Our History
Pythouse Farm is the most significant remaining part of the Pythouse Estate, a property that has, with one exception, passed by inheritance from the Middle Ages to now. The original family were called Benett. They were forced to sell the property in about 1650 to pay fines levied by Parliament because they had supported the King in the Civil War. Colonel Thomas Benett, brother of the then owner, was a cavalier and after the Restoration became secretary to Prince Rupert, the Royalist cavalry commander. He was also MP for Shaftesbury and a supporter of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. Pepys referred to him unflatteringly as “Lord Shaftesbury’s jackal”after he attacked Pepys in the House of Commons!
In 1715 the grandson of Colonel Benett, who already owned the Norton Bavant estate, re-purchased the Pythouse Estate and built the present house. The Pythouse estate has passed by inheritance ever since then. The last true Benett to own the estate was John Benett who died in about 1860. He was MP for Wiltshire (a Knight of the Shire in the pre-Reform Act House of Commons). He financed his campaign partly by selling a collection of letters from the King to Prince Rupert that had been handed down from Colonel Benett. He was also an amateur architect and ‘Palladianised’ Pythouse in 1810, giving it its current appearance.
John Benett’s sons pre-deceased him. The estate was left to his daughter who married a Fane. Their son Vere, who was MP for North Dorset for about 10 years, assumed the name Fane-Benett and then added Stanford when he married an heiress of that name who owned substantial land on the outskirts of Brighton, which was sold off for development, briefly making the family very rich. The family seem to have treated the sale proceeds of this land as income using it to finance a private country club and also to add 2 large wings to Pythouse, supposedly for visiting cricket teams.
Vere was followed by his son John (“Mad Jack”) Fane-Benett-Stanford, who fought in various colonial wars as a young man, but then retired to become an increasingly eccentric country squire with a passion for practical jokes, sports and steam yachts. Mad Jack’s son Vere died in 1920 of wounds suffered in the First World War. His death incurred substantial death duties which led to the sale of the Norton Bavant estate. When Mad Jack’s widow Evie, in her youth a keen Big Game hunter (first woman to shoot a rhino), died in 1956, the property passed to my father, a cousin. Evie’s death incurred further substantial death duties which led to the sale of a substantial proportion of the remaining land including Pythouse itself. Pythouse was then owned for 46 years by a charity which used it as a retirement home but last year the charity sold it and it is now once again a private home. The Estate currently leases the park in front of the house from the new owners.
The remaining estate now comprises just over 1,000 acres and includes woods and cottages besides the farm. All farmland is now in hand. In the 1980’s Victor Sidford, a local farmer, became manager of Pythouse Farm and we subsequently went into partnership together. The farm became organic in 2000 and we started selling organic meat from the Walled Garden shop in 2005. The aim of Pythouse Farm Organics is to sell high quality meat products to a discerning clientele and to build a thriving business that will contribute to the local job market.
Sir Henry Rumbold
April 2006
For more information, please email info@pythouse-organics.co.uk
