It was an ordinary English afternoon in 1915. The sky was grey, there was a soft drizzle and the smell of damp chalk drifted across the Wiltshire Downs.
Somewhere between the promise of domestic harmony and the lure of quiet heroism, an unassuming man called Cecil Chubb set out for an auction in Salisbury. His wife, Mary, had asked him to buy a pair of curtains.
Instead, he bought Stonehenge.
Oh yes, that Stonehenge. The one with the massive stones, druids and an eternal queue of rental cars trying to find the exit.
Even by the standards of British eccentricity, this was bold.
As the auctioneer’s voice rose and fell in the oak-panelled hall, the crowd murmured over catalogues and sandwiches.
Lot 15 was introduced and there was a hush: “The ancient monument known as Stonehenge, together with adjoining land…”
It is said that Cecil, shuffling a little in his seat, felt something stir within him – a sense that this fragile, ancient ring of stones, almost eternally exposed to wind and time, may soon fall into the wrong hands.
And so, he set out to let them fall into his.
With one small and steady gesture, he raised his arm aloft.
The hammer fell at £6,600 (over £880,000 in today’s money). All of it, Cecil’s.
That night, he returned home without the curtains but with several pieces of prehistory. Mary, almost inevitably, will have taken a view.
But beneath this whim lay something more enduring. Cecil was a man of the Downs, born and bred. He could picture the horizon where the stones stood with his eyes closed – how they glowed in low sunlight and were enveloped by almost fictional mist in early autumn. Cecil also knew that the world was watching. Wealthy Americans had begun acquiring pieces of Britain, one abbey at a time. Cecil almost certainly felt that Stonehenge was next.
Why does this story resonate? I suppose because it’s difficult not to like Cecil. This inwardly confident, outwardly modest 39-year-old was driven by his connection to the hills that surrounded him. Passionate about living a life where his choices rippled outward and into future generations, he was prepared to take a different path to others in the hope of not merely fitting into the world, but shaping it.
Even if it did leave him momentarily curtainless.
There are similarities between some of Cecil’s attributes and the Waymarkers that we use to guide our young people at LWC. These are not a set of pre-programmed directions, guaranteed to get these youngsters to a fixed destination. Instead, they offer bearings to guide when the path isn’t obvious, when it breaks or disappears altogether.
Cecil bought Stonehenge seven years before the first student walked through LWC’s Acorn Gates, but he had the same idea as our founder, Baron Sydney Stern, who was equally as keen to widen the worlds of others.
Cecil instructed the lifting of those ancient stones, which lay collapsed on the hillside, surrounded by sheep and dewy grass. Several years later, with a quietness equal to his impulse, he gave them away – a gift to the nation.
The two conditions were that the entrance fee remain modest (never more than a shilling) and that the people of the local parish should visit freely.
A century on, and the A303 past Stonehenge rarely remains bereft of patient queues snaking through the landscape. Motorists stare out at the stones, in awe of just how many eyes have been similarly fixed on them since the dawn of time.
Few know of the man who saved them, or that it was an act of impulse, born from a sense of deep connection to place and a characterful courage to do things a little differently.
Cecil would have been 150 years old this year. And yet his approach to an unpredictable future was as forward-thinking as that of the generations that followed.
And it all began with curtains.
Yours,
Adam
