The refugees mansion

(Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose location.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building and its history.

Todays location looks like a fairy tale mansion, but since I won't be posting any external shots of it, you're just going to have to take my word for it. I want to protect this place, and that means not telling where it is.

I came here about a year ago, approaching on foot, through miles of countryside, not wanting to take the main driveway out of fear of it being a little too conspicuous. I was very much on edge. At six foot two and looking like a serial killer, it's very hard for me to look inconspicuous.

From the internal shots, the building looks far more structurally stable than it is, but from the outside there are missing rooftiles, a bit of a jungle growing around the sides, and the out-buildings look about as stable as Piers Morgan in a debate about...just about anything really. Only one window was open in the entire house, and it wasn't ideal because it wasn't particularly low down. But after a short scramble, I was in.

Here we are in what was once the breakfast hall. At least, thats what I can ascertain based on descriptions of the place that I have heard, and based on images I've found of the place when it was fully furnished. The piano in the corner is pretty gorgeous but the Ikea lampshades are a curious addition to a room that clearly demonstrates some former refinery. As you can see, at the back by the window, the ceiling is starting to collapse somewhat.

The house dates back to 1859, when it was constructed for a 28-year-old rich guy who was allegedly a much loved magistrate in his local community. His family lineage can allegedly be traced back to the Saxons. I didn't pursue that rabbit hole, as much as family trees fascinate me. Last time I did that, I got lost in the medieval era with all its illegitimate children and incest. Family tree? More like family circle!

The style of the building was apparently controversial at the time, although I can't see why. However from what I've heard, it raised a few eyebrows among all the owners our-way-is-normal-and-anything-different-is-wrong buddies. He sounds like he needs better friends, really.

Here he raised seven children, the oldest of which was born in 1856. He'd successfully spawned one more before the house was complete. No doubt the desire to start a family was motivation behind wanting to build a great big house in the countryside. What is peculiar is that his first two childrens births in 1856 and 1857 make very little sense given that his partner was some twenty years younger than him, and born in 1850.

Hmm...

Are we in Telford?

I looked into the historic age of consent and found that it had actually been "increased" to thirteen in 1863, but nevertheless, even if he did take a child bride, I highly doubt she'd be able to conceive. I think it's more likely that he had a wife, whose details elude me, and that he fathered children with her. She then died, and he hooked up with a younger woman later on.
That makes sense. It might also make her a bit of a gold digger, and who can blame her? This house is gorgeous.

A friend of mine who is apparently more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to wall decor has pointed out that the mirror alone is worth a couple thousand pounds, and the grand piano would also sell for a bomb. Here they both are, slowly getting collapsed on by a crumbly ceiling.

What is all this still doing here???

This room, I think, was the library, and both this and the breakfast room led out onto the central entry hall.

The occupiers seven children were spawned between 1856 and 1869, each having the luck of growing up in this massive house. The two daughters married in their twenties and the third son joined the navy in 1875, only to die in 1899 during the second Boer War. His older brother similarly saw military action in 1882, after the younger sibling but surviving him, at least up until 1914 when he was gunned down in France during the first world war. Their cousin faced similar luck, being killed in France in 1915.

The home owner only outlived the one child though, dying in this house in 1906.

This mansion sure does seem to be deserving of a good ghost story but alas, if the big cheese still walks these halls then so far nobody has reported it.

With so many sons dying in combat and the daughters marrying, its hard to determine who inherited the property. A nurse of the same surname lived here in 1915 but its unclear what her line of descent is. It's possible that she married into the family.

There's a nice little balcony overlooking the entry hall.

Propped up against the wall in the entry hall is this vintage mirror advertising Sunbrite as "Britains best selling roomheater fuel." Apparently this is an antique.

This area was apparently the main dining room, although it baffles me why a house would have a formal dining room and a separate breakfast room, especially when you can clearly see through the door that the two rooms are connected. I suspect that this all boils down to having loads of money but no idea what to do with it.

This was the "drawing room," a rather archaic kind of lounge, but one where the guests could be entertained. When guests weren't around, the room would have gone unused. Its odd name actually derives from "Withdrawing room," a 16th century term for the room in which one would withdraw for the day, and chill out and watch Mick Jagger on Top of the Pops. Yes, he is that old.
In the Victorian era, Drawing Room entertainment often involved performing plays for ones guests, which actually sounds quite fun.

This is still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

Whatever came of the family that lived here, I'm not sure. However what I do know is that during the second world war the house became packed with European Jewish children who had fled their home countries to escape oppression.

As we know, the build up to the holocaust was fairly gradual. In the 1920s the Jews contributed to the societies that they lived in, and were fully integrated into all kinds of jobs, from retail to hospitals to the armed forces. Hitler came along and introduced a bunch of anti-Jewish policies. He wasn't out to kill them just yet. He just wanted to make sure their lives were really shit.

The anti-Jewish laws didn't all come at once, but were introduced gradually throughout the 1930s. Jewish students were forbidden to study medicine, dentistry, or the law, their race apparently being more relevant than their skills. They were also excluded from military service, and as the 1930s plodded on, they lost the right to marry non-Jews, they lost the right to vote, they had restricted transport, they were banned from restaurants, swimming pools, parks, cinemas, holiday resorts, concerts and various other places, and they weren't allowed to own bicyles, typewriters or electrical appliances. All of this came gradually, basically shitting on them year after year after year. Foreign Jews living in Germany were also deported, but I use the term lightly. Often they were just driven out to whatever village was closest outside of the German border, and just dumped.

The events had global repercussions too. Of particular relevance in this case is the region that was known as the Sudentenland, which was populated by Germans, many of which who were a little pissed off to find that they were suddenly living in Czechoslovakia thanks to the Versailles Treaty carving up the German territory. Hitler wanted that teritory back, and under the Munich Agreement, the rest of Europe decided to let him have it, reasoning that giving Hitler what he wanted would help avoid war.
We all know how that worked out. Poor naive fools.

The Munich Agreement is historically regarded as a lesson that trying to appease expansive totalitarian states is pretty futile. But at the time it was celebrated, by all but the Czechs, given that the Sudentenland had most of their border defences, and now they were open to German invasion. Given what this historically meant for Czechoslovakia, in that it effectively ceased to exist with the exception of an exiled government, it was a pretty big deal.

And how does that tie into this place? Well, a lot of the kids who came here were Czech Jews.
While a lot of the population thought that the current oppression of the Jews was either perfectly justified or something that would blow over in a year or so, those with enough foresight and enough common sense stepped in to save the day, establishing what was known as The Kindertransport. It was essentially the smuggling of hundreds of Jewish children out of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Poland, to the UK where they would be safe.

The Kindertransport program really started with what historians call Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
Basically, a seventeen year old Jewish boy living in Paris was so pissed off about what was happening to his family in Germany that he marched into the German embassy and asked to speak to someone, only to shoot the first German he met. Ironically it was someone who was actually opposed to the Nazis treatment of Jews, and under investigation by the gestapo for being politically unreliable. So really of all the German diplomats he could assassinate, he couldn't have got it more wrong. For anyone looking for an excuse to hurt the Jews this was it.

Riots broke out and just about anything Jewish- businesses, cemeteries, homes, synagogues- was smashed and ransacked. Police were ordered to do nothing, and fire fighters were told to only stop the fires spreading to non-Jewish neighbouring buildings.
The Jewish community was then fined a billion reichsmarks for "damages to the German nation."

 

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, it's believed that 91 Jews were murdered, with hundreds more beaten up and injured, and sometimes raped. The repercussions run deeper though- It's estimated that Kristallnacht, the worst thing to happen to them after years of bad things happening to them, was responsible for about 638 suicides.

Kristallnacht is regarded as a turning point. Before this, the Jews were oppressed in the sense that they had fewer rights socially and economically. Now it was perfectly fine to publically assault one. It was all downhill from there.

Thats not to say every German was on board. In fact anti-semitic views actually declined to make way for a more sympathetic attitude. The problem was people were afraid to help. One person was arrested in 1941 fined for the crime of paying a Jewish cancer patients medical bill. And that was pretty tame as far as punishments for Jewish sympathisers went.

However, world opinion turned sharply against the Nazis at this point, and the UK allowed for a seemingly limitless number of Jewish children to enter the country on the condition that private citizens and organisations could pay for each childs care, education and eventual emigration once the crisis was over. Families were covertly given a travel date and departure details, and the children were issued an ID card and taught a few English phrases so that they could ask for food or the toilet.

This mirror has a Deftones sticker on it, as well as font reading "Neon Ballroom," which is an album by a band called Silverchair. It's surprisingly modern, and suggests that the house was being lived in as late as 1999.

By 1941 this building was educating 120 European refugees. Their stories, in their interviews and their diaries, are pretty eye-opening, and provide an innocent and child-like view of the war. For example, one Czech kid described in her diary the sudden arrival of new Jewish students at her schools who fled to Czechoslovakia from the Sudentenland. She asked them why they had no shoes, and they just responded with "We didn't have time to grab everything before we moved." But this diary entry doesn't elaborate further. There's no big-picture understanding, just little things that stood out as events happened around them. There was no television and parents were better able to protect their kids from the harsh realities of what was going on. There were still optimists who thought it would all blow over soon and everything would be okay.

As you'd expect, sending the children away was a very controversial move. Many parents were regarded as conspiracy theorists by their neighbours. Some even thought it cruel to just send a small child away to a country they'd never been to with people they didn't know, with no knowledge of when they'd be reunited. Sometimes individual parents would go behind their partners backs to secure papers for their children. Sadder still are the reports of children resenting their parents, because they were too young to grasp what was going on and simply felt that they were unwanted.
This was a very traumatic experience, for the parents and the children.

Upstairs, the buildings derelict state is becoming more apparent, and various parts of it are taped off to warn anyone from entering. Fortunately I was able to get through without disturbing the tape, which is some comfort for me since I aim to disturb these places as little as possible. I guess there would be some hilarious irony if the floor collapsed under my weight on the other side, but luckily that didn't happen!

And look! This brings us out onto the balcony over the entry hall.

The balcony continues on to this blackened room which looks like it's been set on fire.

The fire doesn't seem to have been too brutal. It's blackened the walls but it hasn't added to the structural damage.

Interestingly, the children who came here in 1941 also described it as falling apart, so it seems that the house has never had much luck there. Based on what I've read from numerous refugee interviews, the house was lovely but clearly not fit for purpose. It's important then to understand that it was meant to be a temporary fix. Nobody knew just how long the war would drag on for, and few anticipated how bad the holocaust would get.

One childs diary entry describes how she, at age ten, was given a diary by her father shortly before she was sent away. She was told that every time she wanted to tell her parents about her time in the UK she should write it down, and the family would sit and read it all when she got back. Of course, that reunion never happened. The vast majority of the children sent here never saw their parents again. It wasn't until 1943 that they heard on the radio just how bad things were getting, and for many of the older children, the penny dropped.

The children were generally accepted warmly, and most of them grew up in loving homes with families determined to give them a positive experience.
I know right? What is this backwards version of the UK? If this happened today there would be no end of grumpy old people moaning on Facebook about them pesky foreigners. Helping people? Why, the Daily Mail says that that's socialism! Even if they are Five years old and bound for the gas chamber.

As for this building, it provided education, taught the refugees English but also helped them maintain ties to their native cultures and offer them a support network. Many were adopted by English families so coming here to mingle with others like them was a huge comfort. Their descriptions of this hall, written in the 1940s but matching what I was seeing perfectly, were pretty surreal to read. Its one thing to know something happened, but to get invested in the story about a location and then to actually be there is pretty mindblowing. It drives home the reality of it all. Because the story of the holocaust gets told to us as a statistic. Millions of people died. A brain can't comprehend a million people. Give them names, and individual stories, and it all becomes easy to process, and a lot more hard hitting.

But as predicted, the building was not fit for purpose, and on top of that, it was exceeding its capacity. In 1943 the children were moved on to somewhere more suitable.

Check out the mold on this bathroom wall.

The bedrooms reflect the earlier refinery, with their homely wallpapers and pretty fireplaces.

And creepy fucking dolls lurking behind cupboard doors. This thing looks pretty vintage though, so it's pretty cool even if it did scare the crap out of me.

This room had a small stairway leading down to an ensuite bathroom which looked similarly creepy.

The success of the Kindertransport cannot be overstated. It's estimated that in total just under 10,000 jewish children were admitted into the UK. Those who helped to arrange it have recieved awards, and it's genuinely heartwarming to consider the thousands saved who started new lives in the UK, marrying and having children, grand children, numerous generations, and all of their achievements. From those rescued have come famous artists, successful doctors, politicians, film makers, scientists, authors, and so much more. Their potential never would have been realised had a certain mad little tyrant had his way.

In 2018 the German government gave 2,500 Euros to each child refugee who was still alive and identifiable. A monetary gesture doesnt undo childhood trauma but its nice that the German government is acknowledging and accepting the damage that was done.

This building, meanwhile, had served its purpose. For the rest of the war it was used by American troops, although I have no idea what purpose they could have for a dilapidated mansion.

This sign warns against opening the windows, and with good reason! Many of the frames have deteriorated to the point that if they were to open, they would likely break, and the last thing this place needs is the weather getting in!

After the war, the mansion became a home again, and seems to have retained such a use right up until the 21st Century. It was said to be a party venue during the 1970s, hosted by a family whose surname matches the surnames of the original servant staff who resided here back in the 1910s.

Now, that's probably a coincidence but the thought of the servants descendants somehow inheriting the mansion is quite a juicy one.

The parties of the 1970 similarly sound particularly juicy, in that nobody wants to talk about them!
I assumed it was a venue that people could rent out for the evening but some of the terminology used by those who came here suggest they happened with some regularity and had their regular guests. Their unwillingness to divulge much lends itself to the imagination.

Were they swingers?
Satanists?
Homosexuals? They were taboo back in the 1970s. You know, back before people realised that their lives were unaffected regardless of who someone that they'd never meet got into bed with.

But I joke about the parties. In all likelihood the people I asked, who were just a small number, just weren't in the mood to chinwag with someone whose primary skill is being a terrible role model.
Clearly they weren't Chaos Manor style parties because this place isn't a gentle breeze away from total collapse.

Apparently the home owners did tours too, but even then with the building becoming progressively more derelict, some parts were off-limits.

I'm sure the house has been lived in by multiple families during the latter part of the 20th century, but by 2016 it was allegedly being used for farm storage, until it went on the market. The furniture was all auctioned off in 2017, and rumours have circulated that it will become a supported living community in the future.

However, it needs a lot of work.

It seems that no pianists attended the auction. This is the second one I've found so far!

Up to the attic.

There's this really cool pane of glass depicting a woman.

Generally the rooms up here are pretty much more of the same. Luckily, it's pretty. However the higher up one goes, the more dilapidated the building gets.

A sewing machine. These are perhaps the most commonly found leftover in an abandoned house.

After checking out the attic I decided to check out the rear of the building. The floorboards here were paricularly weak and rotten, making the rear staircase pretty much impossible to traverse. Whoever strung the yellow tape everywhere thought so too.

The rooms at the rear, as you'd expect, were once the servants quarters, and they included bedrooms, bathrooms and the mansions kitchen.

Here are the baths. One of them has a bike frame in it.

Here's a sewing machine in considerably better condition than the one upstairs!

Here's some anti-scratch solution, which I presume based on modern products by Johnsons, would be to stop dogs and cats from scratching themselves. This is a pretty ancient bottle though and would probably be quite an irritant if applied today.

This is cool! The servants quarters bells are still on the wall. Basically these were connected to various points throughout the house so that if one rang, the servant would know that their services were required and where in the house to go, much like in care homes where one has a means of calling for support if they need it.

Unlike care homes, this mansion probably had sufficient staff to ensure nobody was waiting for too long.

We're back on the ground floor now, but that's not quite the end of the adventure! I still haven't checked out the cellar!

This pram is pretty creepy. I wonder if this is where that doll from upstairs should be.

Deep in the cellar I found... another piano. Seriously, who lived here? The phantom of the opera?

In the labyrinthian cellar, entire rooms are off limits, marked so by the yellow tape over the entrance. A quick peek in revealed that the ceiling was slowly beginning its descent to ground level, sure to someday come crashing down.

Curiously, the cellar was the only part of the mansion to have any graffiti.

On one hand, it proves that I'm not the first person to sneak in. However I find it odd that the vandalism is so localised. Why is the upstairs so untouched?

Wow! Check this out! I guess this would have been used during the mansions party days!

The graffiti down here is okay. It certainly seems positive.

The graffiti is also quite creative. This entire room has been labeled the Munster Tavern.

The interior is pretty bleak. Some of the graffiti calls it the House of Love, while other examples talk about death. It's not that contradictory. To quote a brilliant scientist, weddings are just funerals with cake.

Capt Weird Club.

Somebody has painted skeletons on this door.

But in the deepest corner of the cellar I found this! It's a book. An annual for 1907. This is truly ancient! And with it is a newspaper from March 8 1938. This is an immense find, given the context of the buildings usage! This is leftover from the mansions days accomodating European refugees, and it's every bit relevant in that it was around March 1938 that Hitler was planning to invade Austria.

As for the book, the first word on the cover is difficult to make out, but it reminds me of those "Boys own Annual," or "Girls own Annual" which were aimed at children and were printed from 1880 until 1940. They were basically an early equivalent of a teenagers magazine, catering to their interests.

Could this have been owned by a refugee? It's a British publication, a generation earlier than they arrived, but it could have been handed down to a child by someone older. It could even have belonged to the original family that lived here.

Lastly we have an old coal hatch, but this has been sealed up.

But we'll finish up with a quick look at the out-buildings, which need severe restoration.

Typically I don't prioritise barns, because they're rather samey. But this one has a surf board in it, which is pretty cool.

There's also a pool table propped up over here. Evidently a lot of the last occupants posessions were moved out and just left here for storage. They probably would have been better protected inside the mansion. I highly doubt the farm aspects of this establishment were carried out by the original homeowners. They probably hired folks to take care of that, and evidently the farm usage of the place was the first thing to stop, because it's clearly been decaying the longest.
It's quite nice to imagine the refugee kids playing hide and seek in these dilapidated barns in an era before the health and safety overlords clamped down on everything. Nobody back then was saying "Gretchen, come out, it's not safe," and even if they did, Gretchen could totally just respond with "Fuck you, Karen. I just avoided Auschwitz!"

Anyway, that's all I got. My next couple of blogs will be a hospital, and then a railway tunnel, which sounds less exciting, but I love railway tunnels, and I could use a short and sweet snack-blog so that I can focus on other projects that I'll be keeping secret for a bit. Am I making merch? No, not yet. That would be great though. What could I do? It doesn't matter really, I'll just put boobs on it and it will sell. People will buy syphilis if you put boobs on it. Just look at British newspapers.

Anyway, don't forget to follow my Instagram, like my Facebook and follow my Twitter.

Thanks for reading!