Netherlea: Pottery business funded beautiful mansion

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STRICTLY speaking, Netherlea should be classed as a villa rather than a country house, being what would today be described as a high-status residence set in the countryside, but having insufficient land to generate enough income to support it.

However, this criterion could be strictly applied to several established country houses which, despite really quite small estates, were supported from the income of such things as coal or minerals in the area.

In this case, Netherlea was supported by local industry, pottery, for the house was built by the Bourne family, descendants of William Bourne who founded the Belper pottery in 1800.

William, son of Richard Bourne, also had a sister, Mary, who married local mill owner Francis Agard, who moved to Derby and set up a mill on the street later named after him.

William married Edith Dawes and had no fewer than seven sons and six daughters, not all of whom, unsurprisingly, survived to maturity.

Of them, two daughters, Sara, married to Samuel Wood, and Mary, wife of John Comrie, had married pottery-makers from Burslem, now part of Stoke-on-Trent.

Four sons were also involved in pottery manufacture. The eldest, William, died at Swadlincote, where he was involved with the manufacture of the much heavier-duty wares produced there. Edward (the fifth son) ran the pottery at Belper, as did his next brother, John.

Joseph, the youngest son, moved the main operation to Denby, founding that distinguished and still surviving firm in 1812.

He also opened less enduring works at Codnor Park (in production from 1833 to 1861) and Shipley (operating from 1835 to 1856).

Joseph married Alice, daughter of Samuel Harvey of Milford, in 1815, while her sister, Elizabeth Anne, in 1829 married Joseph’s nephew, William Bourne of Belper.

Joseph was succeeded at Denby by his surviving son, Joseph Harvey Bourne, and it was for his widow, Sarah Elizabeth (nee Topham), that Netherlea was built, in 1885.

The house, with its distinctive and romantic appearance, was built in an irregular style combining “Jacobethan” with Gothic overtones, of rock-faced ashlar quarried from Coxbench.

It is two storeys high, with attics, and started off as a simple L-shaped villa with main south and east fronts joined by an octagonal turret at the angle and capped by a steeply pitched conical roof.

This is attached to a straight coped, gabled bay facing east with mullion and transom cross windows.

There is a sloping bay beyond with a separate hipped roof over it, giving something of the effect of Derbyshire-descended John Heathcoat-Amory’s Knighthayes Court, in Devon, designed by William Burges. This house was completed less than a decade before – not that I am suggesting that Netherlea was designed by Burges, far from it, but it at least captures some of the idiom of that important National Trust property.

A later extension of the east (garden) front at Netherlea is slightly set back, ending in a much more arts-and-crafts derived barge-boarded gable with sash, instead of casement, windows.

The effect is somewhat marred by a projecting and uncompromisingly four-square two-storey projection where the two ranges join. This appears to have been added in 1899.

It was unusual for widows to build new country houses, especially childless ones, but Mrs Bourne was left extremely well-provided for and, being just 46 years old, probably decided that she would like to live away from the potworks and coal mines of Denby, albeit within a modest distance of the family enterprises. Nor do I know who the architect was as the style of the house is difficult to match with any other comparable house of the period.

It could have been designed by Richard Waite of Duffield.

Waite was the son of John Waite of Postern, Tunbridge Wells, in Kent, who trained in London, and was certainly acquainted with Burges.

He came to Derby to assist William Giles and settled in Duffield by 1870 (when he was churchwarden there). He had an office at 15 St Mary’s Gate, Derby.

In 1878-9, thanks to his London connections, he took as a pupil W R Lethaby, later an arts-and-crafts architect of singular talent, his young protege later finding a place back in the capital with R Norman Shaw and W Eden Nesfield.

Indeed, the latter, then working on the estate buildings at Shipley Hall, was another of Waite’s wide circle and Netherlea displays some Nesfield-esque features.

Waite’s house in Duffield, Greentrees, Chapel Lane, is entirely his own creation. In a long career, he rose to become chairman of Belper Rural District Council from 1888-1900 and was a county council alderman of long standing.

The gardens and grounds of Netherlea were, in their day, something of a show-piece, and Mrs Bourne was an exceptionally keen gardener, bringing back rare plant specimens from her extensive travels abroad.

They may, therefore, have been professionally laid out by someone of some standing nationally.

On Mrs Bourne’s death in 1898, the house passed to her sister-in-law Mary (Bourne) and her husband, the Rev W Cheslin Wheeler, of Southborough, Kent, and sometime vicar of Pollington, Yorkshire, who assumed the additional surname of Bourne.

By early last century, Netherlea was the home of Colonel Joseph Bourne Wheeler and his wife, Florence, daughter of the opulent banker, F N Smith of Wingfield Park.

They had married in 1899 and I suspect that they had the extension added then, probably by someone other than the original architect.

Previously, Bourne Wheeler had rented Kilburn Hall. They took an active part in village life. We are told by Doris Howe in her excellent book The Story of Holbrook that the house was requisitioned during the First World War as a supply depot for hospitals.

Local ladies could be found in the drawing room on regular occasions making up bandages and dressings to be sent to the Red Cross in Bakewell.

Mrs Howe also reminds us that it was from Netherlea, which had by then been re-named Southwood, that Charles, 10th Earl of Harrington, rode out with the hunt, on Saturday, November 16, 1929. He was fatally injured by a fall while jumping a gate in Nether Lane.

He was carried back to the head gardener’s house on the gate, where he tragically died not long afterwards, having received the last rites.

During the Second World War, the house was the headquarters of the Holbrook Home Guard, and it was there, in 1942, that Col Bourne Wheeler died, aged 85.

His widow moved away in 1944 and, being again childless (the family’s heir was Colonel Bourne Wheeler’s nephew Charles Chittenden), she sold the house to Dr Barnardo’s to accommodate children evacuated from the south-east during the Doodlebug blitz.

It was later adapted to take disabled children and then became the property of Derbyshire County Council in the 1980s.

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