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~ The History of Hatherop Castle ~
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It is from the Domesday Book that we know that in 1086 there were two estates at Hatherop totalling about 1000 acres in area and being home to 21 tenants and 26 villeins. The estates obviously thrived as around the year 1212 they were valued by the Crown at about two and a quarter knights' fees meaning that, in case of need, Hatherop would have |
to equip and provide enough money for two and a quarter knights to fight for the King. |
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In 1222 William, Earl of Salisbury, brought monks of the strict Carthusian order to settle at Hatherop but when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries at the end of the 1530s, Hatherop was handed over to an owner who accepted the new Protestant faith. In 1548 William Sharrington acquired Hatherop but sold it four years later to John Blomer, whose son, William, built an elegant country house, the façade of which we see today. John Blomer's great granddaughter, Mary, eventually became its heir and when she married Sir John Webb of Canford in Dorset the 300-year ownership of Hatherop by the Webb family began. But the Blomer and Webb families were Roman Catholics who stayed true to their faith in spite of all the Crown's attempts to make them adopt the new Protestant faith and so the land so recently taken from the Roman Church returned quickly to Catholic owners - not quite what Henry VIII had intended! In the grounds of Hatherop Castle are the remains of a tunnel constructed originally as an escape route for the Roman Catholic priests.
The 5th baronet Webb was a very wealthy man and on his death Hatherop was inherited by his granddaughter, Lady Barbara Ashley Cooper who, in 1814, married William Ponsonby. In 1862, Ashley Ponsonby, having bought Hatherop Castle from his brother, Charles, put it up for sale by auction. It was bought by the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, the grandfather of a great Indian cricketer of the same name, who soon decided to sell it again. The Prince of Wales, later to become Edward VII, showed an interest in buying it but, because the shooting was not thought to be good enough at Hatherop, instead bought Sandringham!
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In 1867, Sir Thomas Bazely, son of a successful cotton industrialist, bought the house and spent some £200,000 on improving the estate, including the planting of 380 acres of trees. In 1900 he transferred the estate to his son Gardner Sebastian Bazely who died in 1911.
His oldest son, Thomas Stafford Bazely, was still too
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young to take responsibility for running the estate and so this fell to Ruth, Gardner Sebastian's widow. Ruth Bazely hit on the idea of having at Hatherop the children of some of her friends and educating them with her own daughters. Hatherop thus became one of the early home schools of the Parents National Education Union, a system of education by correspondence. When the last of her daughters, Henriette Cadogan, grew up, Ruth transferred the school to Mrs. Theodora Fyfe's establishment at Cambridge where it was known as Owlstone Croft School. |
At the beginning of World War II Hatherop Castle was requisitioned by the Government. Secretly, however, a section of the army living there was allied to the Resistance Movement and dealt with the training and rehabilitation of men and women who were dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe. At the end of August 1945 Hatherop was derequisitioned and the family allowed to return. The task of restoring Hatherop to its former glory would have been very daunting and, not surprisingly, Sir Thomas Bazley decided not to move back. Owlstone Croft School, meanwhile, had outgrown its accommodation in Cambridge and so Hatherop was offered to Mrs. Fyfe. In 1946 the School moved to Gloucestershire and changed its name to Hatherop Castle School. It had returned to its origins. For nearly fifty years it continued as a Girls' Boarding School until, in 1992, it became a Preparatory School with Paul Easterbrook as its Head. |
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