‘YOU
can’t take it with you’ they say of worldly goods but Sir Fortescue Flannery
who died in October 1943, aged 92, eight years after his beloved wife,
didn’t give up his £419,160.8s.0d easily.
After the taxman had made off with just under £150,000 there was
still a tidy sum to be handed down to the family in a nine-page will that
seemed to have everything tightly sewn up.
Sir Fortescue’s son, Sir Harold, was given a life interest in the estate
and various annuities and trust funds were provided for his daughters
Kathleen Edith Hartridge and Enid Fortescue Lindsay. But
before the family could benefit Sir Fortescue had to be sure of one thing.
He had to be well and truly dead. He obviously didn’t put much faith in
doctors as page 2 of his will declares:
“Being convinced that many cases occur of premature burial I direct that
within twenty-four hours of my death or supposed death one or more of
my principal veins shall be opened by a duly qualified medical practitioner
and left so that the blood may flow if
The wedding of Sir
Fortescue's
daughter Enid to David Lindsay
The Flannery's
family tomb in
Wethersfield churchyard
consciousness
should be regained.”
Sir Fortescue
further directed that “my body shall be kept uncoffined and under observation
in a surrounding atmospheric temperature of not less than eighty degrees
Fahrenheit and with a connection to an audible bell attached to the wrist
until decomposition shall have set in and for not less than seven days
after my supposed death and that then my body shall be examined by duly
qualified medical practitioners experienced in post mortem work.”
He required
the two doctors to give “separate written Certificates that the aforesaid
precautions have been carried out and that decomposition has begun and
of my actual death and the cause thereof shall be furnished to my Executors
who may than and not till then permit cremation to be carried out and
thereafter my body shall be cremated and the ashes interred at Wethersfield
Church Yard in the County of Essex.”
The deceased Sir Fortescue was never to know that his desire for the family line to continue at the Manor would be thwarted and that all the legal contingencies would be in vain. Eventually the estate would have passed into the hands of Sir Harold’s son Derek. But Derek, like so many brave young men, was fighting in the second world war as an RAF pilot and sadly he was shot down and killed a year or so after his grandfather’s death.Sir Harold lived on at the manor until, in 1957, the family decided to sell up. The great house was split into seven flats, mostly occupied by American servicemen from Wethersfield airbase. Today, after a further sale, the great house stands rather gaunt upon its hill, broken up into three dwellings, wearing a coat of battleship grey paint and having little connection with the village.
Only the village playing-field keeps the Flannery name alive. It is named after Derek Flannery who gave his life for an England that was already passing into history.
The Manor today, gaunt
and grey on its hillside above the village