Finchcocks
View of the rear of the house, from the garden
Location of Finchcocks in Kent
General information
Type	House
Architectural style	Georgian
Classification	Grade I listed
Address	Finchcocks
Town or city	Goudhurst, Kent
Country	United Kingdom
Coordinates	51°06′08″N 0°25′38″E / 51.1022°N 0.4273°E / 51.1022; 0.4273
Completed	1725
Technical details
Floor area	15,387 square feet (1,429.5 m2)
Listed Building – Grade I
Designated	9 June 1952
Reference no.	1318935
TQ 7003 3646

Finchcocks is an early Georgian manor house in Goudhurst, Kent. For 45 years it housed a large, visitor-friendly museum of historical keyboard instruments, displaying a collection of harpsichords, clavichords, fortepianos, square pianos, organs and other musical instruments. The museum was run by the owners of the house, Richard and Katrina Burnett. It is now owned by Neil and Harriet Nichols^[1] who use it as a family home and a venue for residential piano courses.

In 2017, the museum was closed and the collection sold.^[2]

Ownership

The house was built in 1725 and named after the family who lived on the site in the 13th century. Finchcocks was owned by Edward Horden, who's family crest lies above the front door. Edward was 'Clerk of the Green Cloth' - a secretary to the board that was responsible for organising royal journeys and auditing the Royal Household accounts for three monarchs, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I. The current house was built for Edward Bathurst, a London barrister and 'Master of the Middle Temple'. Edward Bathurst (1680-1772) owned the estate of Finchcocks, and property in Jamaica, where he married his second wife, Mary Gyles. Two years before Edwards death, his son from his second marriage- Charles Bathurst purchased Finchcocks and his Jamaican property from him. This included 56 enslaved people (35 were listed as male and 21 as female. 8 were listed as boys, girls or children) When Charles died in 1767, he bequeathed both Finchcocks and his Jamaican property to his brother Rev. Richard Bathurst. In 1768, during abolition, a claim was made for £2675 as compensation for the Bathursts' 56 enslaved people in Jamaica. [ </nowiki>https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146660691]. Richard Bathurst sold Finchcocks in 1796, and died in 1803. His will makes no mention of Jamaican property. [ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146660691 ]An online unsourced blog states that Richard's eldest son Edward (bap. 1774) was a friend of the Prince Regent and lost his Jamaican estate to gambling debts. Finchcocks was sold to Robert Springett c.1796-97, alegedly to pay for gambling debts.

Sir James Stirling lived at Finchcocks in the early 1900s and described the house in his memoirs The Weald of Youth (1942).

During the Second World War pupils and teachers from Kings School Rochester lodged there before the house was requisitioned by the army.

In the 1960s it was a school for The Legat Ballet - Nicolas Legat and his wife Nadine Nicolava Legat, who brought the classical Russian style of ballet to the UK back in 1923.

Since 1971 it has been owned by international concert pianist Richard Burnett and his wife Katrina and opened to the public in 1976 as the renowned Finchcocks Musical Museum.

After wartime use for military purposes and a period of institutional use in the 1960s, the house was acquired in 1971 by Richard and Katrina Burnett, who restored it and in 1976 opened it as both a museum housing their collection of historic keyboard instruments and a centre for concerts and other musical events.  When they decided to retire and downsize in 2015, much of the important collection was dispersed at auction, but Finchcocks itself was sold to another musical couple, Neil and Harriet Nichols, who run courses for pianists at the house, as well as making it their home.

Architecture

It is noted for its brickwork and has a dramatic front elevation attributed to Thomas Archer. It is located in 13 acres (5.3 ha) of grounds. There is parkland to the front and a garden to the rear with wide lawns, mature shrub borders, an orchard for wild flowers, and a walled garden. There are extensive views over the Kentish landscape of park, farmland, and hop-gardens.

The house, with impressive facades both back and front, is deceptive – the interior is a series of interconnecting rooms without corridors and only 13 metres deep.^[3] Those rooms, with their high ceilings and oak panelling, provided an ideal setting for music performed on period instruments; the house and instruments were used regularly for recordings by leading exponents of early music such as Trevor Pinnock, Simon Preston and Nigel North. In addition to that, there is a jazz club which was founded by Alastair Laurence of the Broadwood Piano company and was developed by Roan Kearsey-Lawson into a premier jazz venue where international artists have appeared including Frank Holder and Duncan Lamont. The club has also been featured on BBC One television.

The Finchcocks collection

Finchcocks was acquired by Richard Burnett, a fortepianist, in 1970. The Adlam Burnett workshop (founded by Derek Adlam and Richard Burnett) was set up at the house and enabled instrument makers to produce copies of historical keyboard instruments in an ideal environment, learning from the construction of many originals. The building housed the Katrina and Richard Burnett collection of over 100 historical keyboard instruments; about forty of which were fully restored to playing condition. These could be seen and heard whenever the house was open to the public; it was one of the few collections of historical instruments at which people were welcome to play them themselves. With the Burnetts' retirement in 2015, the museum closed and many of its instruments were auctioned off for charity.^[4] The auction catalogue^[5] documented the instruments meticulously and in the auction many fetched two or three times the estimated prices. A total of £835,462 was raised from the sale of the collection.^[6]

Fourteen instruments from the collection were retained and form the Richard Burnett Heritage Collection, to be housed in 2018 at the Burnetts' home in Tunbridge Wells.^[3][7]

Similarly, there is a collection of musical pictures, prints and an exhibition on the theme of London's 18th-century pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens.

Historical instruments in the collection

View of the Kent countryside from Finchcocks

Related publications

• Burnett, R: English Pianos at Finchcocks, Early Music (1985)
• Burnett, K and R: Finchcocks Past & Present (2003)
• Dow, W: Finchcocks Collection, Catalogue: the Richard Burnett Collection of Historical Keyboard *Instruments (1989)

See also

• List of music museums

References

External links

• Finchcocks Charity for Musical Education and Richard Burnett Heritage Collection of Historical Keyboard Instruments
• Finchcocks Residential Piano School