Historic Houses of West Sussex & Their Owners

Frances Garnet Wolseley was born in London in 1872. She was very much a countrywoman who loved both hunting and taking long solitary walks with her dogs. Early in 1898 the Wolseleys rented Glynde Place and she had by then trained as a gardener. In 1903 her mother saw an advertisement placed by a lady gardener who was in ‘distressed circumstances' and engaged her. Her employment then sparked the idea of founding a school for lady gardeners. Arthur Beckett founded the Sussex County Magazine in December 1926 and asked her to contribute a series entitled Historic Houses of Sussex. Over the years that followed she described 115 houses, the last four articles appearing posthumously. In Myth and Memory she declared that she would always be glad that she had been chosen to write the series for it enabled her to spend her summers exploring the county she loved looking at fascinating houses. In winter she did her research.

This book contains the articles she wrote between 1926 and 1935 on West Sussex. (Historic Houses of East Sussex & their Owners is also published by Country Books.) These books should prove invaluable for the lover of old Sussex houses, and with an index of family names, for those tracing their family tree. The very fact that she was a viscountess, opened doors to her. Several of these old buildings had been reduced to farm houses. Many of them are still in private hands - where circumstances have changed, they are mentioned at the end of each article.