Howzat for a home! By Eluned Price
£1.7m manor has its own cricket pitch – where acting legend played regularly
IT’S Grade II listed, on the edge of a pretty village and has a beautiful thatched roof. Many manors may have the above attributes, but they don’t have their own cricket pitch, which Wreyland Manor does. And it’s not just any old pitch – actor Peter O’Toole called it his favourite cricket ground and used to play there regularly with his own club, the Lazarusians.
O’Toole, who died in 2013 aged 81, fell in love with cricket when he saw a newsreel of a match from the Oval in 1938, when he was six. It was a lifelong passion – and O’Toole even qualified as a coach – but he didn’t take playing seriously until the birth of his son Lorcan, when he was 50. ‘I thought, “He needs someone to bowl to him,” ’ he said – and that was it.
O’Toole had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had his pancreas and part of his stomach removed. ‘He didn’t want Lorcan thinking of him being this old, unfit, nearly dead father,’ said O’Toole’s friend, fellow actor and cricketer Michael Neilson.
Rejuvenated, O’Toole started the Lazarusians, for whom he was opening batsman. They were a ‘wandering side’, with no home ground, but O’Toole’s always came back to Wreyland Manor in Lustleigh, Devon, where, fittingly, he played his last game.
In an interview in 2007, O’Toole, who would have been 85 this month, talked about his love for the Lustleigh village cricket pitch and how it was part of Wreyland Manor. ‘ The grounds are behind a church – they’re beautiful – and there’s a river,’ he said. ‘The thing to do at Lustleigh is to strike the ball into the river.’
Another friend of O’Toole’s was cricketing broadcaster and writer Brian Johnston, who recalled O’Toole telling him: ‘We play some high-class stuff.’
The current owner of five- bedroom Wreyland Manor, Ian Caston, had only to leave the house, walk across the garden and into the paddock to watch O’Toole. The River Wrey flows through the manor’s grounds and separates the paddock from the cricket pitch.
‘The last time, I sat on a bench and watched him fielding ten yards away,’ he says. ‘The Lazarusians played here very many times. Actually, they did look like they’d risen from the dead – but they played well.’
Ian and his wife Christine bought the manor 25 years ago. ‘Three years before then, we walked through Wreyland and saw the house,’ says Christine. ‘I said to Ian, “I want to live there one day,” and he said, “Well, I’ll buy it for you one day.” We never thought our wish would come true so soon.’
Originally the manor had been a hall house, dating back to the 13th Century. But the long oak-lined through passage and stone-flagged hall is 16th Century. At one point, the house was part of a large estate owned by the historian Cecil Torre, who created some Lutyens-style touches by adding a huge spiral stone staircase in a circular turreted entrance in the early 1900s.
CHRISTINE says: ‘ About 40 years ago the then owners used t he s t one f r om t he staircase to make a bridge over the river, from the paddock to the cricket pitch on the other side.’ The granite-built Wreyland Manor has nine acres in all. The formal garden is beautifully planted with herbaceous borders. Roses surround a heated swimming pool, and a high yew hedge has an entrance arch cut into it. A one-acre apple orchard produces sufficient to make 500 bottles of apple juice a year. Abutting the paddock is a tennis court with a pavilion, and there are a couple of stables adjacent to the car port. The paddock itself is just over three acres, with a lake and a little island.
Th e cricket pitch is another three acres, for which Lustleigh Cricket Club pays a £15 a year.
‘We thought we’d be here for ever but it’s time for us to downsize,’ says Christine. The couple have put Wreyland Manor on the market for £1.75 million.