manor fire

Up stumps and off to save the blazing Manor house
The Manor, with the old West Wing, before the fire.	JUNE 1933 was typically a warm month but that evening it had turned cold and 75-year-old Lady Edith Flannery, who was not feeling well, had a fire lighted in her drawing room. The room was in the oldest, oak-timbered part of Wethersfield Manor, known in earlier times known as Dobbins farmhouse. About 6pm Lady Flannery was walking in the garden when smoke was seen issuing from her apartments. The fire alarm bell on the roof of the manor was sounded and soon the villagers were rushing to do what they could. Cricketers left their match and raced up the hill in their flannels. The nearest fire-engines at Bocking and Braintree were six miles away and would take some minutes	Reconstructed, the Manor West Wing now has a bay window
to reach the now blazing West wing. Ill as she was, Lady Flannery ran back into the house. Several thousand pounds worth of jewels, including the diamond-studded wristwatch presented to her by her husband’s Maldon constituents, were in the bedroom next to the fire but to her their sentimental value was incalculable. The smoke and fumes were too great and Lady Flannery had to retreat. At that moment the roof of the bedroom fell down behind her. Luckily Sir Fortescue’s collection of silver was in another part of the mansion and the villagers set about rescuing this and his valuable library of 2,000 books which they laid out on the lawn. Others, lead by the then famous arctic explorer Augustine Courtauld, propped long ladders against the creeper-clad walls and carried a chain of buckets of water to tip on the roof. Just as courageous was Miss Addison from Wethersfield Place who grabbed a bucket and followed Mr Courtauld up the ladder. By the time the brigades arrived to pump water up the hill from the ornamental pond 350 yards away across the park the West wing had lost its roof and only the chimney stacks remained. The roof of the adjoining billiard room was burnt through. No-one was seriously hurt. Sir Fortescue, 81, was showered with molten lead from the roof and was burned on the feet and head and two men who were trying
After the fire the whole West Wing has disappeared	to carry a four-hundredweight full-size statue of a lady from the front hall were bruised when they fell with it down the stone entrance steps. As night fell the fireman damped down what remained of the wing. Lady Flannery, completely overcome at the loss of her jewellery and the destruction of much of her home, was lifted into a car and taken to Wethersfield Place where her doctor treated her for shock. She never fully recovered her health and, despite going to Clacton and Brighton for the sea air, she died in March 1936, greatly mourned by her friends and villagers to whom she was “Our gracious lady”.	All that remained of the billiard room after the blaze
	Click pictures to enlarge