Wednesday 26 June 2013

Conrad Noel at Paycocke's



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.


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.


Paycocke's from the garden

Second, the period in the nineteenth century by when the house was split into three separate tenemented cottages.


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.


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.


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.




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.