Further adventures of Olive Field, and her butler

We are indebted to Susan Jaleel of Darlington for squirrelling out a 2014 Teesdale parish magazine which contains an article about Joseph Lancaster, who was Mrs Field’s butler.

His 22-year Army career finished when he was stationed at Barford camp, near Stainton, and Mrs Field took him on along with his wife, Bella, who became her cook.

Mr Lancaster’s duties included looking after the guests – although he didn’t smoke, he always carried a cigarette lighter should a visitor need one – and the pets.

This is where history becomes controversial. We said Mrs Field lived with a 50-year-old one-eyed parrot called Horrocks (or possibly Harris) that used to start the day by sliding down the bannister. The magazine says that the parrot was called Horace and it was Mrs Field’s Pekinese dog, Buttons, which only had one eye. She also had a donkey called Neddy, and she filled the hall with stuffed animals with rather spooked little children.

When one of her animals strayed, Mrs Field would go out with her chauffeur, Arthur Shields (who also lived in the hall) to look for them in her 1955 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud Mk 1. She would blow her silver hunting horn out of the car window to call them home.

Tony Crooks, who grew up on a farm in Lartington, remembers that the Rolls’ numberplate was PY 8000 (PY was the code allocated to cars registered in the North Riding before 1974).

“It was often said Mrs Field would she would pull up on the cobbles in Barnard Castle market place on market day and bellow across to the stall holders what she required without getting out of her car,” he says.

Mrs Field and the car star in the first Hannah Hauxwell documentary, Too Long A Winter, made by Yorkshire TV in 1972. PY 8000 drives past a swollen Tees at Startforth as the camera cuts to inside the car where Mrs Field has Buttons the Pekinese on her lap in the passenger seat. “Bloody terrible weather,” she bellows to her driver. “Don’t go too fast.”

The narrator says that the source of her wealth was her late husband’s grandfather, who founded the Marshall Field department store in Chicago, and then he says: “She lives with her secretary, maid, butler, chauffeur, housekeeper and gardeners in the faded glory of Lartington Hall.”

We cut then to inside the hall, with Horrocks/Harris/Horace the parrot in his cage and every surface crammed with nick-nacks. A harvest festival service, attended by Hannah, is being held in Mrs Field’s private chapel, followed by a harvest supper in the ballroom – Mrs Field blowing her hunting horn to announce the arrival of the roast chickens.

Mrs Field must have changed the car soon after the filming as when she died on June 20, 1973, she was in her Morris Marina, with Mr Shields and her nurse, when it skidded into the path of a lorry in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington.

“The cab of then lorry, which was carrying asbestos sheeting, came down on top of the Morris Marina estate car, trapping the three occupants,” said the D&S Times.

It said that Mrs Field, 87, was “the longest serving alderman in Britain” and had been awarded the MBE in 1965 for her services to Teesdale. Mr Shields, 74, had been her chauffeur for 25 years and had only married, in High Coniscliffe, three weeks before the crash.

The D&S also mentioned that in 1947, Mrs Field and her husband, Norman, who died in 1957, moved to Lartington and gave their previous home, Morris Grange, near Scotch Corner, to the Red Cross as a respite care home for handicapped children. As readers of the letters page will know, in 1985, Morris Grange was sold and is now a private nursing home, and the proceeds became the Olive and Norman Field Charity which provides grants to help people in need.

AFTER Mrs Field’s death, Lartington Hall was given to the Disabled Drivers Association, but the charity refused to accept due to its dilapidated state. Eventually it was rescued by former airline pilot Robin Rackham, and Thomas Wearmouth of Shildon remembers how he was employed for six years trying to restore the hall which had become so bad that in her last years, Mrs Field sheltered beneath an umbrella in the ballroom with her parrot and Pekinese when it rained.

To get the hall earning money, Mr Rackham created a squash club.

“I put a squash court in the old chapel, and put the stairway back up to its balcony so people could watch from upstairs,” says Mr Wearmouth. “Then we put the ballroom back to its original state – all the plaster moulds for the ceiling were made by prisoners at Durham.”