The Last Lords of Moretonhampstead Manor

The Smith family were the Lord of the Manors of Moretonhampstead and North Bovey, and the owner of much of the countryside round here, from 1891 to 1928. Their impact on the area was considerable and lasting.

Family background: W H Smith & Son
The famous newsagent business was founded in the West End of London in the late 1700s by Henry Walton Smith. He married Anna Eastaugh in 1784, a servant girl, & as a result became estranged from his family. After he died in 1792, she continued to expand the business while bringing up three small children.
Their younger son, the first William Henry Smith I (1792-1865), became the driving force in the business after his mother died in 1816. He expanded in to bookselling and book binding, developed a newspaper distribution service for country customers first using swift-horsed carts rather than the post office night mails & began exploiting the new railway network system & a boat service around the British isles. They developed advertising techniques and their famous slogan was “First with the News”.

William Henry II (1825-1891), his only son, was educated privately. An early Devon connection came when he spent some of his time with his sister & brother in law, an Anglican clergyman, at Tavistock Grammar School. At first he wanted to become an Anglican clergyman but on his father’s insistence entered the family business that became W H Smith & Son in 1846. He pushed ahead with a precocious understanding of the business often opposed by his father, who receded from the business in the 1850s and formally retired in 1857. Using the railways for nationwide newspaper distribution after the repeal of Stamp Duty on newspapers in 1854, Smith acquired the lucrative sole distribution agency for The Times. Alongsides that was acquired a near monopoly of the station bookstall business as reading became more pleasurable on trains than horse-drawn carriages. New advertising techniques developed with open-air adverts on spaces on the railway propertie: their famous slogan ws ‘First with the news’.
With his increasing prosperity Smith passed the running of the firm to an old Tavistock friend, Wm Lethbridge, – a unique example of a privately owned business that was nevertheless professionally managed – & was able to enter into public service. First with education & SPCK & then hospitals as a patron of Kings College Hospital. That led on to political involvement in 1865 as a Conservative after being rebuffed by the Liberals as a ‘presumptuous tradesman’. In i868 his election for Westminster came as a result of a wider franchise that led to a new school of Conservative members whose leaders were firm and prosperous but not imperious, privileged, or reactionary. He held increasingly high offices including First Lord of the Admiralty (reputedly lampooned as Sir Joseph Porter in Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore), Secretary for War, First Lord of the Treasury, and Leader of the House of Commons during a tough time with Irish Home Rule issues dividing the Tories, An extraordinary career in those days for a self made man.

He became extremely wealthy & began to acquire country property at Greenlands near Henley on Thames at Hambleden, which became their family home, in Suffolk & at Rewe & Silverton in east Devon – in all about 8,000 acres. In 1858 Smith married Emily (1828–1913), widow of Benjamin Auber Leach, and eldest daughter of Frederick Dawes Danvers, clerk to the council of the duchy of Lancaster. In addition to a stepdaughter whom Smith treated as his own child, they had four daughters & a son. The overall impression from his biographers is of a happy Victorian family with strong principles of hard work, devotion to duty & generosity. He was an inconspicuous philanthropist & often insisted that his help should be anonymous. He did not wish to have a peerage whilst alive because the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was in the House of Lords so Smith was needed as party leader in the Commons. But on his death in 1891 Queen Victoria ennobled his wife Emily. She became the 1st Viscountess Hambleden & on her death in 1913 her son, the Hon (William) Frederick Smith, became the 2nd Viscount.

The Moretonhampstead (aka the North Bovey locally) Estate
In the second half of the 19th century the finances of the Earl of Devon’s family (Courtenays) were in a bad way, & from about 1880 large amounts of the 20,00 acres they owned in Devon were being sold off. In 1890 just before his death, W.H. Smith bought the remaining Courtenay lands in Manaton, Moretonhampstead and North Bovey parishes, of about 7,500 acres together with the lordship of the manors and the advowson of the churches of Moreton and North Bovey. He also bought Hayne, near Moretonhampstead, to live in, though that was not part of the Courtenay estate. The main interest of the Moreton lands appears to have been the rough shooting, derided by one of his legal team as ‘a god-forsaken town called Moretonhampstead & a tract of rough pasture on the edge of Dartmoor‘. This was the estate that his son inherited in 1891, and in which he took a considerable interest.

The 2nd Viscount (aka Lord locally) Hambleden (1868-1928)
William Frederick Danvers Smith – usually known as Frederick or Freddie – was educated at Eton & Oxford. He inherited his father’s parliamentary seat but his main interest was first the family business – he owned the whole of WH Smith & Son – & his most important decision was to invest in town centre bookshops in 1905 when the railways proposed excessive rents for the station bookstalls. He showed consistent concern for his employees and he was an excellent manager choosing reliable subordinates. But a close second interest was his work for hospitals, especially King’s College Hospital.
From the first he took an interest in his Devon estates, perhaps to some extent because both his elder and his younger sisters had married into the Acland family, and one of his brothers-in-law had become a director of W.H. Smith. He and his new wife, Lady Esther Gore, spent their honeymoon in Devon in 1894, finishing up with a grand fete in Moretonhampstead. At about the same time he joined the Devonshire Yeomanry, the precursor of the Territorials, in which his brother-in-law was a senior officer, and he became a life member of the Devonshire Association. He also became chairman of the local Conservative Association and attended various local meetings.

So what did he actually do for Moretonhampstead ?
Lord Hableden soon proved to be a philanthropic landowner, with an involvement locally that had never been seen in 600 years of Courtenay lordship. The first important charitable work was the building of Moretonhampstead Cottage Hospital, which was opened in 1900. This is not surprising, because work for the hospitals and in particular King’s College Hospital had been a major interest to the London side of his life. What he did for us was to give the land – part of Addiscott Farm, pay for the building, and provide an endowment of £2000 in consols for running expenses as well as some furniture and surgical instruments. The hospital was also supplied with a large basket of vegetables each week from his gardens. He stipulated that a member of his family should always serve on the Hospital board, and this was done until the NHS took over in 1948.   (The 4th Lord Hambleden took a hand in the improvements in 1999-2000).

The next major work arose through his patronage of the parish church of St Andrews. When the previous Rector, the last of the Clacks, died Lord Hambleden appointed the Rev. Stanley Dawes Dewey from near his home in Henley, and the Rectory in which the Clacks had lived for a century was demolished and a superior one built close by – Mardon House as we know it today. This was completed in 1902, and Lord Hambleden then embarked on a major restoration of the church, which not only repaired all the dilapidations but involved major changes and the extension of the chancel by one bay. The gallery at the west end was removed, a new screen was made to replace the one removed in an earlier “restoration” in the 1856, and a vestry and organ loft were made. The whole operation lasted till 1904 and cost a substantial sum.

The next major building was a new Manor House at North Bovey. The building which is now Bovey Castle Hotel was built as a home for the Hambleden family, with spacious grounds and gardens. In order to do this the old farm of Week was knocked down. The building was elaborate, with good stonework and panelling inside. The architect for all three projects – the Rectory, the Church and the Manor House – was Walter Mills from Oxfordshire. The workmen who had done the actual building at the Manor, when they had finished there, moved on to start on Castle Drogo – another grand house built on the basis of a fortune made in trade. When the Manor House was completed, the family moved there and Hayne was occupied by the Seymours, Hambleden’s sister and her husband, who continued to live in Moreton and effectively stood in for the Hambledens during their absences in London or elsewhere. In fact the Hambledens only came down to the Manor House at intervals, usually by a special railway coach which was routed straight through to Moretonhampstead where they were met by their carriages or later cars at the station. In fact, of course, it was much easier to get from London to Moretonhampstead by train then than now.

So for much of the time there was only a skeleton staff in the Manor, but nevertheless there was an army of estate workers – gardeners, carpenters, masons etc – responsible for seeing to the maintenance of all the property. Hambleden also owned the woodland above the Teign at Fingle Bridge, and the sawmill on Court Street was his, while Mr East, who controlled this army of outside workers, lived at Court House.

Meanwhile, on a smaller scale, Hambleden was responsible for a steady programme of rebuilding and renovation of the farmhouses and outbuildings on the estate with good quality work and materials, and with the building of new houses for the estate workforce. In Moretonhampstead he built Jubilee Cottages in 1897 and another terrace in Pound Street in 1914, and occasional pairs of semi-detached houses as at Manaton, Lowton and other sites, for which he charged his tenants very low rents. The long term result of this was that when the estate was finally sold in 1928, excellent buildings were sold at low prices, because of the low rents, often to the tenants but sometimes to outsiders who assumed (wrongly) that the farming must be very profitable because the buildings were so well cared for.

The war, and North Bovey Church
Lord Hambleden had joined the Devon Yeomanry, and in 1914 he immediately went into training as second-in-command. In due course the regiment was sent to Egypt then to Gallipoli, where they had a bad time, and Hambleden, by then in command, was invalided home.

After the war, his first building project was the restoration of North Bovey church, which was again a major undertaking in which he took a close interest. There is a considerable file on North Bovey Parish matters in the Record Office including correspondence which shows that he kept in close touch with the architect, Charles Nicholson. Now we come to the end of the story:  Lord Hambleden died in 1928, and his estates here were immediately put up for sale by his heir. This was mainly because W.H.Smith was a private company – the family owned all the ordinary shares, and had to pay death duties of about £1 million on his bequest of £2.5 million, most of which was the capital value of the company. The estate was sold by Rendells, the farms quite often going by private sale to the tenants. The Manor House was only sold at the second attempt, and at a fraction of what it had cost to build, going eventually to the GWR who planned a golfing hotel to rival Gleneagles.

For further details see M.A. & R.J.J. Simkins, Lord Hambleden and Moretonhampstead, Trans Devon. Ass.. 123, 167-88 (1991)