Email From Andrew:

Good evening from Yorkshire,

I’ve just been doing some research on a local building and wound up on your website!

I’ve lived in Baildon, West Yorkshire all my life (I’m currently 33) and have been well acquainted with a beautiful building in the area called Hoyle Court Lodge. I wondered if this was the same one you refer to in your writings?

If so, I’m relatively familiar with it! It’s now a Masonic lodge and I have sung there (through the parish church choir) in years gone by plus family and friends’ weddings taking place there too.

This summer, it is my honour to be getting married there myself and I just wanted to let you know that, whilst the gardens are not as extensive as they were when you knew them, they are still elegantly wonderful!

I just thought I’d get in touch to let you know that the gardens are still well cared for and loved (assuming I have the correct Hoyle Court!)

Photo by Tim Green aka atoach

Answer From Pat:

How extraordinary to hear from you at this moment. Yes, you are right, what is now called “Hoyle Court Lodge” is the same building that we called Hoyle Court and it was my family home from my first memories in my pram until age 10.

I was born in Halifax in 1929, the year of the crash, into an old family of successful mill owners. The story of my youth is a “riches to rags” story and a grand adventure. I wrote a book about it. (I can send you a copy.) Our lifestyle was different from any that exists today. It was Downton Abbey on a smaller scale (if you saw that TV series—servants, gardeners, nurses, chauffeurs, and a farmer, most of whom I knew better than my own parents.) Hoyle Court owned all the land surrounding it which at that time was a walled estate, including a small zoo with monkeys and exotic birds, magnificent formal gardens, vegetable gardens, 2 orchards, a woodlot, several greenhouses, and a farm with several fields, cows, sheep and pigs. Due to circumstances I will relate in another email when I have time, my immediate family (mother father and brother) soon moved from Halifax to Hoyle Court and I lived there most of the time until I was 10 at which time I sailed to America and arrived here on New Years Day 1939. During my first 10 years, however, I rarely saw my parents and they were divorced when I was 4 or 5 and my mother remarried. When I was 8 they all left for America, telling John and me “stiff upper lip, we’ll send for you soon but it was almost 2 years later when John and I and a baby half-brother, Bill, finally joined them in America just as war was breaking out.

Thanks for writing.