Everitt of Knowle Hall
George Allen Everitt (1823-1905) bought Knowle Hall in 1865, recently completed and without the manorial titles that had once been associated with it. He had earned his standing not through inheritance but through business, retiring from an active career in his forties to devote himself, as his obituary in the Leamington Spa Courier put it, to “a career of great public usefulness.” Everitt was a director of the Birmingham and Midland Bank for nearly forty years, served on the negotiating team for the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860 alongside free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden, and kept among his most prized possessions a bronze medal given to him by Napoleon III. His long service as Consul for Belgium and Hanover brought him the Order of Knight of Leopold and a Hanoverian knighthood. He spoke fluent French and German, was High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1893 and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He died at Knowle Hall in 1905, aged eighty-two, “well-known in the county of Warwickshire, and also throughout the Midlands.”
His son Sydney George Everitt (1860-1932) went from Harrow to Sandhurst and took a commission with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1881. He served in Egypt, in Crete, and with the China Expedition of 1900, retiring with the rank of Major in 1903. In 1924 he acquired the manorial titles his father had never held, reuniting Knowle Hall with the lordship of Knowle for the first time since Wilson’s departure seventy years before. He sat regularly on the Solihull Bench as a Justice of the Peace and took a close interest in Knowle’s parish church. He died at Knowle Hall in 1932.
Arms: Gules a chevron paly of eight Or and Azure between three mullets Argent
Crest: A griffin’s head erased proper the neck encircled gemelle of three pieces Argent
Motto: FESTINA LENTE (make haste slowly, i.e. with care)
His son Horace George Everitt (1909-1982) held Knowle for fifty years. A 1958 newspaper feature, written for readers curious about “a garden with echoes of bygone days,” found in the grounds of Knowle Hall a landscape that might have satisfied even Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh with Italian statuary, a carved fountain, sphinxes on the terrace, the Four Seasons in the rose garden, Bacchus facing Venus across the topmost lawn. The writer noted, with dry precision, that the present hall was “not as old as might be imagined”, the “noble building” illustrated in Smith’s History of Warwickshire of 1830 having been “largely demolished” by “the handsome, wildly extravagant” Squire Gumley Wilson, an act the writer did not hesitate to call vandalism. Flight Lieutenant H. G. Everitt opened his grounds to the public that year in aid of the District Nursing Fund.
Knowle also had a ‘Manor House’, standing separately from Knowle Hall in the village, though the two were never as distinct as their names suggest. The Manor House began life as the lodge to Knowle Hall itself, its garden pillars the original gateposts of the Hall’s rear drive. It acquired its grander name in the eighteenth century, long after its humbler origins as a gatehouse and, for a time, the village school. When Horace Everitt married Patricia Jefferson, younger daughter of Mr E. Jefferson of the Manor House, Knowle, in 1949, a local paper described it as uniting two well-known Knowle families, with the Manor House lodge and Lord of the manor’s hall reconnected through marriage.
When Horace Everitt died in 1982, his will was published with an estate valued at £675,681. The hall with its ten bedrooms, forty acres of parkland and lake sold for just over £250,000, almost double its guide price. It was sold at a private auction conducted by Savills of Banbury among invited buyers only. The manorial titles went with the hall, priced at £5,000 as part of the deal. The purchaser, who wished to remain anonymous, was an auctioneer.
The contents sale that followed revealed the hall’s Victorian and Edwardian life. Old Masters, including Gainsborough, Van Dyck, Kneller, Romney and Lely were estimated to fetch £100,000 between them, though Birmingham Art Gallery’s director declined to bid. A six-foot bronze Mercury stood ready for a buyer’s front hall. The sale listed a four-poster bed hung with damask drapes, Persian carpets, marble figures of the Fates and the Virtues, and, in a detail that seemed to delight the reporter above all else, an electric Wurlitzer organ, evidence that “the Everitts went in for music-making.” Structural cracks in the great hall, the article noted, were the legacy of a bomb that had fallen on the estate forty years before during the war.
The buyer of the hall and manors was Edgar Sidney Phillips (1933-2003), the auctioneer who conducted the contents sale. To many at the time, the transfer would have called to mind To the Manor Born, the recent BBC television comedy about an old landed family and a self-made new owner. Phillips succeeded Everitt as Lord of the manors for the next twenty one years. Following his death his widow engaged solicitors to verify the chain of title behind the manorial lordships and to prepare them for sale. The manorial titles of Nuthurst, Diddington and Kinwalsey were sold individually in 2007, separated from the lordship of the manor of Knowle for the first time in centuries. The manorial lordship of Knowle came on the market in February 2017, offered for around £7,750.
By then the market for such titles had changed considerably. The Land Registration Act 2002 had required manorial rights to be formally registered if they were to survive in law, prompting many lords to establish and verify their claims for the first time in generations. Lordships had long been bought and sold, occasional attracting notice; Warwickshire had seen a significant sale of the Lordship of the Manor of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1990, reportedly selling in 1993 for £110,000. But the Act brought a new wave of press and public curiosity to a subject that had previously drawn only modest attention. Advertisements offering the chance to “become a Lord or Lady” multiplied, many trading on status rather than substance. Alongside genuine and well-documented titles, a market grew around ‘claiming’ manors that had long since reverted to the Crown or lapsed into obscurity, selling nothing more than an assurance that no one else could be found using the personal designation of the title. The title itself, in such cases, remained with the Crown, or with an unidentified holder of the original deeds. A lordship is only as good as its documentary trail or ‘epitome of title’. Most buyers, the Manorial Society’s Robert Smith observed in connection with the sale of Knowle, were not chasing grandeur but something quieter: a sense of belonging to a community and its history, “a bit of fun and a nice thing to own.”
There is a fragility to manorial titles, as the number of ‘claimed’ names reveals. Squire Gumley Wilson’s four manors were recognised by the Manorial Society of Great Britain. But Diddington and Kinwalsey had almost vanished in the fog of changing landownership and the Squire’s bankruptcy. The manors survived primarily through their connection with Knowle, tied to a lordship with a hall, anchored to a family, an entail and an estate. Like Nuthurst, their isolated geographies and absentee ownership also kept the documentation from disappearing entirely in estate records.
The manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey had slipped into monastic structures, survived religious splits, been absorbed into the Royal Demesne and re-emerged in grants to favoured courtiers. Together with Nuthurst, they carried the stories and personalities of their ladies and lords. For most of their history, the manors of Diddington and Kinwalsey had no lord or lady living there at all. Lords held them from Kenilworth, from Westminster, from Birmingham solicitors’ offices, from wherever their own principal business lay, the land itself left to tenants and farmers who never saw their landlord’s face. It was this very absence, this lack of anyone with a reason to develop, enclose or reshape the place, that let them endure largely unaltered for so long. Of all who held Diddington across eight centuries, perhaps only Robert Dudley ever stayed in the manor, riding out from Kenilworth for the hunting.
Yet one right has never been repealed. Section thirteen of the Game Act 1831 still permits a lord of the manor to appoint a gamekeeper within his manor, the same provision under which Lewis named Charles Betteridge of Radford Semele. It remains a real, viable, and enforceable legal right, though not over land long since sold and converted to freehold. A modern lord might name a gamekeeper for conservation, wildlife management or education, an old privilege turned to purposes the Squire may not have recognised, pursued by methods he and his predecessors knew well.
Long since disconnected from the rights and responsibilities they once carried, the individual Lordships of the Manors of Knowle, Diddington, Nuthurst and Kinwalsey retain genuine, unbroken threads of custodianship - tracing names and events that connect their present holders to a long and layered past and to the particular character and story of each place. Behind the titles lie memories of lives, glimpsed across time, of those who held them, however briefly, and of places that endure, changing and adapting with each age.
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