Royal Air Squadron Visit to Deene Park

At the airfield were our host and hostess Robert and Charlotte Brudenell with a Land Rover and the shoot bus.

All aboard and we were off to Deene Park the ancestral home of the Brudenell family and the Earls of Cardigan for many generations. The impressive Deene Park is approached by a long drive through the parkland and sits amid a beautiful topiary garden overlooking a lake. A scene of tranquillity.

The group was split into two and we started our tours round the house. There was a remarkable collection of paintings, porcelain, glass and tapestries plus memorabilia from the Crimean War. This included the head and tail of Ronald the 7th Earl of Cardigan’s faithful charger who lived on a further 18 years after the Charge of the Light Brigade and out-lived his master. A rather amusing little note book belonging to 7th Earl’s second wife Adeline was pointed out by our hostess, in which Adeline commented that guests were either dull or very entertaining – with the latter group not locking their door before going to bed!
After the tours had finished we had lunch in the Old Kitchen Tea Room. Members were served a delicious cold salmon salad followed by apple pie and a bracing cup of coffee. Now fed and watered we had time to wander around the gardens with Charlotte who had revamped much of what we saw when she took over as chatelaine. There are miles of box hedging parterre with topiary bobbles, cut into fun shapes most notably the tea pots, which provide the perfect frame for the flowers within. The lovely white garden and the long borders leading down to the stone summerhouse were glorious too. All too soon it was back into the shoot bus and the return journey to Deenethorpe.

Deenethorpe is shortly being developed into a garden town and the future for the airfield is uncertain, at best it will not survive in its present format with the long WWII runway. The final aircraft to leave Deenethorpe at the end of WWII was a B-17 named Lady Luck. All the crew members were given a glass bottomed tankard. In 2011 the widow of Tom Parker, the last surviving member of the aircrew, returned the tankards to Deenethorpe where they are buried. Just before take off a group of us were shown where they are – let’s hope plans for an airfield museum start soon and they can take pride of place.