1900s-1945
Among the documents recently handed to the local history archive by Robin Hope-Morley are two plans of building works carried out at Hall Place, both dated May 1941. Their full title is intriguing: 'Proposed Temporary Conversion of Workshop Building into Living Accommodation for Lord Hollenden'. Why would the lord of the manor need a converted workshop to live in? The answer lies in the events of the first two years of the war.
When evacuation began in September 1939, children arrived in the village from two Roman Catholic schools in central London. A lady living at Park House took it upon herself to persuade local households to open their doors to the youngsters. Families from Kensington remained here for the whole of the war, while those from Victoria stayed for under a year. One of the evacuees, Gladys Hale, was seven years old in October 1939 and was initially lodged with the Head Gardener, Mr Ferguson. She was later invited up to Hall Place itself to watch a film, an occasion she never forgot: two flunkies in uniform stood on either side of the staircase as the guests arrived, and Lady Hollenden presented her with coloured ribbons wrapped in tissue paper. At that stage, in October 1939, Lord and Lady Hollenden were still in residence at Hall Place.
Everything changed the following year. A serious fire in 1940 destroyed around a third of Hall Place's main living accommodation, leaving the family short of usable rooms. The solution, as the 1941 plans show, was to press an outbuilding into service as temporary accommodation.
The drawings were prepared by R. Woodhams & Son, constructional engineers based locally. The building they were asked to convert was a long, narrow one: 124 feet in length, roughly 38 metres, and just 20 feet, about 6 metres, across. It was no Victorian afterthought either, for it formed part of the original buildings designed by Devey, whose plans of 1873 had labelled it simply 'workshops'. Internally, the rooms ran straight up to the rafters with no ceilings, which must have made the conversion an interesting challenge.
The layout set out on the first plan gives a vivid picture of wartime improvisation. The Estate Office was turned into a bedroom, complete with a WC and bathroom and a dressing room alongside. From there a door led through into a Lounge, a substantial room of nearly thirty feet with a fireplace at its far end. Beyond the Lounge, another door opened into the Dining Room. Curiously, the first scheme showed no kitchen at all, though the second plan remedied that omission with a kitchen added and the arrangement of the rooms slightly altered. Two further bedrooms were positioned at the end of the building nearest the house, in rooms that in earlier days had been used to store bags from the estate shoots.
Whether Lord Hollenden ever actually lived in the converted workshops is another matter. For most of the war he and Lady Hollenden resided at their estate near Dartmouth. Even that refuge was not to last: the United States Army compulsorily purchased the Dartmouth property so that troops could rehearse there ahead of the D-Day landings. It seems fitting, then, that the fine Lounge created in the workshop conversion has found a lasting use, for the Estate still uses it today for shoot lunches, with the fireplace still standing at the far end of the room.
The plans are a wonderful survival: a snapshot of a great house coping with fire and war, a family displaced twice over, and a humble Victorian workshop briefly promoted to gentility.
This article first appeared in the Parish Magazine in May 2016.