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Hoar Cross Hall - Life Below Stairs #35

This week I’ve done a history blog about the servants who lived at Hoar Cross Hall from the 1870s to the 1950s when the Hall became empty. They were an essential part of keeping a big house running but were often not appreciated by the aristocracy as they went about their day to day duties. The life of a servant in Victorian times was a hard one. They had to rise at 5am to clean and light all the fires and dust and polish the floors, then do a day’s work, often not getting to bed much before midnight. No wonder they didn’t live to a great age in those days! By the end of the 19th century there were nearly one and a half million servants; most young girls...

Hoar Cross Hall - Life below stairs #45

This week I’ve done a history blog about the servants who lived at the Hall from the 1870s to the 1950s when the Hall became empty. They were an essential part of keeping a big house running but were often not appreciated by the aristocracy as they went about their day to day duties. The life of a servant in Victorian times was a hard one. They had to rise at 5am to clean and light all the fires and dust and polish the floors, then do a day’s work, often not getting to bed much before midnight. No wonder they didn’t live to a great age in those days! By the end of the 19th century there were nearly one and a half million servants; most young girls went in...

More Tea Vicar? #12

During the long summer holidays it was easy to get bored. As there was no public transport from Hoar Cross and no children living nearby, we three children had to make our own entertainment and we were always having adventures and getting up to mischief – a bit like the Famous Five but without the dog! We would roam around the village or explore the basement. My dad was a hoarder and had kept all sorts of stuff over the years including gas masks and field phones from World War 2. The old Servants Hall was now my dad’s workshop and he spent a lot of time down there restoring antiques to sell. He had one of the field phones in his workshop and the other one w...

The life and times of an upper class family #44

On 11th August 1863, Hugo Francis Meynell Ingram married the Hon. Emily Charlotte, daughter of Sir Charles Wood, Bart, afterwards 1st Viscount Halifax. The Woods were an old gentry family, for many centuries respectable York merchants. They were later to turn grand upon the discovery of coal beneath their ancestral estates. This was the great Barnsley field, with several hundred acres of Britain's deepest and finest coal. Sir Charles Wood was created 1st Viscount Halifax in 1866 and had a very distinguished political career. The family seats of Garrowby, Pocklington and Hickleton (where Emily was born) had been acquired by his father from the Wentworth family; t...

Victorian Society #93

Victorian society was built around Queen Victoria’s reign, loosely between 1820-1914.  It was characterised by a class-based society and Britain being the most powerful empire in the world. Hoar Cross Hall was built in 1870, at the height of the Victorian era, and boasted up to seventy rooms, twenty-five of them for the servants, approximately fifteen for the kitchens and utility areas, leaving around thirty rooms for the family and their guests.  During this time a lot of people, particularly women, went into domestic service and the Housekeeper at the Hall earned about £50 a year, while a housemaid earned £15 a year – quite the difference!  By all ac...

Ghostbusters! #8

GHOSTBUSTERS!       People were always coming to Hoar Cross Hall to either hire the place or to have a look around.  In 1973, because of all the media interest in our ghosts, we had a couple of professional ghost hunters asking to stay over one night to try and find the source of the noises.  They brought cases full of recording equipment and set it all up in one of the attic rooms.  Rather them than me I thought!  Then I had a brilliant idea and went off to tell my brother Gavin all about it.  As mentioned in my first blog the attic and basement had a row of bells which the family used to summon the servants.  Before the three men arrived we spent all...