A record number of visitors joined members to hear Barbara Middlemass talk on \u2018The Tale of Two Mansions \u2013 Impney and Ynas y Maengwyn\u2019 at the July meeting.\u00a0 Barbara\u2019s presentation was the story of John Corbett, the Salt King.\u00a0 Corbett worked in his father\u2019s canal business before buying the derelict salt works near Stoke Prior, from which he made his fortune.\u00a0 In 1856 he married Anna O\u2019Meara, whom he had met in Paris and by 1869 he felt that he needed a house of distinction near Droitwich.<\/p>\n
Thus work began on the now well-known classical French style chateau at Impney.\u00a0 The house stood in 155 acres of land, had 23 bedrooms, contained masses of panelled woodwork and stained glass and was the first in Droitwich to have gas and electricity.\u00a0 By now a Liberal MP, Corbett was rapidly becoming famous for his philanthropy and in 1878 bought the house and 1500 acres at Ynas y Maengwyn, near Towyn in Wales.<\/p>\n
Following Corbett\u2019s death in 1901 the estate passed to his brother and then to John\u2019s son but the good times were over and whilst Chateau Impney survived to become a hotel, Ynas y Maengwyn was eventually blown up by the Royal Engineers.\u00a0 Thankfully much of Impney is as it was in Corbett\u2019s time and members of the Society were looking forward to enjoying lunch there in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A record number of visitors joined members to hear Barbara Middlemass talk on \u2018The Tale of Two Mansions \u2013 Impney and Ynas y Maengwyn\u2019 at the July meeting.\u00a0 Barbara\u2019s presentation was the story of John Corbett, the Salt King.\u00a0 Corbett worked in his father\u2019s canal business before buying the derelict salt works near Stoke Prior, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-letters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhfs.org.uk\/hhfs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}