Lady Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Hastings was a woman much esteemed in her lifetime for her progressive piety and socially concerned benefaction. At 22 she inherited considerable wealth and a big house in Yorkshire where she would live for the rest of her days. Never marrying, she sought the furtherance of the interests to which she had devoted her life by the endowment of a charity; focusing on educational and religious causes the Lady Elizabeth Hastings Estate Charity presently has funds of around £14.7 million. Lady Betty died in 1739.

Granville Wheler was a man not widely known when he passed away in 2004, a bachelor of 75. He had lived the whole of his adult life in and around a large house in Kent which he had inherited aged just 19. With no heir (two siblings were also childless), Wheler made over his complete estate to a charitable trust which was to be underpinned not just by the values of a woman he much admired – his distant ancestor, Lady Betty – but also to a significant extent by her fortune, the entirety of which, in the fullness of time, had flowed to him. Today, the Wheler Foundation has assets of just over £41 million…

…consisting largely of the Otterden Place and Ledston Hall estates. It’s a slight departure for Handed on as we visit two houses which were in one family’s hands for centuries but are now held in trust and remain effectively private.

The (two) trustees of the Wheler Foundation ‘have the power to make decisions on their land and assets as an individual who owned the property outright would have.’ The Foundation’s broad objective is the maintenance and preservation of the lands, buildings and works of art at Ledston and Otterden ‘for the benefit of the public, whether or not educational.’ Thus far, ‘the public’ has comprised mostly of several thousand schoolchildren via the Foundation’s significant engagement with the charity Countryside Learning and its programme of estate open days.

This activity has mainly taken place on the Ledston estate but it was at Otterden that Granville and his Wheler predecessors (mostly Granvilles, all interred in the church next to the house) generally preferred to spend most of their time. Tucked away in the north Kent countryside some eight miles…

… south-west of Faversham, Otterden is an unusual brick mansion – a C16 courtyard house fancifully remodelled in the early C19 – with one especially fascinating connection. For in the early C18 this obscure house was the setting for some of the very earliest experiments in the discovery of electricity, about which almost nothing was then known.

The Otterden estate (now of some 2,000 acres) was acquired by the Rev. Granville Wheler c.1718. Later, in the summer of 1729, and excited by his amateur scientist friend Stephen Gray’s small-scale observations of conductivity, Wheler invited Gray to Otterden which offered scope for more ambitious and elaborate experimentation.

‘With the apt method Mr. Wheler contrived, and with the great pains he took himself, and the assistance of his servants, we succeeded far beyond our expectations,’ Gray wrote.¹ And one boy servant in particular was to have a starring role.

What Gray and Wheler were discovering was the ground-breaking identification of conductors and insulators of current. Using the horizontal expanse of Otterden’s Long Gallery and vertical drop from it’s turret, various objects – an ivory ball, an umbrella, even a live chicken – were suspended by great lengths of silk and would attract brass leaf from below when a glass tube was rubbed against the thread. Soon it came time to test the elasticity of the lowly footboy’s job description.

“Mr. Wheler procured silk lines strong enough to bear the weight of his footboy, a good stout lad; then, having suspended him upon the lines, the tube being applied to his feet and hands, and [another’s] finger held near his hands or face, he found himself pricked or burned as it were by a spark of fire, and the snapping noise was heard at the same time.”

“Some time after, in my absence, Mr. Wheler tried a red-hot poker…”

Lively times indeed at Otterden Place which unsurprisingly became the talk of the village: ‘When any of Mr. Wheler’s scientific friends visited him, it was given out by the neighbours that “some conjurations were carrying on in the tower!“‘¹

It was the Rev. Wheler’s grandson, Granville, who would give Otterden a ‘typical early C19 Tudoresque’² remodelling, taking his stylistic cue from that retained C16 crenellated tower. But inside he ‘suffered the interior to be classical’³ with the staircase rising through a double-height screen of Doric and Ionic columns. Hopefully still on the walls among the Lely and Kneller portraits is a spectacular 1728 panoramic* of the Ledston Hall estate, a property…

…which came to the Whelers in 1789 thanks to the Rev. Granville’s first marriage to Catherine Hastings, daughter of the 7th Earl of Huntingdon. As late as 1987, this major G.1 house prominently sited above the Vale of York was described by Country Life in a note as ‘one of Yorkshire’s least known and most complex great houses’.

Finding the place ‘uncommonly interesting’, Pevsner declared the entrance front ‘an outstanding example of that transitional phase in English architecture between the Jacobean style and [that] of Pratt, May, and young Christopher Wren.’† Largely unoccupied after WWII, the south wing has been converted into flats, the rest of the house remaining empty. The late Granville Wheler initiated a restoration programme in the 1980s but the Hall remains on the English Heritage At Risk Register. [Major update below]

Granville would travel to Yorkshire several weeks each year but Otterden Place was home. (He was actually born at a third family property a few miles to the north of Otterden, Syndale House, which burned down in the early 1960s.) His seems to have been a rather enviable existence: popping into his assistant’s office to chat for a couple of hours in the morning before pottering off for a bit of serious reading or otherwise indulging his enthusiasms – railways, his woodlands and horses. And all three were to coalesce in the fancifully-named…

…Otterden & Boardfield Railway, a DIY project to create a horse-drawn track for ferrying timber across the estate. Remnants of this endeavour remain in the undergrowth. The story of Otterden Place and its owners would appear to offer great scope for projects, ‘whether or not educational’. Sadly, Health & Safety would today probably have issues with stringing up schoolchildren to re-enact those electrical experiments. But train buffs, the address for grant funding applications to restore Granville’s little railway is here…

[Granville Wheler obituary][Otterden Place listing][Ledston Hall listing]

Update (Ledston): In 2015 planning permission was granted for ‘partial demolition and alterations to Ledston Hall to form 10 dwellings’. The documentation surrounding the application contains a wealth of detailed information – historical and contemporary – about the property, and many revelatory illustrations (see: Heritage Statement, Strategic Plan). [Complete documentation]

Update (Otterden): 2017 visit by science historian Charlotte Sleigh (inc. photos)

¹ Gentleman’s Magazine Vol.151, 183.

² Newman, J. Buildings of England: NE and East Kent, 1969.

³ Lees-Milne, J. Country Life Aug 27, 1970.

† Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding, 1959.