I have blogged before about Conrad Noel, the ‘Red Vicar’ of
Thaxted who was instrumental in establishing the Morris Ring there as part of
his unique socialist vision. I was delighted to discover that before going to
Thaxted Conrad Noel was also instrumental in the restoration of Paycocke’s in Essex.
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| Paycocke's, Essex |
Paycocke’s is a charming Tudor house, on the main road in to
Coggeshall, one of those lovely Essex villages tucked away off the busy
A-roads. The house contains elements of earlier Medieval structures, but in its
present form reflects three main periods.
First, the elaborate carvings dating from the time of Thomas
Paycocke, a prosperous cloth merchant.
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| Paycocke's from the garden |
Second, the period in the nineteenth century by when the
house was split into three separate tenemented cottages.
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| Allotment patch at Paycocke's |
And finally, the period from 1904 onwards when the house was
restored by Lord Noel Buxton, a distant descendent of the original Paycocke
family, who gifted it to the National Trust in 1924.
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| Conrad Noel at Paycocke's, c1904 |
What I did not know, until my visit, was that Conrad Noel,
and his wife Miriam, lived in the house from 1904 to 1910, and were responsible
for undertaking the restoration work for Lord Buxton. Conrad was a
cousin of Lord Buxton.
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| Miriam Noel, in what is now the new coffee shop |
Conrad Noel’s autobiography (1945) contains some atmospheric
accounts of those early days of restoration:
'It had exciting
disadvantages...we lived in an atmosphere of dust and white-wash and broken
plaster’
'The cold was so intense that
we sometimes sat over the fire in the hall with its wrought-iron basket and
logs of wood surrounded by a tent of screens.'
Curiously, Noel’s
biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (you need a public library
card to read this) fails to mention this 6-year period, which immediately
preceded Conrad and Miriam’s move to Thaxted.
However, I should have guessed that Noel might have shared
the same enthusiasms for historic renovation as the founders of the National
Trust. Like Octavia Hill and Sir Robert Hunter, Noel was a keen follower of F.D. Maurice, the
Christian Socialist. Similarly too, he was a devotee of the romantic vision of
William Morris.
Unlike Hill, however, he firmly supported the early
Independent Labour Party, and later the Socialist and Communist parties. He
courted controversy at Thaxted when he hung the Sinn Féin flag, leading to the
famous Battleof the Flags. Noel’s patron was Daisy, Countess of Warwick, the great socialist
socialite who lived nearby at Easton Lodge.
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| Conrad Noel and daughter, Barbara |
Conrad and Miriam had a daughter, Barbara, and I was pleased
to find this picture of her at Paycocke’s. She married Jack Putterill, who
succeeded his father-in-law as Vicar of Thaxted in 1942 until 1973. If
anything, Jack was even more radical than Conrad, inviting his parishioners to
pray for the recently deceased Stalin at the Sunday service in March 1953.
