The Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Ockbrook Manor
by Maxwell Craven
Ockbrook Manor was a wonderful old house which one could only describe as ‘multi-period’ having, seemingly a portion of its fabric from virtually every post-modern era. The other thing is, that by being called ‘Manor’, one might assume that it was the capital mansion of an estate going back well into the Medieval period, yet that is not quite true either.
It is well known that Ockbrook was granted by William I to Geoffrey Hanselin, from whom the estate had passed, by 1290, to Hugh, 1st Lord Bardolph, whose son was recorded as having a park there. The Lords Bardolph lived at Wormegay in Norfolk as their principal seat, but the fact that they had a park presumably suggests that they used Ockbrook as a hunting lodge. At some stage, too, much of the land had been granted by the Hanselins to Dale Abbey. In 1358 John, 3rd Lord Bardolph, sold the manorial rights and his Dale tenancy to Sir Godfrey Foljambe of Tideswell, whose seat and prolific lead interests remained in the north of the county.
This suggests that any hunting lodge at Ockbrook was either abandoned or let, either to a bailiff or to a sub-tenant, although any such detail remains elusive. The Foljambes’ estates passed eventually to Yorkshire grandee Sir William Plumpton, who died in 1481 from whom Ockbrook came to Sir Thomas Seymour. He sold it to Sir Andrew Windsor, created 1st Lord Windsor (ancestor of the present Earl of Plymouth) and in due time, Frederick, 4th Lord Windsor, succeeding to the family estates in 1559, sold the manorial rights to the resident freeholders of the village. Meanwhile, when Dale Abbey was dissolved in 1536, their land at Ockbrook was acquired by Francis Pole of Langley whose posterity also sold it to the Stanhopes of Elvaston.
The freeholders who bought the land and shares of the manor from Lord Windsor included several local families who remained in the village until the early 20th century: Battelle, Columbell, Piggen and Windley.
The purchasers of the land on which stood the original manor house (and three shares of the manorial rights) were the Piggens, They almost certainly built the first residential capital mansion on the site – although whether their new house actually stood on the ancient site is impossible to tell – and a timber box-framed wing remained embedded in the fabric until the house was eventually demolished dated from this mid-Tudor period. The site was on the NE angle of the junction between Church Lane, The Riddings and Bare Lane, 150 yards due north of the church, a proximity that might suggest that it was indeed built on the ancient manorial site.
We get an indication of the size of the house from the 1664 hearth tax record, which shows Richard Piggen assessed for tax on three hearths, which suggests something pretty modest: possibly there was still the great hall, open to the rafters with a large hearth, a parlour with chamber above providing the other two.
Not long after Richard Piggen’s time, the house was rebuilt and enlarged by his successor in brick, two gabled two storey ranges being added to the SE front between which lay the front door. This probably led into the former great hall, which this rebuilding would have floored over to provide two chambers above it. The new gables were straight and coped with stone and included chimney shafts, latterly drafted by the addition of flat tops raided on stone slabs set on end, giving the skyline a distinct profile.
In 1713 the Keys family of Hopwell Hall acquired Piggen’s three shares of the manorial estate and his land, and incorporated it into their Hopwell estate, and it then descended as a tenanted farm, first to Henry Thornhill and then to Sir Bibye Lake, Bt. who, in 1786, sold the estate to Thomas Pares, a rich Leicester tradesman.
The Pares family were great improvers of their estate, and in the Regency period they rebuilt the old house to improve its viability. They added a short two storey service range and put in sashes where previously there were mullion and transom cross windows with casements, although they left the old timber framed wing alone bar up-grading the original mullioned casements. The reason for this up-grading was not so much to improve it as a farm house, but to make it suitable with a view to letting to Derby businessmen and gentlemen, keen to rent a villa as near as possible to Derby but far enough away from the rapidly increasing smoke and grime of Derby’s foundries.
The first tenant, as it happens, was Bryan Thomas Balguy, the second son of John Balguy of Duffield Park (pronounced ‘bawgy’), a descendant of the Bulguys of Derwent Hall. The father had become an Alfreton coal-owner but was professionally a barrister and a very eminent judge. Bryan Thomas (1785-1857) was also a barrister and in 1818 was appointed Town Clerk of Derby and as a result, he built Field House Spondon (see Country Images June 2021) needing a house within striking distance of the Guildhall at Derby.
Bryan Balguy married a young wife, Emma Broadhurst Portmore (who was born in Duffield in 1808) in London in 1827 when he was 42 and she was 19. It seems likely either that she disliked Spondon (how could she?) or she fell out with the locals, for he sold Field House in 1829 and moved to Ockbrook Manor, on which he took a long lease from, the Pares family, whose lawyer he (conveniently) was.
He obviously missed the double Regency bowed façade of Field House, and promptly made alterations to the Manor, including on the SEW side – a full height Regency bow. He was obviously not satisfied with the three sashes to each bow fitted to his old house in Spondon, so at Ockbrook he crammed in five sashes per floor to the bow, dividing them with hung tiles, a very un-Derbyshire conceit at that or any other period.
They lived there, entertaining generously and raising three children, Bryan junior, Emma and Gertrude (two others died young). Bryan died, still en poste as Town Clerk at Derby, in 1857 but the family were still young and they remained until young Bryan, who went off in 1854 to join the merchant navy (later rising to captain), decided he wanted to settle in Australia in 1858. The two girls (who never married and died respectively in 1911 and 1921) went with their mother in 1860 to live in Corsham, Wilts, and later to Clevedon, Somerset.
A note about the sale of the house in the Derby Evening Telegraph in 1979 states that the Manor House had been the property of the Ward family ‘for a century’ at its sale, but no member of that family is apparent in the Ockbrook censuses or directories but, if true, the Pares must have sold the freehold in 1879, between which point and the departure of the Balguys 18 years before I can find no record of whom the tenants were but, in the 1880s, it was home to John Thomson, who is consistently styled ‘Mr.’ instead of ‘Esq.’ or no handle at all, suggesting he was probably a businessman or tradesman. In 1896 he was replaced by Thomas Robinson and he, within a very few years, by William Lowe Mugliston, JP, the Midland Railway’s Superintendent of the Line – a very important figure in the railway, as was his friend and neighbour, Richard Keene’s friend John Alfred Warwick, signals and telegraphs superintendent of the MR.
Mugliston had married Elizabeth Ann Ward in Derby in 1863, and thereby may lie the connection of the name Ward with the house mentioned by the local paper; conceivably her father or brother had been the person who acquired the freehold in 1879. They had eight children by the time they moved in – some had already left home, needless to say – and William retired from the railway in 1906 but the family, latterly sharing with unmarried daughter Maud and widowed daughter Kate Coles with the latter’s infant daughter remained at the house until William’s death in 1918 and, in 1925, John James Spencer had moved in as tenant, followed by Wilfred Durose of a well-known local family in 1930 and Samuel H. Moss in 1934.
The house remained in residential use until its sale in 1979, when it was bought by a local property developer and demolished, unlisted and outside the conservation area (which came along too late in any case). How it avoided being listed is anyone’s guess; it certainly deserved the status. The developer, who could easily have divided the house as two or more residences, chose to demolished and the present Cedar Drive, a cul de sac, was pitched across the site with bungaloid development being built on the grounds. A tragic loss for so historic and agreeable a village.
