I find the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans in East Langton

Friday's House Points, in which I quoted some Commons speeches by the Liberal MP J.W. Logan, sent me off to the village where he lived.

The Langtons - Church Langton, Thorpe Langton, Tur Langton, East Langton and (though it is only a few houses) West Langton - are a group of villages in Leicestershire, a few miles north of Market Harborough. Like so much of the eastern side of this county, they are beautiful but hardly known.

I went first to East Langton because Mr Logan used to live at the Grange there. More than that, Logan was a major railway contractor and according to the Victoria County History he maintained a cottage home in the village for the children of men killed on his works.

This is something I have known for years. Even so, I suspect that I had already invented Lord Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans when I first read about Logan's orphanage.

Anyway, today I decided to find the real orphanage. The county history gives the modern name of the house and a search of the web showed that it was in Back Lane. And the helpful landlady told me where that was.

So here is the nearest thing you will find to the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans...




Not at all an institutional building - in fact, it must have looked quite modern if this is the original house from the Edwardian era. It is reminiscent of some of the more expensive established homes in my old ward in Market Harborough.

The pub was The Bell and as it is in East Langton it has to be one of the inspirations for the Bonkers' Arms...



More about East Langton and Church Langton another day: there is much more to tell.

Meanwhile, here is the dog who lives at The Bell. His name is William.