The House at Howbeck

Howbeck is a place before it is a house. A how beck is a hill stream, and the Howbeck Brook crosses the old London Road two miles south-east of Nantwich, marking the edge of Stapeley township. In 1621 the bridge that carried the "London Roade for Chester" over it was noted as wide enough for a cart, which was unusual locally. That is the earliest mention of the name yet found.

The road was the coaching route from London to Chester and on to Holyhead. On the road atlas first published by John Ogilby in 1675 — in the version revised by John Senex in 1719 — a little building is drawn beside the road at exactly this spot, between Stapeley and Wybunbury, with the words "Hol-beck hill". The spelling wandered for two centuries: half the Victorian newspapers call the place Holbeck.

The first person we can put on this ground is Ralph Biddulph, "of Howbeck", who made his will in 1774 and left "a Tenement & certain lands … where I now dwell" to his nephew. In 1800 the nephew sold it: a freehold farm "called HOWBECK", a house and outbuildings with about fifteen acres "adjoining the great turnpike road between Woore and Chester".

The buyer was Robert Harrison of Oakfield, next door but one — a Shropshire man who, his descendants said, started out as a blacksmith and made a fortune as a cheese factor, buying Cheshire cheese from the farms and selling it on to Manchester, Liverpool and London. When he died in 1831 his personal estate alone was sworn at under £30,000.

In 1827 he left the Howbeck house to his granddaughter, Delphina Harrison, then nine years old. The parish registers explain why she was the only one: her baby sister and her mother had died within nine days of each other in 1821, her other sister in 1824, and her father that spring. She was the last of the household.

A house stood here by 1832, when a valuation of the parish lists "House, Outbuildings, Yard and Gardens" on about an acre, with a House Field behind it and a Field in Front of House between it and the road. In the spring of 1839 some hundred and forty mature trees were felled on "the estate of Miss Harrison"; that July she married her cousin Robert Gough; and that December she came into a legacy of £1,500. The white-stuccoed villa that stands here now most probably dates from those years — the late 1830s — though no document yet proves it.

The Goughs were often away — in Paris, Jersey and Nantes in the 1840s, later in Salford. When Robert Gough died in January 1858, his death notices gave his address as "Howbeck Lodge, Cheshire". It is the first time the name appears in print. By that summer the house was being advertised to let "with about twelve acres of land; the stabling is excellent".

In the mid-1860s the house was sold to the Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot, whose estate office was sixty miles away at Ingestre in Staffordshire. The Earls never lived here. They let it, and their advertisements tell you exactly who they were letting it to:

A later advertisement put it more simply: the house was "about the centre of the Cheshire Hunt". Tenants came and went every few seasons, almost all of them hunting people — among them the Nantwich architect Thomas Bower, and in the early 1870s a Mr George Hutchinson, who furnished the house on credit, sold the furniture and left. He later got five years' penal servitude for fraud, and a local paper recalled a lively auction at which, it was said, one party of his creditors pitched another out of the window.

In 1869 the house was taken by Captain David Longfield Beatty, late of the 4th Hussars, an Irish cavalry officer who had come to Cheshire to hunt. With him came Edith Katherine, born Sadleir. She was not yet his wife: she was still married to a fellow officer, Major William Chaine, whose divorce case was then working its way through the courts. The divorce became final on 21 February 1871, and the couple married quietly in Liverpool that June.

Two sons were born here in the meantime. Charles was born on 16 January 1870 and baptised at Wybunbury that March. His brother was born a year and a day later, on 17 January 1871, with Dr Munro of Nantwich attending. The birth was registered on 7 February:

The census that April found the household in full: the Captain, his wife, the two little boys, four women servants, and four grooms and stable lads, one of them an eleven-year-old from County Wexford. Twelve people in a seven-bedroomed house. The enumerator wrote the address as "Howbeck Villa".

After a season or two the family moved on towards Malpas, and the boy grew up to be Admiral of the Fleet David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty — commander of the battlecruisers at Heligoland Bight, Dogger Bank and Jutland, and later First Sea Lord.

The longest of the Earl's tenants was James Boote, a farmer and a celebrated judge of hunters, who came in 1883 and died here in 1905. His obituary ran as far away as County Clare and gave his age as ninety-seven; the census suggests he was about ninety-two, which is still a good age for a man said to have followed hounds for nearly seventy years.

On 17 March 1913 the Earl sold the whole Howbeck estate at the Royal Hotel in Crewe. The catalogue described "an attractive country residence built in white stucco style, prettily secluded in a grove of trees … approached by a serpentine carriage drive", and carried the earliest known photograph of the house, a winter view across the lawn. It went for £1,100 to Henry Daniel Hill of The Mount, Willaston, lord of the manor of Stapeley, who let it.

In 1918 Hill sold to Richard Darlington, a farmer, and for the first time in decades the owner lived in the house. It was a working farm again: in January 1924, in one of the worst foot-and-mouth epidemics Britain has known, the Ministry of Agriculture declared "the farm known as Howbeck Lodge" an infected place. Darlington sold up in 1928. His sale particulars were the first to lead with the house's claim to fame: "birthplace of Earl Beatty".

The buyer, in May 1928, was Major Harold Lockwood Nixson, an NSPCC welfare officer and a leading figure in the South-West Cheshire Boy Scouts' Association — its District Commissioner through the 1930s and later its President. He handed the grounds over to the Scouts every summer. The camps ran from 1928 to 1954; a report of 1950 called that year's "the twenty-third year in succession".

A thousand boys under canvas on twelve acres, with the public let in by programme, is the largest gathering ever recorded here. A newspaper photograph of a trophy presentation at the camp in June 1931 is one of only three known pictures of the house before modern times, and one of the iron gates still carries Scout insignia.

Major Nixson died in February 1955, and that June his executors sold "a medium-sized Georgian residence, with grounds, garden, cottage and land". Since then Howbeck Lodge has been a private family home.