Record Society 84 (2000), xvii, xxxv,
343.
131Ibid., 341-3; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 29, 87, 127, 164; Norris, op. cit., 21.
132Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 183-6.
133 The narrative of Lloyd George and his ministers at Danny is taken entirely from notes [copy in
Danny House library] prepared by John Campbell for a talk given there in October 2008. These
collate extracts from Lord Riddell’s War diary 1914-1918 (1933) and Stephen Roskill, Hankey:
man of secrets (1970-74), with signatures in the Danny visitors’ book.
134 WSRO, Norman and Burt archives, CC/2/1; TNA CAB 24/66/5967, 13 October 1918; Sussex
Daily News, 4 January 1951.
135 Mary G. Campion, op. cit., 124; Eva Daisy Ellis, op. cit., 185-6.
136 John Campbell, If love were all (2008), 140-3; A.J.P. Taylor, ed., My darling Pussy (1975), 22-5.
Chapter 12: Sir William and Katherine: Gold Mines, Revels and World War 1919-47
1 37 Mid-Sussex Times, 9 September 1919; Sussex Daily News, 5 December 1923; [Chidell], op. cit., 5.
138Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 371; Crook, op. cit., 52-3; Wolseley Collection scrapbook, Hove Library
Rare Materials, 47; The Times, 9 November 1939.
139Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 276; The Times, 19 May 1920; postcard AEB 3528 dated July 1924, in
possession of Rendel Williams; Wolseley Collection scrapbook, 41, 52; Curwen, op. cit., 241.
140 G.C. Bolton, ‘Sir William Robert Campion’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition; West
Australian, 8 June 1931; DAN 2192-6; Anon, A Short History of Government House (1980s); Information
supplied by Tom Reynolds, Archives Research Officer, State Records Office of Western Australia.
141 Mid-Sussex Times, 14 July 1931.
142 The Times, 4 January 1951; M.S.R.G., ‘Colonel Sir William Campion’, Sussex County Magazine 8
(1934), 72; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 370; Vivienne Manchester, ‘Memories of Hurst’, Mid-Sussex
Times, June 1974.
143 Ibid; Ian Nelson, Hurstpierpoint School (2006), 160; Herbison, op. cit., 23, 27.
144 Mid-Sussex Times, 2 October 1981; Anton Bantock, ‘Lady’s Maid to Countess Temple’, Malago,
vol 9 (February 2006), 1-4; Reminiscences by William Thomas (Danny House library).
145 John H. Laurence, ‘Claude Albo de Bernales’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition.
146 The Tatler, 26 June 1940; King, op. cit., 199-200.
147 Mid-Sussex Times, 2 October 1981; Nelson, Hurstpierpoint, 373; The War Diaries or Intelligence
Summary, Le Regiment de la Chaudiere.
148 Information supplied by Stewart Angell of Eastbourne and Tim Wren of Hurst Historical Society.
Endnotes
161
Chapter 13: Danny Transformed: Private Schools and Stylish Retirement 1947-2004
149 Borrer, WSRO Addit. MS 17741, 10 October 1895; ACC 8419/8; King, op. cit., 216-17; Sussex
County Magazine, 28 (September 1949), 274; Sussex Daily News, 4 January 1951.
150 Conversion plans deposited by courtesy of Briony Dessoutter (Danny House library); Anthony
Harrison-Barbet, ‘My experience of Danny as a school’, talk given at Danny in April 2007 (typescript
Danny House library).
151 Sussex Daily News, 10 March 1950.
152 ‘Wolstonbury’, two undated prospectuses (Danny House library); information from Michael Smale
of Ilfracombe.
153 Correspondence of Simon Campion and Rear Admiral Greathead with Lord Euston and officials of
the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 18 March 1955–28 July 1956; Daily Telegraph,
4 June 1957.
154 Frederick Burn, consultant architect, ‘Historical Notes on the Mutual Households Association’
(Danny House library); Marcus Binney, The Destruction of the Country House (1974), 185; Ian
Nairn, The Buildings of England: Surrey (1971), 67, 266.
155 Burn, op. cit.; Anon, ‘A History of the Country Houses Association’ (c.1984) (typescript in Danny
House library); scrapbook compiled by Squadron-Leader Gerald Stoneham, resident 1974-80
(Danny House library); ‘The death of Dr Isabel Little Glasgow’, Navigator (c.1997).
156 Verses by Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Arthur Cox (typescript in Danny House library).
157 John and Sally Grant, ‘Life at Danny’, Country Style, [magazine of the C.H.A.] number 2 (2000)
16; Mid-Sussex Times, 7 September 2000; Brighton Evening Argus, 16 June 1980; Catalogue of
auction of British Paintings 1500-1850, Sotheby Parke Bernet and Co, 11 July 1984.
158 Information from John Grant; [Chidell], op. cit., 5; John Duthie , ‘A snapshot of Danny House
in 1995’ (typescript in Danny House library); unprovenanced local newspaper cuttings (Danny
House library).
159 John Chidell’s research notes (Danny House library); Leslie Geddes-Brown, ‘Alimentary Latin’, The
World of Interiors (April 1990), 108-11; Obituary of Christopher Bowerbank, The Daily Telegraph,
30 April 2002.
160 Gil Saunders, ‘Living the Good Life with Danny’, Sussex Life (March 1998), 30-2; Ysenda Maxtone
Graham, ‘Where life begins at 80’, Town and Country Property; Duthie, op. cit.
161 ‘A Humane Solution for Houses’, Country Life (1 January 2004), 25; Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2004.
Index
Places, except as indicated, are in Sussex. Persons, except as indicated, are of Hurstpierpoint.
Italics refer to an illustration.
Alexander, Princess of Teck; visited the Sunshine
Home, 102
Almack, Captain and Mrs; leased Danny as a ‘Country
House Party’ hotel, 132-3
Arnold, butler, with fond memories of Danny life,
136-7, 139
Austen, Jane, novelist, 72, 75
Bacon, Sir Francis, garden theorist, 23
Balfour, A.J., Foreign Secretary; conferred at Danny,
126-7
Barry, Charles, architect of parish church, 80
Bateman, John, curate, possibly seditious crony of
Henry Campion, 48
Batterson, skilled London bricklayer, 54
Beard, Ralph, lawyer used by George Goring III, 35
Bearstake(s), copyhold farm, 31, 42-3, 83-4
Beaumont, Admiral, notable, 125
Bedlam Street, 1-3
Bedwin, Owen, excavator at Wolstonbury Hill, XIX
Beeching, Henry, farmer at Randalls, 100; Samuel,
farmer at Washbrook, 100
Bernales, Claude Albert de, gold miner and financial
buddy of Sir William Campion, 138
Berry Ivy, fairy, 131
Berwick, Duke of, Jacobite friend of Henry Campion, 49
Bethune, Captain, Southdown Hunt follower, 90
Bill, Henry, Lewes lawyer, relative of Peter Courthope
II, 43-4
Bisshopp, Sir Cecil; installed sash windows at Parham
House, 57
Blackman, Henry, Lewes wine merchant, partner of
Edward Campion, 70
Bland, Samuel, lawyer, resident at Danny; advised
George Goring III, 31-2, 42
Blandford, Thomas, loyal footman, 79
Blaxland, Noel, daughter of pioneer Australian wine
grower; married Frederick Campion, 97
Blencowe, John, Liberal MP for Lewes and landowner;
married Frances Campion, 84
Bolingbroke, Viscount, Jacobite contact of Henry
Campion, 49
Bonn, Leopold Bernhard, German-Jewish banker;
leased Danny, championed the Deaf, 101
Boorde, Dr Andrew, Tudor physician; distrusted the
south wind, 14
Borden, Canadian prime minister; conferred at Danny,
126
Borrer, Carey Hampton, dynamic High Church rector
for 57 years, terse diarist, 81, 83, 90-1, 101, 111,
141
Borrer, Nathaniel, of Pakyns Manor (father of CH),
philanthropic patron of rectory, 80-1
Bower, Edward, artist; painted Charles I on trial, 51-2,
53
Bowerbank, Christopher, colourful architect of
fountain, dining room and annexe for CHA,
147-8, 66, 143, 144
Bowett, Sir William, lord of manor, 5
Boyle, Richard, Earl of Cork, rich father-in-law of
George Goring IV, 31
Brand, Henry, first Viscount Hampden (father of the
Honourable Gertrude), Liberal MP for Lewes,
Speaker of the House of Commons, 93, 96
Brand, Henry, second Viscount, governor of New
South Wales, 97
Breachlands, copyhold farm, 75, 100
Brick-making, 25
Brown, Sir Stephen, CHA resident, President of the
CBI, 148
Budgen, Richard, eminent Lewes surveyor, 63, 68
Bunney, James, head gardener 1881-c.1927, prize
exhibitor, rainfall measurer, 88, 111-15, 135, 116,
120; William (father of James), head gardener
c.1870-81, prize medallist and judge, 83, 88, 92
Burgess, Ian, developer; bought estate and sold
contents of mansion, 145-6
Burke, J.B., author of Visitation of seats and arms
(c.1852), 24, 64, 68, 75
Burrell family of Cuckfield, iron masters, related to
Peter Courthope II, 37, 38-9, 40-1, 43
Burrows, Richard, owner of Danny since 2004, 151-4,
146
Burry family, freeholders at Randalls, 63
163
164
Burton, Dr John, topographer, admirer of Henry
Campion, 60
Buxton, the Honourable Doreen; captained Liberal
stool ball team at Newtimber, 133
Cade, John, yeoman and murderer, 5-6
Campion, Sir William, of Combwell in Kent, ardent
Royalist; killed at Colchester, armour at Danny, 33,
47, 41, 42
Campion family of Combwell and Danny: see
pedigree for fuller coverage, 50, 51
Alice, ‘Elsie’, turkey breeder, tariff reformer; married Charles Phillimore, 115
Barbara, née Courthope, heiress of Danny; married Henry, 47-61, 52
Bridget, highbrow spinster; died in 1797, 72, 79
Charles, soldier; killed in Boer War, 100, 131, 99
Charles Heathcote, rector of Westmeston, a courteous correspondent, 78, 89
[Charles] Walter, barrister, cricketer, Examiner of parliamentary legislation, 87, 90, 93, 97, 103, 95
David, owner of Danny 1976-83, father of James; sold house and estate to Ian Burgess, 146, 129
Edward, wine merchant at Chichester (father of Frances), 70-2
Edward, soldier, robust diarist of Omdurman campaign; gassed at Ypres, 97-99, 123, 131, 98, 124, 125, 130
Elizabeth, née Patheriche, well-endowed; married William, 61
Frederick, Anglican priest, founder of Bush Brotherhood, chaplain to the Fourth Sussex, 97, 123
George, soldier; buried at Cape Town, 78
Gertrude, née Brand; married William Henry; devoted church worker and gardener; launched
Chichester House and Sunshine Home, 93, 95-7, 100-103, 105-21, 123, 131, 96, 97
Harriet, née Kemp; married William John II; talented artist, Evangelical cottage visitor, ambitious gardener, 83, 87-9, 91, 85
Henrietta, née Heathcote, well-endowed; married Henry Courthope [Campion]; died young, 61
Henry, effectively owner of Danny 1725-61, ultra-
Tory MP for Sussex, Jacobite activist, keen farmer; remodelled south wing, Great Hall and offices 1728-31; funded pest-house and school, 47-61, 107, 52, 53, 54
Henry junior; mercantile career in India savagely cut short, 60-1
Henry Courthope [Campion], owner of Danny 1778-1811, magistrate; expanded estate and
landscaped park, 63-73, 75, 69
Jane, née Austen, related to novelist; married William John I; praised by J.N. Repton, 72, 75, 80, 81, 80
Jane, spinster archery champion, 78
Katherine, née Byron, related to poet; married William Robert, vigorous church, charity and war worker, 98, 123, 131-8, 132
Mary, artist and ‘ornamental draughtsman’; awarded OBE for VAD work, 115, 119-21, 123, 128, 131, 133, 103
Priscilla, docile spinster, 70, 78
Simon, owner of Danny 1951-76, farmer, cricketer; leased mansion to schools, then to MHA, 47, 121, 125, 132, 136, 138,141-4, 146, 129, 139, 141
Wilfred, cricketer; played Bottom, 131
William, owner of Danny 1761-78, probably manic-depressive, 52, 61, 69
William, wine merchant (father of Priscilla), fierce Tory; possibly painted by Lawrence, 69-72, 77
William Henry, owner of Danny 1869-
1919, farmer, High Churchman, magistrate, Conservative, Crimea & Mutiny veteran, Colonel in Fourth Sussex, huntsman, 87-8, 90-
1, 93-5, 100-103, 105-21, 123, 126, 131, 94, 129
William John I, owner of Danny 1811-55, magistrate, huntsman; helped fund new church, 69, 72, 75-81, 80
William John II, owner of Danny 1855-69, magistrate, farmer, High Church patron of Hurst College, 83-91, 84, 86, 93
William Robert, Sir, owner of Danny 1919-51, Liberal-Unionist MP for Lewes; commanded Fourth Sussex at Gallipoli and in France; governed West Australia 1924-31; High Churchman, charity-worker, sportsman, 97, 123, 125, 128, 131-8, 141, 129, 131, 133, 134
Carpenter, R.C., architect of Westmeston rectory, 78
Carter, Jenny, ‘Nanny’, fondly remembered family
retainer, 93, 135, 96
Chidell, John, CHA resident, diligent historian of
Danny, 149
Churchill, W.S., Minister of Munitions; conferred at
Danny, 126-7, 143
Clayton and Bell, Messrs; supplied memorial window
to W.J. Campion II, 91, 84
Cobb, Thomas, artist, 118
Cort, Hendrik Frans De, Flemish landscape artist,
69, 74
Costello, Captain Robert, ill-fated headmaster of
Montpelier College, 141-2
Court Bushes, copyhold farm, 10
Courthope family (see pedigree for fuller coverage, 43)
Alexander (son of Peter I), Kentish iron master, 37
George, of Whiligh, Henry Campion’s ‘house keeper’, 60
Index
165
John (son of Peter II), briefly MP for Bramber, 43
Nathaniel (brother of Peter I), ill-fated pioneer spice trader, 37
Peter I, owner of Danny 1653-7, Kentish cloth merchant, Parliamentarian, Sheriff of Sussex, 3, 35, 37-8, 43, 45
Peter II, grandson of Peter I, owner of Danny 1657-1725, High Tory, naturalist, friend of Ray and Willughby; laid out the New Way, probable patron of cricket, 38-45, 47-50, 48
Susan, probable anti-Jacobite, 48
Covert, Sir Thomas, of Slaugham, unhelpful son-inlaw of George Goring III, 35
Cox, Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald, MHA resident and
versifier, 145
Cricket, earliest known pitch in Sussex, 44-5
Currenden, William, wagon master in Napoleonic
evacuation plan, 73
Curwen, Cecil, excavator at Wolstonbury Hill, XIX,
133
Sale of estate 1983, 145-6
Danny House (1983-2004)
Sale to and occupation by MHA, renamed The Country Houses Association, 146-9, 66, 143, 144, 145
Danny House relaunched (2004-13), 150-4, 9, 146,
147
Danny, place name, 3-4, 13
Dapps, copyhold farm, 2, 31, 42-3, 63, 69
Denny, Edward, Earl of Norwich, powerful brotherin-law of George Goring II, 27-8; Honora, his
daughter, wife of James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, 28, 108
Dodson, John, husband of Florence Campion; Sussex
landowner and Liberal MP; created Baron
Monk Bretton, 87, 90
Dryden, Alice [A.D.], article in Country Life, 107, 114
Dunn, Thomas, layer of paving in Great Hall, 57
Duthie, John, CHA resident, lotus-eater and penportraitist, 148
Dyke farm, Poynings, 100
Dabson-White, Vera, CHA resident, artist, 149
Dacre, Joan, heiress, 5; Sir Thomas, manorial lord, 5
Dalrymple, Rita, housemaid at Danny, 136-7
Danby-Hunter, Major F.J., headmaster of
Wolstonbury College, 143
Danny Great Deer Park & lodge, XXI-XXII, 1-4,
6-11, 10, 12, 18, 19, 20
Danny House (1582-1653), 1, 22, 25, 26a, 28, 29
Building and contents, 14-25, 30, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36
Gardens, 24, 30
Little Park, 24-5, 35, 42, 10, 34
Lord Goring’s Way, 30-2, 10
Danny House (1653-1947), 103, 104, 118, 122
Building and ‘improvement’, 42, 52-9, 63, 69, 75, 93, 105, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 66, 71, 75, 105, 106, 107
Contents, 52, 54-8, 75, 85-7, 105-111, 131, 60, 64, 65, 67, 81, 87, 89, 91, 109, 110, 111, 112
Dances, Fayres and Revels, 89-90, 95-6, 101-02, 125, 136, 139, 145, 135, 136, 137
Estate management and leasing, 43, 60, 63, 75-6, 78, 83-4, 100-101
Gardens, 7, 56, 64, 69, 75, 88, 111, 113-15, 59, 70, 76, 116, 117, 119
Landscaped park, 42, 63-9, 75, 111, 68, 72, 73, 113, 114, 115
Royal visits, 102, 103, 136
Servants, XIX, 79, 84, 93, 101, 105-6, 135-9, 96, 102
Sport & recreation, 79, 84, 90-1, 97, 102-03, 136, 82, 100, 101
World War Two, 138-9, 138, 139
Danny House (1947-83), 141
Montpelier College (1947-50), 141-2, 142
Wolstonbury College (1950-4), 142-3
Mutual Households Association (1956-83), 144-5
Edward VII, king, visit to Danny, 103
Edwards, Charles, joiner working on Great Hall, 58
Ellis, Eva Daisy (née Randell), daughter of Liberal
builder, and local chronicler, 125
Euston Lord, chairman of SPAB; advised Simon
Campion on grants, 143-4
Eworth, Hans, artist; painted Anne and Gregory
Fiennes, 7, 17
Fiennes family of Herstmonceux and Danny, 5
Anne, née Sackville (wife of Gregory), friend of George Goring II, 7, 13, 27, 36
Gregory, tenth Baron Dacre, gilded courtier; plagued by poachers; dismantled the Great Park; sold the estate in 1582, 1, 7-11, 13, 17
Mary, née Nevill, tenacious mother of Gregory, 7, 17
Richard, Sir, husband of Joan Dacre, 5
Thomas, ninth Baron Dacre (father of Gregory), hung at Tyburn, 6-7
Figg, William, eminent Lewes map maker and
surveyor, 68, 73
Fourth Sussex Regiment (Volunteers), 94, 123, 125,
128, 131
Freeman-Thomas family of Willingdon, Liberal
Sussex landowners and imperial governors, 93,
133, 135
Funnel, Esther; directed Edward VII, 103
Furlonger, Fred, fiddler, 101
Furnese, Sir Henry, Whig MP for Bramber, 43
Galloway, Ambrose, Lewes merchant, 56
Gatacre, General, ‘idiotic’ speechmaker in Sudan, 98-9
Glasgow, Dr Isobel, MHA/CHA resident, pioneer
doctor in Ulster, 145
Glynde Place, 26b
166
Goring family of Danny and Lewes (see pedigree for
fuller coverage, 23)
Anne, née Denny, wife of George II, custodian of Danny, 1602-c.1606, 13, 27-8
George I, owner of Danny 1582-94, lawyer, Receiver-General of the Court of Wards, MP for Lewes; largely completed mansion within footprint of hunting lodge; died in debt to Crown, 13-14, 18-19, 25
George II, owner of Danny 1594-1602, Courtier, MP for Lewes, strapped for cash, 13, 27-8, 37
George III, Baron Hurstpierpoint, Earl of
Norwich, owner of Danny c.1606-c.1630, comely favourite of James I, close adviser to Henrietta Maria, MP for Lewes; besieged at Colchester, ruined by Civil War, 13, 28-35, 37, 38
George IV, owner of Danny c.1630-53, Courtier, intrepid cavalry general, ruined by Civil War, 30, 31-5, 35, 40
Lettice, née Boyle, childless, possibly ‘neglected’, wife of George IV, 31-2, 35
Mary, née Neville, wife of George III, 30-1, 35
Goring, Henry, of Lewes and Ovingdean, brother of
George I, 13
Goring, Sir Henry, of Highden, Jacobite plotter, 50
Goring House, London, 29-30, 34
Goring, William, of Burton, father of George I, 13
Grant, Mr and Mrs John, CHA administrators at
Danny, 148
Greathed, Rear-Admiral B.W., zealous master-mind of
MHA, 144
Greening of Brentford, plantsman, 56
Grimm, Samuel H., topographical artist, 64, 30, 71,
72
Grimson, awesome butler, 101, 136
Hamper, William, topographer, XIX, 6
Hankey, Sir Maurice, Cabinet-Secretary; conferred at
Danny, 126-7
Hardman, John; supplied stained glass for church, 81,
100, 80
Harrison-Barbet, Anthony, happy boarder at
Montpelier College, 142
Hart, John, schoolmaster, possibly seditious crony of
Henry Campion, 48
Harvey family, Cornish Methodist dairy farmers at
Randalls, 100
Hatches, copyhold tenement, 2, 63
Hathorn, John, gifted London carpenter, 13, 24
Hautbois (Abbey) farm, 43
Hay, James, Earl of Carlisle, crucial patron of George
Goring III, 28, 108
Head, Elizabeth, servant at Danny, 79
Herbison, Vida, local chronicler; rode at Revels, 136
Herstmonceux castle and church, 5, 9, 16
Hoppner, John, painter, 72, 69, 79
Horsfield, Rev. T.W., historian of Sussex, 75, 79
Hurstpierpoint, XXIII
Advowson, 35, 63, 81, 95
Charities, clubs and schools, 60, 79, 83-4, 95, 97, 111, 136
Chichester House, 95-6
Fire brigade, 105, 135, 121
Home Deer Park, 1, 3, 6, 10, 35, 34
Inns, 31, 43, 72, 83
Manor house, 1, 3, 6, 7
Market, 83, 100
Parish church, 33, 37, 42, 51-2, 60, 70, 72, 75, 81, 100, 45, 78, 80, 83, 99, 130
St John’s College, 90-1, 95, 102, 135, 138-9, 141, 84, 93
Scouts, XVII, 134, 136, 4
Sunshine Home, 102, 123, 131, 135
Jansen, Cornelius, portrait painter, 37, 41, 43
Jefferies, Richard, author and naturalist, fond of
Wolstonbury, XVIII-XIX
Jekyll, Gertrude, garden designer, friend of Mary
Campion, 115, 119
Jenner, Mary Anne, owner, then tenant, of Tott farm,
84
Jupp, George, game keeper’s son; migrated to New
Zealand, 89
Kemp, T.R. (father of Harriet Campion), Radical MP
for Lewes, Evangelical and developer of Kemp
Town at Brighton, 78, 83
Kempe, C.E. (cousin of Harriet), designer of stained
glass and furniture; worked maybe at Danny,
100, 105, 99
Kerr, Philip, private secretary to Lloyd-George;
conferred at Danny, 127
Kerr, Robert, architectural theorist, 108, 110
Kidd, aged shepherd visited by the Honourable
Gertrude, 95
Law, Bonar, Chancellor of Exchequer; conferred at
Danny, 126-7
Lawrence, Sir Thomas; possibly painted William
Campion of Lewes, 72, 77
Lawrence-Smith, Dolly, suffragist and Gloriana, 102
Legas, probably John, of Lamberhurst furnace;
supplied fire back to Henry Campion, 58, 65
Lewes, 13-14, 25, 27-8, 35, 37-9, 56, 70, 83, 97, 123,
132, 24
Little Danny farm, 31, 79, 83, 100, 138, 141
Little Park farm, 44, 49, 49
Little Washbrook farm, 78-9
Lloyd George, David, prime minister; momentous stay
at Danny, XIX, 125-9, 123, 126, 127, 128
Loseley House, Surrey, 25
Louis XIII, king of France, 29, 39
Index
Lucas, E.V., topographer, XVII, 111
Luxford family, sometime freeholders at Randalls,
2-3, 35
Arthur, witness at highway dispute, 42
Thomas, probably Park Keeper, 7
Thomas, leader of poaching gang, 10
Madden, homeopathic doctor, 89
Marchant, Thomas, of Little Park farm, yeoman,
fish-farmer, meticulous diarist, friend of Henry
Campion, 44-5, 48-50, 52, 60
Maresford, copyhold tenement, 3, 63
Margary, Ivan, expert on Roman roads, 3
Martin, Barbara and David, historic building
surveyors, 8-9, 155
Mary, queen, visit to Danny, 136
Maud, Sister, crippled supervisor of Sunshine Home,
102
McQueen, Brigadier, CHA resident, ‘cerebral staff
officer’, 148
Megrams Bank, copyhold tenement, 3, 63
Milner, Viscount, War Secretary; conferred at Danny,
126-7
Mitten family:
Annie (daughter of William II); married A.R. Wallace, XIX, 89
Flora (her sister), photographer and early female pharmacist, 119, 123
William I, butler, XIX, 79
William II, pharmacist and skilled botanist, 88-9
More, Sir William, builder of Loseley House in Surrey, 25
Mortimer, Roger, artist; painted ‘sham windows’ for
Henry Campion, 54-5, 58
Nairn, Ian, architectural historian, 18, 58, 144
New Way, 2, 42-3, 10
Northcliffe, Lord, newspaper owner; conferred at
Danny, 126
Ogilvy, Honourable Bruce, CHA resident, 145
Oliver, John, owner of Lewes inns, relative of Peter
Courthope II, 43
Ormonde, Duke of, Jacobite associate of Henry
Campion, 49-51
Pack, Rev. Augustus; married Frances Campion, 78
Paget, Major and Mrs; rented Danny in 1920, 132
Palmer, Sir Thomas, builder of Parham House, 19, 25
Parham House, 19, 22, 25, 57, 26c
Patheriche, John, benefactor to the Campions, 69
Pearsey, John, Captain of fire brigade and Master of
Ceremonies, 101
Pelham family of Laughton, 27, 33
Henry, prime minister, patron of Henry Campion junior, 51, 60
Thomas (his brother), prime minister, Godfather 167
of Sussex politics, 50
Peskett, Frederick, market gardener, 100
Phillimore, Charles; married Alice Campion; penned
amusing reminiscences, 93, 95, 102, 115
Pierpoint family, knights and lords of Hurst manor, 3-5, 93
Effigies in Hurst church, 4-5, 14, 15
Simon; created Danny deer park in 1239, 3
Simon; confirmed its grant in 1333, 3
Rabbit warrens, 1, 25, 31, 7, 11
Randalls (Randolphes), freehold farm, 2, 3, 63, 69,
100
Randidles, copyhold farm, 2, 73, 75
Ray, John, eminent pioneer botanist, life-long friend
of Peter Courthope II, XVIII, 38-43, 46
Reading, Lord, Ambassador to United States;
conferred at Danny, 126-7
Repton, J.N., architect; planned improvements at
Danny, 75
Reynberd, Hildebrand, revolting Hove villain, 4
Richardson, Jonathan the elder; possibly painted The
Apotheosis of Charles I, 52, 54
Richmond, George, portrait painter, 96, 97
Riddell, Sir George, newspaper owner; rented Danny
for Lloyd George, 125, 127-8
Rigden, Peter, CHA resident, up-market car salesman,
148
Roman road and remains, 1, 3
Russell and Sons, Portsmouth photographers, 105
Sa(u)nderson, John, architect; supplied Henry
Campion with design for south wing, 54
Scholfield, Harry, schoolmaster, cricketer and father
of Paul, 136
Scott, Helen, accomplished CHA cook, 148, 140
Shaw, John, London merchant; bought lordship of
manor and advowson of rectory, 35
Shirley, Sir Thomas, embezzler and builder of Wiston
House, 27
Sinden, Miss, secretary at Montpelier College, sister of
Donald, 142
Smale, Michael, pupil roasted at Wolstonbury College, 143
Smith, J.M., designer of Minton tiles at Danny, 105
Smuts, prime minister of South Africa; conferred at
Danny, 126
Southdown farming and society, XIX, XXI
Spalding, C.B., animal painter, 111
Spooner, Miss, Matron of Chichester House, 96
Spruce, Richard, botanist friend of A.R. Wallace, 88-9
Stapley family of Patcham:
Antony, regicide, brother-in-law of George Goring III, 33, 35, 42
Sir John (his son), belated Royalist, 40, 42
Philadelphia (Sir John’s daughter); married Peter Courthope II, 42, 43
168
Stevenson, Frances, ‘Darling Pussy’, secretary and
mistress of Lloyd George, 128-9, 128
Stringer, Maggie, fairy, 131
Strood (Stroud), copyhold tenement, 2
Swale, Doctor, fervently Royalist rector, 32-3
Swinderens van, Dutch diplomat renting Danny, 133,
136
Taylor, Barkell, accountant, financial saviour of MHA,
144
Thomas, Bill, footman in 1938-9 with fond memories,
137-8
Tott, copyhold farm, 78, 83, 146
Tower, Rev. Ferdinand; married Mary Campion, 87,
89; Walter (his son), stained glass maker, 100, 125
Townland farm, 63
Tradescant, John, Royal Gardener used by George
Goring III, 30
Tugwell, Winnie, fairy, 131
Tulley family, Hurst tradesmen:
C.F., welcomed Sir William Campion home, 135
Gordon, danced a polka with Gertrude Campion, 101, 103
Percy, leader of Resistance Patrol, 139
Tupper, George, Danny tractor driver, 138, 139
Utting, R.B., engraver, 84, 86
Wakehurst Place, Ardingly, 26e
Walker, Bill, pianist, 101
Wallace, A.R., eminent naturalist, friend of Darwin;
married Annie Mitten, XIX, 88-9
Wanborough, copyhold farm, 75
Warenne family, Earls of Surrey and lords of Lewes
Rape, 3
Washbrook, copyhold farm, 63, 100
Wealden farming and society, XIX-XXIII
Weekes family:
Arthur (son of Richard II), barrister and magistrate, 125
Arthur II, Captain, M.C., killed in France, 125
George, surgeon (grandson of Richard I), Deputy
Lieutenant; felt belittled by Campions, 81, 89-90, 96-7
Georgiana, George’s daughter; assisted Benefit Association for Reduced Ladies, 90, 97
Grace (daughter of Richard I); excited by illuminations in 1802, 72
Hampton, surgeon (son of Richard I); disliked William John Campion I, 80
Richard I, surgeon; dosed servants at Danny, 73, 80
Richard II, surgeon, fossil and urn collector; clashed with William John Campion I over turnpikes, sand and locked transept door, XXI, 79-80
Wemyss, Admiral; conferred at Danny, 127
Westminster School, 138-9, 138
White, Benjamin, Lewes physician and money lender,
relative of Peter Courthope II, 43
White, Rev. Gilbert, naturalist and author, XIX, 41
White, Roger, architectural historian, 58
Whitpaine, Robert, skilled local map maker and
surveyor, XXI, 2, 18, 22-4, 31, 37, 42, 1, 7, 33,
47, 48
Wilcombe (Warren) farm, XXI, 28, 35, 7
Wilcox, Alfred; described gardens for Garden Life,
111-15
Willughby, Francis, pioneer naturalist, close friend of
Peter Courthope II, 38-41
Wilson, General Sir Henry; conferred at Danny, 126-7
Wilson, Sir Thomas Maryon, early photographer, 84,
86
Wiston House, 27, 26d
Wolseley, Frances, Viscountess, garden designer, close
friend of Mary Campion, 107, 111, 114-5, 131-3
Wolstonbury Hill, XVII-XXI, 72-3, 84, 91, 102, 1267, 3, 5, 6, 7
Wood, Joseph, turner working in Great Hall for Henry
Campion, 57
Woodard, Nathaniel, High Church educationalist;
launched St John’s College, 90
Wulfstan, long-forgotten pagan war-lord, XIX

Danny House Book

Transcription

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