Ruth's Blog

Louth Manor House is an impressive Georgian building in Eastgate, almost opposite the junction with Church Street.  The house has a formal garden, and it originally had grounds that stretched back to James Street.  At the time when it was built in the 18th century, this would have been in the countryside, just east of the town.

I am grateful to Richard Gurnham for information about the history of the house.  One of the early residents, and probably the person who built it, was merchant Robert Neve.  He lived here in 1787, the year he became Warden of Louth.  After Robert’s death in 1789, the house was inherited by his younger brother Gabriel Neve, merchant and ship owner.

There is a story that Mary Chaworth, one of Lord Byron’s lovers, resided in here in the early 1800s, but I have not seen evidence to confirm this.  Mary lived in Nottinghamshire.

The next known residents were Robert Rashdall, from Kirton near Boston, and his wife Lucy.  They probably came in 1806, the year they married, but only six years later Robert died leaving Lucy with three young children and five-months pregnant with the fourth.  The Rashdall family remained in their Eastgate house until 1831 when Lucy sold the furniture, and the family moved first to Kirton, and later to Cheltenham.  Lucy, however, retained ownership of the house, renting it out until at least 1861.

In the late 1830s Lucy Rashdall’s tenant was Richard Dawson.  He was probably a member of a well-known farming family in Withcall, just to the west of Louth.  Subsequently, in 1851 and 1861, the tenant was David Fridlington, a retired tanner now described as landed proprietor, and his wife Ellen.

For more than a century from the 1860s until 1980, this house was the home of the Bourne family.  They were wealthy farmers from Scamblesby and Fulstow, who had owned estates in Lincolnshire since the 15th century, and they continued to be landlords in Fulstow until the mid-twentieth century.  Three generations lived in Eastgate: John Bourne born 1823; John Rowell Bourne, born 1850; and finally, John Kendall Bourne, born 1909.

Older residents of Louth today remember J K Bourne as a reclusive but notable gentleman.  When he died in 1980, Peter Chapman of the Grimsby Telegraph, who knew him well and enjoyed his company, described him as a fount of knowledge, a man of kindness and generosity allied to a brilliant mind, but also “the scruffiest millionaire I have ever known”.

An only child, J K Bourne was educated at Miss Surfleet’s School in Gospelgate and King Edward VI Grammar School.  When he was only eleven years old his father died.  Three years after his mother died, when he was 35, J K Bourne married Irene Stephenson.  After a few years, the couple separated, but they did not divorce.

J K Bourne had no need to earn his living, and rarely any need to leave his property.  He caused a sensation by bequeathing almost his entire estate, not to his wife, but to his next-door-neighbour, Mrs Dorothy Dennis for being a good neighbour and looking after him in his old age.

Finally, why is this house known as the Manor House?  A manor house is normally the main residence and administrative centre of a lord of the manor.  The first reference to the “Manor House” appears in 1941 in reports of the death of Mrs Elizabeth Bourne, J K Bourne’s mother.  Presumably J K Bourne thought that the Manor House was an appropriate name for his residence!