The Collection of Charles Wade

Yesterday I popped down the hill and took a look at the collection of Charles Wade inside Snowshill Manor. My neighbour – albeit from 1919, I really loved his mad and curious mind. With costumes reminiscent of Steven Tennant and the Bright Young things, this interesting chap didn’t live at the Manor, instead he lived in the small cottage next door and allowed the Jacobean slash Georgian home to house his collection of curiosities and my goodness, what a collection. The site, which could have been a hunting lodge perhaps, formally owned by the monasteries then the crown when Henry the Eighth decided otherwise, left the site of Snowshill Manor to Catherine Parr then it went to her fourth and final husband Thomas Seymour, and then the Duke of Northumberland his brother – all of them had their heads chopped in one way or another, we’ll need to listen to some drunk history on that…

Anyway, all that chopping aside, it was then bought by a private owner and it was rebuilt and lived in by a farmer – I say lived, the farmer lived in one room and when Charles Wade saw a classified ad in Country Life when he was on the front in the Great War, he bought it in 1919, to house his collection of curiosities that he had started collecting as a child. I LOVE Charles Wade, well, the idea of him. He restored the house sympathetically as he saw fit for the Jacobean part then the Georgian part. He created trap ceilings so he could lift up his furniture to the upper floors and what a load of stuff he had.

Meanwhile, some phone photos of the day and do make a visit. The National Trust have simply cleared a path so we can walk through, it’s as much as he left it really.