Moving house: How a little old lady spent 23 years single-handedly dismantling her cottage brick by brick and rebuilding it 100 miles away



For a labour of love, it was the DIY job of the century. Brick by brick, the gutsy little old lady demolished her precious home, pulling each medieval nail from its ancient oak beam.

Dressed in a workman's apron, her greying hair tucked beneath a headscarf, she single-handedly piled high the thousands of hand-made Hertfordshire peg tiles from the roof.

Huge timbers were loaded onto a lorry, alongside Tudor fireplaces and Elizabethan diamond leaded glass, for a rebuild that would consume the rest of her life.



Back in business: Ware Hall House, now in Norfork, is a B&B run by May's niece, Christine Adams

Shell of a house: May started to demolish her home timber by timber

For May Savidge was determined to beat developers and planners who threatened to crush her historic cottage under a road-building project.

Long before conservation became fashionable, she decided to move her home lock, stock and barrel from busy Ware High Street in Hertfordshire to a Norfolk backwater 100 miles away.

And move it she did, in a 23-year labour of love, during which she battled the authorities, deathwatch beetles, rats and her failing health, accompanied only by her faithful dog, Sasha.



Now, her incredible story has been told for the first time by her niece, Christine Adams, in a book which is a heartbreaking tale of love lost, stoical determination and a poignant secret.

So who was May Alice Savidge and why did she move 15th-century Ware Hall House from one county to the next?

Born in Streatham, South London, in 1911, May was just ten when her father died of heart failure, plunging the family into poverty. She had to go out to work, becoming a draughts-woman for the Ministry of Aircraft Production team.



Broken-hearted: When her fiance died, May bought Ware Hall House in 1947 to restore

At 16, May met an older man, Denis Watson, a gifted Shakespearean actor. They planned to marry, but he died prematurely in 1938.

May never recovered from this cruel blow and wore his signet ring on her wedding ring finger for the rest of her life. She retreated into herself and it was in 1947 that she bought a house to restore.

Number 1 Monkey Row, Ware, Hertfordshire, had been built around 1450 for a wealthy monk as a 'hall house', a medieval arrangement in which the living space is attached to an open hall overlooked by a minstrel's gallery.

A self-taught home improvement enthusiast, May exposed the heavy oak beams that bore the marks of medieval carpenters and lifted crumbling lino to reveal wide, hand-cut floorboards.

She employed a builder to repair the roof, but all the rest of the work - including brick-laying, carpentry, re-glazing and stripping plaster from the ceilings and 20 layers of paper from the walls - she did with her own hands.

Then, in 1953, the council told her the house was to be demolished to make way for a road - an act of vandalism unthinkable today, now that ancient properties are listed and protected.

Battle began. May dug her heels in and resolved to save the building. For 15 years, she fought the council's plans, writing to them: 'If this little house is really in the way, I would rather move it and re-erect it than see it destroyed.'



Long haul: May carried the timbers herself to the lorries that would move her house

In 1969, when she was 58, the bulldozers reached her gate. Her response was to number each beam and pane of glass so that her home could be reassembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Dismantling the heavy oak timber frame, held together with tapered wooden pegs, was both difficult and dangerous. A team of local demolition contractors helped May. She traced over a sample of brickwork using greaseproof paper and crayons so that she would know which bond to use and how thick to lay the mortar.

She continued to live in the house as it was taken down, sleeping beneath the stars in the freezing cold.

Jigsaw puzzle: Each beam is numbered according to May's floor plans

'I just won't have such a marvellous old house bulldozed into the ground,' she said. 'I've got nothing to do all day, so I might as well do the job myself.'

Strangers sent money to help her - and many became life-long friends. 'Yours is the spirit that once made Britain great,' wrote one.



She found a site in the seaside town of Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, and obtained planning permission and laid foundations. A lorry made the round trip to Norfolk 11 times to carry every part of the house.

So began a life of hardship. She had no electricity and worked by the light of Victorian paraffin lamps. She used an alarm clock to set herself targets each day, noting how many nails she extracted from oak beams per hour, as she dismantled the house and prepared for rebuilding.

A caravan was her home while she began the new work. It was often unbearably cold, but, as she told the Fakenham Ladies Circle Club in 1971: 'My mother brought us up on the maxim that there is no such word as "can't".'

Two years later, the framework was fixed to the foundations by a local carpenter and May started to infill the brickwork. She had no experience of brickwork, but was determined to lay every single brick perfectly.

It would be another eight years before the roof tiles were put in place and the property made watertight.

By the time she was into her 70s, however, May had moved in and the house stood proudly in its new gardens, each old oak beam in place, the brickwork nearly complete and many of the walls plastered.

Despite her age, she continued to build, climbing scaffolding to reach the top windows. In 1986, the Queen recognised her pluck, inviting her to a Buckingham Palace garden party.



On the tiles: May, with her dog Sasha, painstakingly inspects the tons of roof tiles

By now, however, she was running out of steam. In 1992, she finally installed a small wood-burning stove to heat the house, but was having difficulty climbing ladders and found cement work 'a bit heavy'.

On her death in 1993, just before reaching the age of 82, the house was still not finished. 'The walls were up and the roof was on, but the place was little more than a shaky shell,' says Adams, who was left the house in her aunt's will.

A collector extraordinaire, May had filled her home until it looked like an overstocked curiosity shop. In the garden, nine sidesaddles languished, relics of a bygone age. Boxes of unworn wartime nurses' bonnets and May's service medals lay at the bottom of heavy trunks, stacked to ceiling height.

She kept packets of old-fashioned soap powder, Omo, Oxydol and the like, alongside bottles of J Collis Browne's Mixture, the Victorian cure-all.

There were thousands of train, bus and trolley bus tickets, and even the notes left by the milkman.

In 440 diaries, she listed every action she carried out each day, revealing a Britain now lost: a world of shillings and ounces, telegrams and typewriters.



Among this archive, Adams uncovered May's tragic secret. After her fiance's death, she had entered into another secret liaison - a 17-year courtship with a man she believed would marry her.

In a devastating letter, dated 1960, he reveals to her that he has simultaneously found God and fallen in love with his cousin, writing: 'I have, thanks to God, seen my dear cousin Iris in a new and wonderful light.

'I know this will hurt you as I know only too well how you feel towards me. I pray to the Lord that you, too, may experience this most wonderful love.

'I should like nothing better than for you to regard us as a new sister and brother. I would like to bring Iris to see you when you feel like it, I know you, too, will love her - everybody does!'

Clearly cut to the quick, May wrote back: 'It surprises me that anyone so dear and lovable as your Cousin Iris should have thought it right to come between us, after 17 years. My heart is not made of stone. You often spoke of our marriage. Is it surprising that I thought you really cared? I hope you will be more faithful to Iris than you have been to me. Goodbye.'

Next to these letters was a photo of her fiancée playing Hamlet. Adams says: 'Auntie May had wrapped her broken heart in a parcel, tied it with string and hidden it at the back of the attic. Looking through those letters, I could see that she had not become a loner through choice.'

In tribute to her stoical aunt, Adams took on the project of finishing the house, and in the end it was May's hoarding instincts which breathed new life Ware Hall House. Adams sold May's memorabilia, raising funds to renovate the house, which she now runs as a bed and breakfast.

Through her extraordinary habits, May effectively financed the final building work from beyond the grave.

After everything and against all the odds, she had won - she had moved her house across Britain and defied the developers.