The Man Who Bought Stonehenge
The Taj Mahal is rightly regarded as the iconic love token, a symbol of Shah Jahan’s devotion to his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, but did you know, at least according to one theory, that one of Britain’s most significant monuments was bought by a barrister as a present for his wife. As she was expecting him to come home from the auction with a pair of curtains, the gift did not go down so well, just showing that you cannot win all of the time.
Consisting of eighty-three stones, forty sarsens and 43 bluestones, and standing on Salisbury Plain, two miles west of Amesbury, Stonehenge was constructed in several phases, beginning about 3100 BC and continuing until around 1600 BC, a phenomenal engineering feat. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986, it is now owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage, although the surrounding land is owned by the National Trust. It attracted over 1.3 million visitors in 2023.
The Amesbury estate of around 200,000 acres which included the land upon which Stonehenge and Amesbury Abbey stood, was granted to Sir Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. After several changes in ownership it passed to Sir Cosmo Antrobus in 1915, who decided to put it up for sale. The estate was carved up into lots by the auctioneers, Knight, Frank and Rutley, lot 15 comprising the twenty acres upon which Stonehenge stood.
The lead up to the auction created a lot of interest with much speculation that it would not only be snapped up by a rich American buyer but would be transported stone by stone across the Atlantic to be relocated as some tourist attraction, rather like the fate that was to befall London Bridge in 1968. The Daily Telegraph opined that the prospective sale of Stonehenge was “enough to rouse the envy of all American millionaires bitten by the craze for acquiring antiques.”
The auction was held at the Palace Theatre in Salisbury at 2pm on September 21, 1915 and when it was time for Lot 15, the auctioneer, Sir Howard Frank, invited an opening bid of £5,000. The bidding soon reached £6,000 and then rose by £100 increments to £6,500. It was at this point that Cecil Chubb made his strike, offering £6,600 which knocked local farmer, Isaac Crook, out of the running.
When Chubb was asked later why he had bought it at today’s equivalent price of £867,000, he said that he thought “a Salisbury man ought to buy it. If you have bought a ring of stones and your wife would have preferred some curtains, what do you do with it? We will find out next time.
