A Family Affair

The restoration and revival of this house is bound up with more than merely bricks and mortar. It expresses a remarkably long family connection to the building and the place, as John Martin Robinson discovers

- John Martin Robinson

HAILE first became a seat of the Ponsonby family when one William Ponsonby married Constance, daughter of Alexander de Haile, in about 1295. Its recent and exemplary restoration, recognised by a special commendation at the Georgian Group Awards earlier this month (‘Georgian distinction’, October 2), and also at the Historic Houses Awards last year, is the most recent chapter in a remarkable story of revival and survival that has kept this family link alive against all the odds through the vicissitudes of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The family connection with Haile is a complex one. A 17th-century descendant of William and Constance, Sir John Ponsonby of Haile, one of Cromwell’s officers serving in Ireland, acquired land in Co Kilkenny. This Irish property descended to his younger sons Henry and William, who established one of the great Anglo-Irish Whig dynasties, the line of the Earls of Bessborough.

Haile, meanwhile, was inherited by Sir John’s eldest son and namesake and left the possession of his heirs when the senior Cumberland line of the family died out in the early 19th century. It was 100 years later that the junior branch returned to the property. It did so in the remarkable figure of Maj-Gen Sir John Ponsonby DSO (1866– 1952), son of Queen Victoria’s legendary private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, and a grandson of the 3rd Earl of Bessborough.

After a military career in the Coldstream Guards and a distinguished role commanding the 5th Division during the First World War, Sir John bought back his ancestral home in remote Cumberland. In 1935, when he was 69, he married the 34-year-old Mary Robley, known as Mollie, who outlived him by 50 years, dying aged 101 in 2003. In her old age, as things fell into decay around her, Mollie used to say deprecatingly that she had promised Sir John to keep the house going, but ‘I didn’t know I would live to be so old!’