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South Wraxall Manor House
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
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South Wraxall Manor House was started by the Long family in the 1420s as an open hall house, with additions they made in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. There is an unfounded tradition that Sir Walter Raleigh was a visitor here to his friend Sir Walter Long (died in 1610) and that this was where tobacco was first smoked in this country.
After the death of unmarried Walter Long (1712-1807), the house and estate passed to the Longs of Rood Ashton, another branch of the family.
The house was used as a private boarding school for boys that run by Dr Francis Knight (1767-1837) from 1817, when his school moved from Frankleigh in Bradford, until 1826. Then it was empty or leased off and on until 1899, when it was leased to Major Eustace Richardson Cox (1862-1935), who did much to restore it (the architect was Arthur Campbell Martin, who also laid out the gardens). It was requisitioned during World War 2 to house evacuees. In 1946 the press baron Esmond Cecil Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere (1898-1978) lived there (he and his wife Ann, sister-in-law of the 2nd Viscount Long, divorced and she married the James Bond writer Ian Fleming in 1952). Remaining in the Long family’s possession, it became the home of Sir Charles Morrison MP (1932-2005) after he married the Hon. Sara, only daughter of the 2nd Viscount Long, who had been killed in the Second World War.
The South Wraxall Manor estate was sold off in several lots by Walter Hume Long MP in 1919, the house itself not being sold until 1966 when it was bought by a businessman, Douglas Sims Leese (1927-2011). A planning application was made in 2002 for change of use to convert the house into a hotel, but was withdrawn and it was then put up for sale for £6.7 million in 2003.
It has belonged to rock musician John Taylor of Duran Duran and his wife Gela Nash since 2005 and was featured in a BBC television programme in the series The Country House Revealed, with Dan Cruickshank in 2011 (accompanied by a book).
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The gatehouse of South Wraxall Manor, as seen in an old postcard that was published by the Misses Merrett, who had a stationery shop in Silver Street, Bradford. The gateway is of the 16th century, has a canted oriel window above the arch and leads into a courtyard that is open on one side.
In the centre of the picture, with the gate on the right, is the original 15th century hall house, entered through a two-storey porch. On the left is the large mullioned and transomed window of the main Elizabethan living rooms.
The interior of the Drawing Room with its great window, ornate plaster ceiling and renaissance chimney piece that is dated 1598.