Newfield House

'Newfield House'

Not quite gentry, but certainly for the aspiring new middle class, Newfield House sat on Rush Green Road on the site of what is now Newfield Court. This outwardly uninspiring house actually had at least two illustrious tenants. The magnificently named William Tertius Wood was quite probably occupying the house at the time this photograph was taken, around 1910. A civil engineer by profession, Wood was a director of the Rochdale Canal. But his potential claim to fame, (which never came to fruition) would have been as the designer of London’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. His plan for a 1225 foot tower with a central elevator surrounded by a spiral path where horses could potentially carry visitors to the summit was entered into a national competition. It didn’t win, and the winner never got built of course. If it had, it would have soared 200ft above the present day Shard near Wembley.

When the lease expired in 1911 and he was preparing to move on, Mr Wood had to let his coachman Ernest Southern go. He wrote him a glowing letter of reference and this may well be him in the photograph. Mr Wood closed up the stables and if they were used again by the next tenant it would have been as a motor garage.

The new tenant, Percival Perry, was the general manager of the new Ford motor factory in Trafford Park. Perry wasted no time in inviting Henry Ford, his wife Clara and son Edson to England and in 1912 they spent much of their first stay abroad as guests at Newfield House. Henry and Edson particularly enjoyed the genteel sport of bowling on Newfield’s private green. It was Perry too, who a couple of years later secured Oughtrington Hall on behalf of the Fords as a settlement for Belgian refugees for the duration of World War One. Perry was eventually knighted for his government work in the First World War ... so maybe gentry after all!