Clophill House

By the late 1750s the house had pretty much taken its current form and did not change much over the following century, though the Victorians did much damage in the name of improvement. There is evidence that the house was redecorated around 1836, just after the death of John Horton, from which date various peices of newspaper were found in holes and behind wallpaper. It seems that the two Horton children redecorated the house with a view to letting it, as they lived in Mill House opposite. It was let in 1841 to Dorothy Webster, and again in 1847, this time to Mr & Mrs John Medham (parents of the Rector, John Mendham, who had recently taken the living at Clophill). Mary Phillips reports that the front sitting room (now library) walls were canvassed and that a piece of paper on the wall stated this was done for Mrs Horton in 1836. When we restored the front hall we moved the radiator and behind it found a fragment of chinoiserie wallpaper, probably dating from the same period. If the hall were hung with chinoiserie this would explain the raised panels on all the doors facing the hall as these too would have been papered to allow the pattern to continue.

There were some minor changes in 1847 as a carpenter, Sidney Peat, later working for Mr & Mrs Philips in restoring the house in 1936 found the name of his great grandfather, Charles Daniels, with the date 20th February 1847 written on the wall of the front room that is now the Library. Charles would have been an eleven year old apprentice carpenter then. The changes included joining the front and rear sitting rooms (now the Drawing Room and Library) into one by creating an arch between them where the door now is. The front two windows of the Library were removed and replaced with a single large window in the middle, totally ruining the symmetry of the frontage. There was also a conservatory outside the end of the house, where a paved courtyard is all that remains, and that was access from within by a door from the drawing room, to the right of the fire breast.

Further changes were made around 1871 by the next tenant, the Rev Cecil Bosanquet, brother of the Rector Gustavus Bosanquet, who had come to the house in 1870. When the property was sold in 1872 after the death of John Horton the younger, it was stated that the present tenant had done much work to improve it. This included adding the bathroom at the first floor by extending the front of the house adding an extra bay to the right. Here there had been a ground floor room with a sloping roof against the front hall. This can be seen in the drawing of the house from 1820, and also in the brickwork on the wall to the left of the front door. Below the window it is small jacobean bricks while above it are larger Victorian ones. The window itself is leaded and probably the oldest in the house being part of the original tudor structure.

To ensure access to his new bathroom, Bosanquet partitioned off both the sitting room above the hall and the rear gable bedroom to make corridors leading to it and reducing both bedrooms to tiny proportions. A small fireplace was added on the kitchen side of the upstairs sitting room. He also moved the window in this room from above the garden doors to the corner, so that a glass loggia could be installed outside the door. The lines of this are still visible as scars in the brickwork on either side. A piece of paper found in this window when all of this work was undone in the restoration of 1936 was dated 1871 and gave Bosanquet's name as having restored the house.

At about this time the stable block was built, as it is referred to in the sale notes as part of the boundary. This was connected to the street by a carriage drive that ran across the garden on the far side of the ha-ha and down the side to a set of wrought iron gates on the corner of Mill Lane. The arrangement did not last long as a few years later, in 1876, the new owner Thomas Adcock, bought some aditional land to make a new drive down the side of the walled vegetable garden, that is still used today, and the old drive was allowed to grass over. The rectangular paths were added at this time also as they appear on maps from then on, so probably also the steps were added then too.

The sale notice of 1895 mentions that a second bathroom had been added as en-suite to the master bedroom, as well as two indoor lavatories, but otherwise the house did not change much internally until the restoration wotk of 1936. The garden however continued to develop and, during the first world war the four terraces were cleared of trees and shrubs to create open lawns, a sundial was added to the bottom lawn. The tennis court was removed from the top lawn, bringing the garden into the form we see today.