Nocton history

Nocton’s History: From Domesday to the English Civil War

Nocton Hall was the principal seat in England of the prominent Norman family of the d’Arcys. Norman d’Arcy appears
as the landowner in Domesday of 1086. His son Robert founded the Augustinian Priory of St Mary Magdalene in the
deer park surrounding the hall. The Priory was known as Nocton Park, a name derived from its position in the park.
This is a place name that survives in the northeastern part of the village today. There is no reason to doubt that the
d’Arcys built the original parish church next to their hall. Both the Priory and the medieval church are unexcavated
ruins, lying just beneath the ground’s surface.

D’Arcy descendants through the female line continued as lords of the manor here for nearly six hundred years. One
such was Thomas Wymbishe. He and his wife Elizabeth, Lady Tailboys, entertained Henry VIII and Katherine Howard
at Nocton Hall in 1541. They had no children, so Thomas’s sister Frances inherited the estate. She married Sir Richard
Towneley of Towneley in Lancashire. They were a Catholic family who were heavily fined during the Reformation. Their
descendant Richard Towneley was forced to sell the estate after further losses sustained during the Civil War.

Nocton Hall, Courtesy of Lincoln Cathedral Library

Georgian and Victorian Lords of the Manor

Members of the Hobart family lived in Nocton Hall in the 18th and
19th centuries. George Hobart, later third Earl of Buckinghamshire,
enclosed the land on his estate of Nocton and Dunston. His son
Robert, the fourth Earl, was a distinguished statesman, after whom
Hobart, Tasmania is named. Robert’s only child Sarah married
Frederick Robinson, created Viscount Goderich in 1827, and first
Earl of Ripon in 1833. He held the office of Prime Minister for the
shortest period in British history, from August 1827 to January 1828.
Nocton Hall burned to the ground in 1834, when the Ripons were in
London. They rebuilt the hall on the same site in 1841. Many of the
old cottages and farm buildings in Nocton date from the time when
the Ripons were lords of the manor. They built All Saints Church,
sparing no expense. The Countess’s cousin Louisa Charlotte
Hobart designed the two east windows. Her father, Henry Lewis
Hobart D.D, was Vicar of Nocton and Dean of Windsor. The Earl of
Ripon was involved in the early stages, but died in 1859 and never saw it. His son George Frederick Robinson, then
Viscount Goderich, inherited from his father both Nocton and the Studley Royal estate in Yorkshire. In the same year
that his father died he inherited the title of Earl de Grey on the death of his father’s brother. In 1871 he was given the
title of first Marquess of Ripon. A distinguished radical politician, he was Viceroy of India from 1880 to 1884.

From 1889 to the End of World War I

George Hodgson was a Bradford industrialist, famous for perfecting and manufacturing the Hodgson Power Loom. He
bought the Nocton and Dunston estate in 1889; soon afterwards he handed it over to his son John and his wife. They
welcomed their seventh child into the world at Nocton Hall in 1890. Sadly, John did not live to see all of his children grow
up. When he died in 1902, his son Norman was only 25, but already a veteran of the Boer War. Norman set to work
turning the estate into a showplace. He redecorated and modernised the hall, re-stocked the gardens with roses, and
planted more rhododendrons in the 400 acre wood, a practice first introduced by the Ripons. Nocton Wood is still
famous for its bluebells.

During the course of World War I, as more and more men left the estate to serve in the armed forces, Norman
Hodgson converted large potato houses on the fen into barracks for prisoners of war. The POWs were invaluable to
the estate to boost food production during those difficult years. Early in 1917 after the entry of the USA into the war,
the family allowed the hall to be turned into a convalescent home for wounded American soldiers.

1919 to the Present Day

The Nocton and Dunston estate has had frequent changes of

Nocton narrow gauge Potato Railway.

ownership over the last century. In 1919 and again in 1925,
the estate was sold to members of two different branches
of the Dennis family. In 1926 the track of the narrow gauge
railway, bought second-hand from the World War I trenches,
was relaid here in rural Lincolnshire to enable easy transport
for produce and people. From 1936, when Smith’s Potato Crisps
Estates acquired the estate, the light railway brought potatoes
up from the fen for sorting before being sent by train to the
Smith’s Crisps factory on Newark Road, Lincoln.

Nocton played its part in the Second World War, as it did in the
First. The Air Ministry acquired the hall and 200 acres of park
in early 1940. It was used as an Army clearing station until 1943,
when it became the United States Army Seventh General Hospital.
Many new buildings were constructed and the hall was used as
the Officers’ Mess. The RAF took the hospital on at the end of the
war as its permanent hospital for Lincolnshire. It remained so until
1983. The hospital was then kept in mothballs, and was used for a handful of casualty cases from the First Gulf War.
It closed for good in 1995. The hospital buildings are now derelict. Nocton Hall was a residential care home until 1998.
Since then it has changed hands twice, but has remained empty. It was devastated by fire in 2004.

Despite the fact that the hall has not been lived in by a resident owner since the early 20th century, it is remarkable that
the 7000 acres of the Nocton and Dunston estate are still intact today. Most of the village houses and farm buildings
belonged to the estate until as late as the 1980s. But increasing mechanisation led to the need for fewer farm workers,
and gradually more and more estate houses and cottages were sold off. It is only in recent years that the remaining farm
buildings have been converted to houses.

Smith’s Potato Crisps sold the estate in 1975. A series of insurance companies owned it until 1995, when the present
owner Paul Clarke bought it. He grows bulbs and flowers for cutting on former arable and pasture land. During the
height of the flower season, his labour force exceeds 650 people, mostly from Eastern Europe, who live in purpose-
built accommodation in Dunston, with sports facilities and a cinema. Alongside are new glasshouses. Mr Clarke’s
enterprise has transformed the landscape. In the spring, the fields surrounding Nocton are ablaze with colour,
announcing a new chapter in the village’s history.

©2007 Carol Bennett

Looking south from Nocton towards estate farm buildings in Dunston.