Graddon Rowlands

This excerpt from the history of Harlaxton Manor, its construction, interiors and inhabitants, is reproduced from the Harlaxton Manor Guide Book (©Harlaxton College 1984).

Space does not permit any detailed examination of Harlaxton before 1738 when the Gregory association with the manor first began. For information on the church which dates from 1174, the old manor house (built in the mid fourteenth century and enlarged considerably by the Flemish Protestant refugee Daniel de Ligne who purchased the Harlaxton estates in 1619) and the manorial succession one is referred to James Murden's Harlaxton Through the Ages.

With the dying out of the male line of the de Lignes in 1731 the Harlaxton estate reverted to the descendant of Sir Daniel de Ligne's eldest daughter, Elizabeth Tyrwhit. Her granddaughter by a second marriage to a John Orton of London had one child, a daughter Ann, and it was this young woman who was found in reduced circumstances in London by the Nottingham lawyer, George Gregory, and apprised of her inheritance. The young lawyer subsequently married the heiress in 1738 thus beginning the Gregory association with Harlaxton which was to last for 200 years.

Himself later to become High Sheriff of Lincoln, George Gregory was the son of another George Gregory who had been High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Member of Parliament for Nottingham between 1702 and 1722, and great-great-grandson of William Gregory who was the Member of Parliament for Nottingham in 1601 and founder of Gregory's Hospital. George Gregory's mother, Susanna Williams, was heir to estates at Rempstone, near Loughborough, and Denton the neighbouring village to Harlaxton. George Gregory and Ann Orton had four sons. The eldest, George de Ligne Gregory, also became High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire in 1793, and following the death of his father in 1758 he held the Manor of Harlaxton for sixty-four years until he died, unmarried, in 1822. During this period, and indeed during his father's lifetime, the family stayed mostly at Rempstone and London thus precipitating the decay of the old manor house in Harlaxton, but in order to be closer to his Harlaxton estates George de Ligne Gregory also built Hungerton Hall in 1785.

While he did little to preserve his manor house in Harlaxton he did see to the restoration of the other houses in the village, having most of them faced with brick. They carry the inscription 'G.D.G.' with a date between 1790 and 1820. Later Loudon in a Supplement to his Encyclopaedia was moved to comment, 'We have seen many ornamental villages both at home and abroad but none so original and so much to our taste as this of Mr Gregory's ... it is impossible to reflect on that village without imagining what a continued scene and appearance of comfort all England and even all Europe would present if proprietors would follow the example of Mr Gregory.' Loudon was referring to Gregory Gregory who built the new manor, but the restoration of the village owed more to his uncle.

George de Ligne Gregory's will settled the Harlaxton and Nottingham estates on three brothers and their issue successively, and failing them on John Sherwin, the family solicitor. George's brother, William, who had already inherited the Rempstone and the small Denton estates through his grandmother Susanna Williams assumed her surname to become William Gregory Williams. It was his son Gregory Williams who in 1822 succeeded to the estates of his uncle in addition to those of his father, and in so doing he dropped the surname Williams to become Gregory Gregory of Harlaxton.

The estates of his uncle included considerable property in Nottingham, Lenton and Radford and holdings in various canal and railway companies. The Radford property at least contained coal-mines and among recently discovered papers is a receipt for coal sales by Gregory Gregory to the Butterly Company for £10,569.

How Gregory Gregory employed himself before inheriting his estates is not known with any certainty. Sir Charles Welby, writing in 1937, notes that as a young man Gregory 'is said to have been attached to some of our embassies abroad so was in a position to indulge in the then fashionable craze for acquiring foreign works of art'. It is likely that after 1822 these purchases increased as he sold off plots of land in Lenton and Radford and with a view to the palatial mansion which he was to build Gregory amassed 'with very varying descrimination' the collection of statuary, furniture, tapestries, books, and silver plate, and those few pictures which later became known as the 'Gregory Heirlooms'.

His uncle, George de Ligne Gregory, some forty years previously had written of 'building another house of moderate size at Harlaxton', but his nephew proceeded to create with Salvin a structure that was anything but moderate. The reasons for him so doing are not entirely clear for he was a bachelor and the only surviving Gregory relative was an elderly cousin, George, who was also childless. It has been suggested by some that Gregory wished for a title and hoped that the King would be suitably impressed by the owner of such an impressive mansion. It has also been mooted that Gregory wished to establish himself on a par with the Duke of Rutland and so on a site clearly visible from the battlements of Belvoir Castle he built a house that was allegedly one room bigger than Belvoir, and from the central room of which one could look down the one-mile-long drive, across the Vale of Belvoir, directly to the spire of the Duke's church at Bottesford which contains so many of the Manners family monuments. The most likely reason, however, is contained in Greville's description of his visit in 1838 quoted in Dr Girouard's essay.

Gregory lived mostly at Hungerton Hall while Harlaxton was being built but while the formal topping-out ceremony was in 1836 Burn did not complete his work on the house until 1855 and Gregory probably did not reside in the house for many years before his death in June 1854.

With Gregory's death the estates passed, according to George de Ligne's will, to the cousin George Gregory. Not surprisingly, in view of his advanced age, the new owner appears to have made little impact on the neighbourhood apart from his sale of many immature and ornamental trees which brought several complaints to the Trustees of George de Ligne Gregory's estate.

George Gregory died in 1860 and was succeeded, as decreed in de Ligne Gregory's settlement, by the lawyer and very remote relative John Sherwin of Bramcote Hills near Nottingham with whom we are told Gregory Gregory had not been on the best of terms. It was the latter's intention that failing issue by Sherwin (who added Gregory to his name upon inheriting the estate) the property should pass to his neighbour and friend Sir Glynne Welby of Denton, who was again very distantly related to the Gregorys through the aunt of Susanna Williams who had married George Gregory in the late eighteenth century. Sherwin-Gregory sought to circumvent the provisions of the Gregory Gregory will and relations became acrimonious between the Denton and the Harlaxton estates. His obituary notice in the local paper noted that 'The estates pass we believe to the Welby family*'. The extent of the confusion even at the time is apparent from the asterisk which referred to this footnote: '*this is an error inasmuch as Sir Glynne Earle Welby-Gregory came into full possession of all he was entitled to upon the refusal of John Sherwin-Gregory to re-settle all the estates as directed by the will of Gregory Gregory Esq.' It was during Sherwin-Gregory's period as Squire of Harlaxton that the ruined old manor house was finally demolished.

The Welbys did acquire the estates at Rempstone and Denton (the old Williams bequest), certain investments and the major portion of the contents of Harlaxton Manor which had been collected and placed in it by Gregory Gregory. On receiving this massive collection Sir Glynne Welby-Gregory's heir, William, determined to sell some of it particularly the largest and most cumbrous items and to build with the proceeds a larger manor house at Denton to contain the remainder. A special Act of Parliament, the Gregory Heirlooms Act of 1877, was passed to enable Welby to proceed with the sale which took place the following year. The Welbys duly built their enlarged mansion house in 1879-80 to house the balance of the collection, only to pull it down in the late 1930s when it became too inconvenient and costly to maintain.

John Sherwin-Gregory's widow, Catherine, assumed the responsibilities of Squire of Harlaxton for twenty-three years until her death at the age of eighty-five in 1892. She appears to have been popular with the villagers and contributed generously to the restoration of Harlaxton Church, although she was buried, as was her husband, at Bramcote. She was a benefactor of Harlaxton School and was highly regarded for her concern for the sick and the poor.

In 1892 the property passed to a cousin and godson of Sherwin-Gregory, Thomas Sherwin-Pearson, who again annexed the Gregory name to his own. Pearson-Gregory was born in Bedfordshire in 1851 and while his wife had died in 1888 giving birth to their only son Philip, Pearson-Gregory was ideally equipped to fill the role of Squire in terms of his interest and abilities. Chairman of the Rural District Council, County Councillor, Justice of the Peace, High Sheriff of the County in 1900, and benefactor and Life Governor of Grantham Hospital, Pearson-Gregory was keenly interested in many local and county organisations, but it was as a sportsman that he was best known. As a young man he represented both Middlesex and Leicestershire at cricket, he remained a keen angler throughout his long life, and he was one of the best shots in England. Called locally 'the man with the gun' he was out shooting on the Harlaxton estate within a few days of his death in November 1935. Pearson-Gregory was a lover of the old order. There was only one bathroom in the house and he would allow neither telephone nor electricity to be introduced, the rooms being lit by oil- and candle-light. The exception was the night of the Grantham Ball - which sometimes also served as the annual dance for the Belvoir Hunt - when electricity was installed, but the entire apparatus would be removed on the following day.

With his death in 1935 Harlaxton Manor passed for the first time from father to son. Major Philip Pearson-Gregory was (like his father upon inheriting) a widower, his wife having died in a road accident in 1930 and feeling that the house was too large for his purposes he decided to sell it. The village itself was divided into 100 lots which were sold easily enough in the autumn of 1937. The pictures, furniture and other contents were similarly disposed of without undue difficulty, but the huge structure itself, now but a shell, presented far more problems. It was actually scheduled for demolition by a Nottingham firm but at the eleventh hour it was reprieved from the fate suffered by its neighbour Denton Manor when advertisements in The Times and Country Life calling for someone to save 'the labour of an age in piled stones' were seen by Mrs Violet Van der Elst.

Eccentric she doubtless was, but this extraordinary lady not only rescued Harlaxton Manor but, in refurbishing it, she added many features which have considerably enhanced its appeal - the massive chandelier in the Great Hall originally destined for a palace in Madrid but diverted to Harlaxton on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; the bronze lions atop the gate-piers of the front circle; and the pair of marble lions obtained from Clumber Park which flank the fountain on the rear terrace. She also introduced permanent electricity to the house. A greater contrast to Pearson-Gregory than Violet Van der Elst could scarcely have been found. She abhorred all field sports declaring the grounds to be 'a sanctuary for the birds and wild creatures' and would allow neither rabbits to be shot in the grounds nor even mice to be killed in the house. She was ardently opposed to capital punishment and was frequently arrested for her protests but did have the satisfaction of living to see her campaign reach a successful conclusion; she made little attempt to court the local gentry - or they her - and she was so pretentious as to rename her manor 'Grantham Castle'. She held seances in the Library, now known as the 'Van der Elst Room', in order to contact her deceased second husband, the Belgian artist John Van der Elst. The Library in which she held her seances held over 3,000 books on the occult and she claimed to be a magnet for supernatural phenomena. She also admitted to composing more than a hundred symphonies, concertos and preludes.

The daughter of a Middlesex coal-porter and a Quaker washerwoman, Violet Van der Elst made her fortune through her beauty preparations and the first brushless shaving-cream, Shavex, which she first started manufacturing in her own kitchen. She spent a quarter of a million pounds modernising and furnishing the manor only to be confined to a few rooms herself during the war years when members of the First Airborne Division were quartered in the house. Their presence explains the Pegasus insignia on a stone block in the north courtyard.

Mrs Van der Elst, a compulsive litigant, dissipated her fortune on her various causes, and in 1948 was obliged to sell the manor for £60,000, some £18,000 less than she had paid for it eleven years earlier. The new owners were the Society of Jesus who proceeded to use the property as a seminary. Many of the rooms on the upper floor were subdivided into cubicles for use as dormitories and the refectory was created in the Burn extension which forms the north wing of the front circle. The only damaging modification occurred in the Great Hall where the huge stone surround to the door at the south-west corner of the room was destroyed in order to make room for the altar, the Hall being converted for use as a chapel.

The Jesuits' occupation was brief, the numbers of novitiates declining to an uneconomic level from the projected 200 to between 50 and 60, and in 1966 (the year that Mrs Van der Elst died penniless in a Kentish nursing home) the Jesuits leased the property to Stanford University from California. Stanford remained at Harlaxton for four years and the lease was then assumed by the University of Evansville from the State of Indiana.

In August 1971 students and faculty from Evansville and other American universities and colleges took up residence at the manor. That they did so was due to the prescience and determination of the President of the University, Dr Wallace Graves, a Texan, and like his wife Barbara, a confirmed Anglophile - even to the extent of occasional performances in Gilbert and Sullivan operas. With the support of his fellow trustees Dr Graves arranged for the University to assume the unexpired portion of the Stanford lease and then later negotiated a new lease with the Jesuits. In 1978 with the programme by now firmly established Dr William Ridgway, an ophthalmologist from California and Trustee of the University, purchased the property and 104 acres of the estate while the University acquired the contents. It was immediately following this purchase that a major programme of restoration was initiated. The first priority was the Convervatory which had been in a state of dilapidation for many decades and was in danger of collapse, a fate suffered by so many of its contemporaries. With the aid of the Historic Buildings Council, the County and the District Councils, Dr Ridgway, friends of Harlaxton at home and abroad, and several fund-raising events, the money was raised. New glass and glazing bars were installed, and rotting timbers replaced so that by May 1979 the structure could be reopened. An exhibition of works by John Piper marked the event and one of his paintings of Harlaxton was donated by the artist towards the appeal. The Conservatory was copiously stocked through the generosity of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Citrus Institute of Florida Southern College, and many individual donors. The Long Gallery was next restored, the decorator utilising the graining techniques originally employed in that room in the mid nineteenth century. This in turn was followed by the Cedar Staircase, the Small Dining Room and the Great Hall. During this same period considerable improvements have been made to the student bedrooms, the central heating system has been modernised and the building completely rewired.

There are now 160 [185 in 1998] students in residence during the regular academic year, most of them following courses in British and European studies - Literature, History, Archaeology, Art History, Comparative Politics and Economics. During vacation periods the house becomes a setting for conferences, antiques fairs, wedding receptions, and a host of other functions to which it is so admirably suited. It is a far cry from those days when it was occupied by bachelors, widows or widowers, but as the British campus of the University of Evansville its future is secure and its owner and occupants are only too aware of their responsibilities as guardians of one of the most remarkable architectural creations of its age.

Graddon Rowlands