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- Gunby Hall -
Imagine how grave the threat of defeat must have seemed during the darkest days of the Second World War – so grave that the Air Ministry planned to bulldoze Gunby Hall near Spilsby to make room for a longer runway at nearby RAF Steeping!
The plans were amended – thankfully – but only after the squire of Gunby, Field-Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, had brought his considerable influence to bear on the king. (He had until recently been Chief of the Imperial General Staff.) The runway at RAF Steeping was indeed extended for use by Lancaster bombers, but its line was redrawn by a few inches and Gunby was saved.
The Field Marshal was fighting to preserve not only a splendid three-storey William and Mary house and its beautiful gardens, but also the ancestral seat of the Massingberds, which had been in his family for two and a half centuries. The hall was built by Sir William Massingberd, the second Baronet, in 1700, according to the dated keystone on the west doorway: not one of Lincolnshire’s grandest houses – ‘a mason bricklayer’s rather than an architect’s design’, thought Pevsner – but certainly one of the most loveable.
Gunby even made an impression on no less a person than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lincolnshire’s poet laureate; he described it as ‘an English home … all things in order stored, a haunt of ancient peace’, words, which he wrote out by hand and which now hang, framed in the library.
The National Trust assisted in the negotiations which led to the preservation of Gunby Hall, and by way of thanks Sir Archibald and his wife gave their beloved home to the nation in 1944. It is now looked after by a Lincolnshire couple who moved in as tenants in 1967 and who open the hall and its serene gardens to the public on Wednesday afternoons.
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