The sale of Stanhoe Hall Estate, 1949
The 1932 Stanhoe Hall estate sale was only partly successful, with many of the cottages remaining unsold. In 1949 the estate came up for sale again after the death of Henry Calthrop Hollway Calthrop.
Click on the picture to see the sale catalogue (11MB PDF file), including a map. The entries for the 23 cottages give the names of their occupants and the rent they paid.
Click to download the catalogue (11MB)
£4500 for Stanhoe Hall, £28 for a cottage
A pair of newspaper clippings from the Stanhoe Archive collection shed light on the 1949 sale.
One article paints a fascinating picture as Stanhoe’s inhabitants face the sale of many of the village houses and a new owner at the Hall following the death of the old squire. Mr H.C. Hollway Calthrop, it appears, was a good man and much missed.
Another clipping from 11 May 1949 reveals that Stanhoe Hall was bought for £4500 by Mr H.C. Sanderson, a farmer from Wisbech. This was evidently a bargain, since the auctioneer described the price as “appalling”. The cottage prices seem low, too: sub-postmaster Mr. Matthew Tuck bought 13 of them for £375, for instance, while we know from the catalogue that the rent for a typical cottage was around £4 a year.
A close reading of the first of the two articles at first suggests a problem with dates. It says the Queen and Princess Margaret had visited Stanhoe Hall in connection with the sale, yet Elizabeth II was not crowned until 1952. Also puzzling is a note that electricity and mains water are in the process of being installed, whereas we know these services did not arrive in Stanhoe until the early 1950s. So does this article refer to a later sale in, say, 1953?
The description of Henry Hollway Calthrop as “the former occupier” of the Hall suggests not. “The Queen and Princess Margaret” could refer not to Elizabeth II and her sister but to the wife of king George VI and her younger daughter. And the sale catalogue – with a view to boosting prices, no doubt – mentions that installation work for electricity and water was under way in 1949.