Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

goes right, the garden is a failure .... it is disgusting .... people’s borders are gorgeous – mine are in swarms’. By 1906 he decided to move on and arranged for the firm of E & H Lumley to sell the estate; they put Old Buckenham Hall up for sale, advertising it as ‘A Miniature Mansion in a Miniature Park’. Lionel duly bought the property 23 but only required the grounds so the fixtures and fittings were auctioned off separately over as many as four consecutive days in June 1906. A lavish catalogue detailing all 908 lots was published by Pettitt & Cox, titled ‘OLD BUCKENHAM HALL CATALOGUE by direction of HH Prince FREDERICK DULEEPSINGH’. When he made way for Lionel, Prince Freddy did not move far, renting Breckles Cottage, which he renamed ‘Breckles House’, from Charles Bateman Hanbury. He also spent his final years nearby, residing at Blo Norton Hall which dated from the 16 th century and boasted a moat. He died in 1926. Barry Wilson describes Prince Freddy as an ‘antiquarian’ but states that he is most famous for being the father of the Test cricketer, Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji. Unfortunately there is not a grain of truth in this assertion; Prince Freddy never married and had no issue. When the estate is referred to in Robinson’s times, sources describe it as being around 2,000 acres. Given that Prince Freddy’s advertisement described a ‘Miniature Park’, it is obvious that the great expansion of 23 WS, reported in his memoirs that the estate at Old Buckenham had actually passed through the hands of Lionel’s ancestors twice before. In the 11th century it had been owned by William d’Albini and in the 15th by Sir John Knyvett. Michael Robinson assumes that it was Lionel who organised for an entry on the Robinson family to appear in Burke’s Landed Gentry and for the recognition of their coat of arms and crest for such matters butter no parsnips in Australia. 23 Robinson comes to Norfolk Prince Frederick Duleep Singh’s elegant house, demolished to make way for Lionel’s mansion (courtesy of Roger Wilson)