Cecil Chubb: The Guy That Bought Stonehenge But His Wife Hated It So He Gave It Away
Updated: Sep 21
On the afternoon of 21 September 1915, a Salisbury barrister stuck his hand up in a packed theatre and walked out as the owner of Stonehenge. By his own account, he hadn’t planned to bid on anything.
You’ve probably heard the famous version. His wife sent him out for dining chairs and he came home with a 4,500-year-old stone circle instead. It’s a great line and it’s very probably legend. The documented story is stranger, with a private asylum, a letter in The Times and a grave that’s surprisingly hard to find.
Quick Answers
• Who bought Stonehenge? Cecil Chubb, a barrister born in the nearby village of Shrewton, at auction in Salisbury on 21 September 1915.
• How much did it cost? £6,600, for Stonehenge and about 30 acres of downland.
• Why did he buy it? By his own account he never planned to bid. He just thought a Salisbury man ought to own it.
• Did his wife really send him for chairs? English Heritage only says legend has it. Nobody has proved it.
• When did he give it away? 26 October 1918, to the government’s Office of Works, for the nation.
• What did he get for it? A baronetcy in 1919. Plenty of write-ups say knighthood, but that’s wrong.
• Who looks after it now? English Heritage, on behalf of the nation.
The auction: Lot 15
Stonehenge had been in private hands since the 12th century and the Antrobus family had owned it since the early 1800s. Then the First World War tore through the family. English Heritage says the heir to the baronetcy was killed in action in the opening months of the war and Sir Edmund Antrobus died shortly afterwards. The whole estate, Stonehenge included, was carved up into lots.
The sale took place at 2pm at the Palace Theatre in Salisbury, run by the auctioneers Knight, Frank and Rutley. Lot 15 was Stonehenge itself plus about 30 acres, 2 rods and 37 perches of adjoining downland. The catalogue description, written by the Royal Archaeological Institute, sold it as a sacred spot for watching or worshipping the sun. Whoever won also had to put up a fence along the western boundary, and the local paper reminded the room that the monument was protected under the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913.
The auctioneer, Sir Howard Frank, asked for £5,000 to start. A man in the stalls obliged. From £6,000 the bids crept up £100 at a time until a local farmer called Isaac Crook reached £6,500. Then one more bid came in, the hammer hung in the air for a moment and it came down at £6,600. The bidder was Cecil Chubb. Crook’s grandson Richard was still farming the fields around the stones when English Heritage wrote the auction up in 2015.
Chubb told a local reporter afterwards that he’d never meant to buy it. In his words, “I thought a Salisbury man ought to buy it.” Asked what he’d do with the place, he said he hadn’t had time to think about it, but promised that every means of protecting Stonehenge would be taken. The Salisbury firm Woolley and Wallis says, according to a Salisbury Journal report, that its founding partner John Turton Woolley acted for Chubb on the day.
£6,600 sounds like a steal, and for a site like that it was. It was still hundreds of thousands of pounds in today’s money, depending on whose inflation sums you trust. That’s a lot to spend on a whim.
What was he actually buying?
Not a polished visitor attraction, that’s for sure. Stonehenge had been a tourist stop since the Middle Ages, and by the 19th century day trippers were chipping off souvenirs and scratching their names into the stones. In 1893 Augustus Pitt Rivers, the Inspector of Ancient Monuments, reported that most of the stones were in a state of collapse. Two more fell in late 1900.
A leaning stone was straightened in 1901, a fence went up and an admission charge was introduced for the first time, partly to pay for a policeman to keep watch. Plenty of the other stones were still held up with wooden props. English Heritage sums it up as a neglected ruin, and that’s what Chubb bought.
Did his wife really send him for chairs?
Probably not, or at least nobody can prove it. English Heritage only goes as far as saying legend has it that Chubb was after dining chairs, and it adds that Mrs Chubb’s reaction to the deeds isn’t recorded. What it does say is that Stonehenge was apparently meant as a gift for Mary and that both their names appear on all the later paperwork.
That matters because Mary wasn’t a bystander in this story. One account on the Slow Travel site says it was her money he’d spent. That’s plausible given where the family’s wealth came from, which is the bit most versions of the tale skip.
Who was Cecil Chubb?
Cecil Chubb was born in Shrewton, a village just west of Stonehenge, in 1876. His dad was the village saddler. He went to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and then gained a place at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he picked up a double first in Science and Law. Barrister next, and eventually a wealthy one.
In 1902 he married Mary Finch. Her uncle, Dr William Corbin Finch, owned several private asylums, including Fisherton House near Salisbury, one of the biggest in the country. When the uncle died in 1910 Mary inherited the business and Cecil gave up law to run it. By the 1911 census the couple were living at Bemerton Lodge with two children and eight servants, and Cecil’s job was listed as barrister and owner of a lunatic asylum.
Freemasonry Matters says he ran the place well, bringing in new treatments aimed at getting patients back to their families. During the war he used his own home as overflow space for soldiers coming back from the trenches in a bad way. If you want a look at asylum life in another part of Britain, we’ve covered the North Wales Asylum in Denbigh.
He was also a Freemason, initiated in Salisbury on 26 October 1905, which is thirteen years to the day before he gave Stonehenge away. He sat on Salisbury City Council, served as a magistrate, owned racehorses and bred Shorthorn cattle. English Heritage adds that the future George VI was a regular guest at Bemerton Lodge.
Why he gave it away
Not because Mary hated it, as far as anyone can show. On 15 September 1918 Chubb wrote to Sir Alfred Mond, the First Commissioner of Works, and the letter was printed in The Times. He said he’d become the owner with a deep sense of pleasure and had expected to keep it in the family for years, but people had pressed on him that the nation would like it for its own. He also pointed out that “It brings in a revenue.” Then he asked, without making it a condition, that the income go to the Red Cross while the war lasted. The wish came from both him and Mary, and English Heritage credits them both with the gift.
English Heritage reckons he was nudged along by the Ancient Monuments Act of 1913. The deed was signed at a ceremony at Stonehenge on 26 October 1918, about two weeks before the war ended. Mond accepted it as a monument of unique importance and passed the news to the King and the Prime Minister. He also said he hoped the excavations already made on the site could be extended.
The deed came with conditions. The public would get access, a visit would cost no more than a shilling and nothing new could be built too close to the stones. Sources disagree on exactly how close. The site was also meant to be kept in its present condition.
Chubb wasn’t as breezy about it all as the legend makes out. A letter he wrote to Mr Goddard, a former president of the Wiltshire Archaeological Society, on 1 October 1918 turned up in a book at the Wiltshire Museum in 2018. In it he admitted it had been “hard to part with such a possession” before deciding he’d done the right thing.
The government gave him a baronetcy in 1919. Older versions of this article, and plenty of other write-ups, call it a knighthood, but it was a baronetcy: Baronet of Stonehenge, in the County of Wiltshire. His coat of arms includes a trilithon and the locals nicknamed him Viscount Stonehenge.
Fixing the place up
The Office of Works started in 1919. Many stones had been propped with larch poles, which people thought looked awful, so the plan was to straighten leaning stones and set them in concrete. One odd detail is that the tenons on one set of uprights were capped with lead recycled from the roof of Hampton Court Palace. Then Charles Peers, the man in charge, decided the capping wasn’t needed and it stopped there. A lintel went up on stones 6 and 7 by crane on 27 November 1919.
Lieutenant-Colonel William Hawley dug alongside the restoration from 1919 until 1926 and explored about half the interior. He found the Aubrey Holes, a ring of 56 pits just inside the earthwork, named after the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey. His digging also let a Geological Survey man, Herbert H Thomas, work out that the bluestones probably came from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. After that the Office of Works stopped, worried that more straightening would amount to “faking” the monument. Nothing much happened again until the 1950s.
The wider landscape got protection too. A national appeal launched in 1927 raised enough by 1929 to buy 1,500 acres around the stones and hand them to the National Trust. In 1958 a trilithon that had toppled in 1797 was raised again.
A plaque commemorates Sir Cecil's birthplace, along with his mistletoe-sporting coat of arms
So why can locals get in free?
People often say Chubb wrote free entry for locals into the deed. English Heritage says the deed didn’t. The real story is a 1921 deal. Public rights of way ran close to the stones and were awkward to manage, so the Office of Works agreed to divert them. In return Amesbury Parish Council asked that residents of the Amesbury Rural District and the parish of Netheravon get free entry. That’s the root of today’s Local Residents Pass, which covers one adult and up to three children.
The stones Chubb handed over
The stones he put his hand up for were only half understood in 1915, and researchers are still rewriting the story. The big sarsens came from West Woods near Marlborough, about 15 miles away. The smaller bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, well over 100 miles away. The Altar Stone, the six-tonne slab lying at the centre, got blamed on Wales for more than a century. Then in August 2024 a study in Nature traced it to the Orcadian Basin in north-east Scotland, roughly 435 miles (700 km) away.
One of the researchers, Nick Pearce, called it the longest recorded journey for any stone in a monument of that period. Later work says how it travelled is still an open question. So Cecil’s £6,600 included what may be the best-travelled stone in Neolithic Britain.
How Chubb’s story ended
Cecil Chubb died on 22 September 1934, aged 58. That’s the day after the 19th anniversary of the auction. He’s buried in Devizes Road Cemetery in Salisbury, in a plain grave that a visiting writer says took nearly an hour to find because nothing points to it. A plaque marks the Shrewton house where he was born.
Britain has a long list of wealthy oddballs, but most of them spent their money on themselves. Chubb bought a wreck on impulse, handed it over three years later and it’s been cared for on the nation’s behalf ever since.
You Might Also Like
• Britain’s Greatest Eccentrics: The Bizarre, the Brilliant and the Completely Unhinged, for more British characters who did things their own way
• John Aspinall: The Gambling Showman Who Built Zoos for Tigers and Dukes, another very rich Brit with a very expensive passion
• The Discovery of the Lascaux Caves by Robot the Dog, another prehistoric treasure found by accident
