Stocks House - Ward

Ward

Stocks manor house was inherited by Sir Edward Grey, 1st Viscount of Falloden, who served as British Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the United States, from his grandfather. Sir Grey's career never allowed him to live there, and in 1892 he sold Stocks House to best-selling British novelist Mary Augusta Ward who made Stocks her beloved home until her death in 1920. While Ward lived at Stocks, it became a bustling salon of leading intellectual luminaries of her day, including her nephews Aldous and Julian Huxley, her son-in-law historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, and such guests as George Orwell, who gathered for long weekends, to join as many as 50 other literary and intellectually inclined overnight guests and friends who could be accommodated in the main house. Ward is buried just down the road at Aldbury Church. Upon Ward's death, Stocks was inherited by her son, a Member of Parliament, Arnold Ward. who sold Stocks to the Blezard family, who later sold it to the Brown family, before Stocks became an exclusive girl's school in 1944.

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Famous quotes containing the word ward:

    Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

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    Conviction is the conscience of the mind.
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