Plus ça change
These two timeless houses have been passed from family to family
AN article in the August 27, 1904, number of COUNTRY LIFE intones grandly: ‘Houses of the class of Stibbington Hall have a particular claim upon the regard of Englishmen. They are to be found in every shire, but are most numerous in some districts in which the inhabitants enjoyed the fuller measure of that prosperity which came with Tudor and Stuart times, when the roads were improved and the waterways made more available.’
The writer goes on to lament the lost status of so many of ‘these houses of strong and solid character, mostly fallen to decay, often reduced to the character of farmhouses; and not seldom does the peasant sit by the fireside about which gathered the family of the Cavalier’.
Only once in its long history did such a fate befall the Grade I-listed Jacobean Stibbington Hall, built in 1625, which sits in 19 acres of formal gardens, lawns and paddocks on a loop of the River Nene, eight miles west of Peterborough, in what was historically the north-west corner of Huntingdonshire, but is now Cambridgeshire. The calamity took place after 1757, when the then owner died and the house was leased to a farmer.
There followed a period of decline that was swiftly rectified when, in the early 1800s, Edward Steed Girdlestone bought the hall and carried out a sympathetic programme of repairs and improvements, before moving there in 1836. Following his death in 1843, his widow—the third ‘merry widow’ to play a part in the evolution of Stibbington Hall—gave the property to her daughter on her marriage to John Maylin Vipan, a respected local Justice of the Peace.
The status of Stibbington Hall as a country house of importance was to be greatly enhanced by their eldest son, Capt John Alexander Vipan, who came to live at the hall with his mother after 1880. Internationally renowned as a naturalist and ichthyologist, he maintained ‘the finest collection of freshwater fish in Europe’ in two greenhouses in the kitchen garden—a collection transferred to the London Zoo a few years before he died in 1939, aged 90. Other greenhouses housed ferns and orchids, several of which were named after him, and his collection of butterflies and moths was said to be one of the best in Huntingdonshire.
Capt Vipan also transformed the gardens at Stibbington, which today still include several greenhouses, a kitchen garden, a formal garden, elegant, stone-edged lily ponds and a small park, all laid out between 1875 and 1899. The house itself was well maintained, but remained largely unaltered during his lifetime, leading COUNTRY LIFE to comment: ‘This Huntingdonshire dwelling-place has been fortunate, unlike many such houses, in preserving its features unchanged.’
Following Capt Vipan’s death in 1939, the hall and its 19 acres of grounds were bought by Londoner Philip Frere MC, but he never lived there. The house was put back on the market the following year and was promptly requisitioned as an RAF hospital. After the war, a succession of distinguished owners —among them Sir Guy Thorold, Lord George Cholmondeley, Sir Peter Benton Jones, Sir Stephen Hastings and their successors— were largely content to maintain the status quo at Stibbington Hall, apart from some restoration of the house and garden in the 1980s and some sensible updating since then.
Next week will see the reappearance of this Jacobean gem in the advertisement pages of COUNTRY LIFE, at a guide price of £3.5 million through the Stamford office of King West (01780 484520), whose prin-
cipal, Stephen King, has twice previously been involved with its sale: in 1993, when it sold for £980,000 and in 2005, when it was on the market for £2.7m.
Still set in 19 acres on the banks of the Nene, this impressive house, built of creamy Ketton stone under a Collyweston slate roof, was said by Pevsner to boast ‘the finest Jacobean façade in Huntingdonshire’. It now offers a manageable 8,590sq ft of living space, including six reception rooms, a fabulous kitchen/breakfast room, a good range of service rooms, nine bedrooms and four bathrooms and comes with a three-bedroom former coach house, a two-bedroom cottage and outbuildings. Amenities include stabling, a heated swimming pool and a tennis court.
Stately 17th-century Hanlith Hall at Kirkby Malham, near Skipton, North Yorkshire, is one of those grand historic houses ‘of strong and solid character’ and had been rented out for long periods and largely neglected when, in the early 18th century, the Serjeantsons, who built the original hall in 1668, decided to move their family seat to Camphill, near Bedale.
By the latter half of the 19th century, however, the Serjeantson family’s fortunes had declined and, in 1861, Hanlith Hall and the bulk of its estate were put up for sale, but failed to find a buyer. Its then owner, George John Serjeantson, had no children and, when he died in 1889, he left the family estates to a cousin’s widow, Elizabeth Serjeantson, who sold Camphill, rebuilt Hanlith Hall in the style of a typical Victorian mansion and moved the family back there to live.
In 1909, Mrs Serjeantson rented the hall to Dudley and Florence Holden Illingworth who later bought it, having already spent a tidy sum on the building in 1911–12, when they greatly extended the east wing, added more bedrooms, a belvedere tower and a billiard room, as well as creating new gardens. When Mr Illingworth died in 1958, his Hanlith Hall estate was offered for sale by auction in 16 lots by Knight, Frank & Rutley in October 1959 and the hall was bought by a builder, who planned to demolish it.
Miraculously, the house escaped the fate of so many of its historic contemporaries when William Bulmer (later Sir William) stepped in and bought it after the sale. In 1962, the Bulmers demolished the tower and removed the upper storey above the ballroom, which had fallen into disrepair, but has since been reinstated by the present owners. Sir William and his wife then went on to convert some estate outbuildings into a smaller house for themselves and the hall was sold once more.
Last seen on the market in 1999, Hanlith Hall is for sale once again through Knight Frank (020–7861 1114) at a guide price of £2.95m for the eight-bedroom house, with four/five reception rooms, set in 64 acres of splendid gardens, parkland and woodland on the edge of the hamlet of Hanlith, in the picturesque heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Amenities include an indoor swimming pool, a stable yard with six loose boxes and about a mile of fishing on the River Aire, which meanders along the south-western boundary. Also included in the sale are the shooting rights, in perpetuity, over some 2,053 acres of the adjoining estate.