Across the Universe
The History of Retford Manor
Camera Obscura
( May 1895 edition)
As was the fashion a Camera Obscura was constructed in the highest room of Retford House during the early 1850s.
In 1840 James Lees’ daughter saw a description of a camera obscura in a periodical and pleaded with her father to have one built in their house. He told her that if she could learn the names and positions of the major constellations he would have one built for her. She dutifully did and by her sixteenth birthday could map the heavens with the use of a simple telescope, reference books and her journals.
So in 1850 the top most room in the house was converted. A hexagonal turret was erected on the roof. On one of the six sides a small hole was drilled in the centre of the panel. Inside the turret a mirror was fixed at an angle reflecting from the hole down into the room. The room was fitted with removable shutters on the inside of the windows and a circular table with a circular mirror fixed in the centre was placed directly below the mirror. A handle on the wall was connected by a set of gears to the turret. When the shutters were in place and the room in complete darkness, by turning the handle views of the gardens, the town and the surrounding countryside were reflected onto the table.
Excerpts from the parish magazines in the hotel library.
The Ghost
( August 1845 edition)
Whether or not there is really a ghost in the old Retford Manor House is still open to argument, but when Terrence Topham-Hatt was interviewed last night by our reporter Gerald Caldecott, Caldecott was able to verify that Hatt's hair was as white as snow in the middle of an especially frosty winter. Terrence Topham-Hatt stated that he was woken in the night by the sound of small feet running down the corridor outside his room. On opening the door he found no one there. The next morning he asked his friend Mr Lee who would have been up in the middle of the night running around in the corridors. He felt it particularly irksome as they had awoken him from a pleasant dream in which he had been smoking his pipe whilst curled up in his favourite comfy chair, stroking his cat and humming a ditty to himself. It was a most plesant and relaxing dream broken most unnecessarily, it seems.
Mr Lee told him a story. A few years back in the house there was a little girl who was unwell and kept mostly to her bed. Her favourite colour was blue and she often wore a pretty blue dress and white apron. One day she had a fright which, being of weak disposition anyway, killed her outright. No one knows what frightened her so. Whatever it was, her soul is not quiet but it is no longer tied to her crippled body and so she runs from place to place around the house. It is said that one day she will find the thing that holds her to the house and when she finds it, she will leave. Mr lee seemed surprisingly unconcerned by having this apparition in his house, but later that day Hatt heard a rustling noise in the corner of a large room on the ground floor and he was just in time to see the skirt of a blue dress dissappearing through the door.
He did not stay one more minute in that house. He left at once, his hair as white as we see it today.
The team of builders were led by an engineer from Bristol hired by James Lee, by the name of John Fowler, who later went on to build the first steam drawn plough.
For several years the room was a local talking point, and much used by the family and visitors to the house. However the Camera Obscura now seems to be broken and has not been on display to visitors for many years.
