Kesgrave Hall

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Kesgrave Hall (picture here) is a country house located in woodlands north of the suburban village of Kesgrave, which itself is on the eastern outskirts of Ipswich, in Suffolk. It was constructed in 1812 by William Cunliffe-Shawe, and has been extended since, notably by the addition of a northern extension. The building was described in a recent property advertisement (PDF) as having "many interesting and attractive features including a large hall with a sweeping Mahogany staircase with fine balustrades, six panel Mahogany doors, large sash windows and glazed entrance doors under a wide portico with paired Doric columns". The building has five large rooms downstairs, with another two in the northern extension, with another seven upstairs. The building is set in 38 acres of grounds, which includes woodlands, marsh and fields; a stream, a tributary of the River Fynn which is itself a tributary of the River Deben, runs west to east through the grounds.

Since late April 2008, the building has been used as a restaurant and hotel and owned by the Hills Building Group and the Milsom Hotel Group, which owns a number of restaurants and small hotels in Essex. They bought the building in autumn 2007, and the East Anglian Daily Times reported on 16th October 2007 that Milsom was investing UK£4million in a new "restaurant with rooms" called milsoms at Kesgrave Hall, along similar lines to the milsoms establishment in Dedham, Essex. Among the favourable conditions was the location between Ipswich and the picturesque riverside town of Woodbridge.

Contents 1 Kesgrave Hall until the 1970s 2 Kesgrave Hall School and Shawe Manor 3 Sexual abuse 4 After Shawe Manor 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Kesgrave Hall until the 1970s

According to British Isles Genealogy, the hall was purchased around 1814 by William Cunliffe Shawe, and by 1844 was inhabited by his son, Robert Newton Shawe ^[1], a magistrate and joint Chairman of the Woodbridge quarter sessions, who at one point represented Suffolk in Parliament; the Shawes were descended from "an eminent merchant of Liverpool" according to the British Gazetteer ^[2]. According to a report published in 1846 by the Committee of Council on Education ^[3], Robert Shawe funded the local school, which educated 238 pupils between ages 7 and 14 (11 in the case of boys), where discipline was said to be good but not as strict as was usual in "good national schools", and that the pupils' knowledge of "Holy Scripture" was particularly notable.

The building has been used for five boarding schools in its history, two in the 19th century and three in the 20th and 21st. Of the first two, little is known; the National Archives has records of a diary by one Francis Aldous Kent, headmaster resident in the nearby village of Little Bealings, from 1860 with "accounts of Kesgrave Hall School", which is deposited in the Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich branch) ^[4]. In the 1920s, the hall was inhabited by a Colonel Barnes, whose daughter Mary, later Mary Goodman, formed the Kesgrave Guide Group; Goodman Grove, in Kesgrave, is named after her ^[5].

The third was St. Edmund's School, a boys' preparatory boarding school founded in 1936. This school was originally in a large house on the corner of St. Edmunds Road and Henley Road (No.57) in Ipswich, hence the name, and after being evacuated to the south of England during World War II, returned to Ipswich and moved to Kesgrave Hall in 1946 after outgrowing it's original premises. The school was founded by the Marshall family, and was under a headmaster by the name of McClintock in the 1950's. The school was taken over by the Mills family in 1958 and took on many improvements, including it's own swimming pool and the draining of the marsh at the front of the main building for playing fields. Major John Mills was headmaster until the school closed in 1975. The following year saw the founding of the fourth school at Kesgrave Hall known as Kesgrave Hall School (See details below). During World War II, the building was used by an RAF unit, the 356th Fighter Group, which was involved in airborne operations in France, Germany and Central Europe. Details, including a contemporary black-and-white picture, are to be found here.

[edit] Kesgrave Hall School and Shawe Manor

In 1976, a boys' boarding school was founded at Kesgrave Hall. Kesgrave Hall School was founded by teachers from a boys' junior boarding school, Heanton in Devon. The teachers found that boys from that school were ill-served by their secondary schools. The school's prospectus, which was still in use in the late 1980s, decried the use of children as educational guinea-pigs and assured that the school preferred to rely on "tried-and-tested old-fashioned methods". The school had four headmasters: Mr Sheppard from its foundation until 1985, Michael Geoffrey Smith from then until Easter 1992, Eric Richardson, a long-standing teacher and hitherto deputy headmaster, from then until Easter 1993, and John Williams, another long-standing teacher, from then until the school closed at the end of 1993.

The school specialised in boys with a strong academic bent but with emotional or behavioural problems. It had a strong academic focus, but also taught vocational subjects such as woodwork. The school had a playing field, a small outdoor swimming pool, tennis courts (now removed, replaced by a car park), a gym, and several prefabs and outbuildings which were used as classrooms and laboratories. One of these, used for German and French lessons, was destroyed in an accidental fire in 1991 (two attempts were made, by two separate pupils at the school, to burn the Hall itself down during the 1980s). The building itself housed three classrooms, the boys' common room, the staff room, the dining room (picture here), pupil and staff living quarters, toilets and offices; the dining room, toilets and one classroom were in the extension. The common room, which was actually two rooms with the wall between removed, contained boys' lockers, two pool tables, and a television; one wall was decorated with a reproduction of Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam! painting (see picture); above the divide between the two former rooms were boards displaying lists of boys who achieved O-level and GCSE qualifications.

Living quarters for boys mostly consisted of seven large dormitories, named the Constable, Suffolk, Norfolk, Nelson, Essex, Munnings and Gainsborough rooms (this picture shows the landing, with the Norfolk and Suffolk room entrances visible). Norfolk was used for fifth form (year 11) boys and consisted of eight cubicles with a bed, a wardrobe and a desk in each, with electric sockets; the others were open-plan, with beds, a small bedside cabinet per bed and a wardrobe in each. However, in 1992, the Suffolk room was converted into a fifth-form room and fitted with bunk bed/wardrobe units. The boys' washing facilities, the medical room, and senior and staff living quarters were located in the northern extension. In particular, the Yarmouth and Lowestoft "flats" were double rooms used by sixth-formers (although, in the final year, other senior boys were housed in the extension, including in Yarmouth and Lowestoft and the former staff quarters).

There are two other houses on site. The "white house", officially called Norwich House while Kesgrave Hall School existed, was used by sixth formers and other boys were banned from it. It consisted of two double and two single rooms, a common room and a kitchen. There is also a bungalow, which was used by the headmaster and his family.

The school closed at the end of 1993, at a time when a number of similar establishments in the UK were closing. The school was renamed Shawe Manor during a brief period of new ownership in 1993. It is sometimes mistakenly asserted that the school was known as Grange Farm (headmaster John Williams even said, at the summer prize-giving in 1993, that he had received mail so addressed, and the error is repeated on some websites), but this is in fact the name of a nearby housing development. Its location is the middle square on this map.

[edit] Sexual abuse

On 9th November 2007, according to the East Anglian Daily Times, a former teacher, Alan Stancliffe, aged 58 and from Pontefract, was convicted of sexually assaulting a pupil at Kesgrave Hall School in the late 1970s and in 1980^[6]. On 6th December of that year, he was jailed for two years and placed on the Sex Offenders' Register for ten. Stancliffe had other convictions for similar behaviour dating from 1982 and 1999 ^[7].

Boys who attended the school in the late 1980s and early 1990s reported that there was a culture of bullying and intimidation at the school. They also reported sexual harassment by other pupils, and overt racism, both among boys and even from staff.Mr Kevin Antony Mackintosh a former pupil until 1993 confirms that whilst he was there Mr Eric Richardson physically abused him. There was frequent child abuse within the school and corporal punishment was rife within the school with the cane and slipper being frequently used..

[edit] After Shawe Manor

In 1995, the timber trading company KDM moved into the building. According to their history page, they converted the dining hall into "the first hi-tech timber trading room of its kind in the UK". KDM also developed an internet business, COUNTYWeb, which it sold in 2003, and also launched BT Global WoodTrader, a joint venture with BT, to trade timber over the Internet. KDM moved out of the building in 2004 into a purpose-built building at Ransomes Europark, on the southern outskirts of Ipswich.

After this, the Ryes School organisation moved into the building. The Ryes is a special residential school for children with behavioural problems and other complex needs, based near Sudbury, Suffolk. Kesgrave Hall was used to house senior pupils. However, in 2007, local educational authorities decided that the site was too big and obliged the school to move the youths to smaller premises. As of 2nd October 2007, a plan to house them in Pettaugh, near Stowmarket, was the subject of objections from locals who feared that they would have nothing to do outside school times ^[8].

On 28th November 2007, the East Anglian Daily Times reported that Milsom's had received planning permission from Suffolk Coastal District Council for their change of use and for their alterations ^[9]. The new restaurant and hotel, milsoms at Kesgrave Hall, opened in April 2008. In the first phase of works the Hotel will have approx 15 rooms, sports hall and a 100 seater restaurant. This PDF is the notice of approval from SCDC. In the second phase the current proposals are for further bedrooms, a spa with treatment ment rooms and the re construction of both the swimming pool and the pavilion building.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Kesgrave Hall restaurant website