Wardley Hall

It is a great pity that the magnificent quadrangular, wood, plaster and brick building called Wardley Hall has become known as The Skull House. It was built in the reign of Henry V on the site of an older house, whose moat and gate- house still remain. This unattractive title is solely due to the legend of its far-famed and gruesome skull contained in a recess at the head of the main staircase since the reign of Charles II and quite erroneously believed to be that of Roger Downes. Whatever the original legend, it has been so distorted, falsified and exploited that all the versions have become totally unconvincing. All that is certain is that the skull belonged to a man with a bitter and stubborn resistance against its removal to anywhere else but where it now is. If anyone dared to remove it chaos would ensue.

Wardley Hall in Greater Manchester belonged to the Worsleys and then the Tildesleys until the seventeenth century, when it passed into the possession of the Downes family, whose arms may still be seen on the staircase, near what has always been accepted as Roger Downes’ skull. That belief was shattered when, in 1779, his coffin was opened and found to contain his full skeleton, after which rumours never ceased to spread and guesses multiplied alarmingly as to whose skull it really was. Roger Downes was a particularly unpleasant man during his lifetime, a debauchee, a boaster and swaggerer, aggres sive and quarrelsome, one of Charles II’s loose-living cronies. He was known as a ‘scourer’, one who swaggered about the streets of London looking for unarmed and defenceless people whom they could attack with their sword, slicing off an ear or slitting a nose for the sheer delight it gave them as sport. Even ‘the watch’ though armed themselves, forerunners of the police force today, avoided them whenever possible, because the royal pri vilege overlooked any crime a ‘scourer’ might commit.

At last there came a night when .the tide turned against Downes. It was on London Bridge, according to one version. He made an attack on one of the watchmen, who seemed to him to be the feeblest, instead of which he was suddenly confronted by a very tough man indeed, who attacked him with his halberd and severing his head from his body, the head rolled into the gutter. The second version of his death is that Downes and some of his cronies were having great sport with some fiddlers whom they had caught. They began tossing them in a blanket higher and higher, meaning to snatch the blanket away so that the fiddlers would then crash on to the cobbled street. Their sport was suddenly interrupted by the watch who had been called to the affray by a bystander. Lord Rochester, another crony of Charles II, drew his sword and attacked one of the watchmen, but Downes sprang forward and saved the man’s life. He himself, how ever, was felled by another watchman and so badly wounded that he died a few days later. His body was buried in Wigan church.

In the first version there is no mention of a burial; instead it is said that Downes’ head was picked up from the gutter, put into a box and sent back to Wardley Hall as a present for his sister Penelope, who was later married to Richard Savage, Earl Rivers. It was she who put the skull in the recess at the head of the staircase, where it has been ever since. It is quite incredible that the watch should have sent the skull back, for the long journey from London Bridge to Wardley Hall would have been very expensive and certainly not paid for by any of the watchmen, even if they knew who it was. The skull has remained where she put it ever since, except for one or two absences.

It was Penelope who caused the first of these absences for, with the best intentions in the world, she decided her brother’s skull should have a Christian burial and be com mitted to the churchyard. All the arrangements were made for this and the skull in its box was taken down and put into the care of the priest overnight, ready for the burial service the next morning. However Penelope, had not consulted the skull, for scarcely had it left Wardley Hall than it asserted itself with great force. That very night a storm of such power broke over the house that those who were living there fled in terror from room to room. They hid under beds andin corners as the storm raged above the Hall as if it had been singled out for destruction. It did not end until dawn broke. Downes’ sister, convinced that the skull was the whole cause of the havoc, hastily fetched it back and returned it to the head of the staircase, when im mediate silence came and peace was restored. Later, there were other occasions when tenants had moved it out of the house; almost at once havoc would break out again. It was evident that the skull ruled the Hall to such an extent that no one ever dared to move it again.

Whilst all this is a good story of horror and skull-power, which has been repeated in other houses, notably Burton Agnes in Yorkshire and Chilton Cantelo in Somerset, nothing has substantiated the truth. In an effort to settle the matter, in 1779 an unnamed tenant of the house unable to live any longer in constant fear by the haunting, even by its presence of the skull decided to challenge both the legend and the skull itself, obtaining church permission to have Roger Downes’ coffin opened to see if his skeleton was headless. It was not. To whom then did the skull belong? Thus yet another version of the legend was born, equally unauthenticated. This time it was established that the head belonged to a Roman Catholic priest named Barlow, known by everyone as ‘Father Ambrose’. He was the cousin of Sir Alexander Barlow of Barlow Hall, which was near Wardley Hall. Wardley Hall was then occupied by John and Francis Downes, close friends of the Barlows. All were Roman Catholics and because of intense religious persecution fre quent secret Masses were held in both Halls. Father Ambrose was finally caught holding one of his secret Masses and arrested in 1641, he was executed and his head impaled on the tower of Manchester Old Church. A devout sympathizer managed to secure the head and bring it secretly back to Wardley Hall.

As if these legends were not enough to lay the skull to its final place in ghost history, it became a national sensation when, in 1930, it was stolen from Wardley Hall, There was an invasion of photographers and journalists of almost all the national and local press. Naturally the skull and its history became ‘exclusive’ with headlines of local stories fed to them by the locals, in a welter of misinformation and nonsense. In 1931 the skull secretly arrived back atWardley Hall from the frightened thieves who had been haunted by it almost at once and was once again restored to its recess at the head of the staircase. So, after nearly four centuries the mystery remains unsolved, which might at least prevent the appearance of yet another legend.

When I had finished the story of Wardley Hall I received from Manchester County Libraries a message informing me that the Bishop of Salford is now the official resident of the Hall and giving me his telephone number. I rang his secretary about the skull, asking if it would continue to stay there. He informed me that of course it would. I then asked him if I could end my story expressing a hope that the Bishop would bring peace at last to both the skull and the Hall, and he said with a laugh, ‘Certainly, the Bishop would enjoy that!’

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