THE VALE OF EVESHAM brims with peace and contentment. Standing almost at its heart is Wolverton Hall, a handsome Queen Anne house that is surrounded by a pretty coach house bearing the date 1714, a black and white Worcester barn and matching bothy, a walled garden and a stream opening out into a pond. There are 18 acres of woodland and paddock and the price of £1.5 million is attractive both to people living or working locally and to those thinking of moving from London and starting a business.
Some of the feeling of being shut away from the world may come from the fact that Wolverton was long the home of recusants — Catholics who held to the old religion and paid the penalty in taxes and forfeiture of any role in public life. In 1581 William Cooksey bequeathed the manor and house at Little Wolverton to the male heirs of his sister Alice, wife of Humphrey Acton. His descendant, Thomas Acton, was an ardent royalist whose estates were sequestered, but they were restored and for nearly two centuries generations of Actons, all called William, lived here. The William who married a Margeret Perkins from Bath is the likely builder — a keystone bears the date 1715.
The house is shaped like a tea caddy, tall and square with a parapet screening a shallow pyramid roof. On the two garden fronts there are so many sash windows that there is almost more glass than wall, promising lovely light rooms within. The windows on the entrance front are fewer and more widely spaced with a fine, crisply carved columned porch, all suggesting a remodelling in the mid-18th century to conform with fashionable Palladian proportions.
The deep plan of the house suggests a secret room lurking within. In fact Wolverton has more than this, for there are 18th-century tunnels beneath the lawn — presumably to keep servants out of sight. It must have been these that gave Wolverton its own very special war, recorded in intriguing detail in The Mercian Maquis: The Secret Resistance Organisation in Herefordshire and Worcestershire during World War II by Bernard Lowry and Mick Wilks.
Wolverton Hall provided a refuge for the Van Moppes brothers, who brought a large stock of industrial diamonds out of Amsterdam just before the German forces arrived in May 1940. Churchill, then First Sea Lord, was determined to secure the diamonds for use by the armaments industry. With fears of an imminent German invasion they were stored in the strongroom at Wolverton, conveniently accessible to Birmingham and its metal industries.
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The hall also became the local headquarters of the Auxiliaries, the secret army that was to be left behind to harry the Germans as and when they invaded. The idea was proposed in a topsecret paper headed “Pessimism” and given to Captain Peter Fleming, a special correspondent for The Times and brother of the James Bond author Ian, to develop. Colin Gubbins, who took charge (and was later head of Special Operations Executive), wrote that “there would be no question of co-ordinating these forces into large units or grouping them for battle; they must be very small units, locally raised, able to melt away after battle. The highest possible degree of secrecy must be maintained . . . for the personal security of those left behind.”
It was all rather like the lost boys’ subterranean home in Peter Pan, with hide-outs in woods, farm buildings, cellars, even deserted badger setts. Peers and poachers were to serve together, trained in grenade-throwing and the use of plastic explosive.
The front door of Wolverton Hall opens into a pine-panelled hall with a carved fireplace and a pretty niche. The strongroom, with a massive steel door, is hidden in the archway leading to the staircase. This has a trio of pretty turned and carved balusters to each step, swept round at the bottom with a Baroque flourish. The elegant dining room, drawing room and morning rooms all retain 18th-century folding window shutters in working order.
The bedrooms, eight in all, are on two levels. On the second floor the sheer number of windows would have been overwhelming and this, rather than the window tax, probably explains a number of false windows on the top floor. These upper rooms are reached by a pretty, secondary stair that retains the original flat S-pattern balusters. The views also get better as you ascend — with Bredon Hill to the south and the Malvern Hills to the west.
The spacious kitchen is in a single-storey wing overlooking the garden. To the left of the entrance court is a two-storey wing containing a billiard room. With two external doors, this wing could serve either as two cottages or partly or wholly as an office. The coach house provides another spacious, self-contained cottage, the barn, though retaining its original timbers, needs substantial repair, but the bothy is perfect as a well-equipped garden shed or workshop.
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The former estate farm remains very much a working operation, while in a field beyond is a large, pheasant-rearing enterprise. With so much accommodation and a very competitive price, Wolverton is attracting great interest.