SECRET HIDING PLACES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 169, 19 July 1941, Page 11

SECRET HIDING PLACES

By J. C. Hook

JHE mysterious secret chamber, beloved of fiction writers, has a very real place in actual fact, and many of the known concealed rooms in old houses in Britain have historical and romantic associations. A large number of these secret hiding-places owe their origin to religious persecution, and the great Catholic families all had priest's holes cunningly concealed about their mansions. Many of these were the work of one man. Nicholas Owen, who spent most of his life in the invention and construction of these secret rooms, and many a priest owed his life to Owen's ingenuity. When at last captured, Owen was promised a pardon if he would reveal the whereabouts of the many hiding places he had constructed, but he bravely refused to disclose anything and eventually died under torture in the Tower of London. Ingenious "'Priest's Hole" I'fton Court In Berkshire contains many curious hiding places, one of which is situated in the gables close to a ceiling. It is fastened on the inside by a spring bolt which can be opened and closed by means of a catch concealed in a door of an adjoining room. Another hiding place in the same house, discovered beneath the floor boards of the landing in ]8.'30. contained a crucifix and two old pistols or Elizabethan pattern.

Another curious priest's hole is at Salford Prior Hall, where the hiding place is cunningly concealed be-

hind an innocent-looking cupboard in The attic. By removing a hidden peg. the back of the cupboard swings inwards, revealing a recess four feet deep.

At Wallington in Northumberland a secret room is situated at the back of the dining room fireplace, reached by climbing through the false back of a nearby cupboard. At another old country house. Stanford Court, which was burnt down in 18S2. panel portraits of the family concealed hidden recesses and passages leading up to the roof. In one of the recesses a lot of manuscripts of the seventeenth century were found, together with the household book of a certain "Joyce Jeffereys" during the Civil War. Perhaps one of the most interesting discoveries of a secret room took place early in the nineteenth century at the old manor house at P.ourton-on-the-Water, later completely modernised. While workmen were stripping some wallpaper off a passage, the entrance to a hitherto unknown room was discovered. The room was about Bft square and contained an Elizabethan chair and table upon which lay an antique teapot and a silver spoon. Across the back of the chair lay a dusty old black cassock, exactly as its owner had thrown it down more than two centuries before.

Another strange discovery is connected with the ruins of the old manor house of Minster Lovel, once the scat of the Lords Lovel. After the Battle of Stoke, the last viscount. who had sided with Lambert Simnel against Henry VII.. managed to escape from the battlefield and reach his home, but from the

night of his return was never seen or heard of again. Nearly two centuries were to pass before the mystery of his disappearance was finally cleared up.

In 1708 a concealed vault was discovered at Minster Lovel, and in it. seated before a table upon which lay an open prayer book, was the entire skeleton of a man. Numerous jars which had once contained food lay around empty, and as history records that the house had been seized by the King shortly after the battle, the unfortunate Lovel had apparently died of starvation. Another hiding place which came •to light many years ago at Danby Hall in Yorkshire contained some interesting finds, no less than fifty sets of harness and many pistols and swords being discovered. They had no doubt been stored there in readiness for the Jacobite rising of ITlo. but had never been used. Upon the hilt of each sword the mysterious word "Shortly" was engraved. Amazingly Well Hidden Some of the secret rooms were amazingly well hidden, one in an old manor house near Dunstable being approached from an iron door up the kitchen chimney. A short flight of steps led from this door to a second door of stout oak. which could only be opened by a secret spring. Behind this lay a small room on the ground level, the existence of which had been for years quite unknown to the occupiers.

During the last forty years many of the older country mansions have been demolished or destroyed by fire and the number of secret hiding places still in their original condition gets smaller as the years go by.