Exbury House

Exbury Manor dates from the 13th century. It belonged to the Berkeley family in the 15th century and the Compton family of Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire in the 16th. In 1708 it passed to William Mitford and thence down to his grandson, the historian William Mitford (1744–1827). On the latter's death it passed directly to his grandson Henry Reveley Mitford, whose father had been drowned at sea in 1803 after his ship hit Bell Rock. Henry sold it to Major John Forster in the early 1880s, whose son sold it in turn to the financier Lionel de Rothschild in 1919. Major Forster let the house to George Stucley for a number of years.

Rothschild remodelled and upgraded the house, developed the gardens and extended the village of Exbury. He died in 1942 and the house was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a headquarters to prepare for Operation Neptune. The house was designated as HMS Mastodon from May 1942 to July 1945, HMS King Alfred January to June 1946, then HMS Hawke from August 1946 to 1955.[3]

The house was finally returned to the Rothschild family in 1955 and Rothschild's son Edmund was able to renew the plant breeding program. The house itself was not reoccupied as a private residence until 1989.

The gardens have been open to the public since 1950, run since 1988 by Exbury Gardens Ltd on a long lease from the Rothschild family.

Janet Prentice, the heroine of Nevil Shute's novel Requiem for a Wren, finds herself, as a Wren specialist in landing craft guns, assigned to HMS Mastodon in 1943. In the novel, Shute identifies Mastodon as Exbury, and describes the wonder of Prentice and a fellow Wren when they first arrive at the grand river-front house and explore its gardens. Among other things, they find underground irrigation systems, carefully labelled plants, and "... a rock garden half as large as Trafalgar Square that was a mass of bloom ..." All of this, says Shute, was tended by a gardening staff that "... had been reduced from fifty to a mere eighteen old men."