Flintham

Victorian conservatory, Flintham Hall

Col. Thomas Blackborne Thoroton Hildyard (1752–1814), was MP for Grantham.[13] As a colonel in the Coldstream Guards, Thoroton Hildyard served with British forces in the American War of Independence.[14] He was also a longstanding friend and advisor to John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland, to whom he was related.[14] His grandson Thomas Blackborne Thoroton Hildyard (1821–1888), son of Thomas Blackborne Hildyard (1788–1830),[15] also lived at Flintham Hall and was educated at Eton and Oxford.

In 1846 Hildyard entered political life as the Conservative Member of Parliament for the southern division of Nottinghamshire.[16] It was a toughly contested election. Hildyard was supported, according to the University of Nottingham, by the 4th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme "in spite of the fact that Newcastle's son, the Earl of Lincoln, was his opponent. Lincoln attacked Hildyard's youth and inexperience, but the 'young squire' still defeated him by a majority of almost 700. Hildyard held South Nottinghamshire from 1846 until 1852. He was re-elected in 1866. He then continued to represent the South Nottinghamshire constituency until his retirement in 1885."[17]

The name of the Hildyard family of Flintham was initially Thoroton.[18] Col. Hildyard, father of MP Hildyard, was formerly called Thomas Blackborne Thoroton. The second son of Thomas Hildyard, formerly Thomas Thoroton, took holy orders and became a rector. In 1816 the Rev. Levett Thoroton married in London the daughter of Sir Alexander Cray Grant, 8th Baronet of Dalvey, Elgin, Scotland, and MP.[19] Rev. Levett Thoroton later became a rector in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where his family owned land,[20] but changed his name to Hildyard in 1815 on marrying a Hildyard heiress, the niece of Sir Robert d'Arcy Hildyard, 4th and last Baronet, who died without issue leaving his estate to his niece.[21][22] Col. Thoroton Hildyard was descended from Mary (Levett) Blackborne, who was the daughter of Sir Richard Levett, Lord Mayor of London[23] and the widow of merchant Abraham Blackborne,[24] and her second husband Robert Thoroton of Screveton Hall, Nottinghamshire.[25] (Robert Thoroton and his wife Mary became parties to a contentious lawsuit with the Blackborne family heirs — Thoroton vs. Blackborne — over an enormous estate left by William Hewer, longtime friend of diarist and Secretary of the Admiralty Samuel Pepys.)[26]

In 2005 the family's best-known representative, Myles Thoroton Hildyard, landowner and historian, died at Flintham. Hildyard, a Cambridge-educated landowner and historian, won the Military Cross for a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp after the Battle of Crete.[27] He also became known for his work at Flintham Hall, a Grade I listed house, which The Independent noted in its obituary of Hildyard, has been described as "perhaps the most gloriously romantic Victorian house in England."[28] Hildyard became known in the community for his good fellowship. "Flintham was, for the years Myles Hildyard was its guardian," noted The Independent in its obituary, "a most remarkable place to visit. Not just because of the beauty and richness of its physical surroundings, but also because he himself was so remarkable a person. 'He was, in a way,' writes Antony Beevor,[29] 'the local equivalent of Nancy Mitford's Lord Merlin.' At Flintham he encouraged and received a stream of visitors young and old, who brought lively conversation, stimulation and enjoyment to a house which, when his father inherited, had been a rather forbidding and lifeless place."[30]

Flintham Hall

Flintham Hall is a Grade I listed country house in the Flintham estate, on the western edge of Flintham village. It was built in 1798 on the site of an earlier house bought from the Disney family by Thomas Thoroton in 1789. It was extended in 1820–1830 by the architect Lewis Wyatt for the British Army Colonel. T. Thoroton and again remodelled in 1853–1859 by George Thomas Hine for Thomas Blackborne Thoroton Hildyard. It is built on two and three storeys, 11 bays wide and 3 bays deep with an attached glassed Victorian conservatory. The conservatory, influenced by London's Crystal Palace, is the finest of its type left in England.[31][32]

The Thoroton Hildyard family continues to reside at the Hall.[33][34] Flintham Hall, now the home of Myles's nephew Sir Robert Hildyard and his wife Lucy, was recently chief location for "Easy Virtue," a movie based on the Noël Coward play.[35] It was also used in And When Did You Last See Your Father?, a film starring Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth, directed by Anand Tucker,

The village has a circular brick pinfold resembling those at Screveton and Scarrington.[36] A windmill stood in Broad Marsh field from 1779 to 1847 (grid reference SK742462).[37]

Flintham is one of twenty or so places in Nottinghamshire where the local historian Maurice Barley (1909–1991) found evidence of a traditional English Plough Boy's Play being performed. It consists of 151 lines of text and involves seven characters. It was last performed in Flintham in 1925.[38] It was more recently revived by the Foresters Morris Men[39] in September 2014 with schoolboys from Flintham, and performed at Nottingham Castle and around.[40]