Sir Cecil Herbert Edward Chubb was a self-made man. The son of a leatherworker in a small village in Wiltshire, he was born into obscurity but died a very rich man.
His upbringing was nothing of note, however. Born in 1876 into a deeply conservative Victorian England, he excelled in his education, earning a Double First Class degree in Science and Law from Christ’s College, Cambridge.
He went on to become a lawyer and a rich one at that, enjoyed a lengthy career and died at the age of 58 in 1934, leaving a loving family at that. And that would be all there was to say about Cecil Chubb, except for a moment of madness in 1915 which went down in history.
It all started when his wife Mary sent him out to buy dining chairs for their dining room…
Sold!
To be fair to Cecil, the auction he attended had some unusual items. Many had been put up for sale from the estate of Sir Edmund Antrobus, 4th Baronet Antrobus, by his brother Cosmo.
The Antrobus baronets were large landowners in Wiltshire and in order to pay death duties and other taxes, much of the estate was put up for sale. This included items such as furniture, in which Chubb was interested, but it also included large portions of the property, including Salisbury Plain.
From a modern perspective, the standout lot was one such parcel of land: Lot 15, including the center of Salisbury Plain, and Stonehenge. Chubb was interested in the land and felt it his patriotic duty to ensure the ancient standing stones for the nation.
Chubb had himself become quite rich by this point, and at the auction he made the snap decision to bid for Stonehenge himself. He would end up winning the land and the ancient monument for a purchase price of £6,600, a bafflingly small $750,000 in today’s money.
What Cecil’s wife had to say when he came back from the auction with a prehistoric monument instead of a matching set of chairs has not been recorded. One can only assume that she was not thrilled, even after Chubb tried to pass it off as a gift for her, but she didn’t make him return it: Cecil kept the land and the standing stones.
Three years later on 26 October 1918, Cecil Chubb left Stonehenge to the nation in perpetuity, being knighted as a baronet as a reward from a grateful people. Cecil Chubb, now Sir Cecil Chubb, was therefore the last private owner of Stonehenge in history.
Today Stonehenge is recognized for what it is, a truly remarkable survivor of Britain’s ancient peoples, a marvel of engineering and construction and an enigma built on a plain of grand tombs, druidic worship and strange earthworks. But for the intervention of Chubb, this monument could have been lost.
His choice to buy it and preserve it spoke to his vision as to its importance. His willingness to spend a small fortune on a whim (and to ensure the wrath of his wife) on such a property, while hilarious, marks an important moment in the preservation of one of Britain’s oldest, and most mysterious, monuments.
Top Image: Sir Cecil Chubb and his long-suffering wife Mary. Source: Bain News Service / Public Domain.
By Joseph Green
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