1937 Catalogue for the Auction of the Berners Estate

In 1937 the Berners family decided to divest themselves of their entire estate. The estate comprised the parts we knew well, but few of us realised that in 1937 it included almost the entire Shotley Peninsula at over 9 square miles.

The auction over two days in December took place at the Crown and Anchor Hotel in Ipswich. The Hall and grounds were sold to Oxford University for £185,000.

Woolverstone House (Corners) was lot 25 of the 169. By whom it was acquired at that auction and how it became available to Woolverstone Hall School, I don’t know. My guess is that it was also acquired by Oxford University as another site with potential for its educational interests.

Over 30 years ago a friend of mine was then living in Suffolk. He knew I was at Woolverstone and happened upon the auction catalogue in an antiquarian book shop and bought it for me (very cheaply): a lucky combination of a good friend and a chance encounter. Presumably there were not vast numbers of the catalogue printed, and, anyway, it was only of value for its prime function for only months, if not weeks.

It is a wonderful document with comprehensive details of every property and photographs of some of the principal ones. It is between A4 and A3 in size and with rather fragile binding can’t be placed on the bed of a scanner without causing damage, so I have instead photographed the nearly 100 pages, and Chris has done a great job of straightening them and reducing shadow. Every word is legible and very close to the quality of the original.

There is a wealth of social history contained in these pages, as well as technical details relating to provision of services such as water supply. It appears there was no mains water supply at the time. In fact that only appeared after the school started.

I spent many hours “out of bounds” in my time at Woolverstone, either on foot or by bike and I reckon I knew every road and property from Freston to Harkstead and down to Shotley so this catalogue, I know, will be of great interest to anyone who got to explore much of the Estate.

In my many wanderings I rarely encountered land owners, farm workers or members of the general public. It was as though I had this whole beautiful area to myself. The only awkward moment was when a herd of bullocks started to chase me in a field about a mile beyond Pin Mill. I just beat them to a gate.

As a Socialist, I have my own thoughts about a single family owning so much beautiful land and to a large extent the lives of thousands of its inhabitants. But I suppose we have to be grateful that it was probably because of that that we were able to enjoy much of that land almost as our own. We were lucky, as I expect that very little of what we took to be common land is now available for the current generation to explore, and in the case of Deer Park Lodge, below Corners House, what appears to be a new 21st century style of hoarding and closing off of land and property by the Super Rich. It is clearly not possible to wander the entire length of the foreshore any longer.