Bat Manor

(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.

Because the world isnt full of enough things that can kill me, I decided to drag my only good friends, Joe and Casi, to this luxurious manor death trap out in the middle of nowhere. Long time readers of the blog will remember these two as the couple with which I pissed off a "leading politician" by sneaking into a derelict school, so much so that the local paper ran an article about us, warning people not to go into the school that none of the locals knew was accessible until the paper pointed it out. Nice going, media. The best way to make sure people stay away is to tell everyone that it's wide open, after all.

Joe and Casi are two very talented tattoo artists, but being self-employed have been affected by this whole Covid-19 malarky, so if you do fancy getting inked once this is all over, check out their pages here and here.

But onto this manor... well, it's certainly seen better days!

This window is pretty.

Kill the Kardashians.

I can't say I'd notice if anyone did.

Slipping inside the house was easy. The place is pretty trashed, but what does remain hints more of the commercial use of its later years, rather than that of a residential home. For example, the door propped up is labeled "Ladies," although the nearest toilets ironically had urinals. The Ladies toilets were actually across the house, which makes the doors placement here curious.

Prior to the gender segregated toilets, the house had residential usage, dating back to the late 1700s.
A chap called Robert lived here first. He was born in 1774 and he died in 1818. A chap called John is also said to have lived here afterwards, but his birth in 1819 would suggest that they weren't father and son, although their identical surname certainly indicates lineage. They were pretty damn wealthy, owning a lot of land and numerous lead and coal mines in the area. But for whatever reason, John ended up moving out of his family home, selling it in 1916 to another man name John!

I know right? Nine months to think of a name and John is all anyone could come up with...

John 2 was a timber exporter to Burma, and like the other John, was pretty damn wealthy as a result. His exact year of birth is lost to me, but he'd gotten married to a lovely lady named Susan in 1890, and by 1911 he'd shot his DNA into her enough times to have produced six smaller humans. Given that he purchased this house in 1916, it seems pretty likely that all six children lived here.

There's a nice big safe here, locked tight. Very curious!

Of John and Susan's children, Violet was the first, born in Burma in 1892. Her sister Margaret was born two years later in 1894.
(I shouldn't really have to point out the year if I'm pointing out how many years were between them, but lets face it, I've seen bins outside houses full of piles of unopened, mouldly loafs of bread, because this pisspot of a species decided to buy a years worth even though they'd never go through it all before its best-before date, and now people who could have used it are going without, so in conclusion, I'm done making any assumptions of intelligence.)

Two years later, in 1896, John and Susan had a son, who they imaginatively named John. We'll call him John Jr for the sake of simplicity.
Their next child, Edward, was spawned in 1898, and then in 1900 the family moved from Burma to the UK, where John and Susan successfully spawned two additional small humans named Robert and Winifred. Robert was born in 1901, but I'm not sure about Winifred.

This means that by the time the family moved into this house, Violet was already 24, Magster was 22, John Jr was 20, Eddie was 18, Rob was 15 and Winifred was something-teen, so its possible they didn't all live here. The girls likely did until they got married, but records from the 1940s show only three permanent residents- Susan, Daddy John, and Violet.

From what I've seen of old pictures, there would have been a bar here, starting in the wall between the doorway on the left and the hallway on the right, and then curving left, effectively cutting that door off from this area. It seems to have been removed rather than destroyed, given that there are no remnants of it.

The place is trashed but looking around we found these clues to its former glory. It would have been a beautiful house once. Now it's a death trap.

So what became of Daddy John and Susan's other kids?
Well one account tells that Edward died in 1918, but he clearly didnt do a good job of it because he also managed to spawn some daughters after getting married in 1935. He finally died for real in 1967. His brother Robert died in 1964, having had one daughter.

John Jr joined the army in 1914 as a motorcycle dispatch rider. Dispatch riders were basically messengers, and John Jrs unit was involved in the "Retreat from Mons" in 1914 and the first battle of Ypres in Belgium. Surviving the war, John Jr must have stayed in touch with some of his fellow soldiers, because it was through him that his sister Winifred met and fell in love with Cecil, of the same motorcycle regiment. They ran off to Kenya together, spawning their own children, at least one of which died in 1944 at the age of 12.
John Jr, meanwhile, married in 1934 and had a boy and a girl. He died in 1970.

This area is huge, likely some kind of function room in days gone by.

The local papers covered Maggie's death in 1925. She'd married a chap named Richard in 1920 and buggered off to live in Iraq in 1923. She'd had two daughters, Rosemary in 1922 and Hazel in 1925, just six weeks before she died. Rosemary was actually born in this house. On the exterior photo at the top, the middle window on the far left was the room in which she came screaming into the world.

Poor Rosemary and Hazel were seemingly unwanted by their father, who chose to stay in Iraq  building railways for a living, stopping by Marseille in France to hand over his daughters to their aunty, Violet, who took them back to this house. Just in case that wasn't enough to give them abandonment issues, their grandparents John and Susan sent them off to boarding school in Hastings, although they came back here for the holidays and befriended the children of Johns kitchen staff. Apparently they kept dogs, and an angry goat, and all the children from that era have fond memories of playing here.

There's still wallpaper on these crumbling walls! This place is amazing. Fucked, but gorgeous. A bit like Britney Spears in 2007.

Here are the ladies toilets, still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

The old Victorian floor tiles are still here.

By the 1940s, Rosemary and Hazel were approaching adulthood, and the house was lived in by Daddy John, Susan, and their daughter Violet, as well as their staff. John was getting quite old by this point, but was well known to the locals. He was prone to long walks around the local area, and would give the local kids a shiny sixpence if they helped him over a stile.

Of his habits, one that has survived the test of time is his preference to have a rice pudding placed by his bed while he slept, just in case he woke up hungry in the night. 

It is peculiar what details people carry forwards... Imagine accomplishing so much and then a century from now all anyone talks about is the most mundane aspect of your life.

So as you can probably guess from the title, this house is home to a small bat colony, and I managed to snap one on camera here, zooming across the wall. They're pretty difficult to snap in flight, at least in a way that one can actually tell what they are. Often they just look like a shadowy smudge, so I'm quite happy with this one! But Joe managed to capture one just as it was getting ready to spread its wings, which I'll include below.

(Picture credit Joe)

 Sadly for Daddy John his business collapsed when the Japanese invaded Burma in 1941, bringing his entire livelihood crashing down. He died in 1945, and by 1946 all of his staff had been made redundant, although he left them each vast amounts of money in his will. His chauffer George used the money to allegedly abandon his own wife to take off with his ladyfriend to parts unknown.

As I said, it's peculiar which details do endure the test of time. Had he not done that, would George the Chauffer even be mentioned today?

This manor was sold in 1947. I'm not sure what became of Susan or when she died, but Violet lived until 1984.

There's the remains of a newspaper here, dated 2009.

After selling in the 1940s, the house was lived in briefly by another man and his family before it was converted into flats. By the 1970s it had become a club house for a branch of the Royal British Legion, which explains why there was a bar and gendered toilets. The place was also available for wedding receptions and other events.

Finalising the ground floor, we turned our attention to the stairs. The majority of them were long gone, but someone had put a wooden board over them, perhaps in an attempt to make a really stupid slide. Naturally I wanted to see what was upstairs, and as I proceeded to climb up Casi asked me a very good question- how have I not died yet?

I honestly don't know.

As you can see, the stairs are about as safe as a kid on holiday with the McCanns.

This is about as far as I could get. I probably could have stepped over that hole, but even the floorboards I was standing on sagged under my weight, and as the ceiling in my numerous downstairs shots will suggest, it was likely similar across the entire upper floor.

I'm quite excited by the possibility that it's still furnished upstairs but nobody has been able to clear it out.

As I came downstairs, back to relative safety, Casi and Joe pointed out a massive crack in the beam right under where I'd been standing. One fart and my derring-do would have been derring-done.

Conveniently after pointing out to me how close I had been to certain death, Joe sent me upstairs again, this time with his camera on a stick, which we hoped we could use to get a glimpse of the upper floors by poking it up through the floorboards and around corners.

It's all in his video, here-

Nevertheless, further adventure awaited, in the cellar...

This metal pole seems to be the main thing stopping the ground floor from caving in. But what is intriguing is that doorway in the background. That's been filled in, quite deliberately. Was it a coal shute maybe?

Here's whats left of the manors furniture. But the real shock was in the next room...

This white fluffy stuff that covers the support pillar is all mould. I've never seen it in such a gigantic quantity. Needless to say, we vacated this room pretty quick, and made our way outside, where Joe whipped out his drone to take some aerial shots.

Shit, it's a group of more than two people! Alert the media!!!

Finishing on the aerial shot helps get our bearings for the other shot, below, of how this place looked in the early 1900s. The left hand side of the building was so overgrown that getting a shot of the house from that side was a little impossible, but the curved protrusion means that showing the old photo would be silly without providing some kind of additional context, because it would look like a completely different building!

It sure looks like a pretty nice place to live! And it really drives home that once this was a home, and that numerous people grew up and had memories here. It's a shame that its going to waste now, although the bat colony would be a hindrance to any development. Perhaps it's best left to the bats now. They're certainly the only ones who know what's upstairs!

Anyway that's all I've got for this place. I actually really like this house, but lets face it, its future is bleak. Next time I'm blogging about an old military facility, and then I'm returning to my old blog, in Shropshire, to focus my attention on a very special place in Shrewsbury. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, like my Facebook and follow my Twitter.

Thanks for reading!