The Friends of the Old Hall Association at Gainsborough Old Hall, 1949
A great many listed buildings were saved in the middle of the twentieth century not by the state but by a subscription society formed in the town that owned the problem. The Friends of the Old Hall Association is one of those societies, and the papers it left behind are the reason a good deal is known about how the building was used between 1949 and the present century.
The timber-framed range and brick tower from the street, in a drawing that circulated with the association's own papers.
What the Friends of the Old Hall Association was formed to do
The society was formed in 1949 with two stated purposes: to save the building from decay, and to open it to the public. Neither was rhetorical. The manor that Sir Thomas Burgh had built between 1460 and 1480 had come through five centuries of subdivision and hard use, and by the middle of the twentieth century the question was whether it would survive at all.
What the Friends of the Old Hall Association provided was the thing a building in that position most needs and can least buy: a standing body of people with a reason to turn up. Members guided parties round the rooms, ran the catering, and did the unglamorous work behind the scenes that keeps a building open to visitors. A committee co-ordinated it and worked with the curator.
Gainsborough Old Hall, the Bacon family and the sale to the nation
Gainsborough Old Hall had been in the Bacon family since 1826, inherited from Lady Frances Hickman. Sir Edmund Bacon, who owned it when the society was founded, supported and encouraged its formation, and in 1970 he sold Gainsborough Old Hall to the nation for one pound.
That sequence is worth setting out plainly, because it is the ordinary shape of how a private house becomes a public monument in England: an owner who can no longer carry it, a local society that supplies the labour and the advocacy, and a transfer to public ownership once the case has been made. The society's own records name Sir Nicholas Bacon, Premier Baronet of England and Sir Edmund's son, as its president from 1982.
Membership and what it carried
Membership worked the way it does in most museum friends' societies. A subscription bought free admission during general opening times, event days included, and the association held membership of the British Association of Friends of Museums, the umbrella body for societies of this kind.
The offer was never only transactional. The surviving material is explicit that moral support counted alongside active help, and that the society wanted to know people were there and cared what happened to the building. That is a membership proposition of its period, and it is the one that actually sustained buildings like this one.
The lectures and the events programme
Two lecture series ran under the society's name. The First Tuesday lectures were the monthly fixture, priced at £2.50 including light refreshment, and the Sunderland Lectures were the named series that brought outside scholarship into the building. An annual general meeting carried a talk of its own.
The programme is the part of the association's work that reads least like administration and most like a purpose. A society that only maintained a building would have produced minutes; these lectures produced an audience for it. The First Tuesday programme is set out separately, and the archive holds the papers both series left behind.
From 1949 to the surviving record
By 2016 the association's own material recorded sixty-seven years of service to the Old Hall, counted from 1949. The documents that survive from those years are newsletters, event lists, lecture programmes and photographs rather than a formal history, which is the normal condition of a volunteer society's paperwork.
They are reproduced here as a record, not as an active notice: opening arrangements, prices and contacts in them belong to the years they were printed and have not been carried forward. Personal contact details of named individuals have been removed from the documents. The room-by-room photographs and the south door of the great hall come from the same body of material.
Questions about the association
When was the society founded, and why?
The Friends of the Old Hall Association was formed in 1949, to save the building from decay and to open it to the public. It was founded with the support of the then owner, Sir Edmund Bacon.
Who owns Gainsborough Old Hall?
It passed into public ownership in 1970, when Sir Edmund Bacon sold it to the nation for one pound. The association's own papers from the following decades describe the building as owned by English Heritage and managed by Lincolnshire County Council; arrangements of that kind change over time, and the papers here record the position as it stood when they were written.
What did members actually do?
Guiding visitors, catering, and behind-the-scenes work, co-ordinated by a committee that worked with the curator. There was also a social programme, and the society was clear that support which was moral rather than practical was welcome too.
Is the information on this page current?
No. This is a reference page about the society and the documents it left, compiled from those documents. Prices, opening times, contacts and officers named in them were accurate when printed and should not be relied on now.
Where do the paintings pages fit in?
They are a separate subject on this site. The English school of the eighteenth century is covered under old English paintings, and the Victorian reaction to it under Pre-Raphaelite paintings.