It’s the 108th anniversary today of the last time Stonehenge was sold by one private owner to another. Wealthy local barrister Cecil Chubb went along to a property sale in the Palace Theatre in Salisbury on 21 September 1915 and bought the monument on impulse for £6,600.
There are lots of perfectly good accounts of the story already, including one by the BBC to mark the centenary of the event, so you might ask why I’m adding to them.
The one in Country Life shows that what’s now a world heritage site was an afterthought at the bottom of a full-page advert for a massive estate sale by Sir Cosmo Gordon Antrobus — so we’re not short of obscure detail.
But something caught my eye in English Heritage’s version. It has fascinating details of the sale, the state the place was in at the time (fallen sarsen; snapped lintel), and the decision three years later to give it to the nation (Chubb was made a baronet by Lloyd George in return)…
…but what intrigues me was that, according to legend, Cecil originally went to the auction because his wife wanted him to buy a set of dining chairs. And “while I was in the room,” Chubb said, “I thought a Salisbury man ought to buy it, and that is how it was done.”
So, assuming for the sake of argument that that’s true, what this means is we owe the preservation of several large chunks of our national culture to an early version of this man:
