Kitnocks Estate Sale, 1947.
On October 14th, 1947, a Sale by Auction of ‘The Kitnocks Estate, Botley’ was held at the Polygon Hotel in Southampton. The former owner of the Estate, Major Charles F Randolph, had died earlier the same year and the property was now to be sold ‘as a whole or in 27 lots.’ The lots included numerous arable fields and enclosures, also ‘accommodation land’, ‘valuable’ and ‘attractive’ blocks of woodland and various cottages, old and ‘modern’. They also included five whole farms. The entire estate amounted to some 1,182 acres.
The centre of the estate was of course Kitnocks House at the top of Kitnocks Hill, set in ‘charming grounds of about 20 acres’. Among the farms was Kitnocks Farm, which is of course adjacent to the House, although in this case the auctioneers managed to correctly locate the Farm in Curdridge rather than in Botley. The other farms were : Fairthorne Grange Farm (on the Burridge road), Barn Farm and Ridge Farm in Curbridge (both now subsumed by the North Whiteley development) and Harmsworth Farm, also in Curbridge. The blocks of woodland included Bedlams, Hangmans and Suttons Copses – I.e. the daffodil and bluebell woods in Curbridge. In fact, there couldn’t have been much of Curbridge that wasn’t part of the Estate.
Most of the farms and cottages were already let to tenants, a number of whom are still familiar local family names – Barker, Oakley, Pink, Hillier, Churcher and Mears. In fact it was Brian Mears, my neighbour in Outlands Lane, who lent me the sale document for the Estate. The Mears family have lived in Curdridge since at least the 15th Century – their name appears on a list of tenants from that time. At the time of the Kitnocks Estate sale, Brian’s grandfather Alfred was the tenant of one of the ‘modern cottages’ in Outlands Lane – one of the timbered, mock-tudor dwellings that had originally been built as staff quarters by Augusta Burrell of Fairthorne Manor in the early 1900s. The written notes on the sale document reveal that the property was purchased by Alfred’s sons David and John, whose home address it already was, when they weren’t way with the Navy. They were still living there when we first moved into Outlands Lane in 1993, and until they passed away.
Among the lots of land was a piece at the top of Kitnocks Hill – the plot still known as the Kitnocks Triangle, which now has houses on it. However, a ‘reservation’ in the sale document notes that Major Randolph had, in his Will, already gifted a small section of this land to Curdridge Parish Council to serve as a bus stop. This is where the bench on the crest of the hill sits now and where many will still remember catching the Hants & Dorset bus number 53 which ran between Fareham and Southampton – and vice-versa of course.
Kevan Bundell