Westbury House School

In July 1918, the mansion and Westbury Estate of nearly 5,000 acres was offered for sale in 10 lots. Although several outlying farms duly sold, the main property and the large adjacent farms failed to reach their reserves; and the estate was not finally broken up until 1924, when a second auction sale, this time conducted by Knight, Frank and Rutley, sold it to Thomas Whitehead, who converted it into a boys’ preparatory school. The photographs of the school show the adaptations made to the splendid fittings and decoration which Le-Roy Lewis had made when re-building the house after the fire in 1904.

An ex-pupil of Westbury House, Denys Ryder, recorded an interview in 2013 in which he described  aspects of life at Westbury House School:

”Thomas Whitehead and his sister acquired the house as a private preparatory school for boys. They stayed there until the mid-60s, when they handed the school over to a former pupil of theirs, Sherard Manners, who  took on and ran the school until 1977, when it closed, either due to lack of pupils or financial reasons. A school with 70 pupils was probably unprofitable, but that is what happened, and that is where I came, ten days later than the third of September 1939.

We were allowed the ability to roam there, because outside the house was 125 acres in which boys could go on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, which were the half days of the week, boys could go and play and bully each other  and climb trees and build tree houses and did everything out there until we were called back into the school.

Westbury is a very extraordinary house, it is only two rooms wide although it is a large, long and high  building, three storeys high – four if you include the basement, and it was in the basement, where we had our changing rooms and the larder and all the other things down there, there was a great big dark, empty room with no windows in it at all, and inside there was stored a whole lot of records. Now we boys, when we heard they were records, thought they were 78 playing records, and of course they weren’t, they were worthwhile records come down from London – they went all over the country of course, the records, in case of bombing – and we sat down there whenever there was an air raid, and we sat down there until the air raid finished.”

After the closure of the boys’ preparatory school, Westbury House was converted into a care home, specialising in the treatment of patients with brain injuries.