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Harlaxton Manor

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  • Harlaxton Manor - Harlaxton Manor – grandiloquent, over blown and utterly beautiful – is a testament to two Lincolnshire people: to George de Ligne Gregory who pulled down the original manor in the 1830s and replaced it with this eccentric, magnificent pile, and to Mrs Violet Ven der Elst, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary fortune who bought Harlaxton a hundred years later and saved it from dereliction. No one knows for sure why Mr Gregory enlisted the architects Anthony Salvin and William Burn to create this phenomenal building – a mish-mash of style, perhaps, or a breathtaking Victorian fusion of the best parts of England’s architectural heritage, depending on your point of view. Mr Gregory was an established country gentleman whose family had lived at Harlaxton since the 17th Century; but he had no heirs to inherit his awe-inspiring house. Our best guess is that he built Harlaxton simply to out do his neighbours at Belton House, Stoke Rochford Hall and Belvoir Castle, the last of which was extensively refurbished in 1825. The story of Violet Van der Elst sounds almost as improbable. She was born Violet Dodge in Surrey in 1882, the daughter of a coal porter and a washerwoman, and after starting work as a scullery maid she became a successful businesswoman by developing Shavex, the first brush less shaving cream. By the end of the 1930’s, now married to the Belgian Jean Van der Elst, she had amassed a huge personal fortune and earned notoriety from her vocal campaigns against capital punishment. It was in 1937 that Mrs Van der Elst heard about Harlaxton Manor for the first time. The house boasted 100 bedrooms and 427 acres of parkland, but it had been neglected and was virtually derelict. In the desperate hope of saving it from demolition, agents advertised it for sale in the national press, and Mrs Van der Elst paid £90,000 for it. The new owner’s first acts were to rename the place Grantham Castle and to forbid shooting on the estate. By now a Labour politician who was to stand three times (unsuccessfully) for election to the commons, Violet Van der Elst promised to preserve the grounds as a sanctuary for the dear birds and the wild creatures’. She then set about restoring the interior of her new home. In 1959 Violet Van der Elst moved to a flat in Knightsbridge, her fortune almost spent. In 1965 the act abolishing the death penalty was passed, thanks in large part to her tireless campaigning; and a year later she died, penniless, friendless and obscure. Her memory lives on, however, at Harlaxton.
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