WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 1996 THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Frail home with secrets to share Dixie Nichols looks at the sale of a much-loved old house that has remained untouched for the past 100 years
Grade II star Pirton Grange, near Shillington in Hertfordshire, is an extraordinary survivor. Part palace, part cow shed, encircled by a broad moat and nosing on to a commercial arable farm, the grange has 15th-century origins but is predominantly 17th century.
Its builders, the Hanscombe family, cleared out in 1878 in order to build a nice new Victorian baronial monster (now a nursing home) a few fields away. The grange was then tenanted, bought by the tenants, held by a family trust and relet; nobody along the way was much inclined to spend money on it.
Finally, the family trust sold it two year ago with a sitting tenant, Vera Davis, who died in January at the age of 89. Now it is to come to auction through Jackson-Stops & Staff on July 12. The guide price is £200,000; the investor paid in excess of £150,000.
At the moment you could reach up and pull the poor old house down with your fingers. It is patched like a child’s knee, the cement sometimes given a sympathetic swirl to mirror the ancient pargeting, sometimes finished with a handful of pebbles to try to keep its innards from bulging out.
The garden is patiently creeping up over the house, the wisteria drips flowers, the fig pushes in, the roof erupts in yellow flowers. But here and there are reminders of its civilised days: the rusting fleur-de-lis-topped railings, the seatless iron bench.
The house’s angles are now so ludicrous that it looks like a cardboard model of a historic house that you might buy in a National Trust shop. Inside it has runs of primitive rooms then suddenly a painted panelled chamber.
Its secrets are starting to come out of the woodwork; a cooking range emerged from behind a tallboy. Elsewhere, a marble fire surround has fractured as the house has shifted uncomfortably – and behind it is a huge inglenook. The prosperous barley twist staircase marches with measured steps to the broad landing. On the way up you notice the outline of the once sentinel grandfather clock, stencilled on the wall by the year.
From the landing you can see the house’s grandest vista, an impressive painted panelled upper bedchamber with two large Jacobean sash windows and a heightened ceiling. This descends via the dressing room to the corner room, used in later years as an apple store.
The upper floor has five bedrooms and above, tucked into the centre of the roof and reached by a surprisingly broad staircase, is the attic bedroom, baking hot in summer with a little door into adjoining roof space – bright as day because of the poor state of the roof.
The huge supporting roof timbers look like a skeleton Viking boat hauled out of the mud. Big wooden pegs hold the timbers and because they have not been pampered by roof felt and central heating, they look rock hard beneath their blue grey dust and ready for more centuries of service.
Pirton Grange was Vera Davis’s home. She was brought up there but left to spend most of her life teaching. She returned to care for her father and after his death she lived on in the house with her cousin Betty, who died in 1976. It is thanks to Vera’s determination that the building is so little changed.
Miss Davis cared little for the advances of the 20th century. She never owned a television, preferring her huge old wireless. Electricity was introduced in 1967; the telephone, after much procrastination, in 1992l. She cooked on her Aga, washed up at the stone sink (the water heated by a fearsome Ascot), and made her own bread at the kitchen table.
She entertained at the damask spread dining-room table in the panelled chamber, where in winter the feeble heat generated by a two-bar electric fire meant diners generally kept on their overcoats. She completed the Daily Telegraph crossword each day in under five minutes right up to the age of 89.
Somebody who worked for the Davis family was Carol King. She started work at the grange 20 years ago, aged 14, when her jobs included driving the ride-on mower. “Miss Davis was as tough as old boots,” said Mrs King. “She had some fine furniture and had to endure a series of burglaries which started after the announcement of her cousin’s death in the local paper. But she never let the burglaries touch her. She never moaned about nothing.”
Miss Davis was far from a recluse. Visitors were always welcome; ushered in, given food and drink and taken on a grand tour of the house. Miss Davis, the schoolmistress once more, was master of every date and connection.
Sadly, she would never allow herself to be recorded – so much of her encyclopaedic knowledge died with her. Up until three years ago she slept in the attic. There is still a half finished bottle of Sal Volatile forlorn on the shelf and the Koala curtains which perhaps she chose as a child. However, last Christmas Eve she fell and lay by the Aga unable to get up for 12 hours. When she was found she still did not want the doctor called as she was afraid she would never get back to her house again. In that, as in most things, she was right.
