by Harry Ludlum
CHAPTER 14
Gregson and the Fire - The Rectory's Last Tenant
If the strange events reported to have occurred at Borley Rectory during its existence have resulted in countless theories and much speculation, not to mention open refutation and counter-accusations, then this can certainly be said of the varied versions of how this rather unprepossessing and isolated house came to its untimely end in February, 1939.
Following the conclusion of Harry Price's tenancy of the Rectory in 1938, the Church authorities were finally able to dispose of their liability - for one could hardly consider the rambling great barn as an asset - once and for all.
On his arrival in 1936, the Rev. Alfred Clifford Henning had made it quite plain that he did not want to reside in the place, and even if he had been prepared to accept the bleakness and lack of comfort in the old Rectory, one could well imagine that Mrs Henning would have had something to say on the subject.
In fact, according to Henning's little paperback book, Haunted Borley, his wife was none too keen on the Borley living from the word go. Although the Smiths and the Foysters had spent some money on tidying up the old Rectory, by the time the Hennings came, it was already dilapidated.
Harry Price could not satisfactorily maintain it as apart from living in Sussex, he was also in poor health and unfit for any strenuous activity. After he ended his tenancy, the place remained empty until December 1938. On the 16th of that month, Borley Rectory was purchased by Captain William Hart Gregson, retired and late of the Royal Engineers. With it, Gregson purchased about 33D4 acres of grounds, the cottage at the rear of the building and the farm buildings. For this, we are told he paid the princely sum of £500, a figure previously quoted to Price.
Having thus acquired the Rectory, it is told that Gregson proceeded to insure it for £10,000, which it might have been worth properly modernised, wired for electricity, etc. But as it was in 1939, however, one doubts whether the Church would have got more than a thousand for it from anyone.
Gregson moved in initially to the stable cottage, with his two young sons Allan and Anthony, and apparently renamed the place 'The Priory', which certainly, if inaccurately, reflected the associated history of the place. It is thought that something in the contract of sale prevented it from being referred to as 'Borley Rectory' once its use as such had finally ceased.
About ten weeks later, on the night and early morning of February 27 and 28, 1939, the Rectory caught fire and was so badly damaged that without the necessary immediate and extensive repairs, it became a complete write-off. It was left roofless and largely unattended except for some makeshift temporary repairs to the upper flooring carried out by some Polish officers who visited the site.
After the worst that an East Anglian winter can produce in such an exposed position, followed by further seasons exposed to the elements, the ruined Rectory began to collapse, becoming dangerous to anyone who ventured inside its remains, and in 1943 Gregson sold it for demolition and soon workmen began to pull it down.
When Harry Price and an American photographer, Mr David Sherman, visited it for the last time in 1944 - an occasion that later led to another attack on Price's integrity by one of that day's party - Price was shocked to find that all but the rear wing and the cellars had gone, and with it the last reminder of the wealth and grandeur of the family of Henry Dawson Bull.
The exposed cellar reveals the brick wine bins.
What concerns us now, however, is exactly how the Rectory came to burn down in the first place. Captain Gregson gave varying accounts of the fire, starting with that given to Harry Price not long after the fire. In this, Gregson told how, on the night of the fire, he had gone into the Rectory to sort out some of his books. A number of books that he had already stacked, securely as he thought, toppled over on to an oil lamp which landed on the floor, smashed, and sent burning oil all over the place.
Another version of events was that he stacked his books on a drawing board laid across a couple of cabinets to dry them out by the warmth of an oil lamp, the books having become affected by damp.
Gregson, in this report, stated that in the course of sorting out his books he noticed a copy of Chambers Encyclopaedia, which had escaped his previous attention. He made to pull it out from the pile and, in doing so, caused the stack to topple, knocking the oil lamp flying.
Later, in 1947, when Gregson broadcast on the In Town Tonight programme, he said nothing about books, but said that an oil lamp which should not normally have fallen over did just that, and scattered burning oil with unfortunate results. Some people believe that the fire was a belated manifestation of the 1938 'Amures threat' to destroy the Rectory, a threat that came about during experiments with a planchette at a sitting with the Glanvilles 11 months to the day prior to the fire.
In the local press at the time, mention was made of the 'Ghost Room' over the library, going up in flames. This would have been the Blue Room, but in fact one slightly curious aspect of the progress of the fire was the apparent speed with which it took hold, bringing down the roof and completely wrecking the front part of the house before the fire brigade could get to grips with it.
Gregson could not, in truth, tackle the fire himself because he could not obtain water without resorting to the pump. In any event, his only means of getting his pumped water to the flames would have been by bucket and that procedure, against a fire of burning oil, would have been inadequate.
If one takes into account the time occupied in trying to dowse the fire himself, and adds to that the time taken to run to the nearest telephone and get through to Sudbury Fire Brigade, it is not hard to see how the place was lost before the fire brigade could reach it.
Sudbury Fire Brigade were called at approximately 12.15 am and arrived in about 15 minutes. The blaze was brought under control in about an hour and a half, after which the tender remained to damp down the remains and ensure that the fire did not restart. All their efforts were, in the end, to little avail. The fire had done its worst and Borley Rectory, save for the rear part of the house, was a write-off.
It could have been salvaged or rebuilt, at considerable cost; indeed, many a Borley fan including the present author bemoans the fact that it wasn't salvaged, but no attempt was made to clear the mess or replace the ruined floor and gutted roof and the Rectory became an unsafe ruin.
Now, however, we come to an aspect of the fire at Borley Rectory that has, in more recent times, thrown a cloudy shadow over the whole incident and Captain Gregson's tenure at the Rectory. In due course, Gregson filed an insurance claim for accidental loss by fire to the tune of £7,356. The claim, which was taken up by William Crocker, a solicitor concerned with insurance matters and Colonel Cuthbert Buckle, a loss adjuster, was adjudged to be fraudulent.
Writing in his memoirs in 1967, Crocker (subsequently Sir William Crocker) told his side of the Borley Rectory episode in Chapter 23 of his book, Far From Humdrum ... A Lawyer's Life. It makes interesting reading.
The gist of Sir William's account goes as follows: having distrusted Gregson's versions of how the fire occurred, and having taken a rather dim view of his having insured a house and possessions worth at the most £500 for £10,000 and of his having paid for it by a mortgage of £600 raised for the purpose, Crocker and Buckle began to have their doubts about the claim.
Ultimately, their rejection of the claim as it stood was based, among other things, on the results of a careful examination of the wreckage from the fire, some of which was put through sieves for close scrutiny.
Among other things, Gregson had bemoaned the loss of a collection of coins valued at £50. According to Sir William Crocker, a search of the gutted Rectory produced just one Victorian farthing. Secondly, Crocker concentrated on, of all things, Gregson's underclothes, which he described as being highly priced, initialled, and existing in large quantity. A chest of drawers containing these garments was found to have charred outwardly in the fire but the clothes in it were so tightly packed together that there ha
d been insufficient air inside to cause the contents to be more than vaguely scorched. These garments were, it is said, thin and darned, worn out and fit only for the rag basket.
The inference here is, of course, that in insurance terms, the value of Gregson's property in the house was virtually nil. The upshot of the whole episode was that the insurers bluntly refuted what they considered to be an impudent claim, stating that, as far as they were concerned, Gregson had set fire to the place himself. It was then made known that for the sum of £750 the matter could be settled on a nuisance basis, out of court. Sir William, in his memoirs, commented on the fact that this would have been much less than their costs in debunking Gregson in court and achieving, as Crocker put it, 'an empty judgement against this man of straw'.
Accordingly they paid out on that basis, and that was an end to it as far as Sir William Crocker and Colonel Cuthbert Buckle were concerned.
To the author, however, there are aspects of Sir William Crocker's assessment of Gregson and his intentions which strike an incomplete note, at least in respect of the relatively little detail related about the Captain in print.
Whilst it should be clearly understood at this point that there is no intention on the author's part to question the integrity of either Sir William Crocker or Colonel Buckle over their handling of Gregson's claim for the loss of Borley Rectory, one wonders whether, on looking again at the case, their view of Gregson and his role in the story of Borley Rectory is totally correct?
So far as the existing chronicles of Borley Rectory are concerned, there are various aspects of this episode that would seem to have been given less than close attention. There are a number of questions that occur to the writer:
What was the view of the officers of Sudbury Fire Brigade concerning the Borley Rectory fire? This I have so far been unable to ascertain.
What was Gregson like as a person, particularly in the context of his ownership of the Rectory?
Would he have been likely to set fire to his own home, especially to a building with the post-war potential of Borley Rectory, which once the war and resulting shortages were over, could soon have been turned into a desirable residence, worth a substantial sum?
Was the Captain then in such dire financial straits that he took such an appalling course of action in order to obtain funds?
Finally, considering the reputation of the Rectory, does it not seem certain that it would have been of greater financial benefit to Gregson intact rather than a blackened ruin?
It seems to me that an attempt ought to have been made to answer at least some of these questions, and also to provide something about the life and character of this, the last owner and resident of 'the most haunted house in England'.
Captain Gregson at Borley, standing in front of the bricked-up dining room window
When we come to delve into the story of Captain Gregson and the fire at Borley Rectory, it becomes obvious that the late Captain William Hart Gregson was not all that he seemed. When Harry Price was compiling The Most Haunted House in England in 1939/40, not having known Gregson until he had bought the Rectory, he obviously took the Captain at face value and indeed, at the time, he would have had little reason to view Gregson in any other light.
Had Price known then what was alleged about Captain Gregson, then the story of the Rectory's destruction would very likely have read very differently in Price's books. The passage in Sir William Crocker's memoirs has been known about for some time, but beyond that, very little has been written about the Gregsons.
After having faded from the scene for some years, one of the Captain's two sons, Anthony Hart Gregson, was found to be living at Cultus Lake, British Columbia, and this through the efforts of Richard Lee van den Daele, of Shipley in West Yorkshire. Anthony Gregson, in a letter to him stated quite bluntly that his father had set fire to the Rectory for the insurance money.
Furthermore, according to this same letter, Captain Gregson is portrayed as very much the 'man of straw'.
Gregson came, it appears, from Rusland Valley in the north of England, where his father was a local preacher, but at the time he purchased the Rectory in December 1938 he was living at Maldon in Essex.
During the 1930s, Gregson became involved with Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF), and became a sort of area organiser for them in the Maldon district. On one occasion, however, his activities brought him into conflict with what Anthony Gregson describes in his letter as 'a mob', who were incensed at the appalling treatment meted out to hapless tribes people in Ethiopia by Mussolini's air force. The late Captain, 'man of straw' indeed, thought that discretion was the better part of valour and changed sides. In due course, he became a garrison engineer with the Royal Engineers at Southend-on-Sea.
Of his handling of Borley Rectory, Anthony Hart Gregson says this of his father:
'My father Captain (Retd.) W. H. Gregson bought Borley Rectory as a real estate venture around 1937 at which time a prominent spiritualist, Harry Price, classified it as the most haunted house in England. When this didn't pan out, he torched it for the insurance.'
According to the same letter, Gregson became involved with the Mosley bunch after the Borley episode, but this conflicts with, among other things, evidence in the form of letters to and from Price and the Rev. Henning, revealing that Gregson was living at Maldon, where he had been a BUF organiser, before and not after the Borley period.
When, in 1943, Gregson finally sold the shell of the burned-out Rectory to a Mr Woods for demolition, he and his sons departed, not back to Maldon in Essex, but to the similar-sounding Walden in Yorkshire, not far from Rusland Valley from whence the Captain had originally come. His two sons went into the forces, Anthony serving in Europe, while the other, Allan, was posted to East Africa where, his brother complains, he had an easy billet.
In his letter to Richard Lee van den Daele, A. H. Gregson describes his father as 'an upright citizen', in connection with his joining the British Union of Fascists, but his actions in 1947 could hardly be classed as such. It was in that year that, despising the Socialist point of view and partly it seems because he was a landlord owning about 25 slum dwellings, he and Allan Gregson departed for Tasmania.
According to his own story, Anthony Gregson decided to get to Canada by stowing away aboard ship and finally came to Discovery Mine, a gold camp in the North West Territories, from where he later claims to have stolen part of a gold shipment by substituting lead for the gold bars. He was not apprehended until 1957 in Tasmania, the year of his father's death, whereupon he was sent back to Yellowknife in Canada to face a two-year prison sentence.
That at least is the picture of the Gregsons and the fire, given by Anthony Hart Gregson. However, without supporting evidence from the other son, Allan, this discrediting assessment of the case is not necessarily the end of the story.
Richard Lee van den Daele managed to trace Allan Gregson, now living in Tasmania, and the latter's response and version of events directly contradicts the insurance fraud suspicions! Allan Gregson's memories of the night of the fire turn the whole episode on its head again, because in his letter he says:
'Although we'd bought the property and taken possession in late 1938, we lived initially in the flat above the coach house, pending redecoration and furnishing of the Rectory (not all 20 rooms of it though). A great deal of our furniture, etc. was stacked in the entrance hall and stairwell temporarily. There being no electricity or gas, our lighting was by oil lamps which were not pressure lamps. One of these was an argand-type brass table-lamp, which was carried into the rectory any evening when we required to fetch one of our books or other articles.
'On one such evening my brother and I were in the flat, it was about bedtime, and my father wanted a book or document from the Rectory; apparently he stood the lamp on a table or box while he rummaged about, and then a stack of books suddenly keeled over on to the lamp, overturning it, and spilling kerosene which then caught alight and speedily ignited surrounding articles. L
ike most households, this one didn’t have ready-use fire-fighting equipment and so my father immediately sent us boys to the nearest telephone (Borley Green) to call the fire brigade from Sudbury.'
This contradicts Anthony Hart Gregson's version of events, in which Allan says that his brother tended to suffer from 'over-exposure to James Cagney', but there are aspects of Allan's account of the night of the fire which raise questions.
The first concerns the storing of their belongings in the Rectory prior to having it redecorated. In a house with wooden floors and stairs, what on earth was all that gear doing stored in the hall near the main stairs, the worst place of all to store books and paper in the event of a fire, unless it was never the intention that the Rectory should survive to be redecorated?
The second point that arouses suspicion to the outside observer is the despatching of both boys to the nearest phone. If one of the two boys had stayed with the Captain, they just might have stood a chance of containing the fire until the brigade arrived. Nobody could really be blamed for thinking, as I am inclined to suspect, that with both boys out of the way, Gregson could have made sure that the place was well alight!
It should not be forgotten that in the space of about 15 minutes, the time taken for the Sudbury Fire Brigade to get to the Rectory, the place was far enough gone that they were unable to save it. The evidence against Gregson may well be considered circumstantial, but when we stop to take stock of the evidence, the conclusion that the fire was deliberately started for financial gain is hard to avoid.