11th February 1905 SA
The speech delivered by the Earl of Harrowby at Sandon on Saturday afternoon will be read with more than usual interest. The occasion was the formal opening by Mr. F.E. Kitchener, chairman of the Staffordshire Education Committee, of the Sandon village club. This large brick building, with a rough-case exterior and a red-tiled roof, stands in the village street opposite to the entrance gates of Sandon Park. It comprises a gymnasium, reading-room, billiard room &c., with a verandah to serve as a pavilion, and a cricket pitch is being prepared in an adjacent field. This village club with all its equipments and surroundings, has been provided at the sole cost of Lord Harrowby, and he said it had been “a genuine pleasure” to him. His lordship is much impressed with the fact that the sapping of village populations and their absorption into towns is largely due to causes which are remediable by making village homes and village life more attractive than they are today. The provision of this well-appointed club for the labourers and artisans of the village is a practical outcome of this sincere conviction. But there is more to follow. Lord Harrowby wisely recognises that the inadequate housing of the labouring poor is a fruitful source of the migration of the villagers to the towns. It is a deplorable fact that on the outskirts of many of the “stately homes of England” cottagers are housed under conditions which render moral and physical well-being quite impossible, and this brings us to the most touching of utterance in Lord Harrowby’s speech. He referred with some feeling to the fact that the ancestral Hall at Sandon, needing much repair, was temporally closed, but he was resolved, before putting his own house in order to give “to every inhabitant of the village comfortable and sanitary quarters.” It was, he said, only by living for a time in an unpretentious house in Gloucestershire—“the Wilderness,” near Chipping Campden—that he would be enabled to carry out the schemes he had formed for Sandon. A finer example of the spirit of true nobility it would be difficult to conceive. We do not for a moment say that this ample recognition of the responsibilities of property, whether inherited or acquired, is absolutely unique, for several other Staffordshire landlords might be named, but Lord Harrowby’s departure is, to say the least, exceptional, and it is to be hoped that, like good seed cast onto congenial soil, it may bear an abundant harvest of beneficent fruit.
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