Langtry Manor, Dorset, England

The Langtry Manor (formerly The Red House) is a country house hotel at 26 Derby Road in the East Cliff area of Bournemouth, England. It was formerly in the parish of Christchurch but is now in the Borough of Bournemouth. There is a strong and developed local tradition that The Red House was built by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in 1877 for his mistress Lillie Langtry (1853-1929) but contemporary evidence shows that the house was in fact built by her contemporary Emily Langton Langton (born Emily Langton Massingberd) (1847-1897), a prominent women’s rights campaigner and temperance activist.[1] It had no connection with the Prince or his mistress.[2]

Emily Langton and The Red House 1877-87

Emily Langton Langton was born Emily Langton Massingberd, the eldest daughter of Charles Langton Massingberd, of Gunby Hall, Lincolnshire. She married in 1867 her second cousin Edmund Langton.[3] The couple lived principally in Bournemouth,[4] but Edmund died, aged 34, in November 1875, at Eastwood, East Cliffe Road, Bournemouth (the home of his father Revd Charles Langton who was at that time married to a sister of Charles Robert Darwin the naturalist), leaving her with a son and three daughters. She turned then to temperance work with the British Women’s Temperance Association and in 1877 built The Red House at the junction of Knyveton Road and Derby Road, Bournemouth, adding a large assembly room for her meetings.

A portrait of Emily painted by John Collingham Moore (who died in 1880) shows her with a violin, and in December 1880 she was one of the instrumentalists for the Congregational Band of Hope in the Richmond Hill Congregational School-room, Bournemouth.[5] In May 1880 she helped at a bazaar in Bournemouth Town Hall[6] and in January 1881 she held a notable fancy dress dance ‘at the Assembly Room of the Red House, Bournemouth’.[7] In September 1882 she held a ‘fashionable concert’ at the Red House in aid of funds for the Bournemouth Dispensary.[8] Emily was not always at the Red House and at the time of the Census (3 April) in 1881 she was staying in Kensington and the Red House had been let to John Edward Cooke, late of the Royal Navy, his wife Sarah Rosa (a daughter of Edward Mackenzie of Fawley Court, Surrey) and their young family.[9] In 1882 the Red House was let to Mr and Mrs Holdsworth.[10. Emily made her first speech in favour of women’s suffrage at Westminster Town Hall in 1882 and on 15 December 1883, Laura Ormiston Grant and Caroline Biggs ‘held a drawing-room meeting at the home of Mrs Langton (The Red House, Derby Road)’.[11] Mrs Langton is listed at that address in Kelly’s Directory for Hampshire for 1885.

However, Emily’s father died in 1887 and she succeeded to the Gunby Hall estate in Lincolnshire. She resumed her maiden name of Massingberd by Royal Licence that year describing herself as ‘of The Red House, Bournemouth, and of Gunby Hall, Lincoln, widow’.[12] For some years she managed the Gunby Hall estate herself and the Red House saw little of Emily Langton Massingberd when the house was often let to others.

The Red House’s later history

In 1891 the census shows Emily Langton’s young widowed sister Alice Clark (died 1927) at the Red House with her two young children and Emily’s daughter Diana Massingberd, then aged 18, and five servants,[13] but meanwhile in 1889 the wife of Warren Thomas Peacocke (died 1920), a Captain in the Rifle Brigade, had given birth to a son, Warren ‘John’ Richard Peacocke, at the Red House[14] though his family seems to have lived mainly at Efford Park, Lymington.[15]

By 1901 the Red House was occupied by Henry Martin Cornwall Legh (1839-1904), a retired Colonel in the Grenadier Guards and his wife Constance. The Census that year shows also three visitors and nine indoor servants, together with, in the neighbouring Red House Stables, a coachman, two footmen and a groom.[16]

Shortly afterwards The Red House was occupied (and it seems owned) by the Revd George Bennett, former Head Master of Sarum Cathedral School (1881–90) and Rector of Folke, Dorset (1890-3) and later Vicar of Rodmersham, Kent (1903-5) and Rector of West Quantoxhead, Bridgwater (1907–11).[17] Bennett was, in fact, described as of the Red House in 1898 [18] so he had presumably let the house to Colonel Legh for a short time. In 1905 Bennett’s wife advertised for a cook (good plain), a house parlour maid and a young housemaid.[19] and later that year her husband was successfully sued for damages by a local ironmonger and engineer after driving his car ‘without due care and attention’.[20]
The Bennetts seem to have continued to let the house and in 1911 it was occupied by Louisa Lucy Sitwell, the 80-year-old widow of Sir Sitwell Reresby Sitwell, 3rd Baronet, who had died in 1862. She had with her three relatives as well as eight servants and a nurse, her butler and his wife living in three rooms in the stables.[21] Lady Sitwell (who in 1901 had with her at Gosden House, Shalford, Surrey, her granddaughter, the young Edith Sitwell) died in October 1911 but by then was living at Balcombe Tower, Branksome Park, Bournemouth.[22]

The Revd George Bennett died at The Red House, 5 September 1915,[23] and his widow, Caroline Elizabeth, died there 4 September 1937.[24]

Immediately after Mrs Bennett’s death in 1937 the house was sold and converted into an hotel. The first proprietors were Cecil Henry Ravenhill Hulbert (1895-1974) and his wife Dorothy Minnie, nee Kemp (1899-1987). They named it the Manor Heath Hotel and from July 1938 actively advertised it in newspapers, producing also a brochure saying that the house was ‘built originally for Lily Langtry’.[25] The Hulberts were presumably responsible for the Borough of Bournemouth plaque on the front of the building recording its supposed connection with the Prince’s mistress.

In 1977 Pamela Howard and her family purchased the property and called it the Red House Hotel. After restoring some of the original features and décor, they re-named it the Langtry Manor Hotel and put together an ‘1877 Collection’ of memorabilia relating to Lillie Langtry. In March 2015 the Howard family sold the hotel. Derby Lodge no longer forms part of the estate.

The Langtry legend

By the 1940s, when memories of Emily Langton’s activities at Bournemouth had begun to fade, local people confused the names and began to say that the single lady who had lived at the Red House in the 1880s was none other than the notorious Emilie ‘Lillie’ Langtry, the mistress of Edward VII. Lillie Langtry had lived at Monaco since 1918 and died in 1929. She had made no mention of the house or of any Bournemouth connection in her memoirs The days I knew (1925).

However, by the time that the former journalist James Brough collected information for his

The Prince and the Lily (1975), it was being said that Lillie and the late King had designed and built the Red House in Derby Road on land which belonged to Lord Derby, that they had stayed in a smaller property on the land (Derby Lodge) whilst the house was being built, and that when completed the initials E. L. L. and the year 1877 were carved into the inglenook fireplace in the dining room.

This photo of the Kings room in Langtry Manor Hotel is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Lillie probably did not become the Prince’s mistress until late in 1877 or early in 1878[26] and the initials E. L. L., which were said to be those of Emilie Le Breton Langtry, were in reality those of Emily Langton Langton. By 24 May 1877, when Lillie Langtry first met the Prince of Wales, she had already dropped the name Emilie and the monograph on her writing paper was just ‘LL’.[27] The size of the assembly room, ‘more dining-hall than dining-room’ as Laura Beatty described it,[28] had always been something of a surprise to those interested in the Lillie Langtry story.

The Red House is in Derby Road and it was said that the area had belonged to Lord Derby[29] but Lord Derby owned no land in Hampshire[30] and his family papers make no mention of Lillie Langtry or of the Red House.[31]

Finally, Professor Jane Ridley, with privileged access to the Prince of Wales’s diaries and other Royal Archives, states that there is no contemporary evidence that the Prince had any connection with the Red House or ever went or stayed there.[32]
Although remaining friends with the Prince, Lillie Langtry’s physical relationship with him ended in June 1880 when she became pregnant, probably by her old friend Arthur Jones with whom she went to Paris for the birth of the child, Jeanne Marie, in March 1881.[33][34]

It may be noted that Captain Warren Peacocke’s father, Warren William Richard Peacocke (1822-1877), had married secondly in 1875, Georgina, the eldest sister of William Cornwallis West (1835-1917), of Ruthin Castle and Newlands Manor, Milford-on-Sea. It is just possible that Lillie Langtry, by 1889 the mistress of Fred Gebhard and frequently touring in America, had been spoken about when the Captain visited The Red House that year, for Lillie was a great friend of William’s wife, the celebrated beauty Mary (‘Patsy’) Cornwallis West (1854-1920), whose name was also closely associated with that of the Prince of Wales. If so, it would perhaps have strengthened the local gossip and stories. Two of Mary’s children stayed with Georgina Peacocke at West Street, Southwick, Hampshire, in 1881[35] and the whole West family were at neighbouring Newlands Manor in 1891[36] and were well known in the area.

In 2006 Langtry Manor appeared as the subject of the Five television series The Hotel Inspector and the hotel later won the 'Best Small Hotel' award as part of the first Bournemouth Tourism Awards.[37]

References

Jump up ^ Clement, Mark. "Massingberd, Emily Caroline Langton (1847-1897). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2007. Jump up ^ Ridley, Jane, Bertie: a life of Edward VII (2012)206. Jump up ^ Burke’s Landed Gentry, iii (1972) sub ‘Langton of Langton’ and ‘Montgomery-Massingberd of Gunby’ Jump up ^ A daughter was born at Little Forest House, Bournemouth, in 1871; Hampshire Telegraph, 21 June 1871, page 2 Jump up ^ Hampshire Telegraph, 24 December 1880, page 8 Jump up ^ Hampshire Telegraph, 29 May 1880, page 7 Jump up ^ Hampshire Telegraph, 15 January 1881, page 3 Jump up ^ Hampshire Telegraph, 16 September 1882, page 3 Jump up ^ 1881 Census: The National Archives, RG11/1194-32-55; Burke’s Landed Gentry (1882) sub Mackenzie of Fawley Court; Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain: The Kingdom in Scotland (2001) sub Mackenzie of Farr Jump up ^ James Brough, The prince and the Lily (1975) 259 Jump up ^ Elizabeth Crawford, The women’s suffrage movement in Britain and Ireland: a regional survey (2013) Jump up ^ The Times, 19 March 1887, quoted in W.P.W. Phillimore & E.A. Fry, An index to Changes of Name (1968) 219 Jump up ^ 1891 Census: The National Archives, RG12/903-73-73 Jump up ^ Morning Post, 7 May 1889, page 1 Jump up ^ Burke’s Landed Gentry, ii (1882) 1246 sub Peacocke of Efford Park; Kelly’s Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes (1893) Jump up ^ 1901 Census: The National Archives, RG13/1043-97-27/28 Jump up ^ Crockford’s Clerical Directories Jump up ^ Crockford’s Clerical Directory Jump up ^ Western Gazette, 5 May 1905, page 6 Jump up ^ Western Gazette, 1 December 1905, page 5 Jump up ^ The National Archives, RG14, RD 95, ED 16 Jump up ^ Principal Probate Registry, General Calendar of Grants, 1912 Jump up ^ Western Gazette, 1 October 1915, page 5; PPR, General Calendar of Grants Jump up ^ Western Daily Press, 16 October 1937, page 6; PPR, General Calendar of Grants Jump up ^ https://www.flickr.com/photos/alwyn_ladell/15475059259 Jump up ^ Laura Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals (1999) 97-8 Jump up ^ Beatty (1999) 89 Jump up ^ Beatty (1999) 89 Jump up ^ Beatty (1999) 88 Jump up ^ The Complete Peerage, iv (1916) 222 Jump up ^ Beatty (1999) 89 Jump up ^ Jane Ridley, Bertie: a life of Edward VII (2012) 206. Jump up ^ Beatty (1999) 173 Jump up ^ Anthony Camp, Royal Mistresses and Bastards: Fact and Fiction: 1714-1936 (2007) 364-367 Jump up ^ 1881 Census: The National Archives, RG11/1169-38-10 Jump up ^ 1891 Census: The National Archives, RG12/900-26-7 Jump up ^ Events and News - Langtry Manor

External links

Langtry Manor Hotel Official website of Lillie Langtry