The Site and its Formers Owners

- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries -

The first time the name of the property called Paddockhurst occurs is in 1691 when it appears to be part of the Wakehurst estate of Ardingly. A deed of sale of that year shows that Sir William Culpepper of Wakehurst sold part of what used to be Wakehurst Park as a separate property known as Paddockhurst. Old Farm Cottages, the timber-frame cottages in the hollow to the right of the main gate, are though to be the oldest buildings on site (possibly fifteenth century). The buildings up the slope to the left of the drive are the main house of the original property or, at least, the site of it (now known as Austin House). Paddockhurst was little more than a farm house. The present building is probably late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Between 1691 and 1862, there were a series of owners who seem to have been minor gentry.

- The Victorian Age -

The transformation that came over Paddockhurst reflects the new wealth that was being made in Victorian England. The great house was the creation of three self-made men who were successively owners of Paddockhurst. The first was a London builder whose wealth came from the population explosion. The second was an engineer whose skills were a product of the Industrial Revolution in which Britain led the way. The third was a civil engineer and contractor when British skills were in demand all over the world.

George Smith the Builder. In 1862, a wealth London builder named George Smith, of Wimpole Street, bought Paddockhurst. He soon decided that the old house on the hill did not measure up to his expectations. Smith selected a site about 300 yards south-east of the old house and invited a well-known architect who had worked on Windsor Castle, Anthony Salvin (1799-1881), to design a mock Tudor mansion which was completed in 1865. The old house then became Old Paddockhurst. It is difficult to picture the new house today. Although it is the nucleus of the present house, it looked very different. It was of two floors (instead of the present three) and the stables were beside the house on its north side, separated from it by only few yards. There was a porte-cochere or drive-in porch at the front door.

The house in Smith's time with the porte-cochere

Robert Whitehead the Inventor. In 1881, Paddockhurst was sold to Robert Whitehead, a Lancashire man and marine engineer who became part of a "brain-drain" from Britain. He is a fascinating character who had known Garibaldi and had worked for the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Navy at its Adriatic base in Fiume. He was heaped with Austro-Hungarian honours and his daughters made aristocratic marriages. One of them was the first wife of the father of the von Trapp family, which many years later, was to delight the world as the Trapp Family Singers. Whitehead made a fortune as the inventor of the torpedo (his wife had to push him out of bed to put the design on paper!). Sadly, he was never honoured in his own country, where he remained plain Mr.Whitehead when he retired to Sussex in his old age. He bought Paddockhurst from Smith's executors and proceeded to make grandiose changes. In 1883, he added the Great Hall or Salon (now the Assembly Room) and in, 1885, an extensive and lavish range of farm buildings on the crest of the hills, with a water tower over its entrance (now the clock tower). The architect is not known. For various reasons Whitehead put the property on the market again in 1890, but he loved Sussex and was finally buried beside the old Saxon church at Worth village. He had extended the estate to about the estate to about 2,000 acres of woods, farms, and houses.

Whitehead's Great Hall which was used as a music room,
as the organ in the right background indicates

Lord Cowdray. Finally, in 1894, Paddockhurst was bought by Weetman Pearson who eventually received a peerage as the first Baron Cowdray (1910). Pearson, a Yorkshire man, had started with a firm of building contractors at Bradford. He began to look abroad for civil engineering contracts for the building of railways, dams, harbours and tunnels. His very successful business was to be supplemented later by the discovery of oil in Mexico. He was at the time an MP but was so frequently absent from the House of Commons that he was referred to as "the Member for Mexico".

Beginning in 1895, Pearson employed a well-known architect of the time, Aston Webb, who was responsible for the facade of Buckingham Palace as we know it today. Webb remodeled and embellished Whitehead's house. A third floor was added and an east wing along the line of the south front. A large Winter Garden with skittle alley extended the building further eastwards. There were enormous greenhouses growing tropical fruits. Particular attention was paid to laying out the gardens for the pleasure of weekend house parties. Few signs of these gardens survive except in old photographs. Cowdray extended the estate to over 5,000 acres, most of which the family retained after the 1933 sale.

Cowdray was created a Viscount (1917) for his war work, and after the first World War he set in motion new plans. The west front of the house of 1865 (house and stable block). Thus came into existence the long stone frontage that is seen today. The drive was straightened and the inner gates set up. The clock and bells in the tower on the hill were installed in memory of Cowdray's youngest son, Geoffrey, who was killed in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne.

The memorial clock tower

- A Look at the House -