Shadows of Empire: Ellen Stanford Sets the Scene

We begin the story (Shadows of Empire: Taking Tea at Preston Manor) in Preston Manor’s elegant Dining Room, where entertaining took place.

Lady Ellen Thomas-Stanford is unlikely to have given much thought to how tea ended up in her caddies or in the cups of her illustrious visitors. She may have been entirely unaware of those who toiled in poor conditions on tea plantations to bring this ‘liquid gold’ to her manor house in the south of England.

Occupied with the business of running a household, entertaining visitors and maintaining their positions in society, Edwardian gentlewomen were often oblivious to unpleasant truths overseas. Lady Thomas-Stanford took the business of serving tea seriously. She kept her expensive tea leaves under lock and key in her tea caddies. Each day, she would select her preferred flavours.

Visitors to Preston Manor, then and now, have also been impressed with her collection of 124 ‘Dogs of Fo’. These porcelain figures, which dominate the Dining Room, actually depict Chinese guardian lions. They were inspired by the two tame lions that were said to have guarded Buddha outside a temple. The Chinese craftspeople who created them had likely never seen lions and would have modelled them on Buddhist iconography adopted from India.

Ellen Thomas-Stanford believed these porcelain figures to be ‘Qilins’ – a composite mythological animal. However, there is only one Qilin in the collection. Ellen named her beloved Pekingese dog ‘Kylin’ (1909-1924). It’s possible this is how she believed ‘Qilin’ to be pronounced.

Ellen Thomas-Stanford was born in 1848. She lived at Preston Manor with her second husband, Charles Thomas-Stanford until their deaths in 1932.

Ellen’s ancestors were farmers and landowners. Charles was from a prosperous shipping family. For over 200 years, the Stanford family land greatly appreciated in value. The family became the wealthiest in Sussex.

The Stanford name is familiar throughout Brighton & Hove. It appears in road and school names. The deeds of thousands of houses constructed on land once owned and farmed by the family also bear the Stanford name. Charles Thomas added Stanford to his surname when he married Ellen – it was a condition of her father’s will to keep the name alive as Ellen was his only surviving child.

The Thomas-Stanfords received many important and famous visitors. These included Rudyard Kipling and HRH Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest child.