House that seduced the Queen of Romance By Lucy Maclaine
She was urged not to buy it, but mansion still won author’s heart
WHEN Catherine Cookson first laid eyes on Loreto, her estate agent advised her not to buy i t . The mock- Tudor mansion needed work and was ‘always up for sale’, he said, so she should consider somewhere else as a base for her budding writing career. But Cookson – notorious for her determination and temper – had fallen in love with the place and would not be so easily deterred.
She and her teacher husband Tom bought the house, and Catherine would go on to write more than 40 of her bestselling novels and rise to international fame during her 22-year stay at the six-bedroom property in Hastings, East Sussex.
Loreto, which is on the market for £995,000 with Fine & Country estate agents, is now a mecca for fans of Cookson’s gritty romantic fiction.
The couple bought the house in 1954 after Catherine sold the film rights to her fifth novel, A Grand Man – turned into the movie Jacqueline, starring John Gregson and Kathleen Ryan two years later.
She told her biographer, Piers Dudgeon, that the estate agent wouldn’t even show her Loreto. ‘But something attracted me to the place and when later I got rid of him [the agent], I waited for Tom to come home and said, “I want to show you something…”
‘As we made our way down the drive to this house, we knew we wanted it.’
Tucked away in a pretty corner of the seaside resort, Loreto is set at the end of a sweeping flower-filled pathway. It is a far cry from the gritty streets of Victorian Tyneside where most of Cookson’s books are set, streets she grew up in in the early years of the 20th Century. In 1929, she moved south to run a laundry in Hastings and it was in the town that she met Tom.
COOKSON, who died in 1998 aged 91, wrote dozens of her novels i n Loreto’s sunny study, and spent years exhaustively renovating the sixbedroom house – which she described as ‘beautifully built’. She said: ‘The labour that we put into it was indescribable. How we did it I don’t know. I was never done from morning till night, and on looking back I am amazed how, in those 22 years, I got through the work of looking after that house, clearing it, cooking and doing the washing by hand. We didn’t even have a fridge until about five years before we left there, about the time we also had a beautiful indoor pool made.’
The house was built in 1938 by the daughter of a local millionaire, Maude Harrison – whose ghost supposedly haunted the premises when Cookson lived there.
The author, who believed in the occult and attended seances and spiritual healing sessions, said she first became aware of the phantom on Christmas Eve 1954. She and Tom were upstairs papering a bedroom ceiling when they heard a strange noise coming from outside the room. Cookson ventured out to see their bull terrier Bill ‘transfixed’ by something – or someone – invisible at the bottom of the stairs.
His coat ‘bristling with fear’, Bill walked down the stairs nervously before sitting obediently – which was odd, as he did this only when a hand was placed on his rear.
Current owner Andreas Fink, 48, has renovated Loreto with partner Phillip Bingham, 56, after the house had stood empty for almost a decade. The building is full of character and includes a stunning oak staircase, a magnificent stained-glass doorway and the original 1930s fireplace in the sitting room. The ground floor offers lots of scope for entertaining, with a spacious dining room, drawing room and sitting room. And on lazy summer days, the property’s terrace is perfect for alfresco dining.
Upstairs, the six double bedrooms also come with luxuries, including a cast-iron fireplace and four bathrooms.
Andreas says: ‘It has been an honour to own this house and I doubt we’ll ever live in a property as special again.’