The Old Vicarage

click The Vicars of St.John's for list of these

click The New Vicarage for this vicarage's replacement.

click Lacey House also, as this was the name given to this vicarage when a new Vicarage was built

The original vicarage was built next to the Lacey Green Church about 1850.

In Hallmark 1981. St Johns Vicarage researched by Miles Marshall

It was the mellow gothic charm of this early Victorian its traditional local building materials, the cool grey flints and the warm brick quoining, that entitled me last summer to sit down and draw it. I had intended a short historical note for a future ‘cover story’ and I am indebted to the Vicar for the ready assistance he then gave me in compelling my facts and figures.

Suddenly, however, it has become 'News’. We learn that the Vicar is retiring after Easter and will be leaving the village. The Vicarage will be up for sale. A new vicarage is to be built.

This turn of events perhaps emphasises the need for an historical note, but first let me say that Bernard and Mrs Houghton, after twenty years of loving, caring and devoted service, not only to their own Church and its congregation but also to the life of the village, will leave a vacuum which may be hard to fill. May they both enjoy a long and happy retirement.

Although the Vicarage was modernised in 1960 when the kitchen wing and servants quarters were considerably reduced in size, the main structure remains much as it was when occupied by the first resident vicar, the Rev. Wm. T. Burgess M.A. and his wife Mary with their five children. He held the living from 1848 to 1880 and the building of his Vicarage coincided with the completion chancel which was to make the little chapel of 1825 into the church as we know it today. His new was a comfortable family home for those days though not a pretentious establishment; as the living was only worth £110 at the time. Even so, such a household would probably have employed 3 or 4 servants including a stable boy or gardener/coachman, for the family would certainly have kept some form of horse-drawn conveyance. The house would have been warmed by ample coal fires with a large, well polished kitchen range for cooking and eating the water. The plumbing arrangements would have been fairly civilised in such a house even then, though the water, we know, had to be pumped up into the storage tank by the servants. With the absence of gas supply in the village, they would have relied on candles and oil lamps until about the end of the century when an engine-driven electric lighting plant was installed, to be shared with the church.

The well—proportioned, high ceilinged rooms of the Vicarage would have provided the Burgess family with comfortable accommodation for themselves and the entertainment of their friends. The present drawing-room was originally half as large again and could be divided by folding doors when desired. It was in this room that one of Mr. Burgess's daughters is believed to have installed, for her own enjoyment, a secondhand Chamber organ which she eventually presented to the Church; the now much treasured Samuel Green organ of 1792. It was also the young Burgesses who installed the stained glass windows in the Church in memory of their parents.

The house was well sited, near to the Church but standing in ample grounds providing croquet and tennis lawns, those essential Victoria shrubberies, a good kitchen garden and a most delightful outlook towards Bledlow Ridge.

Incidentally it was a former vicar, the Rev. W. Robson, who being both wealthy and expert at tennis, built, in 1900 for his own winter exercise the covered tennis courts in Church Lane, now used as a warehouse by Palmer & Harvey Ltd. Most of the land enclosed by Church Lane was originally common parish grazing land which was solid off by the Parish Council in Robson's time for building development.

What is to become of this rather endearing relic of a bygone age? A house of this size is terribly costly to maintain and lays a heavy burden on the incumbent for heating alone, to say nothing of the house cleaning and gardening. But the problem does not rest with the Vicar nor with the Parochial Church Council, although their consent must be obtained before it can be sold. Ownership of the property, I am told, is now vested in the Oxford Diocesan Parsonage Board whose intention it is to. put the old house on the market through Messrs. Hamnett Raffety & Co., and to build a new parsonage of more suitable proportions on part of the existing garden.