Looking at the occupation column of the 1911 census, Chubb has recorded himself as a barrister – while under industry he has written ‘Manager of a Lunatic Asylum’. We can read something about the asylum in the Kelly’s directory on TheGenealogist. This tells us that ‘Fisherton House Lunatic Asylum stands in beautifully wooded grounds, containing cricket field and lawn tennis and croquet courts’. In the First World War, Chubb also gave great service to the country by treating military casualties affected by the horrors of trench warfare. In fact the Chubbs used their own home, Bemerton Lodge, as an overflow for the main asylum during this time. The asylum changed name to become The Old Manor Hospital while still run by the Chubbs and then eventually became part of the National Health Service in 1954.

In civic life we can find, from the list of magistrates for Salisbury in Kelly’s Wiltshire Directory 1923, that Sir Cecil was a justice of the peace. By searching the outgoing passenger lists on TheGenealogist we can also see that In the 1920s and 30s he travelled by ship to places such as New York, and more exotically to Valparaiso in Chile and Cape Town in South Africa.

We now have an idea of what the last private owner of Stonehenge was like. But what about the family that owned it before him? We know that it was the death of Lieutenant Edmund Antrobus that led to the auction of the land on which Stonehenge stood. A search of the military records on TheGenealogist finds this Grenadier Guards officer in the casualty lists described as being killed in a report from 26 October 1914.

While Sir Cecil Chubb had been raised from a modest background to become a baronet in 1919, the Antrobus family had been titled for some generations their baronetcy having first been created on 22 May 1815 for Edmund Antrobus, of Antrobus Hall, Antrobus, Cheshire. Researching TheGenealogist’s Peerage, Gentry & Royalty records finds them in the The Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage of the British Empire for 1880. This gives us the information that their Wiltshire seat was at Amesbury Abbey in Salisbury. Sir Edmund was the 4th Baronet and his heir, also named Edmund, was set to inherit the abbey and its land.

The Amesbury estate, which included Stonehenge, had been sold to the Antrobus family in 1825 by the 4th Duke of Queensbury. Descending through branches of the Antrobus family until it reached, Sir Edmund Antrobus, 4th Baronet. In the early months of World War I, Sir Edmund’s son and heir was killed while serving in the Grenadier Guards, his father’s regiment. When Sir Edmund died the next year the estate passed from him to his brother, Sir Cosmo Antrobus, who decided to sell the land and thus it went to auction.

Searching the Tithe collection on TheGenealogist returns various results for Sir Edmund and then Sir Cosmo Antrobus and their land holdings in the parish of Amesbury. The tithe record for 2 September 1843 documents Stonehenge as being just over two acres of pasture land that Sir Edmund has let, with various other parcels of land, to one Robert Pinkney. There are also a number of altered apportionments, that were added to the collection when changes in ownership or the way that the land was divided took place. The last of which for Stonehenge was in 1922 when the owner is now listed as H M Office of Works.

The centenary of the gifting to the public of the stone circle sitting in the rolling chalkland countryside of Salisbury Plain is something to celebrate, thanks to the action of the barrister who ran the local lunatic asylum and who bought Stonehenge, on a whim, instead of the chairs that he had been sent to bid for saved it from being sold and transported abroad.

Using the records on TheGenealogist we have been able to see the rise of the saddlemaker’s son to Cambridge student, barrister of the Middle Temple and manager of a mental institution before saving the 4500-year-old monument for the country and being rewarded with a title.