When the first FR died he left no will, but an inventory was made of his household goods and farm stock.  The assessors did not state whether he was a “yeoman” or a “gent”, perhaps because he was on the borderline of the two.  At £263 his inventory was about twice the average for a yeoman and his house was comfortably furnished.  There were plenty of cushions and carpets, while the beds in the parlour and parlour chamber had feather mattresses instead of humbler flock.  It was not uncommon to have a bed in a reception room; it was the most valuable and showy piece of furniture in the house.  Randolph also had two livery cupboards, i.e. ventilated cupboards for the storage of food.  The white house or dairy contained equipment for making cheese, butter and beer.  The kitchen was well equipped and three spits indicate the family enjoyed meat fairly often. There was also plenty of linen (by 18th Century standards).  In an area where the making of woollen cloth was the secondary industry after agriculture, a large stock of wool is not surprising.  Randolph had a large stock of bees and as there was a still in the house he may have been distilling mead to make metheglin.

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Looking at his house we have three downstairs rooms, (hall, parlour and kitchen) all with chambers over them, and a daisy, these could be the three west bays of Woolley Grange and the first bay of the west wing.  The room above the dairy is not mentioned separately although it was often the cheese loft.  Wool and cheese were also kept in the attics and the attic door above the main staircase was perhaps a door with a hoist for use with heavy goods.  It is not obvious where the buttery was as there were not always substantial buildings.

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The earliest Bradford rate book to survive dates from 1702 and from it and Randolph’s will, we get an idea of the estate of Francis Randolph, who died in 1706, and by this time the family had acquired gentry status.  The farm at Woolley is 120 acres in extent, there were smaller farms at Atworth and Holt and some property in the Bradford borough.  Francis had no children; he left estates to his brother and unmarried sisters, with his wife Margaret receiving the major share.  She was also left the “Great Cabinate” and his silver, the best tankard, a set of castors, six salts and teaspoons.  Richard Gupy was appointed as an overseer to the will (probably Margaret’s brother).  If this is so, then she shortly after remarried as his third wife, Isaac Self of Beanacre Manor, a prosperous lawyer and clothier.  Certainly Self appeared in the rate books paying for Woolley in 1706, and in the later lease is said to hold the estate in right of this wife.  In March 1726, they leased it to John Baskerville of Bradford, clothier; the house was by then described as a mansion, and the previous tenant had also been a clothier.

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A few months later, Matthew Randolph, Francis’ cousin and heir after Margaret, sold the estate to Baskerville for £1500.  John Baskerville came originally from Burton Hill, Malmesbury; he paid rates on his clothiers stock at Woolley in 1726 but died in this year.  His widow, who had been Rachel Sargent, remarried Richard Grant of Monkton Farleigh, who is always described as a grazier.  For some years there is no evidence of clothier’s work at Woolley, and then John’s third son, Thomas took over the estate in 1745.  He had recently married Ann Dike of Bradford, and they were to have a family of two sons and five daughters.  After 1745, Thomas was again rated on stock at Woolley.  In 1769 his wife inherited the large farm at Great Ashley from her uncle, and two years later Thomas bought further land at Woolley.  It was probably at this time that extensions were made to the house and workshops, perhaps funded by an extra estate.  There were also cottages and a “Factory” on the site of the present kitchen garden, shown on a map of 1813, of which only a later copy survives.

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In the meantime the family was growing up.  The eldest son, Thomas, went into the army, and plays no further part in the estate.  At the age of 15 the second son, John, wrote his name (in his best handwriting) on the window of the west wing bedroom (now known as the John Baskerville suite).  Later he married Hester Webb, of Norton Court, Gloucestershire, and he served his country as a magistrate and as Deputy Lieutenant.  His eldest son, John, succeeded him in 1800, but none of the three sons married.  By 1830 John Junior had moved to Bath, and it is possible that the house was rather neglected, until his death in 1837.  He left the estate to his cousin, Henry Viveash, on condition that he assume the name Baskerville, and directed that none of his effects at Woolley were sold.

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Viveash was at the time in the Madras Civil service, but he took up his inheritance, and in 1839 spent the sum of £4400 on a nearby farm.  Eventually he settled at Crowsley Park, Oxford, however, and soon after 1840 Woolley Grange was leased to Capt, Septimus Henry Palairet, of the 29th regiment.  A slightly later lease, dated 1848 calls it Woolley House.  By 1859 it had become Woolley Grange.  The 1848 lease, of the house and field in front for £100 per year, directs Palairet to keep the house in repair, and not to leave it empty, and allows an annual inspection by the Baskervilles.

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Palairet was a very wealthy man, and his “repairs” included greatly enlarging the house by the inclusion of the outbuildings, and rerouting the road so that it was further from the house.  He also demolished the factory and the outbuildings.  He was a very generous man, greatly interested in the newly built Christ Church, of which he was a warden in 1846.  He presented the town with Christchurch school and schoolhouse entirely at his own expense, and was instrumental in bringing the manufacture of rubber to Bradford, investing £5000 in the venture, which was headed by his friend Stephen Moulton.  Septimus Palairet died in 1854 and his son, Rev Richard Palairet, surrendered the lease in 1863.  The house by then probably had substantially its present appearance; certainly this was the case in 1887 when its picture appeared in the Pictorial Guide to Bradford.

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The front hall and long room contain a number of copies of wills, marriage certificates and other documents, many of which are mentioned above.

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In 1864 Samuel Beavan, the son of a Somerset farmer, paid £12,000 for the whole of the Woolley Grange estate.  In 1873 he sold it to Buddle Atkinson, the great-nephew of John Buddle Jnr (1732 – 1843).  John Buddle Jnr was a leading mining engineer, colliery owner and manager at Tyneside.  John Buddle Jnr died unmarried and about half of his estate, worth about £150,000, was inherited first by his nephew, Robert Thomas Atkinson, and then by Robert Thomas’ son, Buddle.  Buddle was only four when his father died and management of the estate was vested in Trustees, including his uncle Benjamin Chapman Browne.

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“An extremely pretty house with a few farms attached to it” was how Benjamin Browne (a leading Newcastle industrialist who well understood the value of money) described Woolley Grange; but “it was expensive to maintain” and Buddle “was surrounded by Agents and other people who were all very eager to spend money both on the house and property and … suggest extravagant alterations which, though tempting in themselves, were not the least worth the money they cost”. Buddle, however, was very fond of Woolley and lived there with his wife Clara and their four children until he died in 1880.  His grave can still be seen at Christ Church, Bradford-on-Avon, together with a memorial window donated by Clara. 

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Clara remarried in 1886 and in so doing returned the family to its Tyneside roots.  The Atkinson inheritance passed to Buddle and Clara’s elder son, Frank Buddle Atkinson, who in 1902 purchased a large estate in Northumberland.  Woolley Grange, which had been let since 1886 and now comprised 516 acres, therefore went back onto the market.  To quote Benjamin Browne once again:  “it was better that .. attention … should [not] be distracted by a small, difficult property at the other end of England”.  One wonders whether he would have made the same comment if he could have seen Woolley Grange today.

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Further notes

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The original house consisted of three western bays of the present front range, and the first bay of the West wing and was built in the first half of the seventeenth century.  The gabled façade, 27 walls, and ovolomoulded window mullions (some are original) with hood moulds and relieving arches, are typical of this period. 

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Within, a few seventeenth century features remain, although the present winding staircase on a thin newel may replace an older spiral stair, situated beside the kitchen fireplace as was common.  The present rounded appearance of the beams is unusual, with few chamfers and no stops; some are plastered and painted to resemble wood.  Possibly they were all plastered during the eighteenth century, and those that have been revealed needed treatment to remove notches, which is an early feature. 

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All this agrees with the inventory of Francis Randoll or Randolph, taken at his death in 1640.  There was also a buttery, position uncertain.  During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the house evolved with the increasing prosperity of the then owners, the Baskervilles.  The second and third wings (form the West) were added; the latter has an eighteenth century beam. The low East wing was also built, and the use of squares rubble suggests a date around 1770, when this material was popular. We know that the family inherited extra property in 1769, so probably funds were available.  The East wing was in fact not part of the house, but a separate complex of outbuilding, shown most clearly on a plan of 1837.  The Baskervilles were clothiers, paying rates on stock at Woolley, for which the building could have been used.

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The garden too, received attention.  The terrace balustrade are of eighteenth century design, also the little classical summer-house, which contains a reset medieval 2-light window.  The bay windows were added before 1837, and the porch also.  The carved wood ceiling of the porch and matching date, 1665, appear to have been taken from a piece of furniture; the initials FR undoubtedly refers to the later Francis Randolph.  Inside, the West sitting room has shutters and doors in the gothic style, but a late eighteenth century Adam style fireplace.

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After 1830 the Baskervilles were absentee owners, and there is some evidence that the house was neglected.  In about 1846 it was leased to the wealthy Captain Palairet, who altered the Eastern outbuilding, incorporating them into the house, and decorating them in Tudor style.  He also diverted the road, which previously ran below the garden balustrade, and probably added the conservatory.  The plan of the house on 25” OS map of 1866, and a picture in the 1887 “pictoral guide to Bradford” show the house then to be substantially as now.

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Thomas the third son of John Baskerville was still only a minor when he succeeded to the property on his father’s death.  His second son, John who married Hester Webb, succeeded Thomas and a fine monument was erected in Bradford Church in 1800 when he died.  He left two sons, neither married; the second son, another John, owned the house until his death in 1837. Palairet’s first wife was an American who died in 1851 leaving him with a young family and he married again two years later to a woman 26 years his junior.  He died later the same year.  A stained glass window in Christ Church commemorates him.

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The previous owners Nigel and Heather Chapman acquired Woolley Grange in 1988.  The house had become dilapidated following a period of ownership by a family who gradually contracted their usage of the house and its buildings into a few rooms.

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In December 2011 Nigel Chapman purchased Woolley Grange and the rest of the Luxury Family Hotel group from von Essen Hotels.

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These notes are partly a copy of a History of Woolley Grange, supplied by Woolley Grange Hotel.