Scarisbrick
on the Internet
Scarisbricks (by First Name): A B - D E F - I J K - M N - S T - Z Unknown
Scarisbricks (by Residence):
English
Counties/Unitary Authorities Rest of the World
Scarisbrick Hall Scarisbrick Locations, Businesses
& Websites Scarisbrick Family Tree
Scarisbricks
in 1881 Census (England & Wales)
Descendants of Gilbert
de Scarisbrick (1170-1238)
Scarisbrick
Hall
Scarisbrick,
Scarisbrick Hall –
prior to 1833
In about 1238 the estate on which Scarisbrick Hall now stands
was given to Gilbert de Scarisbrick by his brother Simon de Grubhead.
There is no mention of the family’s original home, but in 1595 Edward
Scarisbrick built a new home on higher ground, further away from the mists of
Martin Mere; it was apparently of considerable size, having twenty rooms
including a chapel. Later additions were made and by 1673 there were forty-six
rooms.
In 1802-3 Thomas Eccleston, who had
changed his name from Scarisbrick on inheriting the Eccleston
estates, had designs for a new house, in gothic style and on a different site,
supplied by H. and J.A. Repton. In the event he did
not carry out their ambitious plans.
The old Hall, however, must have been in a poor state by this
time, and after the death of Thomas Eccleston in 1809
his son Thomas Scarisbrick had extensive restoration work carried out. Between
1813 and 1816 the Hall was ‘improved’ by John Slater, a
The Hall was refaced in stone, new windows were made, the porch
was re-designed and ‘gothic’ detailing in the form of battlements, pinnacles
and crockets added. The west wing of the Hall is, except for an added bay
window and the butress, of this date. The external
treatment is in a very weak gothic style that contrasts markedly with Pugin’s later additions, such as the grotesque carvings
below the parapet. Internally, some features are probably of the Slater/Rickman
period. These include Tudor style fireplaces, doors with iron cusping, and probably the creation of a Great Hall with
twin bay windows.
Once the Hall itself had been duly ‘gothicised’
Thomas Scarisbrick began on the furnishings. Between 1823 and 1826 a great deal
of oak furniture was supplied by Gillows of Lancaster
for Scarisbrick Hall. A cabinet writing desk from this suite can be seen at the
Judges’
Charles Scarisbrick 1800-1860 –
The Patron
In 1833 Thomas Scarisbrick died. Under his father’s will, the
most valuable of the family estates, Scarisbrick itself, had been settled on
him and his sons, if any. William, his younger brother, was to have the less
valuable Wrightington estate, and Charles, the
youngest, got Eccleston, the smaller
of the three.
William died before his father, and in 1809 Thomas had succeeded
to both the Scarisbrick and Wrightington estates.
When Charles came of age in 1821 he challenged his brother’s right to the
second estate, but lost his case in 1823. He himself succeeded to the Wrightington estate on his 25th birthday, when he took the
family name of Dicconson.
On Thomas’s death in 1833 further family quarrels arose. Charles
claimed both the Scarisbrick and Eccleston estates
for himself, but was opposed by two of his sisters, who claimed the smaller
properties. Charles fought the case all the way to the House of Lords, where in
early 1838 it was decided in his favour, giving him an estimated annual income
of £40,000.
Throughout his life, Charles continued to acquire land, and
exploited the resources of the estate. He owned coal mines at Wrightington and Shevington, and
developed the resort town of
Charles Scarisbrick seems to have been the kind of eccentric
recluse around whom legends grow up. The american
writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived at Southport in 1856-7, remembered
Charles Scarisbrick being discussed by fellow passengers on a train to
“He was an eccentric man they said, and there seems to be an
obscurity about the early part of his life; according to some reports he kept a
gambling house in
This passage was written when Charles was nearing the end of his
life, and had become a bye-word for his secretive and unusual behaviour. It is
as difficult today as it was in the 1850s to discover the details of his early
life. As a boy he is said to have attended
The Scarisbricks were a Catholic
family, and had entertained strong Jacobite
sympathies in the past. Growing up in the period before the Catholic
Emancipation Act of 1829 it is unlikely that Charles would stay in
It is true, however, that in the strict terms of mid-Victorian
morality Charles’ private life was “irregular”. At some time in the 1830s
Charles began a liaison with Mary Anne Braithwaite of Biskey
How near Bowness, Westmorland. Mary Anne went to live
at Charles’
Charles took an active interest in his family, as is shown by
surviving letters from the boys’ Headmaster when they were at prep. school in
Relations between Charles and his own sisters must have been
strained by the law-suits over family property, and further aggravated by his liaison
with Mary Anne Braithwaite. Although he was High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1839,
it would have been difficult for Charles to play the role expected of a
prominent landowner in society if his private life was the subject of scandal.
This helps to explain his eventual reputation as a recluse. There were,
however, others who saw Charles in a different light. He was said to have been
a popular landlord. A
“In my younger days I heard tales of his noble generosity and kindness
to his tenants - in fact his memory was worshipped by them, their sons, their
daughters, and their grand-children.”
Charles appears to have been a hoarder
by temperament. He preserved every scrap of paper listing his bids at auctions,
his household inventories, and much correspondence. He was also interested in
curiosities; he kept a list of
Charles died in 1860 after a long and debilitating illness. The
directions he left for his own funeral reflect his isolation and his
individualism:
“Respecting my own funeral it is my wish to be buried privately
in the burial ground I have inclosed round my
Scarisbrick Chapel: no undertaker to be employed: but mourning to be made for
men servants by the tailors that now work for them: the women’s mourning to be
made by the country milliners. No invitations to relatives or others to attend.
A plain oak coffin home-made - no hearse: but the coffin to be borne by six or
eight of my keepers … to go through the East gate by as direct a route as
practicable thro’ the Cliffs to the South West angle of the Wall inclosing the Cemetary where an opening may be made in the hedge to pass
through into the ground.”
It is characteristic of this extremely complicated man that
having devoted his life and fortune to acquiring the most suptuous
surroundings, he chose to leave them in the humblest possible way. His plain
coffin was carried to the chapel through a meadow, a wheatfield,
a potato field and a garden.
A.N.W. Pugin 1812-1852 – The
Architect
Augustus Northmore Welby
Pugin was the son of an emigré
French architect who came to
Pugin had shown a precocious talent for design, and at the age of 15 went to work for the
In 1833 he was working with Sir Charles Barry on designs for
King Edward’s School,
By 1836 Pugin had formulated his ideas
on architecture, and in that year he published “Contrasts”, which was virtually
his manifesto as a Catholic, gothic, architect. In it he set out to prove that
“the degraded state of the arts in this country is purely owing to the absence
of Catholic feeling”, and that the gothic style of
architecture was the only one appropriate for a christian
country to adopt. Classical architecture, he argued, was irredeemably pagan and
unsuited to express christian
social values.
“Contrasts” brought Pugin’s ideas to a
wide audience, and as the new champion of Catholic architecture he was rapidly
taken up by Catholic patrons including Charles Scarisbrick. In 1836 he designed
the roofed stone garden seat at the north side of Scarisbrick Hall, and also
the fireplace in the Great Hall. On the 24th April, 1837 he noted in his diary
“Began Mr. Scarisbrick’s house.”
Pugin began work on Thomas Rickman’s existing
West Wing, to which he added the Library bay window, the garden porch and
The problems of planning the building were considerable, as it
was the client’s wish to preserve the old part of the Hall, and any new work
had to take this into account. Pugin’s solution was
to provide a north-south and east-west corridor connecting the old and new
parts of the Hall on both ground and first floors. The problem of lighting
these corridors was solved with masterly ingenuity; Pugin
put skylights over the east-west corridor and a glazed turret over the point
where the corridors crossed. He then made the upper corridor floor half the
width of the one beneath and introduced superbly carved bracket supports
between which light could fall into the lower corridor. True to his own code,
he had made an awkward problem into a feature of the building.
In 1838 Pugin proceeded to design the
north elevation and this was followed by the Clock Tower in 1839. This has
since been replaced with a more spectacular tower by E.W. Pugin
(his son), but the original appears in the carved view of the Hall on the main
staircase at Scarisbrick. It apparently had a steeply pitched roof over the
clock stage, and was the proto-type for the clock-tower of the Houses of
Parliament.
Drawings of 1840 show Pugin working on
the windows of the Great Hall, and designing the series of attractive and
humorous carvings that ornament the bosses on its exterior. This vast room was
planned as a Banqueting Hall, and so the bosses all show scenes concerned with
eating and drinking. In the same year Pugin made
designs for the main staircase and staircase roof. The previous lack of this
apparently vital feature would not have disturbed Charles Scarisbrick’s
comfort, as there are two spiral staircases leading from the Oak Room and the
north Library in the West Wing to his bedroom suite above.
In 1841 Pugin was engaged in designing
the leaded windows of the Library. There are a range of very attractive
geometric patterns in the leading of casements at Scarisbrick. The original
effect must have been rich, as they were finished with gilding.
After this there comes a gap in the dated drawings. Pugin’s work was in demand from other clients, and although
he continued to work at Scarisbrick until at least 1845, the first impetus was
gone and Charles Scarisbrick’s generosity seems to
have been wearing thin.
From 1844 onwards Pugin was involved
in the tremendous task of designing the interior decoration and furniture for
the new Hoses of Parliament. He was also keeping up his own busy architectural
practice and finding time to write more books. Once asked why he kept no clerk
to help him, Pugin replied: “Clerk, my dear sir,
clerk, I never employ one. I should kill him in a week.” Instead, Pugin wore himself out, and died in 1852.
In such a short life it is remarkable that Pugin
had managed to influence the course of architecture and design so strongly.
Through his writings he could justly claim that he had “revolutionised the
taste of
Lady Ann Scarisbrick
At the death of Charles Scarisbrick in 1860, the entire estate
was inherited by his sister, Dame Ann Hunloke, the
widow of Sir Thomas Hunloke of Wingerworth
Hall, Derbyshire, who altered her name to Lady Ann Scarisbrick soon after.
Lady Ann, considered a great beauty in her youth, was a woman of
considerable determination and character. Since the death of her husband she
had lived in
Under the terms of her brother’s will, Lady Ann inherited only
the Hall itself, most of the furnishings having been sold to raise money for
his children’s Trust Fund. Nothing daunted, she set out to redecorate and
extend the house on an even more lavish scale than her little-lamented brother.
To carry out her designs she chose Edward Welby Pugin, son of the original architect and inheritor of his
architectural practice. It is clear from furniture which survives, bearing the
C.S. monogram of Charles Scarisbrick, but obviously to E.W. Pugin’s
designs, that he was already involved in work at the Hall by this time.
Unfortunately, no written evidence of his work for Charles seems to survive
among the Scarisbrick papers.
After 1861, E.W. Pugin found a patron
in Lady Scarisbrick who would give him much greater scope. The interior of the
existing Hall was largely re-decorated to his designs, incorporating wherever
possible the monogram ‘A.S.’. The clock-tower built by A.N.W. Pugin was taken down and replaced with a taller, more
flamboyant one in french gothic style. An East Wing
was added, with a pious inscription by Lady Ann, dedicating the work to her
father’s memory, and this was joined to the original building by an octagonal
tower with eight huge and rather sinister heraldic doves of Scarisbrick. The
present stable block, with its turretted entrance was
also work of this period.
E.W. Pugin’s style was more lavish
than his father’s, as can be seen from the best of his surviving decorative
schemes in the Blue Drawing Room on the ground floor, and Lady Ann’s bedroom
immediately above. Most of the work here was done in co-operation with
Hardman’s of
In 1867, Mr. Gladstone came to stay at Scarisbrick for a night.
In honour of this great occasion Lady Ann had the Hall illuminated by Bengal
lights, and: “the splendid tower, with its elaborate tracery, gilded spire and
ornaments and quaint gargoyles looming in the fog, was lit up with artificially
coloured lights, moved to and fro by the employees who seemed to swarm about
the roof.” This was exactly the sort of glorious victorian fantasy to which E.W. Pugin’s
work lent itself.
In her own way, Lady Ann seems to have been as fascinated by the
gothic style as her brother had been. It has been suggested that her
relationship to E.W. Pugin was more than that of
client to architect. This is patently absurd, and ignores the importance of
Lady Scarisbrick’s role as the patron of an artist.
For her Pugin designed a whole living environment,
down to such details as her headed notepaper, inkstand and dessert service.
Hardman’s provided the bindings for her books of devotion. No aspect of her
material surroundings clashed with the fairy-tale gothic of the Hall itself.
Lady Ann, unlike her brother, however, had no taste for
combining medieval pageantry with medieval discomforts. During her occupation
the Hall appears to have been gas-lit for the first time; Hardman’s supplying
large quantities of gothic brass gasoliers. They also supplied many brass and
iron grilles, which suggests that the under-floor central heating system dates
from this period. All the magnificent brass door-furniture,
and bell-pushes in the Hall were supplied by Hardman’s in the 1860s, together
with a large number of fire grates and dogs. One can only speculate on the
truly medieval cold, gloom, and inconvenience that must have gone before.
Lady Ann had waited a long time for her eventual triumph in
returning as owner of Scarisbrick. She was 72 when she inherited the estate. In
1872 she died and was succeeded by her only surviving child Eliza Margaret,
Marquise de Casteja. This brought to a close the
greatest era of Scarisbrick Hall. It became a part of the extensive Casteja estates, and little more was added to the Hall
itself. The stained-glass windows in the south porch depicting the arms of
Scarisbrick (dove) and Casteja (lion), with a Latin
legend translating “Doves in peace, lions in war” were supplied by Hardman’s to
designs by Pugin & Pugin,
architects, in 1889. The following year this firm was commissioned by the
Marquis to build St. Elizabeth’s Church, Bescar, on
the site of the old Catholic chapel. This was done in
memory of his wife who died in 1878. Items of furniture originally from the Hall,
possibly including the magnificent baroque pulpit, can still be seen in the
church.
Scarisbrick Hall remained in the Casteja
family until 1923 when it was sold back to Sir Thomas Talbot Leyland
Scarisbrick, a grandson of Charles Scarisbrick. It passed to his son Sir Edward
Talbot Scarisbrick, who sold the hall in 1946 for use as a teacher training
college. In 1963 the college closed and the property was bought by a
development company which intended to demolish the Hall and build houses in the
grounds. Planning permission was refused, and the Hall was again sold, this
time for use as an independent school.
Acknowledgement
This text has been extracted from
“Scarisbrick Hall – A Guide” written by Rachel Hasted, who was Assistant Keeper
of Social History at
Photographs of Scarisbrick Hall - July, 2003
(Taken by Rob
Scarisbrick)
.
© Rob Scarisbrick
Front View
of the Hall
.
© Rob Scarisbrick
South West
View of the Hall
.
© Rob Scarisbrick
Front
Entrance of the Hall
Scarisbricks (by First Name): A B - D E F - I J K - M N - S T - Z Unknown
Scarisbricks (by Residence):
English
Counties/Unitary Authorities Rest of the World
Scarisbrick Hall Scarisbrick Locations, Businesses
& Websites Scarisbrick Family Tree
Scarisbricks
in 1881 Census (England & Wales)
Descendants of Gilbert
de Scarisbrick (1170-1238)
© Rob Scarisbrick. Last updated: 16-Jun-07