Wentworth Woodhouse: History of Yorkshire house that dates back nearly 300 years where Gentleman Jack and Darkest Hour were filmed

Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed country house situated in the village of Wentworth, South Yorkshire and is currently owned by the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust.

The building has more than 300 rooms and the original Jacobean house was rebuilt by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Marquess of Rockingham.

It was inherited by the Earls Fitzwilliam and the family of the last earl owned it until 1989. The most prominent gardner was Humphry Repton.

The house and estate of Wentworth Woodhouse were used as backdrops and interiors for a variety of films and TV shows including Oscar winning film Darkest Hour starring Gary Oldman, ITV series Victoria, BBC’s Gentleman Jack, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Charles III, Billionaire Boy, as well as music videos.

Following a £5 million renovation project, the historic Camellia House has recently been removed from Historic England’s ‘At Risk’ register.

History of Wentworth Woodhouse

The Wentworth family owned the lands from around 1300 and were united by marriage with the Woodhouse family who lived on the site now known as Wentworth Woodhouse.

Part of the house, above the lower wing, can be traced back to the 1600s, while the English Baroque, brick-built, western range of Wentworth Woodhouse was first constructed in 1725 by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, who later became Lord Malton, after he inherited it from his father in 1723.

This replaced the Jacobean structure which was once the residence of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, whom Charles I sacrificed in 1641 to pacify Parliament.

Before the West Front was completed in 1734, Wentworth’s grandson Thomas Watson-Wentworth commissioned Henry Flitcroft to build the East Front extension and the model they landed on was Colen Campbell’s Wanstead House, illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus in 1714.

The construction of the house was completed in 1772, although the house was built over a period of more than four decades.

The house was inherited by Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, who was briefly the Prime Minister in 1765-1766 and again in 1782.

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It was visited by King George V and Queen Mary from July 8 to 12, 1912, and they stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse for four days. The house party guests included Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, the then-Archbishop of York, the Earl of Harewood and his Countess, the Marchioness of Londonderry, the Marquess of Zetland and Lady Zetland, the Earl of Scarborough and Lady Scarborough, the Earl of Rosse and Lady Rosse, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and Lady Mina Beresford, Mr Walter Long and Lady Doreen Long and Lord Helmsley and Lady Helmsley.

During the Second World War, the house served as a training depot and headquarters of the Intelligence Corps, though conditions for trainee intelligence soldiers had worsened by 1945.

In April the next year, a column of lorries and heavy plant machinery arrived at the house on the orders of Manny Shinwell, who was the Labour Party’s Minister of Fuel and Power at the time.

The purpose was to mine a large part of the estate close to the house for coal and the area in front of the Baroque West Wing of the house became the largest open-cast mining site in Britain at that time; 132,000 tons of coal were removed solely from the gardens.

It was claimed at the time that coal was desperately needed in Britain’s austere post-war economy to fuel the railways, but this resolution has widely been considered as useful cover for an act of class-war spite against the coal-owning elite.

The house was in a poor state by 1989, with the family no longer requiring the house and family trustees decided to sell it and it was bought by locally born businessman Wensley Grosvenor Haydon-Baillie, who began a renovation project.

However, a business failure saw it repossessed by a Swiss bank and put back on the market in 1998 and architect from Highgate, Clifford Newbold, bought it and progressed with the renovation.

He was the owner until his death in April 2015 and the house was advertised in May 2015. A year later it was sold to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust for £7 million.