The remains of the Hanbury mausoleum at Church Langton

So I went to Church Langton churchyard to pay my respects to J.W. Logan.

I was sorry to see that one of the other Logan family monuments has been damaged, but please that a couple of plaques inside the church that a family member has recently contributed to restoration there.

But the structure in the photograph above is the remains of the Hanbury family mausoleum. I have blogged about William Hanbury and his ambitions for Church Langton before.

John Throsby saw the mausoleum in 1790:

Near the above, in a seat, is a rude pile of bricks which incloses the body of the late Mr. Hanbury. For its reception, he built a mausoleum in the church-yard; but thither it, at present, has not found its way, although I am told, that some of the ashes of his kindred rest in it. It seems somewhat a pity but his will was complied with in this instance. The mausoleum is built of wrought stone, plain and lofty.

It was taken down in 1865. All that remains today is the base, which home to a rather fine statue of an angel.

The lions of Tur Langton

I was taken with these two lions on Saturday. They guard the entrance to the churchyard at St Andrew's, Tur Langton, and appear to be gravestones too.

St Andrew's is a Victorian brick church designed by Goddards of Leicester and funded by the Hanbury Charity.

It is uncompromising and incongruous in a picturesque village, but I rather admire it.

Tur Langton Manor now has a cafe and some retail units, which makes it easier to view the fragment that remains of the village's Medieval church.

I found it being guarded by conscientious alpacas.

Summer in Church Langton

A memory of warmer days last summer: another picture of the Hanbury Trust's school at Church Langton.

Hanbury's Charity: Church Langton to Westminster

In one of my early outings with my digital camera I visited East Langton and Church Langton. That visit led to several postings, including one on William Hanbury and his charitable schemes.

I have since discovered that Hanbury's Charity was the subject of a House of Lords debate in 1895 in which both the Marquess of Salisbury and the Archbishop of Canterbury took part.

The problem was that Hanbury's ambitions far exceeded the endowment he left on his death. This is brought out by a Commons written answer from 1921, when the Charity again came up at Westminster:

The Reverend William Hanbury, by a series of deeds made in 1767, directed the establishment of a school, the endowment of an organist, the provision of beef for the poor, the establishment of a fund to provide organs, the establishment of a picture gallery, a library, a free printing press, a hospital, and various professorships with an income of £5,909 a year, the expenditure of £100,000 on the erection of a church at Church Langton and the erection of a Temple of Religion and Virtue.

The fund of about £2,000 which he provided to satisfy these purposes proved scarcely adequate, and it is difficult to say to which of them he gave the preference.

This problem was tackled in 1895, which led to the debate in the Lords. Some participants thought that the Charity's revised objectives did not give sufficient weight to his wishes for the church at Church Langton.

The Church Langton Puma

Remember Church Langton? Home of William Hanbury and scene of a famous performance of Handel's Messiah?

There' s more to it than that.

The Leicester Mercury reports:

A Church Langton resident said her husband saw a big cat in The Causeway early one morning.

She said: "My husband saw one at about 5.30am on Sunday a week ago. It was in the road and then went through a hedge.

"It was black and the size of a big dog."

The contradictions of Gumley

Gumley is a village dominated by Gumley Hall 1764 which was demolished over 50 years ago.

So says a document (Word file) from Harborough District Council. It sounds odd, but then Gumley is a place of contradictions.

It has to be admitted that it has a very ugly name, yet the Arthur Mee volume on Leicestershire was happy to call it "perhaps the prettiest village in the county".

And despite its rural setting the village is largely of 19th century red brick, which gives it a slightly urban feel. It consists of one long street leading you up the hill to the church - it reminds me a little of Bishop's Castle in Shropshire.

Beside the church, the interior of which was largely recast in the 19th century, is a mysterious wooded mound, and beyond that are some impressive earthworks. Somewhere here must be the site of the Synod of Gumley, which King Aethelbald of Mercia held in 749.

Offa visited Gumley twice in 772 and 779 and one local theorist, Andrew Burbidge, reasons that Gumley must have been Arthur's Camelot.

Beyond these ancient sites is a remarkable cricket ground, but that deserves a posting of its own.

The Gumley of today does not occupy the site of the original village. That was clustered at the top of the hill, but it disappeared in the 18th century when the Hall was built and its grounds laid out. William Hanbury also had some of his plantations here.

Gumley Hall was built for Joseph Cradock (1742-1826), a Leicester man with tastes very different from those of most country squires. He was a friend of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick.

After passing through various hands in the 19th century Gumley Hall came into the ownership of George Murray Smith, the Chairman of the Midland Railway. It is easy to imagine at glaring across the fields at East Langton Grange, home of the radical Liberal MP and railway contractor J.W. Logan who had built part of the rival Great Central route to London.

During World War II Gumley Hall was used for training by the Special Operations Executive, which organised sabotage behind German lines, and after the war Leonard Cheshire used it for one of his experimental communities for former servicemen and their families.

The Hall was demolished in 1962, but its stable block, complete with its clock tower in the style of an Italian campanile, still dominates the village. So you can see what the council means.

The clock tower is shown in the picture at the top of this post. Below are views of the church, the mysterious mound by the church and some of the earthworks nearby.

More on William Hanbury and Church Langton

I looked up William Hanbury in Guy Paget and Lionel Irvine's Leicestershire from the Robert Hale County Books series.

They write:

In 1758 Mr Hanbury exhibited his first proposals for his charities. The exordium was:

"It will be no difficulty to pick out a society of honest and worthy men whose virtue and probity will render them truly respectable, and apply whatever is entrusted to their care to the glory of God, and the good of mankind."

To this he adds in his book a footnote:

"Here I must own myself to have been mistaken; for I soon found it to be the most difficult thing in the world."

William Hanbury and Church Langton

Back to Church Langton, where J. W. Logan is remembered. St Peter's, as you can see, is an impressive church for a small village, but there could have been something even more remarkable there.

William Hanbury was born in Warwickshire in 1725. As a child he was fascinated with gardening, and later, while studying at Oxford he would wander for hours in the Botanic Gardens near his college, extending his knowledge. He became the Rector of Church Langton in 1750.

By 1755 he had created a thriving nursery and large plantations in the nearby villages of Tur Langton and Gumley, which were valued at over £10,000.

Hanbury next set up a charitable trust. He proposed that a new organ should be provided for the parish church with a resident organist. He also suggested that a school should be built in the village and that funds would be available to help the poor.

To publicise his benevolence, Hanbury planned a great music festival. Its centrepiece was a performance of Handel's Messiah. Accounts suggest that the village was ill equipped to host it, so much so that the Duke of Devonshire had to lodge with a tradesman (not that it will have done him any harm).

The Leicester Chronicler, whose account I have leant on rather heavily here, says:

He held further festivals, using them to publicise his horticulture and the sale of forest trees, American plants, flowering shrubs and seeds. They were not such a success, but Hanbury, still undaunted, decided on an even more adventurous project.

He planned the building of a vast Minster church with a college, library, picture gallery and printing press. In 1777, Willliam Hanbury paced out the boundaries of his glorious project in the fields near the parish church. Marker stones still exist, indicate the proposed boundaries of this vast building. It was to be his last dramatic gesture. He died a few months later at the age of 52.

Next time I visit Chuch Langton I shall look for those marker stones.

But the Hanbury story did not end with William's death. The living remained in the hands of his descendants until around 1900 (if I remember the list of rectors on the board in the church rightly).

The Hanbury Trust opened a school in the village, which is shown in the other photograph. I still recall my surprise, during one of my teenage bike rides around the villages, at coming across such a range of buildings here.

The nearest buildings are the original school, which was designed by the Leicester architect Joseph Goddard. It housed a secondary modern until 1964 and then, until a few years ago, a Leicestershire County Council field centre. That part of the range has since been converted into private homes. (A Kibworth Chronicle article, which gives the school's history, was published in 1998 when its future was uncertain.)

Further along you find the Hanbury Institute from 1925 (also now in private hands, I believe), some more modern buildings that house the current village primary school and finally a new community centre, opened a few years ago and funded by the sale of land to build houses behind these buildings.

The decline in the quality of the architecture as the buildings get newer satisfies my own antiquarian prejudice.

The Messiah at Church Langton

Unmitigated England celebrates the Reverend William Hanbury, Church Langton rectory and the performance of Handel's Messiah he staged in the village in 1759:

The country lanes were jammed for miles with the carriages of the nobility, and once the hotels in Market Harborough were full, accommodation was offered in much humbler abodes. When the trumpets and kettle drums started up the common people became sore afraid, thinking it was the Day of Judgement.