The following article appeared in our newsletter number 108.
Excerpts of correspondence received October 2025 from Frankie Francis. Compiled & edited by Stephen Tonge. Reproduced with the permission of the correspondent.
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| Higher Dunscar House in about 1910 |
While searching for some historical information I came across your website and thought that you might be interested to have some first-hand information about the original Higher Dunscar house on the site of the Higher Dunscar estate. I was born there in 1946 and spent the first 22 years of my life there. My remaining brother and I are the last people still alive to have lived in the house.
Before living at Higher Dunscar, my parents lived at Dunscar House, which they rented from the Water Authority. They then bought and moved to Higher Dunscar in 1936, after a tragic accident where a baby died due to snow falling down and smothering her in her pram. It seems that the Chadwick family, who had previously lived at Higher Dunscar, had suffered a family loss through drowning and decided to move elsewhere.
It was a wonderful house to be a child in, full of strange nooks and crannies and reportedly a tunnel under the road to the Vicarage opposite which, despite many years of trying, we never managed to find! Our father always used to say that the house was 300 years old.
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| Architectural drawing of Higher Dunscar House |
My father was (Colonel) Felix Knowles. By comparison with my friends’ fathers, he was “very old”; having been 55 when I was born, but I thought he was the most wonderful person in the world. My fondest memories of Father were of riding with him, me on pony Betsy, a fat little Connemara dun with a black stripe down the centre of her back and stripy legs, and he on his beautiful bay Fair Maisey. We would ride all around the area, chatting about anything and nothing, people would raise their hats to him with a “morning, Colonel Knowles” which probably gave me a greatly inflated sense of my own, and my family’s importance!
My father died in 1964, shortly after I left school, leaving just my mother Eileen and myself living in the house. The house was clearly too big for just the two of us and had a substantial amount of land. The executors of my father’s estate were advised to apply for planning permission to develop the site. This was turned down on the basis that the Council wanted to use some of the land to build a school, it said that any other use of the land would not be considered for 10 years. A local developer offered to buy the land at agricultural value with the proviso that, if he managed to obtain planning permission within two years he would pay the balance of the added value to the Knowles estate. Four weeks after the contract for this agreement had expired, the developer miraculously obtained planning permission! Demolition started as soon as planning permission was granted. My saddest memory, apart from driving down the driveway for the last time, was seeing just the porch area still standing during the course of its demolition.
I got married and left Higher Dunscar in 1968; as I remember it, my mother was there for 18 months to 2 years on her own, which means that the house would have been demolished in 1969-1970.
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| The entrance to Higher Dunscar driveway on Blackburn Road can still be seen, pictured here in 1906 |
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| Higher Dunscar House on the 1893 25-inch OS map. The old house stood where numbers 19 and 21 Higher Dunscar are now. |
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| Modern map of the same area |
