Author: Liam Spinage
Directions: Exit the Macquoid Room via the door at the back to enter the Morning Room.
Transcript
Originally, this used to be the dining room, until the Stanford family move in in 1905. Then it becomes Charles’ library. Now it contains this stunning collection of valuable furniture. These items – the Macquoid collection – were collected by Percy Macquoid and his wife Therese.
Percy Macquoid was a theatrical designer by trade but really he is remembered as the first serious historian of English furniture. Percy and Therese lived in London but would spend their summers at Hoove Lea on the coast here.
Therese bequeathed these items – only a small part of a larger collection – to Preston Manor in 1939, just before the Second World War. None of these were here when the house was lived in, they’re very much of an earlier time and reflect different tastes. Charles had already gifted the Manor to the Borough of Brighton at this time – Charles and Ellen both passed away in 1932.
Here’s an extract from an article by Isabel E J Haddan in Sussex County Magazine Vol 7 1933, the year after Charles and Ellen died.
‘No gift could possibly be more gratefully appreciated by the people of Brighton than that of the old Manor House, so full of tradition and legend, which has been bestowed by Sir Charles and Lady Thomas Stanford on the town to which they belonged and which they loved so wholeheartedly, and for whose welfare they gave so many years of faithful and loyal service.’
This is a great place, I think, to talk about legacy, about what we leave behind. Charles left Brighton the manor, Therese this collection, this kind of museum-within-a-museum.
The ghosts of the manor, for me, aren’t in the jump scares or the sightings of spectral figures, but in every object here and what they meant to the people who collected, used and loved them and what they mean to us now we are able to connect with those objects and bring the manor back to life. And finally, to think about what we might leave behind for people to remember us by.