Moving home frrom Westgate to Benenden

The Grange in the early 1900s when the field in front of the house was farmland.

In the autumn of 1919, Collingwood, Florence, the three boys Ivor, Mervyn and Alastair, and their two year old daughter Certhia moved form Westgate to The Grange in Benenden in the weald of Kent.

       The Grange was built in 1892 by Lord Cranbrook, owner of the Hemsted Estate   which included most of Benenden parish. Lord Cranbrook intended The Grange for his unmarried daughters, but it was occupied for a time by his son Lord Medway. The estate was sold to Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, in 1912. During the war it was used first as a hospital and then for schools displaced from Thanet in north Kent.[1]  It seems to have remained unoccupied again until, together with adjoining farmland and woodland. it was bought by Collingwood in 1919. The house is a rather overbearing “Victorian Tudor Gothic” buiding, designed by Thomas William Cotman of Ipswich.

       The garden was initially laid out by the landscape architect, William Broderick Thomas^[2], but by the time Collingwood arrived it was in a poor condition. There was a rose garden, neglected shrubberies, an abandoned tennis court, two large ponds and a derelict kitchen garden separated from the house by a field.
       The kitchen garden with a cottage for the gardener, once the farmhouse of a small farm known as Stonefield, had been renamed by Lord Cranbrook,  grandly and perhaps ironically, Balmoral (he had stayed with Queen Victoria at Balmoral when he was Home Secretary). The kitchen garden is now a very fine topiary garden, often open to the public – Collingwood would have been delighted.
       Soon after his arrival in Benenden. Collingwood set about expanding his garden As the original garden adjoined his own farmland, expanding it was not difficult. He incorporated the large field to the south, immediately in front of the house, and a smaller one to the west, adjoining Iden Green Road. The additional land roughly doubled the size of the garden to 10 acres (4 hectares).

Most significantly, there were two mature Japanese cherry trees in the garden! These trees were undoubtedly a major part of the reason that cherries were to replace birds as the main focus of his energies and enthusiasm - but of course he never forgot the birds. and for a while ornithology still prevailed.