Chelmsford & District National Trust Supporter Group

Report by Keith Otter

Today’s outing from Liverpool was to Speke Hall. This elegant Tudor mansion is set in extensive grounds. Pat and I booked to go on a tour of the house at 12:05. Since we had time to spare, we looked at some of the grounds first.

From the entrance to the estate we walked along the path to the side of the house and then round it, both to admire it and to get oriented. We then made the short way through a wooded area to the Secret Garden. This turned out to be a wooded dell. By following the path all the way round we exited through a tunnel on to the North Lawn.

There was only a few minutes’ wait before the guide was due to meet the tour party at noon. We waited with others on the Moat Bridge as instructed on our tour tickets. The Bridge leads to the main house entrance. The photograph accompanying this paragraph is of the gable above. I’ve had to reduce the size of the photo to fit this page, so it is difficult to make out the beautiful carving of the wood. There is a small carved head immediately above the window.

The Speke estate is recorded in the Domesday Book. There was an earlier mansion on the site. The current building was begun in Tudor times. It is a wood-framed construction, built without nails. Some of the timbers have warped, a fact made obvious by the occasional slanting window or floor. The southern range was built first, followed by two shorter side wings at right angles, giving the building a U shape. The north range was added later in the same style, creating an inner courtyard. There are two yew trees in the courtyard, known as Adam and Eve. Adam is the older of the two and may predate the current building. Our guide passed on a remark by one of her younger visitors, that you can tell which one is Adam because “Adam is thicker than Eve.”

The Norris family assumed ownership of Speke Hall through marriage at the end of the 13th century. Construction of the current building began in 1490. It was expropriated by Parliament in the Commonwealth period but returned to the Norris family following the Restoration. It then remained in their ownership until 1797, when it was sold to Richard Watt. The Watt family retained ownership until it passed to the National Trust in 1942 following the death of the last family member.

Our guide, attired in an elegant grey Victorian-style dress, took us round the house. She told us about the scandal in Victorian times when (horror of horrors!) the then owner married a housemaid! The Watt line ended with their daughter, who never married.

The Norris and Watts families may have owned the property in succession for nearly 700 years but that does not mean they were in occupation all that time. There were periods when it was let to tenants and times when it was vacant and locals made use of it. Apparently at one point the Great Parlour was used to house cattle!

Successive legal occupants have put their mark on the building, particularly in the last two centuries by bringing in furniture they liked. There is a corridor running through all four wings of the house. At least part of this retains early William Morris wallpaper, purchased by the last member of the Watt family during her occupation. There are armorial bearings in some of the windows but apparently the Watts purchased these to impress visitors; they don’t actually have any connection with the family.

Our guide took us upstairs to look the bedroom used by the last family member, Adelaide Watt. It was Adelaide who introduced Victorian innovations, including central heating and a bathroom next to her bedroom. The bathroom looks rather stark by modern standards.

In a way it was strange that a single lady should choose to occupy that particular bedroom. There is a legend that, when the house was owned by the Norris family, a female family member with a young baby, finding life intolerable, threw her baby out of the window to its death and then went down to the Great Hall and killed herself. Her ghost is said to stand at the window holding her baby.

However, this is purely a legend with no basis in fact. The lady in question lived into her sixties with surviving heirs. Our guide thought the story had been started to stop the local children approaching the building too closely.

The tour lasted about an hour, by which time the Hall was open to the general public. Pat and I set off to walk round the grounds.

We set off but didn’t get very far before is started pouring with rain. We sheltered under trees for a while and then decided to go back into the house to keep dry. We were able to visit some of the ground floor rooms we had not seen on the tour and also some of the other bedrooms upstairs. In each room there was a volunteer ready to answer questions. These were most helpful. The volunteer in one of the upstairs bedroom showed us the hidden ladder giving access to the Priest’s Hole, used to hide Catholic priests from prying soldiers in the days when Catholicism was banned but the Norris family continued to follow “the old faith”.

When we emerged it had stopped raining. We walked the length of the Bund. This is a raised mound that runs round the eastern and southern boundaries of the estate and ends near the entrance. We wondered when and why it had been constructed. Presumably it was a defence of some kind. For the most part it is now bordered by a wood on the estate side and mature trees on the other side. There are spots where one can look at the Mersey and there are views of the old Liverpool airfield and the new airport.

Coming down from the Bund, we visited the restaurant for a pot of tea and a scone before joining the rest of the group back at the coach for the return to our hotel.