The Rookery (Ruskin Hall)
The Rookery, the home of the Finch family for two hundred years, is on your left as you enter Stoke Place in Old Headington. Largely rebuilt in 1810, it was known as Charlton Lea from 1897 to 1933. It became part of Ruskin College in 1946, and is now known as Ruskin Hall.
The postcards above and below date from around the late 1940s, and are described as showing "The Rookery, Ruskin College, Oxford".
The postcard above shows the Common Room and below the Library at the Rookery
In the late eighteenth century the former house on this site was occupied by a second Richard Finch (1740–1802), who was a friend of Parson Woodforde. He appears to have been a bit of a playboy: Woodforde wrote in his diary on 14 July 1775, "We put about the wine pretty brisk it being Finch’s Birth Day to day, who is now 35 Years old". Three years later, on 8 September 1778, Finch married Laetitia White at Newington, and she gave birth to five children at the Rookery between 1779 and 1794. Richard, who appears to have been an Oxford wine merchant, is regularly listed in Jackson’s Oxford Journal among those renewing their game licences.
Their eldest son, a third Richard Finch (1779–1851), obtained his BA from Trinity College, Oxford in 1802, and rebuilt the Rookery in about 1810. He lived there with his wife Clara, his widowed mother Laetitia (who lived to the advanced age of 95), and his unmarried sister, also called Laetitia. He had no children, and after the death of his mother in 1846 and his wife in 1849, Richard and his sister became the last family members to live in the house. In December 1850 the Headington Rate-Book shows that Richard was still the occupier as well as the owner of the Rookery: its rateable value was then £81 and its estimated extent two acres. But very soon after this the Finch family must have moved out: the April 1851 census shows Richard (then a widower of 71), and his sister Laetitia (a spinster of 70) living as lodgers in Miss Hanwell’s school in Old High Street, and later that year the Rookery was let out to Colonel Champaigne. On 14 July 1851, Richard Finch made a will leaving all his rents to his sister Laetitia and empowering his trustees to sell his property after her death: just ten days later, he was dead. Less than three years later, on 20 January 1854. his sister was buried with him in St Andrew’s churchyard.
At the end of 1858, all the contents of the Rookery were sold. Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 23 October 1858 has the following advertisement:
"The Rookery", Headington, near Oxford. All the valuable furniture of the mansion to be sold by Auction by I. & W. Fisher on Tuesday 26 October; comprising capital feather beds, hair and flock mattresses, palliasses, blankets, counterpanes, bedsteads, mahogany and painted chests of drawers, bureaus, wash stands, dressing tables and glasses, presses, wardrobes, and other furniture of the numerous chambers and dressing rooms; telescopic and other dining tables; mahogany sideboard, mahogany hair-seat chairs, sofa (in hair), pier glasses, carpets, druggets, hearth rugs, easy chairs (in morocco and chintz); window hangings and poles, capital cottage pianoforte, sofa (in chintz), mahogany leo, card, sofa, Pembroke, and work tables, bagatelle board, bookcases &c.; also the kitchen furniture, utensils, china, glass, earthenware; likewise a four-wheeled carriage, with patent axles.
From 1859 the Rookery was rented by the Revd John William Augustus Taylor, who started a prep school there, and in 1863 he bought it outright. (Its land included the whole of Highfield Farm, then known as Rookery Farm, on the other side of the London Road, which had been awarded to the Finch family under the Headington Enclosure Act in 1804.) In 1883 Taylor retired, and moved into a new house he had built across the lane called Stoke.
The Rookery and its immediate land was then purchased by Dr Walter Sumner Gibson, but the land of Highfield Farm was sold for development. Gibson lived in the house and continued to run the school there for another 14 years until 1897.
In 1897 the Rookery was sold and once again became a private house. Rechristened Charlton Lea, it was first owned by Mrs Bartholomew Price and then the Misses Price until 1910.
In 1910 Charlton Lea was bought by Dr John Massie (1842–1925) (see ODNB). Massie had come to Oxford from Birmingham in 1886 when Spring Hill College, where he was Professor of New Testament Exegesis, was replaced by Mansfield College. He initially lived at 101 Banbury Road.
An article in the Oxford Chronicle for 14 October 1910 (p. 9) describes the extensive improvements Massie made the the house, including electric lighting. The architects were Messrs W. W. & G. A. Harrison of Turl Street, the builders Messrs Knowles & Son of Holywell Street, and the consulting engineers Messrs Best & Son. Massie employed six indoor and twelve outdoor staff to look after the house. He died in 1925.
In 1933 a firm of builders bought the house and its extensive grounds for development, but Oxford City Council refused to grant them planning permission. In 1934 it was bought by Sir Michael Sadler (1861–1943) (see ODNB) when he retired as Master of University College, and he restored its original name of the Rookery. He died there on 14 October 1943.
After Sadler’s death the Rookery and its grounds were requisitioned by the War Office: the American army camped there in Nissen huts, and later used it as a convalescent home.
In 1946 Ruskin College, which was outgrowing its cramped Walton Street premises, rented the Rookery and soon bought it outright (less a chunk of land which was retained for a new house at 4 Dunstan Road, confusingly given the old name of Charlton Lea). The Rookery is now known as Ruskin Hall, an accommodation annexe providing a rustic retreat for the students of Ruskin College, which is in Oxford’s busy Walton Street. (The college also bought Stoke on the other side of the road in 1965.)
Thus the former Rookery is still an educational establishment, but one very different from the "young noblemen’s school" of 1869: for Ruskin College is committed to equal opportunities and has educated adult students from the working class since 1899.
Left An old crinkle-crankle wall, thought to be Elizabethan, in the grounds of the Rookery
Right The unspoilt fields of the Rookery run down beyond the bypass and are always full of rabbits.
Listed Building references: Rookery: 1485/47; Kitchen garden wall: 1485/47A