NB   For other local history articles and comment, please follow 'Local History' on the main menu. The articles below are reprinted from a now out-of-print booklet produced for an exhibition - mainly of photographs - held in St John's Church in Stanwick in the summer of 2005. 

THE LOST STANWICK HALL  -

REMNANTS OF
The Dowager Duchess Eleanor
of Northumberland,
her time and people 
 
Since the publication of the booklet ‘The Lost Hall’ in 2005 to accompany the exhibition in the Church of St John the Evangelist at Stanwick of memorabilia and photographs concerning the tenure of Eleanor, Duchess of Northumberland at Stanwick Hall, many other fascinating snippets of information have come to the attention of those involved. As they appeared, we published them in the Parish Magazine – essentially a monthly local publication with a strong Christian overtone written by and for the Parish, but which also acts as a small local area newspaper. The earlier articles in ‘The Lost Hall’ also appeared in the magazine but before the exhibition.
 

The Stanwick website provides an ideal vehicle for making them available to a wider audience. Should any further relevant information or gossip concerning the period emerge we hope to add it to the current collection.
 
Some minor changes have been made in transferring these pieces to the website, and will, we expect, continue to be made as it becomes possible to modify or correct earlier versions in the light of new information. Major changes will be indicated by a dating at the foot of those articles altered.
 
 
1         THE BUTLERS AT ELM GROVE WEST

Under our noses, waiting to be found in the churchyard at Stanwick, was a clue to one of our photographs as well as an insight into Eleanor’s attitude towards her staff. 

This early Yeoman photograph from the exhibition shows what was called the butler’s house (now Elm Grove West) with, presumably, the butler and his wife. (An almost exactly matching photograph of the Higgies next door in Elm Grove East suggested a dating of about 1891.)  Can we guess who this is? 

Working backwards from 1911: the Duchess Eleanor left £100 to her then butler, Henry T Evans, whom we know was hired in 1906.

  In the 1901 census, the ‘domestic butler’ was Thomas Butler, married to Sarah, who were aged 58 and 59 respectively; they weren’t living in the Hall and the census records that their  house was near to the Higgies’. 

Eleanor didn’t seem to have have anyone she called ‘butler’ at Stanwick much earlier than this; previously they were ‘house stewards’ and travelled with her from other residences. 

For example, the census of 1881 gives an Alfred J Bacon as working in 10 Upper Grosvenor St London as ‘butler’ with Eleanor, and his age is recorded as 52. But ten years later he is the ‘house steward’ in Stanwick Hall. There is no mention of a Mrs Bacon in either local census, but he was married. In the graveyard a stone beginning ‘Elizabeth Margaret Bennet’, the inscription continues ‘beloved wife of Alfred James Bacon’. She died in 1892 at only 42. Further down the stone his death is recorded in 1897 at the age of 48*. That means either his age was recorded wrongly in 1881 (52) or there were two Alfred J Bacons. Unlikely. And now (2008) something else turns up in the marriage records in Northallerton: he took a second wife, Margaret Hendry Dickinson, in 1894.

So it looks clear – the photograph was most likely of the Butlers, posed very appropriately outside the butlers’ house after Alfred Bacon’s death in 1897. Their ages certainly fit better.  

*This gravestone is remarkable however. It says that he was  ‘…for 28 years the faithful and valued friend and servant of the Duchess of Northumberland’. That means he had been employed in her service from the age of twenty in 1869, shortly after her widowing – and most of that service might well have been in London. He was born in Little Stoke, Oxfordshire, so that would fit.

The tribute, certainly authorised if not written by Eleanor herself, is striking, with the word ‘friend’ placed before ‘servant’. Victoria herself had been cooler in her choice of Biblical text for her intimate servant, the famous John Brown, on his tombstone in 1883:

Well done, good and faithful servant,

Thou hast been faithful over a few things,

I will make thee ruler over many things.

 (Mod.Oct '08)