Preston Manor and its owners
The first owners
The Domesday Book of 1086 records that Preston Manor was one of eight manors belonging to the Bishopric of Chichester.
Bishops eventually gave up farming their own manors through a bailiff and started renting them out. In 1510 the Bishop granted a lease of the Manor of Preston to Edward Elrington. Preston Manor stayed within the Elrington family for over 50 years.
In 1569 it was inherited by Anthony Shirley (a step grandson of Edward Elrington). Anthony’s son Thomas became the first lay lord of the manor, buying back the lease from the Crown who had acquired it in 1561. The house stayed within the Shirley family for at least four generations.
A prosperous family takes over
Sir Anthony Shirley’s grandson Richard died unmarried in 1705 and the title of the manor became extinct. The property was inherited jointly by Richard’s three sisters, Anne, Judith and Mary, and eventually passed to the sole ownership of Mary and her husband Thomas Western in 1712.
The prosperous and well-educated Western family owned Preston Manor for nearly 100 years. Thomas Western’s great grandson, Charles Callis Western, who devoted his life to political and agricultural reform, eventually sold the manor and its 1,000 acres to a tenant farmer’s son, William Stanford, in 1794 for £17,600.
The Stanford inheritance
The Stanford family were freeholders, copyholders and leaseholders of lands in Sussex and they tended to marry other Sussex families of similar status.
By the time William Stanford became High Sheriff of Sussex in 1808 he had married twice and had seven children by his second wife Mary Tourle of Lewes. His son the second William Stanford led the life of a country squire at Preston Manor until he died at the young age of 44 in 1853. His widow Eleanor later married Captain George Macdonald.
The estate passed to William and Eleanor’s eldest daughter Ellen Stanford. Eleanor and George continued to live at Preston Manor rent free (he died in 1881 and she died in 1903). Ellen went on to marry twice. First to Vere Fane Benett and then to Charles Thomas, who both took on the Stanford surname. Ellen and Vere Benett-Stanford divided their time between their homes in London, Wiltshire, Sussex and Madeira, but it was not until her second marriage to Charles that Ellen took up more permanent residence at Preston Manor in 1905.
Charles Thomas was an Oxford classics scholar and in 1895 sought his fortune in South Africa. Here he became a partner in a gold prospecting syndicate in Rhodesia. After settling at Preston Manor with Ellen he was elected Mayor of Brighton in 1910 and Preston Manor became the focus of many glittering social events and guests included Rudyard Kipling, Princess Beatrice and the Crown Prince of Sweden.
Ellen and Charles Thomas-Stanford had no children but Ellen’s son John (from her first marriage to Vere Benett) and his wife Evelyn had a son, also named Vere. Vere would have inherited Preston Manor, but his life was tragically cut short at the age of 28. Having fought bravely throughout the World War I, he died of tuberculosis in 1922.
The Stanfords hand over to the town of Brighton
Ellen had feuded constantly with her son John, an eccentric and erratic man, and eventually cut him out of her will. He had hoped to inherit Preston Manor (with the intention of turning it into a girls school, demolishing it or selling the land for development) but as early as 1918 Ellen had already made plans to sell the house to Brighton Corporation.
Both Ellen and Charles Thomas-Stanford died in 1932. Since then, under ownership of the local council, Preston Manor has remained a living testament to the Stanford family and a reflection of their daily lives at Preston Manor.
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