Story Search Results

What the Butler saw!

...d one and Hoar Cross Hall was no different.  The Ball was held in the Long Gallery and this was the one time when the family mixed with the servants.  With mulled wine flowing freely and mistletoe hung here about, the young ladies would be very excited to be standing near to a young, good looking footman!  Let’s hope they didn’t get up to too much mischief when the butler wasn’t looking!  Don’t miss next week’s instalment:  Gardeners world at Hoar Cross If you would like to follow my story from the beginning, click here and please feel free to share with your friends....

Temple Newsam and the Meynells

...TEMPLE NEWSAM AND THE MEYNELLS:     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 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 had a distinguished political career and they owned family seats at Garrowby, Pocklington, near York and Hickleton, near Doncaster.  They also owned a London house in Belgrave Square....

Alice - the ghost in the mirror

...new home, Hoar Cross Hall, and there it hung over the fireplace in the Library for many decades until the Meynells left in the 1950s. And so herein lies the connection between Alice and the Hall!  Fast forward to the 1990s when Hoar Cross Hall had a new owner, Steve Joynes. He converted the Hall into a Spa Hotel and managed to source a lot of the original furniture from the Victorian era when Emily Meynell (nee Wood) lived there with her husband, Hugo. He found the original mirror which came from Hickleton Hall and now it hangs over the fireplace in the Library, just as it did all those years ago. But it seems that the ghost of Alice may have come with the mi...

The Schoolroom Maid's Story #33

...THE SCHOOLROOM MAID’S STORY:      For the first 75 years of the Hall’s history about 50 servants were employed by the Meynell family in the house and grounds. Among these was a young girl of fifteen who started work in 1920 as a Schoolroom Maid. Her name was Miss Inez Sophia Large and she had connections to Hoar Cross through her grand-parents, William and Mary Tooth, who lived in the village where William was the blacksmith; his smithy was just along from the Meynell public house. He had worked on the ironwork of the Hall during its construction in the 1860s. Inez’s aunt, Constance Madeley, was the wife of the landlord at the Buffalo Inn, in nearby New...

Calendar Girls and Front Covers #7

...CALENDAR GIRLS AND FRONT COVERS During our time at Hoar Cross Hall people would occasionally hire the house for a day’s filming or whatever. During the summer of 1973 a photographer from London hired the house and grounds for a day and he brought two models with him, one English and one German - they were taking photos for a glamour calendar! We children were told to keep right out of the way as they were taking photos in the gardens as well as the house. Naturally we wanted to see everything that was going on and my younger brother Gavin especially was very keen to watch – so much so that he found a pair of binoculars to follow all the proceedings! We mana...

Anyone for tennis? #62

...including Hoar Cross Hall.  However, when we moved there you couldn’t see them at all as the grass had grown long and wild and it looked liked a wilderness.  In fact, we didn’t even know that there were tennis courts until Mrs Meynell told us! Mowing the old tennis courts in 1984   Of course, back in the 1930s the younger members of the Meynell family often played on them during their weekend house parties (see header picture).  One young man who became a close friend of the Meynell family made regular visits to Hoar Cross and recalled the happy times he spent there as “.....the last days of the traditional English country house with weekend pa...