Hancox

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

List of Contents

This book is dedicated to the descendants of Alan and Mary Moore and to their spouses:

Peter Moore and Pam Edwardes; Caroline Moore; Helena Moore and David Alexander; Charles and Caroline Moore; Simon White; Rowan Moore and Lizzie Treip; Tom and Catherine Oliver; Henry and Emily Oliver.

Paul and Esther Edwardes Moore; Toby, Mary and Guy Cohen; Rose, Catherine and Harriet Alexander; Will and Kate Moore; George, Sam and Jake Smith; Helena and Stella Moore; Isaiah Oliver, and his sibling in utero.

Also in memory of Anne Norris, late of Crowham Manor, who took great interest in the progress of this book but did not live to see its completion.

‘These little bits of driftwood washed up on the beach of the present time from the vast illimitable ocean of the past always touch me’

A Family Tree

Acknowledgements

My mother, Ann Moore, catalogued thousands of family letters; if she had not done so, it would hardly have been possible to write this book. My thanks also go to her for reading and annotating the manuscript.

My uncle Norman Moore, my father Richard Moore and my aunt Meriel Oliver also commented on the manuscript and supplied me with their memories. I thank them for this, and for their generous approval of this intrusive project. My thanks are also due to Christopher Leigh Smith for similar reasons.

Several others have read the manuscript and made helpful and encouraging suggestions, most particularly Charles Moore, Kate Moore, Tom Oliver, Elspeth Sinclair, Cathy O’Neill, Caroline Barrett and Simon White. Very many thanks, also, to Tom for his beautiful map, and to Simon for his Googling and chauffeuring, and for listening to me talk about family history night and day for the last four years.

The Cherry family – Ethne’s descendants – unearthed Ethne’s memoir and diary, for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks also to the Sutton family, Rosemary and Jeremy Goring, Kevin Ades and Pete Capelotti for sharing points of information. I’m grateful to the Norris family and to Amanda Helm for giving me access to Crowham, and to Simon and Katherine Weston-Smith for allowing me to peer at the fireplace at Scalands.

Many thanks are due to my agent David Godwin, who helped shape the idea, to my patient and good-natured editor Tony Lacey and his assistant Ben Brusey, to Sarah Day for her careful copy-editing, to the rest of the team at Viking/Penguin, and to Mark Reed for his painstaking photographic work.

Eva Littna has typed all my manuscripts, but this was by far the most complicated. I am deeply grateful to her for the cheerful sacrifice of so much of her time.

Errors of punctuation and spelling have not been corrected in original material.

Prologue: A trust for my ancestors

I live in the house where I grew up. Hancox has a Tudor hall house at its core, but each century has added or subtracted a layer, so that it is a living history of East Sussex architectural vernacular, an organic unplanned pile of tile and timber and russet brick in which nothing quite fits, a house of unnecessary corridors and pointless landings and doors that lead nowhere. There are thirteen windows on the side that faces north-east, and not one of them matches another. The materials that made the house would almost all have come from within a five-mile radius; perhaps that’s why it looks like a natural outcrop, something cast up from the undulations of the Sussex Wealden landscape in which it sits. It’s not a silent house. It sighs and rustles. Windows rattle, hinges squeal, floorboards groan. Squirrels, mice and worse career across the roof; starlings jabber in their nests under the hanging tiles, jackdaws quarrel in the chimneys. The water pipes hum and drone; the house is a gigantic Aeolian harp.

My three sons, George, Sam and Jake, have grown up with the same sights and sounds that formed the background to my own childhood. They are the fifth generation of their family to live at Hancox. Such continuity would once have been common; now, it’s unusual though not extraordinary. What is extraordinary is the extent to which my sons and I are surrounded by evidence of the lives of those five generations. I spread the table with a cloth monogrammed with the initials of my great-grandfather. My sons have all ridden Queenie, the rocking horse belonging to their great-great-grandmother. The copy of The Jungle Book I read aloud to Jake is inscribed by his great-great-grandfather Norman Moore as a gift to his wife Amy. Jake stirs his cocoa with a silver spoon engraved with the name ‘Gillachrist’, a christening present for his great-great-uncle, who died at the first Battle of Ypres. Sam sleeps beneath a frieze of waterbirds chalked on to the bedroom wall by that same Gillachrist in his Edwardian boyhood. George’s room, once the night nursery, has been liberally graffitied by children of several generations sent upstairs to ‘rest’, including me and my brothers, Charles and Rowan. The walls of this room are covered with lining paper, honey-coloured with caramel blotches. There are many holes in the paper, evidence of childhood games and fights. Underneath, you can see brown hair, the hair of Sussex cattle, mixed in with the old plaster; when I was a child I knew that my great-grandfather had had more than one wife, and I believed that this hair was the hair of these wives. I didn’t feel that they’d been murdered and walled up; it was more a sense that those wives of the past, with their long, old-fashioned hair, were somehow still here in the house.

Hancox seems to house the dead as well as the living. I grew up with such a strong idea of the people who had lived here or been connected with it that I almost thought of them as living presences – Milicent, who first bought the house, Uncle Ben who got shipwrecked in the Arctic and had to eat polar bears, poor Bella who went mad, beautiful Amy carrying a sheaf of rushes, Aunt Charley who gave me my name, Aunt Barbara who invented university for women, my grandfather Alan, who walked round the top of factory chimneys without feeling giddy but couldn’t bear to have cooked cheese in the house. I always felt that these, and many more, lived on at Hancox somewhere, and in a sense my research for this book has proved me right.

All families are potentially interesting. Every human life is full of drama, it’s just that, in most cases, the evidence is destroyed. Most families would have thrown out the frayed tablecloth, sold or lost the christening spoon, redecorated over Gillachrist’s swans and geese. My own family tend towards a strong historical sense and a reverence for the written word. They are disinclined to throw anything away, especially anything that’s been written on. If you live in a house as large as Hancox you don’t have any pressing need to dispose of stuff; it just silts up. Stamped on our DNA is a dislike of change, an inability to generate or to hang on to much money – there’s never enough for ‘home improvements’ – and an unusually high threshold for tolerating, even welcoming, shabbiness and inconvenience in our living arrangements. ‘Odd that so many of our relations tend to discomfort,’ my grandfather wrote to his sister Ethne, though he himself tended that way. He would routinely make a note in his diary when the temperature in his dressing room fell below freezing point, but he never felt it was within his powers to do anything about it.

What all this means is that, since Hancox came into the family in 1888, remarkably little has changed, inside or out. It’s not so much that we live in the past as that we live in parallel with the past. I can’t see any reason not to use the pots and pans that came with the (new!) Aga in 1934, when the kitchen range was replaced (I’m sure that was controversial). The pans still function. And I enjoy the thought that so many other hands have touched them, used them for homely, kindly things like boiling eggs and potatoes and Christmas puddings, or stuck them under drips when the roof can’t stand up to the pressure of stormy nights.

As I sit writing this, the view from my window is much the same as it has been for several hundred years, before my family’s time, even. The shakes and ripples in the ancient glass distort it for me just as they would have distorted it for all those who went before. I can see a glimpse of our farm, the great roof of our cathedral of a barn, the stables, the old coach house, the brewhouse where the beer was made, the hut in which the butchering of pigs took place – a series of pyramid shapes, all hung with the same warm fox-coloured tiles. I can see the crumbling walls that frame what were once the kitchen garden and the bowling green, the culinary rose bushes planted in the 1890s, the flowers of which were harvested to make rosewater and pot-pourri, the hops, the last of those once grown for beer, now preserved for sentimental and decorative reasons. I see the wobbly brick paths that converge at the cover over the brick-built well shaft that drops seventy feet to an underground stream that never dries up.

The most modern construction I can see is a loosebox built in the late 1880s to house the hunters belonging to Mabel Ludlow, a valiant rider-to-hounds, a lively but often unhappy woman whose life was overshadowed by what her fearsome Aunt Nannie called ‘the family taint’. Mabel was, with her sister Milicent, the first of my relations to live at Hancox, but it’s with Milicent that this story begins, because it’s due to Milicent that I’m here today.

On the mantelpiece in this room, a room which Milicent and her husband Norman called the ‘Scriptorium’, is a little grey plaster cast not much bigger than my hand. It shows, in profile, the bas-relief portrait of a young woman wearing a hooded cloak, her long hair loosely coiled in a bun. The flowing lines of the cloak and hair give her a romantic, adventurous air; the firm outline of her nose and chin correctly suggest determination and a sense of purpose. This is Milicent Ludlow; it was made in Rome in 1893 when she was visiting her Aunt Nannie.

I’d always known about Milicent. I knew that she was the second wife of my great-grandfather, and that she was also the cousin of his first wife, Amy, which makes her my first cousin three times removed as well as my step-great-grandmother. I knew that it was Milicent who bought Hancox; childless, she later handed it on to my grandfather Alan. He brought up his four children here; one of them was my father, Richard, and in turn it became our family home. But it only struck me a few years ago, as I inspected more closely the little image I’d always taken for granted, that when Milicent took on Hancox she was extraordinarily young – only twenty when she moved here in 1888. True, her sister Mabel, Mabel’s husband and their children lived here with her for much of the time, but it was Milicent who bought the house, Milicent who set about enlarging it, built cottages for farmworkers and tenants and – most surprising of all – Milicent who decided to manage the farm herself.

This Victorian girl’s impulsive, brave, foolhardy decision has shaped my life, for Hancox is a place that shapes lives. I wanted to find out more about the place and the people who made me, so I began to work my way through the vast archive that fills the house. Every drawer, every cupboard, every trunk, shelf, box, is filled with letters, memoirs, journals, notebooks, sketchbooks, photograph albums; there are prescriptions, bills, invoices, school reports, recipe books, even chequebook stubs.

I am not the first to attempt to weave a narrative out of this tangle of domestic archaeology. Milicent’s husband, Norman Moore, was the dominant ancestor, a man of whom it is appropriate to use the well-worn description ‘larger than life’. An Irishman, the only child of a hard-up single mother, he had risen to the top of the medical profession. He was a scholar, an author, a linguist, a naturalist, a bibliophile, an antiquarian, and the friend of almost any eminent late Victorian you can think of. His son Alan tried to write his biography, but was defeated by old age and ill health. My mother, Alan’s daughter-in-law, took up the challenge in the 1960s; I remember her surrounded by drifts of Victorian letters – from, among others, Darwin, Kipling, Florence Nightingale – sorting them into categories and storing them in turquoise Clark’s shoeboxes. She was overcome by the sheer mass of information and by the pressure of other demands on her time, but those early investigations have been the most tremendous help to me. Without the shoeboxes full of ordered letters, without the painstaking family trees drawn up by my grandfather, I would never have threaded my way out of the tangle.

I didn’t want to write Norman Moore’s biography. His was a marvellous life, and arguably an important one – ‘He is a very good representative of an environment and a society which has now passed, and without him the history of the [late Victorian] age would be incomplete,’ wrote a younger colleague of his – but my mind isn’t scientific enough to do justice to his medical career, or scholarly enough to follow his antiquarian researches. I wanted, instead, to piece together the whole picture, explore the context in which he and Milicent and the others lived their lives, at Hancox and elsewhere. I wanted to take a good look at the forebears who peopled my childhood imaginings; I wanted to see them move, hear them talk. This is a book about a house, but it’s also about what the house holds in storage, the human stories that are hidden in those shelves and trunks and shoeboxes. Every little thing in the house is a clue to somebody’s story. As Norman Moore himself wrote to his first wife, Amy, ‘These little bits of driftwood washed up on the beach of present time from the vast illimitable ocean of the past always touch me.’

I was unsystematic at first, noting things in no particular order, imagining this book as a series of vignettes rather than a full narrative, but the more I unearthed, the more I understood how it all hung together. Marriages, love affairs, bereavements, triumphs, failures, travels, illnesses, friendships, rivalries – I had access to the minutiae of the lives of my forebears, even to the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the animals they kept. And to it all clung the indefinable glamour of the past.

An archive such as the one Hancox holds won’t ever be gathered again. The lives I’ve written about span the best-documented age in our history. The formidable Victorian postal system meant that a letter written in London at breakfast time would arrive by lunch time in Sussex; the penny post meant that everyone could afford to use it. Now, of course, we send emails or make telephone calls; unlike these, letters survive, especially in a highly literate age, when the written word was respected. These post-Romantics believed that expressing their thoughts and feelings in writing was the right thing to do. The affordability of domestic servants meant that the upper middle classes to which my family belonged had enough leisure to write, diaries as well as letters. They sketched, because they wanted to record what they saw, and taking photographs was still expensive and rather complicated. They kept their sketches so that they could discuss them with other people. When photographs were taken, their relative rarity meant that they were reverently stored in albums rather than left to languish in the depths of a computer.

We have a far more intimate knowledge of our Victorian and Edwardian past than we do of that of any earlier age, and no future generation will have anything like so full a picture of us, thanks to our throwaway habits. ‘I am myself but I am more. I have received a sort of trust for my dead ancestors,’ wrote Norman, again to Amy, and that’s just how I feel. This book is my attempt to acknowledge that trust, to make sense of the limitless wealth of evidence that, washed up from the ocean of the past, has gathered under this roof, and to breathe life into the men and women who left it there for me to find.

HANCOX

1. ‘Except the Lord build the house …’

A carved inscription, set into the panelling, runs the length of our dining-room wall: NISI DOMINUS ÆDIFICAVERIT DOMUM IN VANUM LABORAVERUNT QUI ÆDIFICANT EAM. My great-grandfather, Norman Moore, chose the Clementine Vulgate version of this line from the 127th Psalm: ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.’

Three letters are picked out in gold – N, M, M, standing for Norman and Milicent Moore. The letters that signify the year the inscription was made are larger than the others – MCMVII (1907). The panels bearing the inscription were made in London by an East End woodcarver Milicent had come to know in the course of her mission work at the settlement in Bethnal Green; my grandfather, Norman’s son Alan, brought them down on the train from London and walked the four miles from Robertsbridge station to Hancox with them tied in a bundle on his back. The work cost £3.10/–, which even in 1907 seemed a bargain.

1907 was the year in which Norman and Milicent Moore moved into Hancox. (Norman is always referred to in the family as ‘NM’, so I’ll do the same, not least to distinguish him from my uncle, another Norman Moore.) The association of Hancox with the family goes back a little further, to 1888, long before Milicent’s marriage to NM. Milicent Ludlow, then only twenty, and her older sister, Mabel, were the only survivors of their immediate family; both parents and two brothers predeceased them. The girls had inherited plenty of money, but they had no home; Yotes Court, the grand house in Kent in which they had been brought up, was only rented. Mabel had suffered a serious mental breakdown in her early twenties. Though she had officially recovered, when it was decided that the two sisters should set up home together the burden of responsibility was inevitably placed on the young shoulders of the more stable Milicent. Early in 1888 they started househunting, and by July they had found Hancox. They rented it, in Milicent’s name, from Earl de la Warr.

Family associations drew them to this corner of East Sussex. Their late mother’s family, the Leigh Smiths, had inhabited the area since the 1820s, and Mabel and Milicent had spent many holidays with these aunts, uncles and cousins. There were plenty more cousins in London, and the girls could have taken a house there, but fresh air and physical exercise were vital to Mabel’s well-being. She was a fearless huntswoman, a skilful tennis player and an enthusiastic cyclist; strenuous exertion was the best way of keeping her mental demons at bay. So Sussex it was. Hancox provided stabling for Mabel’s hunters, a ready-made social network, and picturesque opportunities for watercolour sketching, a passion which Mabel and Milicent shared with most female members of their extended family.

They had been at Hancox for two apparently harmonious years when Mabel accepted an offer of marriage. Her fiancé was a lieutenant in the 9th Bengal Lancers. His name was Ludlow Coape Smith; he was related to Mabel through both her father’s and her mother’s families, and on his marriage he changed his name, strikingly, to Ludlow Coape Ludlow. The wedding took place in March 1891. In October, Mabel and Ludlow set off for India, leaving 23-year-old Milicent as head of the Hancox household.

Not only was Milicent undaunted by the prospect of running the large house and its grounds single-handed, she immediately took on additional challenges. She bought the house from Lord de la Warr – he had taken out twenty-three mortgages on it, so he must have been glad to get rid of it. The tenancy of Hancox farm was due to expire. Milicent searched, briefly, for a new tenant, but the hunt was fruitless. On 1 December 1891 she noted calmly in her diary, ‘I heard that Crump would not take the farm – so must farm it myself.’ Her complete lack of training or experience troubled her not at all. ‘Milicent talked as if the world was hers,’ her future husband had once unflatteringly remarked.

Milicent’s time in sole charge proved short. Mabel and Ludlow gave up on India after only a few months and returned to Hancox in 1892, assuming that they would be received with open arms. Perhaps because Ludlow was a cousin as well as a brother-in-law, no one foresaw any difficulties with this triangular family structure. Ludlow, who was quietly ducking out of a military career on the grounds of poor health, was eager to be of use. He managed the farm jointly with Milicent, but he had no more expertise than she – rather less, even – and expensive mistakes were made. The Ludlows produced four children in brisk succession; in the wake of childbirth Mabel’s mental health began to deteriorate.

Milicent found her independence compromised and her enjoyment of rural life curtailed by domestic cares that were not strictly her responsibility. She was strong-willed and courageous, possibly ruthless, and she made a snap decision. Family legend says that one morning in 1900, at breakfast, Milicent announced to Mabel and Ludlow that she had let Hancox to the Church of England Temperance Society. It was to be used as a drying-out home for ‘inebriates’. The Ludlows had no option but to pack their bags.

For some years, Milicent had divided her time between Hancox and Bethnal Green, where she worked at St Margaret’s, a branch of the Oxford House settlement set up for the welfare and education of East End girls. Once the Temperance Society had taken Hancox, ‘St Mag’s’ became her main base. But she also spent a lot of time with her cousin Amy, who was dying of tuberculosis. Amy was the first wife of NM. Milicent became such an integral part of the afflicted family that it is not surprising that in 1903, two years after Amy’s death, NM asked Milicent to marry him.

On her marriage, Milicent left St Mag’s, though she continued to some extent with her good works for the settlement. She became mistress of 94 Gloucester Place, NM’s large, rented house in Marylebone. NM’s life as one of the country’s leading physicians was extremely busy, but Milicent, small, wiry, adventurous and energetic, threw herself eagerly into her new role as hostess, housekeeper, amanuensis and stepmother. Her reverence for her husband and his profession was boundless; everything was organized for his convenience and comfort. His work tied him to St Bartholomew’s Hospital during the week, but Milicent worried about what would now be called his stress levels. The need was increasingly felt for a country retreat. It made sense to reclaim Hancox from the inebriates.

When NM was sixteen years old, he had walked from his home in suburban Manchester to admire the collection of stuffed birds and beasts at Walton Hall, near Wakefield in Yorkshire. NM’s fascination with natural history began early and remained with him all his life. The great naturalist Charles Waterton, the squire of Walton Hall and owner and stuffer of the creatures NM had come to inspect, was immediately taken with the spirited and well-informed boy. Despite the great disparity in their ages – Waterton was eighty-one when they met – the two became firm friends. Walton Hall was heaven on earth to NM. Waterton had turned its park into the first bird sanctuary in England; no gun was to be fired within its high walls – walls paid for, said Waterton, with the wine he didn’t drink.

By the side of the ancient ‘wanderer’, as Waterton named himself, the young NM’s understanding of natural history grew apace. NM had never met his own father; the friendship assuaged a need. Fragments of the old man’s conversation would come back to NM in later years – ‘All he said seemed to me true and good.’ One such memory was of Waterton saying, ‘I hope when you grow old you will manage to have a little land of your own & you’ll sit in the sun & now & then think of me.’ All his adult life, NM, impecunious, frantically busy and endlessly curious, had moved from place to place. Bart’s had been more of a home to him than anywhere else – he had never owned a house. Now, in 1907, at the age of sixty, he moved into Hancox, put down roots, sat in the sun and thought of his old friend.

Hancox existed by 1433. The name John Handcocks occurs in records of 1492, so it seems likely that the name derives from the surname of an early owner. It is common locally to find houses thus named. The ‘x’ ending also seems to be a local quirk; Lavix, Platnix, Glorix are all place names found in the area.

When Milicent Ludlow first set foot in the place in 1888, Hancox was half in the small village of Whatlington and half in Sedlescombe, its bigger and more prosperous neighbour. It is the largest medieval ‘hall-place’ still in existence in the joint parishes. The boundary between the two villages used to run right through what is now our dining room. The old custom of ‘beating the bounds’ was kept up until 1944; once every seven years the male inhabitants of the parish would walk all round its margins, the older ones showing the young boys the way, pointing out landmarks, crashing through hedges, even ducking them in a ditch or a pond when one came in handy to imprint the boundaries on their minds. This was an age-old way of ensuring that villagers knew exactly what constituted their parish, a rite-of-passage left over from the days before maps were generally available, or even before they existed. When the bound-beaters reached Hancox, they made their way through the middle of the great barn, then knocked at our door for permission to trudge through the dining room. They were given tea and buns. When my parents married in Sedlescombe church in 1955, my grandfather told my mother to sleep in the south-east end of the house the night before the wedding so that she was on the Sedlescombe side of the parish boundary. In 1960 the boundaries were redrawn, and Hancox is now firmly in Whatlington.

The first owner about whom more than a name is known is John Dounton, a lawyer and steward of Battle Manor, who made extensions and alterations to the house in 1569. The original medieval high-roofed hall was divided into separate floors; the upper storey hides the crown-post and roof timbers, though the fine ornamental timbers of the old hall are still visible. On some of the timbers there are painted Roman numerals. These told the builders which piece went where, like flat-pack instructions. The timbers were erected ‘in the green’; as they dried out, they shrank and warped, which is what gives Tudor houses their wavy, non-symmetrical, organic look.

The Dounton family was important enough to have a coat of arms. When John Dounton owned Hancox, ‘3 score and ten acres of land’ went with it. The general scale of things makes it a gentleman’s house rather than an aristocrat’s. Dounton’s heiress was his daughter Joan, who married John Sackville in 1589. This was the beginning of the Sackville connection with Hancox, which lasted for three hundred years, until Milicent took over. John and Joan Sackville lived here after their marriage, apparently happily co-existing with Joan’s father. They produced four sons and two daughters, and presumably felt a little cramped, for they made two major alterations. First, a central chimney and fireplace were installed and a ceiling inserted across the great hall, to join the upper storeys already in existence on either side of it. Second, what was virtually a second house was added, altering the rectangular ground plan to an F shape. These Sackvilles were a branch of the important Kentish family, owners of the colossal house, Knole, near Sevenoaks. Knole, famously, has 365 rooms, as many as there are days in the year. Though Hancox was of course on a very much smaller scale, John and Joan’s aim seems to have been to make it one of the most imposing houses in the neighbourhood.

John Sackville died in 1620. His son Thomas succeeded to Hancox and to the flourishing and lucrative furnace situated nearby, off Brede Lane. In those days, before the Industrial Revolution took industry to the coal fields, East Sussex was the chief area in the country for ironworking. There was iron in the soil and, as Sussex was the most thickly wooded county, plenty to burn in the furnaces. There is a local legend that our streams run red with the blood of the men killed at the Battle of Hastings, but of course they actually take their rusty colour from the iron.

Iron helped make Thomas Sackville a prosperous man. By 1626 he had been created a Knight of the Bath and a Justice of the Peace. His wife, Elizabeth, provided him with four living sons and five daughters; two other babies died in infancy. When Elizabeth died (in childbirth, not surprisingly), Thomas remarried and sired another four children. At this time the interior of Hancox was mainly panelled; the panelling would have been brightly painted and patterned.

Thomas’s son John succeeded to the property but died childless. His brother, another Thomas, inherited. Colonel Thomas Sackville was perhaps the most interesting of the Hancox Sackvilles. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, aged fifteen, later joined the army, and fought for the Royalist cause in the Civil War. Sussex, however, was predominantly on the side of the Parliamentarians, and Sackville’s forge and furnace off Brede Lane were commandeered by Roundhead forces. Thomas left the King’s employ and went to France. When he returned to England to claim his inheritance he was fined £400.

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 Thomas became a Justice of the Peace and, eventually, a Member of Parliament for East Grinstead. He sold the furnace, and in 1676 he let Hancox for thirteen years at £135 per annum to Thomas Piers of Ewhurst. The colonel lived thereafter at one of his other, smaller, Sedlescombe houses. I assume that by letting Hancox he was hoping to economize by ‘down-sizing’.

In the county archive is a list of ‘fixtures and fittings’ drawn up at the time when Hancox was let, 24 October 1676: ‘a schedule of particulars of such goods as were left by the above named Thomas Sackvill in the capitall mesuage mentioned to be devised by him to the above named Thomas Piers in and by the indenture whereunto this is annexed’. It seems that Sackville took his portable furniture with him; this is a list of items of use and value which Thomas Piers would have to account for at the end of his tenancy. The handwritten document is hard to read, but it provides a rare picture of seventeenth-century household items and the uses to which rooms were put:

First in the kitchen, one little iron furnace one little brasse furnace, one fender of wrought iron, one rack of cast iron for the stove.

Item in the brewhouse two iron furnaces, one iron oven dore & one cooler of firr boords.

Item in the milkhouse one old table with a frame two shelves of firr boords and two little shelves of oaken boords.

Item in the Larder two rows of old shelves round the roome …

Item in the Stourhouse two cupboards three shelves and one candle shelf.

Item in the Great Parlour one iron plate …

Item in the Buttery one cupboard for glasses …

Item in the matted chamber one plate and one plate for the hearth …

Other rooms listed are the Lundry (laundry), the Pastry (maybe Pantry, but it really does look like ‘pastry’), the chamber over the Bakehouse, the Little Parlour, the closet and the kitchen chamber. Some of these rooms are completely obvious to me and have not changed their function since the seventeenth century or earlier. Others I can’t identify. The ‘kitchen chamber’ is a small space high in one corner of the kitchen accessible only by a ladder; it must have been where servants slept. Though cramped, it would at least have been relatively warm. Now it is used only by spiders. There are still two iron furnaces in the brewhouse. My larder still has ‘two rows of old shelves round the roome’, and I have no reason to think they are not the ones on the list.

The ‘plates’ mentioned must be firebacks or braziers. The firebacks are still in place and likely to remain so; they are impossibly heavy. The ironware presumably all came from the Brede furnace. The ‘firr’ (pine) boards were prized above the oak ones because oaks grew all over the place, but ‘firr’ would have been brought at considerable expense from the Baltic. The slow-growing wood was hard and dense and didn’t rot.

Colonel Sackville does not seem to have returned to Hancox, which he eventually sold to his cousin Richard. Richard Sackville was paying rates for Hancox in 1708 but disappears from view by 1712, to be replaced by his brother Charles, Earl of Dorset.

The Earl of Dorset was far too grand to live at Hancox. For the next hundred and fifty years it was let to tenant farmers. Nicholls, Igglesdon, Hook, Russell, Moses Cloke – the names succeed each other rapidly until the Ades family farmed there for three generations. During their long tenancy a drawing of Hancox was made, dated 1785 and entitled ‘Seddlescombe Place’. It shows the Jacobean wings, free-standing chimney and oriel windows, now gone. The core of the house is recognizably the same, and you can see the brewhouse and the garden walls, but the feeling of the drawing is very different to that of Hancox today. It’s all open and spacious, with only one large tree (an elm?) anywhere near the house. Nowadays, trees crowd and jostle all around – sweet chestnut, yews, sycamores, oaks, hollies, fruit trees, Milicent’s rows of Scots pines.

In the early nineteenth century, while the third generation of Ades lived there, the two Jacobean wings were pulled down, the plastered exterior walls were covered with hanging tiles and the front was faced with grey cement, which is now dropping off in large lumps. The Sackville crest over the front door, a coronet composed of a fleur-de-lys with a star above, was covered by a porch.

The Ades’ tenancy ended abruptly. This may have been for political reasons. The early decades of the nineteenth century were a time of agrarian unrest. When a local labourer was accused of rick-burning and inciting a riot, Spencer Ades, tenant of Hancox, a well-to-do yeoman and a ‘righteous man’, held a meeting at Hancox in support of the accused. Suddenly Lord de la Warr declined to renew the Ades’ lease. I like to think of Hancox as having been a site of radical agitation, however fleetingly.

The Ades family was succeeded by John Symes, then John Swift, and in 1865 by Albert Apps, who by 1870 was in arrears with his rent. The last of the tenant farmers boasted to Milicent that he’d stripped out four wagonloads of old panelling and burned the lot. It still pains me to think of that. The panelling that was allowed to remain had been plastered over. During the 1890s Milicent made a good many alterations, most importantly tacking on an enormous lump of a drawing room with two bedrooms above it. In 1907 she and NM set about clearing up after the ravages the inebriates had wrought and turning the house into both a family home and a fit place for NM, once a poor Irish boy, now an eminent physician and man of letters, to study, exercise and entertain his many friends.

The process of removing the inebriates from Hancox began early in 1907. Milicent, struck down by a lung haemorrhage the year before, spent the winter at Davos in Switzerland, wrapped in furs on the hotel balcony. In those days before the discovery of penicillin, the only treatment for TB was fresh, clean air and a strengthening diet. NM wrote to her daily, sometimes twice daily; his affectionate letters constantly urge Milicent to fatten herself up:

11.2.07

Swallow swallow swallow

Never be your inside hollow

Outside clothed in garbs of silk

Inside filled with mugs of milk.

Having lost his first wife, Amy, to the same disease six years earlier, his anxiety for Milicent must have been acute. He cheered both of them with his hopes for their future life at Hancox:

22.02.07

I like to think of our little country seat & hope we may have many a joyful day there together my own dear Mil.

23.03.07

I think it would be nice to encourage birds in our little territory … If when the Winters [tenant farmers] lease falls in we were to take the whole farm we might make a wonderful bird place in a few years.

(This plan did not materialize. The Winters continued as tenants of Hancox Farm until the 1970s; however, the farm has always been rich in bird life.)

On 16 March, NM and his elder son from his first marriage, Alan, then twenty-five, went down to Hancox to see how the land lay. That evening, despite a long and busy day, NM wrote a full account to Milicent. They caught the train from Charing Cross, travelled third class to Robertsbridge and walked:

by that nice old up hill & down dale & by woods & Poppinghole Lane road to Whatlington. We left our coats at the Royal Oak & went straight to Hancox. There are only nineteen drunkards there now. Mr Gott [the superintendent] came & we went in. The house is in a very disordered and rather dirty state. It will want papering throughout … Mr Gott says the inebriates could not paint it but seems quite to understand that it must be painted throughout. The big new room is a chapel … & it requires a great deal of hyssop. [In other words, it smelled bad.] Was a sort of brown ribbed paper dado round it in your time. If so it looks horrible now. They are scraping the coloured paper off the windows. [Put there to imitate stained glass?] … What a lovely old staircase there is. I did not know of it. Upstairs all is horrible at present … I almost think every room upstairs should be fumigated with sulphur … The garden looks well & it is a dear place & my own I shall like to be there with you.

Alan and I then inspected the fir trees 91 of the 100 are doing well. George [George Dann, tenant of two of the fields and landlord of the Royal Oak] is laying soot on that field. Then we had luncheon. Gott & Mrs Gott begged us to lunch with them but we were very glad we had ordered food at the inn. Roast beef, two kinds of potato, cauliflower & bread & butter pudding.

At 2.30 we rose & walked down to the Hancox stream across the fields … & then up the hill to Sedlescomb & looked in its church a sadly restored place & then by way of Oaklands Park to Crowham.

Crowham Manor, Westfield, had been the childhood home of Amy, NM’s first wife. Her parents Willy and Jenny Leigh Smith – Milicent’s uncle and aunt – still lived there with their unmarried offspring, Roddy, Bella and Willy junior. Before she bought Hancox, Crowham, a large, sleepy old house sitting deep in its own farmland, had been almost a second home for Milicent, and she was very close to her cousins. Reading this letter huddled on her Swiss balcony, Milicent would have been pleased to learn of the warm reception the Crowhamites gave NM, for it had not always been thus: ‘They gave us eggs & a noble tea … pressed us to stay the night but we couldn’t & so started back at five minutes to six.’ Willy junior, nearly forty but never to shrug off his ‘junior’ status and, according to NM, grown ‘hugely fat 16 stone I should say,’ walked with them to the foot of the Forge Wood, then NM and Alan trudged on:

to Battle station where we arrived at 7.20 so it took us 1 hr 25 m from Crowham. Thus you see we had three good walks. Alan walked well so much better than he used & liked it & was in high spirits & with his great coat on his arm ran at a five barred gate & jumped it clear with ease … It was a grey & occasional slight showery day & a tremendous south east wind blowing but in the deep lanes it was quite warm. Very few wild flowers to be seen – Here are the only three primroses I saw … even dogs mercury was not out but we saw a few dashes of catkins in the woods.

Alan had arranged for a telegram to arrive about the boat race as he generally sends one to Aunt Jenny [his grandmother]. It came while we were at tea & we cheered that Cambridge had won … I like Sussex my own Mil. Oh I am glad you weigh 13lbs more drink milk & make it a stone. A little Milicent is a good thing more Milicent is a better thing & still more Milicent a still better thing in fact you cannot have too much of so good a thing as Milicent … Goodnight now my own dearest Mil.

This letter, of which I have quoted less than half, is indicative of the energy that enabled NM to accomplish the work of ten men in a lifetime. The walks he describes amount to more than fifteen miles; more than enough in themselves to tax the strength of most sixty-year-olds, let alone the train journeys, the inspection of Hancox, the family tea at Crowham and the writing of the letter itself.

Work got under way once the inebriates had left – there’s no record of what became of them. The ground floor, which had been divided up into many little rooms, was opened up and simplified into library, dining room and front hall, with a little curtained section called the parlour. Once Milicent had returned from Switzerland in better health, she and Alan made regular trips to inspect the work. Her historically minded stepson was excited by the discovery of a recess large enough to hide smuggled goods concealed by a panel. Smuggling had flourished in Sussex for centuries, with landowners, magistrates and clergy involved in it as well as tradesmen and labourers; it was a well-organized industry with numerous hideouts. Smuggled goods could easily be brought to Sedlescombe, which is only six miles from the coast, by means of the tidal River Brede, now a sluggish stream but once a busy thoroughfare. Another welcome discovery had been made when one of the inebriates stumbled and fell heavily against the dining-room wall, causing the ancient deal panelling to be revealed beneath Victorian wallpaper over sacking. Alan and Milicent attacked the wallpaper with knives and found that much of the ground floor was panelled. Restoration was carried out wherever possible, but a new wall of panelling was commissioned for the division between the dining room and the library. This was where the ‘Nisi dominus …’ chronograph was to go.

Another find was a fine wooden pillar, supporting a ceiling beam. It had been plastered over. The pillar was found to be thirteenth century, a survivor, presumably, of Hancox’s first, medieval, incarnation. It stands in the middle of our dining room, a roof-tree, the centre of the house. Attached to its top is a plaster-of-Paris imp, a replica of the imp of Lincoln Cathedral, bought by NM as a souvenir during his undergraduate days. The grinning bug-eyed creature has amused or alarmed four generations of children. He became a casualty of war; in 1944 a doodlebug shook the house so severely that the imp’s leg fell off. But still he grins on, undaunted, ornamented by horns of holly at Christmas.

A wag had stuck a notice saying ‘Dipsomania Hall’ on the front gate but Milicent and NM were excited by the house, and moved in long before it was ready. They spent their first night together there on 3 September 1907. NM at once began to keep a gardening notebook, noting the plants sent by his friend Miss Willmott, the great gardener of Warley Place. He bought three or four small fields – glebe land – to round off the property. He hung the parlour with handwoven curtains from the William Morris workshop, installed a fireback decorated with anchors and dated 1588, the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the gift of a grateful patient he had successfully treated for gonorrhoea. Then he settled down to cultivate, at last, a sense of home.

2. ‘Still she talks and laughs!’

What made Milicent Ludlow decide to buy such a place as Hancox? It was large, dilapidated, complicated and expensive to run. It hardly seems the obvious choice for a very young single woman. But in 1891 Milicent bought not only the house but the farm as well. She set about enlarging the house. She radically restructured the garden. She built or restored several cottages on the farm. And – perhaps most surprising of all – she decided she would be the chief manager of the farm itself.

History books and works of fiction still encourage us to think of Victorian girls as emotionally and financially dependent on men, undereducated, overprotected, physically frail. Milicent Ludlow, it seems, conformed to no stereotype. She came from a family of pioneering women and of men who took pride in them. On the face of it, her childhood had been privileged – plenty of money, plenty of space, plenty of adult attention – but her young life had been beset by tragedy. That’s an overused word, but it’s not too strong in this instance. Milicent’s misfortunes seem to have bred in her a stubborn independence, a brave though possibly blinkered attitude that led her to see no difficulty in organizing building projects and farm management without the slightest architectural or agricultural training.

Milicent died in 1947, twelve years before I was born, but I have a kind of folk memory of her, born of photographs and grown-up conversations. I see her standing on the garden steps under the clematis montana, bony in black with a wide brimmed hat and something in her hand that is either a rolled umbrella or a walking stick. After her husband’s death she became Milicent, Lady Moore; Rose Smith, her lady’s maid, who lived on to become our cleaner, called her ‘Milicent Lady’, which changed itself for us children to ‘Innocent Lady’.

Milicent was the youngest of the four children of Major-General John Ludlow and his wife Bella, née Leigh Smith. ‘The General’, as Milicent’s father was (approvingly) known in the family, came from a distinguished military line. He was a descendant of Edmund Ludlow MP, who had fought for the Parliamentarian cause, was imprisoned several times, and signed King Charles I’s death warrant – the fourteen-year-old Milicent was pleased to spot the signature when she visited Madame Tussaud’s.

The General’s father had had a distinguished career in the Indian Army and was the model for Colonel Newcome in Thackeray’s best-selling novel of 1855, The Newcomes