Geoff and Jeff

Lancashire

Meet Geoff-with-a-G and Jeff-with-a-J, and try to guess who is who! These dedicated volunteers give guided tours around Hoghton Tower, an Elizabethan manor house in Lancashire. Built in 1560-1565 by Thomas Hoghton and made from local millstone grit, this house and its history have Geoff and Jeff spilling over with stories, which they are very willing to share...

Volunteering and being volunteered!

Geoff: I got fed up of seeing my grandchildren on their tablets and laptops, and so I said we’re going out! We came to Hoghton Tower and took the tour, led by Richard our head guide. As we came out my wife looked at me and said ‘You could do that’. Well, it was fatal! Richard jumped straight in and I’ve been here ever since. I was volunteered.

Jeff: I’d retired from work and was at a loose end. At about the same time, Sir Bernard had advertised they were looking for volunteers and had an open day. I came up and, along with half a dozen others, was recruited. I remember it was a beautiful summer day, we all sat out on the front and Sir Bernard was telling us about the house and a story about the drive.

The longest drive

Jeff: The drive was half a mile long and before WW2 it was gravelled. We’re told that Sir Bernard’s father Sir Cuthbert was woken up every night in 1941 by planes flying low overhead. He got fed up with this, and so he phoned the air ministry and complained. He was told ‘Those planes aren’t ours Sir Cuthbert’. They turned out to be German planes flying over from the east coast and seeing this long drive, sparkling white in the moon and starlight, pointing due west – a perfect marker for Liverpool Docks. The following day the drive was blacked out and has been so ever since.

Geoff: There is another little story about the drive. If you go back to 1900, Sir James (who was the baronet living here at the time) had a Bens – single cylinder car, about eight horse power – but it wasn’t strong enough to come up the drive. I’ve seen the account books and they spent an absolute fortune on this car – probably more than we would spend on a car today. But, to get it up the drive, Sir James had to have a shire horse called Westminster that met him at the bottom to pull the car up!

Little tiny anecdotes – there’re loads of them that you can tell around the house. And of course you’ve been on the tour, so you will know all about the visitors the house has had through the ages as well.

A different kind of visitor

Geoff: It’s quite lively at the moment. Last Thursday, Eric (another tour guide) was stood in the state bedroom talking. Behind him, a man saw a lady in a green dress smiling. She walked around in front of Eric and then disappeared. Eric did not see this lady in the green dress, but he said if she was smiling, she must approve of what he was saying. That’s now written into the archives as just one of the incidents.

Jinty, go fetch!

Geoff: I was in the well house taking a tour of about 8 or 10 people and all of them asked me ‘Whose is the dog?’, so I said ‘What dog?’. ‘The one round your legs.’ ‘There is no dog round my legs.’ ‘Oh yes there is, we can all see it. A black Labrador.’ There is a story we tell of Jinty, Major Adams’ dog, who used to go through the house at night and loved to get into the well house and they could never get the dog out. Well, apparently, you still can’t!

A little girl’s apotropoeic discovery

Geoff: We do a lot of school tours. One had gone into the well house, and a little girl said ‘What’s this mark on the back pillar of the well?’ Nobody in the house even knew the mark existed. It must have been the light on that day was just catching it, and she was probably the right height as well. We went and looked and couldn’t explain it, so we started to study it and we found out that there is a thing called witch marks. I think the technical term is apotropaic. They are protection marks, not made by witches, but made to keep evil out. Once we started to study it, we found that there are a lot of them all the way through house. We now have quite an academic interest, so professors are coming, I think from Cambridge, to go through the house and study, and they will give us some feedback and training, so that we can start doing special tours around the house.

What keeps you coming back?

Jeff: The satisfaction of taking people round, giving out our local history and, especially at the end of the tour, finding out that people are happy and pleased with what we’ve done. I try to make it not a dry-as-dust tour, but to make it a little bit of entertainment.

Geoff: I think you actually grow quite fond of the house – whether you like it or not, it gets under your skin a little bit! Like Jeff, I also quite enjoy taking the tours and seeing people at the end when the go ‘Wow, I never knew this was here’... and that’s the thing about this house. It’s an undersung gem in Lancashire, which is not recognised as well as it should be. For that reason, I like to try and push it as hard as I can and do more for it. It’s a lovely old house.