‘My ancestors hosted royalty at our 4,000-acre estate – but history doesn't pay the bills'

Telegraph

09-03-2025

One day in the late 1990s, Charlie Giffard was out in the car with his grandmother Roanna and his younger brother Freddie. Talk turned to Chillington Hall, the Giffards' family home since 1178, near Wolverhampton, in Staffordshire.
Charlie remembers Freddie asking, 'Who gets to live at Chillington when we're older?'
'Granny stopped the car and laid it out to him. She said, 'Charlie's going to live there, and you're not.' He was about eight at the time.' The messaging dealt to Charlie was strong: one day, he would be the 30th generation of his family to run Chillington.
'You just don't understand that when you're 15,' he says. 'You think, OK, it's going to be good. Then you get there and you realise it's an entirely different way of life.'
This realisation matured in 2023 when Charlie, his wife Tessa, and their three children moved into Chillington, replacing his parents John and Crescent who had run the house since 1998. It was a shock to the system.
'I had warned Tessa that it was cold – it's not called Chillington for nothing,' says Charlie. With only oil heating and open fires, temperatures during this winter's storms proved 'quite challenging,' says a cheery Tessa. 'But if we don't laugh, we cry.'
The Giffards – pronounced 'Jiffard' – are one of the oldest families in England. Walter Giffard, a supporter of William, Duke of Normandy since the 1040s, provided 30 ships for the future king in preparation for the invasion of 1066 and was offered the role of his standard-bearer at the Battle of Hastings.
A century later, Peter Giffard was granted Chillington in exchange for 25 marks and a metal charger, and the family have been there ever since.
They have long been royalists. Sir John Giffard was a member of Henry VIII's court; Elizabeth I spent a night at Chillington in 1575 – 'cleaning us out of house and home' – and following the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles II found refuge on the Giffards' Boscobel estate. Helped by their woodman Richard Penderel and his brothers, the hunted king hid in an oak tree there as the parliamentarians galloped past.
After the Restoration, the Penderels were granted pensions to be made in perpetuity to their descendants, held in trust by the Giffards and two other Catholic families. 'The other two ducked out and it was left to us to manage,' says Charlie, who, with his father, dispenses the few pence per person per year.
Charlie's father, John Giffard, for a decade Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police, inherited Chillington in 1998 from his father Peter, who had served with the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, losing a leg in the process. 'You always knew when grandpa was coming because you heard the squeak of his [wooden] leg,' Charlie remembers.
The house John and his Texan wife, Crescent, inherited needed comprehensive restoration and modernisation; moving in, Charlie and Freddie would 'try and catch raindrops from the saloon ceiling in a bucket', leading to their parents replacing the house's entire roof.
On occasion, John found that his two roles clashed. When in February 2005 the fox hunting ban was enforced, the Albrighton Hunt, supported by the Giffards since its foundation 200 years prior, was no longer legally permitted at Chillington.
'I accept the family tradition [of hunting] and everybody knows that,' John said at the time. 'But everybody knows that, as chief constable, I will enforce the law.'
He amply supported his son along his more conventional career path when he chose to study property at the Royal Agricultural College, but didn't push him into Chillington, 'mindful of what was to come'.
For some heirs, the idea of a mapped-out destiny can be a boon, but 'it makes life planning quite challenging,' says Charlie. 'You know that you've got to go back to something at some point, but you don't know when.' Tessa had built a catering business in London, 'but then we had to move to Staffordshire and start a new life. It doesn't always sit easily on the conscience.'
They have put down roots for their own children in Staffordshire, despite Tessa's admission that the county had previously been 'completely unknown' to her.
'That's how we have hidden for centuries,' her husband laughs. 'Dad's friends would find out they'd driven through Staffordshire when they got a letter from him with a speeding ticket.'
Chillington is primarily a private home, only open to the public for limited tours through the spring and summer, but bookable for events and filming as the Giffards try, somehow, to strike 'a fine balance between home and goldfish bowl' – even if that means sneaking the children down the back corridor when they get home from school, so as not to disturb crews at work.
In due course, it is likely that one of their children will take on Chillington. It isn't a job for the faint-hearted. 'It tests your mental capacity from one day to the next,' says Charlie.
The conversation about inheritance is more nuanced now than when he was a child. 'It's not like the old days where you could slam it down their throat and say 'that's yours'. You've got to be sure that they want to take it on.' And, while 30 generations of Giffards is very impressive, 'history doesn't pay the bills,' he adds.
These are significant and the house doesn't wash its face. Nor does the park, designed in the 1770s by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, and the wider 4,000-acre estate always lend themselves to profitability. 'We have 800 acres of woodland, a 64-acre lake which you can't do much with, and 64 kilometres of hedge,' says Charlie. 'It gives you a wonderful ecological balance, but it takes away your 50-acre fields, so our yields are greatly diminished and it costs more to farm.'
He compares running Chillington to 'holding a sieve – the sieve is the estate and you're basically pouring water through the sieve and trying to catch some of it. Everything just sucks up cash quicker than you can hold it.'
Part of their plan to even the keel includes a solar farm for which they now have planning permission, the children's play site, Hockerhill Adventure Playbarn, which opened last year, as well as some residential development and a biodiversity net gain site.
Charlie wakes up every morning saying, 'I've got a plan',' says Tessa. 'I sometimes want him to slow down and concentrate on one thing at a time, but there's so much pressure to keep it going for another generation.'
Charlie admits that this pressure is self-inflicted, but he feels like he's on a deadline. 'When you really look at it, you've got 25 years on average in a place like this. We've been here for two years already, and we want to sit down and enjoy some of it after a while, rather than have problems for 10, 20 years.'
As an estate agent he is relentlessly optimistic, but for Chillington this approach is essential. 'When you look at the estate you have to think of the positives,' he says. 'If you look at the negatives, sometimes it feels so bad that you just want to forget it all and hand the keys to someone else. But you can't do that, you have to deal with it.'