Was West Cumbria Alice's real wonderland?
THE thickly overgrown foundations of a former West Cumbrian stately home boast links to both the famous Victorian author of Alice in Wonderland and the courageous UXB men who defused hundreds of unexploded bombs in the London Blitz. Holmrook Hall was demolished after the Second World War and only its cluster of stable blocks and servants' houses remain. But it was originally the home of one of Whitehaven's wealthier merchant families, the Lutwidges. |  |
The Lutwidge family, owners of Holmrook Hall, made their wealth through sailing vessels carrying the profitable tobacco cargoes to Whitehaven from the new Virginia colonies in the infant USA.
In 1742 Thomas and Walter Lutwidge were heavily involved in the tobacco trade between Whitehaven and Virginia. According to Daniel Hay's authoritative History of Whitehaven book, in 1746 Walter described himself as a "man of opulency" with a fortune of £30,000, the equivalent to a present day millionaire.
But investing in trade was a gamble and Thomas Lutwidge overstretched himself and ended his days dying in a Dublin debtors' jail in 1744.
But there must still have been some wealth in the Lutwidge clan and one relative was none other than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under his pen name of Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice books that were the Harry Potter hits of their day.
 | Although many of the book's adventures were based on, and influenced by people, situations and buildings, in Oxford, some of the inspiration for the bizarre adventures of Alice with her talking white rabbits and Mad-Hatter's tea party may have come from visits by Lewis Carroll to the woods and fields around Holmrook. The other fascinating world that unfolded in the grounds of Holmrook Hall did so during the Second World War.
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The hall was renamed HMS Volcano and became a secret training school for the Royal Navy. The now overgrown woodlands were in those days used for the burial of bombs and mock bombs on which men were trained in the delicate arts of defusing and removing the explosive contents from unexploded bombs.
What few pictures were taken of this work show trainees deep in trenches carefully listening through early primitive amplifiers to hear if a timer fuse is still going on bombs that could blast out huge craters if wrongly defused.
One can only imagine the nerves of steel and the bravery of these men, who once trained in Cumbria, had to catch the train to London and face the daily reality of unexploded German bombs that needed making safe throughout the war.
