Beware Falling Chimneys
Tudor buildings are famous for the height and intricacy of their chimneys. West Horsley Place is a house that combines Tudor sections with a medieval hall at its core, dating to around 1425, and additions through to the mid-nineteenth century. The house hit the headlines in 2014 when it was unexpectedly inherited by Bamber Gascoigne - for many decades, the much-loved host of TV’s University Challenge. Gascoigne’s aunt lived at West Horsley Place until she died, aged 99. During the last years of her life, little was done to maintain and restore the house and she had largely retreated to a five room flat at the centre of the building.
As a result, by 2014 the house was on English Heritage’s Heritage at Risk register and was, in the words of Country Life’s John Goodall, “in a parlous condition”. Bamber Gascoigne decided to sell all the contents which had no significance to the history of the house, raising sufficient funds to establish a charitable trust. Today, the West Horsley Place Trust is responsible for restoring the house and running it as a centre for the arts. The Trust’s first task was to stabilise the building and deal with the most pressing repair jobs. Ten years on and some of that work needs to be revisited. A prime example is a tall layered brick chimneystack – Chimney No.6 - on the North West corner of the building.
Chimney No. 6 is built against a timbered wall which dates to around 1444, one of the earliest parts of the house. The chimneystack itself is later, maybe part of improvements made by Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter (1498-1538), a favourite of Henry VIII until the King turned against him and had him executed for treason in 1538. If the chimney belongs to the years when Henry Courtenay lived here - or even earlier - it was standing when King Henry and his entourage visited in 1533 to be entertained by hunting, music and a grand feast. The menu from this visit survives and includes dishes of heron, stork, sturgeon and sparrow, while an inventory, taken at Henry Courtenay’s death, records a large number of musical instruments, recapturing a little of the extravagant festivities in the Great Hall.
West Horsley Place in the 1500s
By 2014, the area around the chimney had become the site of significant water damage. Decades when failing gutters allowed water to pour down the wall, had soaked the ground at the base of the chimney which, in turn, had destabilised the whole wall and the chimney stack in particular. Emergency repairs to the guttering undertaken nearly ten years ago have allowed the ground and brickwork to dry out and the time is now right to continue urgent repairs to the chimney stack. The HHF grant will help the West Horsley Place Trust to tackle this repair which will see the stack repointed, degraded brickwork repaired, a chimney pot and downpipes replaced in addition to repair to the adjoining roof and new leadwork.
The history of the chimneys at West Horsley Place has not always had such happy endings. It was a chimney crashing through the roof onto her bed that killed the lady of the house, Lady Penelope Nicholas, as she lay sleeping during the Great Storm of 1703. She left behind her husband, Sir John Nicholas, and their four children, the youngest of whom was only five years old. Twenty-one people in London and the Right Rev. Bishop Richard Kidder and his wife, at The Bishop’s Palace in Wells, suffered the same fate on the same night; a macabre lesson in the perils of not maintaining your chimneys.
