Longwood House

Longwood House on Church Road,  was built in 1913 for Henry Godfrey Woolsey who had acquired the site that year on a 99 year lease from Philip Berney Ficklin of Tasburgh Hall. Kelly's Norfolk Directory of 1916 records that as his address but earlier he had been renting Hill Farmhouse on the main road, presumably whilst Longwood was under construction. The 1911 census has him living in Mill Hill Road, Norwich with his widowed mother when he was described as an Estate Agent and it was in that capacity that he already had links to Tasburgh because the census return for Tasburgh Hall that year was signed by him as land agent for Mr. Berney Ficklin. Henry Woolsey had been born in Eaton, Norwich where his father Thomas was a farrier but after his father died in 1887, the family had risen up the social scale when his widowed mother had married Godfrey Barnard, a director and later chairman of Barnard, Bishop and Barnards, one of the leading Norwich manufacturing companies with their metal works and foundary in Calvert Street. They are perhaps best known now for the Norwich Gates at Sandringam, but one of their earliest successes was the development and patenting of a knitting machine for the production of wire netting.In 1914 Henry had married Nellie Briggs at St George's Church, Hanover Square in London so Longwood would have been their first home. At some point before 1923 the house had been acquired by Mrs. Henrietta Muirhead, because in October that year she put the property up for sale by auction when it was described as having "charming flower and kitchen gardens with a tennis lawn, rose beds, herbaceous borders, a sunk garden, shrubs and trees." The photograph comes from a copy of the auction particulars held at the Norfolk Record Office (Ref. BR 241/4/72) and it is just possibly to make out the tennis court markings and the backstop netting strung up on poles.

The property failed to reach its reserve and was withdrawn at £940 but by 1925, Kelly's Directory records that the house had been bought by Surgeon Commander Fairman Rackham Mann who had retired from the Navy in 1919. He had been born in 1872, the son of a Norfolk farmer, and after training as a doctor in London had joined the Navy as a staff surgeon, and was a member of the first crew of the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought when she was commissioned in 1906. So keen was he on his naval background that he had all the external woodwork painted in battleship grey, as discovered in the 1970s during an exterior redecoration of the house! He was a keen amateur archaeologist who did some excavating in the vicinity of the Roman town at Caister. The 1939 Registration confirms that he and his wife Hilda were still living in the property with a resident housemaid at the outbreak of WW2, but William Moore's statement, in his wartime memories of Tasburgh, that Commander Mann was the village's only casualty, being killed in action at sea, seems unlikely. His death was registered with the local authority, Depwade RDC, in the autumn of 1943 by when he would have been 70, far too old for service, and his name was not added to the village war memorial along with the two other known WW2 casualties.

Hilda Mann continued living at Longwood and didn't die until 1970, though it's not clear whether she lived there until then. However, by the beginning of the 1970s the property had been acquired by Virginia Bedini who was the daughter of Rosemary Hastings, the owner of Rainthorpe Hall, and she sold it in 1976 to George and Sue Milner-Smith by which time the original long lease had been replaced with a freehold title. He was a television programme producer, working for the BBC in their Norwich studios, and they had two children, Claire and Oliver. In 1999 they moved into Chapelfield Crescent in Norwich and sold the house to Mr and Mrs Wright, but not before selling off the orchard as a building plot to Mr Thornley who built the adjoining bungalow now owned by Ann Crawshay after she moved from Tasburgh Grange.

Mr Wright was a London businessman and she was an interior designer and talented seamstress, selling items via an internet shop, run from a purpose built shed in the garden. Once their three children had left home they sold the house to the current owners, Lennel and Jenny Lutchman, in 2010. Mr Lutchman, who originated from Trinidad, is an orthopaedic consultant at the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital, specialising in spinal surgery, and Jenny is a published author, who as well as being mother to their four children, also looks after a menagerie of animals, including two falabella miniature horses which now graze what was once the tennis lawn.