It was in the dining room at Hurstly that the prime minister of the time, Herbert Asquith, realised he was in love with Venetia Stanley. In 1912 Asquith, 59, was staying at the “nice little villa” near Lymington in the New Forest with his wife, Margot, and family and friends when he was overcome by the strength of his infatuation with his daughter Violet’s friend, who was 24.
Asquith wrote that it was “when we got back to England [after a holiday in Sicily] and I was spending most of my Sundays in the late winter and early spring in a house lent to me on the outskirts of the New Forest (I remember it was on the eve of the Coal Strike which gave me one of the most trying experiences — up to then — of my public life) that she came down with us for the usual week-end”.
Writing of that time several years later, Asquith noted: “I was sitting with her [Stanley] in the dining room on Sunday morning — the others being out in the garden or walking — and we were talking and laughing just on our old accustomed terms. Suddenly, in a single instant, without premonition on my part or any challenge on hers, the scales dropped from my eyes; the familiar features and smile and gestures and words assumed an absolutely new perspective; what had completely hidden from me was in a flash half-revealed, and I dimly felt, hardly knowing, not at all understanding it, that I had come to a turning point in my life.”
Venetia Stanley and Herbert Asquith
A period map detailing Hurstly’s setting on the outskirts of the New Forest
By the spring of 1914 he was writing to her at least three times a week. This is the backdrop to Robert Harris’s latest bestseller, Precipice, which explores the national threat of looming war and the more personal matter of how his love affair with Stanley, a socialite, threatened national security.
According to research by Melanie Backe-Hansen, a house historian, Hurstly was relatively modern when the Asquiths stayed there. It was built in 1898 by John Barnard, but by 1903 he had left and the house had been acquired by William Eustace Firth and his wife, Anna Maria. Firth was a successful carpet manufacturer from Heckmondwike, between Leeds and Huddersfield, who extended the house to use as a country retreat.
The present owner, Sue Leach, who has lived at the house for close to 20 years, says there are “a lot of Arts and Crafts 1880s features” which would have been there when Asquith and Stanley visited, including a panelled grand hallway, stained glass windows, parquet flooring, high ceilings, double fireplaces and turned chimneys.
The panelled grand hallway with original parquet flooring
Leach, who is planning to downsize (the five-bedroom house is on the market for a guide price of £2 million with John D Wood & Co), could do with the former guests’ help in solving a mystery: steps that appear to lead to a level below the cellar are bricked off; another cellar — concreted over — beneath the courtyard which was discovered during building works contained a woodburning stove.
At the time of the 1911 census no one was living at Hurstly, with the Firths and their 21-year-old son Geoffrey, who followed his father into the carpet business, staying in Heckmondwike. During these years leading up to the First World War Firth made the house available to family and friends, including his cousin Asquith, the son of Firth’s maternal aunt Emily Willans and her husband, Joseph Dixon Asquith.
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After the visits of Asquith and his friends to Hurstly, the Firths moved to the house permanently. Notices reveal that Geoffrey, who served as second lieutenant with the 18th Hussars, was captured in Ypres on October 20, 1914, and was a prisoner of war for four years, after which he returned to Hurstly.
At the outbreak of war things changed for Asquith and Stanley too. In July 1915 Stanley married Asquith’s protégé Edwin Montagu, who had also met Stanley for the first time on that fateful holiday in Sicily. He had been Asquith’s parliamentary private secretary before becoming under-secretary of state for India. Asquith went on to lose his role as prime minister in December 1916.
Firth died in 1923. His wife continued at Hurstly for many years and became one of the first female justices of the peace, for Hampshire. She died on July 10, 1937, and her obituary noted that Geoffrey had died in 1931 at 42 years old.
The obituary of William Eustace Firth
The house was sold and by 1938 it had become the home of Lucy Ashby. When the national register was taken in September 1939, Lucy, 64, was at home with her daughter Evelyn, 42, along with five live-in domestic servants. However, Backe-Hansen says the register also reveals that Hurstly had become a girls’ school. It was home to a matron, an assistant matron of the “girls’ home”, a sewing matron, a cooking matron, two girls “receiving domestic training” and seven younger girls “at school”.
By June 1950 the house was to be auctioned. It was described as having “nine principal bed and dressing rooms, three secondary bedrooms, three bathrooms, four recreational rooms, [and a] billiards room”. The grounds consisted of ornamental trees and shrubs, a tennis court and two paddocks — in all about seven acres. There were also cottages and outbuildings. A little over two years later, the house and estate were being auctioned again, Backe-Hansen says.
The notice of the house’s auction in 1952
After that sale Hurstly was divided into two semi-detached homes, with the portion to the south named Hurstwood. Later, from the 1960s, Hurstly (to the north) became the home of Edward Arthur Shackleton, the son of the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, and his wife Betty.
Edward Shackleton (right) prepares to depart on an Arctic expedition, 1944
ALAMY
Initially Edward followed his father into exploration and undertook several expeditions during his time at Oxford University in the 1930s. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Air Force, rising to the rank of wing commander by June 1945, and in the same year he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. After the war Edward entered politics and became MP for Preston in 1946. He had a high-profile career as a Labour politician.
In August 1958 he became a life peer, Baron Shackleton, and moved to the House of Lords. In 1974, he was appointed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s he continued to hold prominent positions, including President of the Royal Geographical Society and Pro-Chancellor of the University of Southampton. Lord Shackleton was still at the house at the time of his death, in September 1994.
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