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Echoes of an age of grace

This is part of a set of pages about Keep Hatch House.

[Originally published in The Wokingham Times, 5 September 1991. Reproduced with permission.]

Keep Hatch House stands today boarded, apparently derelict, and under threat from development.

Elsewhere in these pages we report that the latest plan, to turn it into a hotel, has foundered. But it seems inevitable that whatever happens, a piece of history, an echo of a past age, will have been lost irrevocably.

Today Stroller publishes pictures for the first time which recapture the flavour of those long-gone times. They have been in the care of Ron White who served the estate faithfully in the tradition of his family.

"In the good old days in Wokingham, what didn't belong to the Bowyers belonged to the Palmers and what didn't belong to the Palmers belonged to the de Vitre family," said Ron, who for 16 years spent his weekends working in the gardens and grounds of Keep Hatch.

"My uncle Dick worked there for 32 years — he was the tree man and my father George worked there for 28 years. Miss Sybil used to say: I never married, Ron, but you're like a son to me," Ron explained.

When Ron was a lad, he regularly went up to the big house at Keep Hatch with his father. "One day," he said, "when I was about 12, he took me and left me at the back of the house. He said to me: "Stand there and don't move."

After a while, the chef came out. "He was six foot three," Ron said. "He grabbed hold of me and hung me by my collar on the meat hooks high on the kitchen wall!

"My father could hear me hollering and he came up and the chef said: "I'm just making sure he doesn't get into mischief!"

And Ron continued: "When that chef got ill, those sisters nursed him until he died. They looked after all their staff and at one time they had 26 living in the house or on the farm."

Keep Hatch was built by the de Vitre family in the latter years of Queen Victoria's reign. The family had made its money in France. The two sisters spent their lives at Keep Hatch.

Sir William van Straubenzee, formerly Wokingham's Member of Parliament, remembers the sisters with great affection. "There was never any financial need for them to go out to work," he said, "but they spent their lives working for the community they lived in.

"Sybil was involved with the Guide movement nationally and locally, with the Red Cross, the Royal British Legion and similar organisations. Dora was much the quieter, but she had just as strong a social conscience. And they both had such good senses of humour."

Of the plan to build 130 houses on some of the land at Keep Hatch, Ron says: "I wouldn't have a house built on that land if they gave it to me and paid me to live in it. Any house built there is going to fall down because it's running sands.

"There's water under the land and it's not going away. The cellars in the old house are full of water now.

"I remember one day Miss Sybil came to me and said: Let's see if you're as clever as your father. See how many springs you can find on this little bit of land. I went and cut a withy from the sewer bed and dowsed the ground just at the front of the house.

"I found nine springs and was pretty pleased with that. But Miss Sybil said: Your father found 11."

"The ground was so soft that even in the summer you couldn't take four horses and a plough across the land, because they'd sink right in. So how do they think the land is going to take houses?

"The withy bed was just a sewer for the house. All the sewage from the family and the 26 staff used to run in there and nobody ever did anything to it, except make baskets from the withies."

All the water for washing, bathing, cooking and cleaning was stored in tanks. Early each Saturday morning the outdoor staff started up the pumps to fill the tanks. It took until lunch time to complete the task, but by the evening the well was full again.

Just like everyone else, Miss Sybil complained about the rates. She said to Ron: "I've got no mains water, no sewer, even the dustcart won't come up here. I have to put all the bags of rubbish into the car and take them down to the lodge. What do I get for my rates?

The installation of street lighting in the Binfield Road resulted in yet another rate increase. Miss Sybil protested: "Those lights are a quarter of a mile away from my house. What good are they to me?"

The house had drives front and back. When the family went out to church on Sunday mornings, one of the outdoor staff had to go and open the gates to let the carriage and horses through.

"They never used to say which way they were going," Ron said. "We would hear the horses coming and run out to open the gate, shut it after them and run to the next one."

Ron believes that the rot set in when old Mrs de Vitre died. "The developers were after all they could get," he said. "The sisters had death duties to pay, and they had to sell all the land on the opposite side of the road from the estate. De Vitre Green was named after them."

Chris White, Ron's wife, said: "There's flowers, plants, wild animals and birds, badgers and foxes up there. And up until this year, we've always heard the cuckoo from the grounds.

"From the day it was sold, you could see what was going to happen to it. The gate was going to be left open, people were going to walk through and do what they wanted to the house."

Ron said: "It was Scammell, the first people who bought the place, that let it go. Fancy letting that happen. They just left it open, and let everyone go in and do what they want. It's wicked, really."

And Chris interrupted with: "The roof was stripped, somebody stole the beautiful marble fireplace and even the oak double front door went. We heard that the firemen burnt down the staircase so that the children couldn't get upstairs and come to harm."

Ron and Chris both visited Miss Sybil during her final illness. He said: "I knew she was dying. When I came back to Wokingham, I said to Dora: "You realise your sister won't come home again, don't you?"

I told her she had to be prepared for the worst. She replied: Sybil won't let go of the reins and I said: Of course she won't. She knows you can't hold them!"

The sisters died in their eighties within a few weeks of each other in 1985. All of Wokingham went to their funerals and Sir William gave the address at Miss Sibyl's funeral.

They were, as Chris said, lovely old ladies. "There aren't any like that now," she concluded.