July 8, 2025, by Kathryn Summerwill

Thoresby’s Lady Rozelle: the Nottinghamshire landowner who loved the open ocean

Photograph of Lady Rozelle Raynes, perhaps aboard the ‘Martha McGilda’ on the River Thames, 1970s (Ma 10 Ph 203/110/2)

Lady Rozelle Raynes, born Frederica Rozelle Ridgway Pierrepont, had a long life (1925-2015) of chance, tragedy, adventure and happiness. Her parents were Gervas Evelyn Pierrepont and Marie-Louise Roosevelt Butterfield. They were privileged but not titled. Gervas fought with distinction in the First World War and then became a London County Councillor. Marie-Louise’s father had inherited the small Cliffe Castle estate at Keighley in West Yorkshire. Marie-Louise was a talented artist and studied in Paris.

Their life was very different from the Gothic splendour of Thoresby Hall and the management of thousands of acres of Midlands arable land. But in 1926 Gervas’s cousin Robert Evelyn Pierrepont succeeded to that estate as the 5th Earl Manvers. Sadly, following a severe mental breakdown aged 17, he was unable to manage the estate and had no children. Gervas would be the next owner. Rozelle was the youngest of three children, but over two horrific years in 1928 and 1930 her four year old brother Evelyn and nine year old sister Mary, known as Venetia, died of scarlet fever and septicaemia, leaving her the only surviving child.

Sailing

Gervas succeeded as 6th Earl Manvers in 1940 and Rozelle, now the daughter of an Earl, assumed the title Lady. Rozelle preferred action to aristocracy and at the age of 18 she joined the Wrens and became a stoker on launches and small landing craft in Portsmouth and Southampton. She saw British and American troops off to D-Day in 1944 and was horrified by seeing young and wounded German prisoners of war. Rozelle hated war but loved the sea.

Mounted photograph of Lady Rozelle Beattie on board her boat ‘Imp’ in Montgomery Dock, Ostend, Belgium, 12 August 1954 (Ma 10 Ph 203/133/1). Sailing with her friend ‘Winkle’ (Joan Preece), the boat had come aground and had to be towed to shore. The incident was reported in the newspapers.

She served as a crew member on the racing yacht ‘Moonbeam’ in 1947. After that, Rozelle’s life at sea was confined to holidays as she took a full-time job with the Inner London Education Authority as a School Care Committee secretary. She bought her own boat ‘Imp’, and in 1953 a larger vessel, the ‘Martha McGilda’. In this boat she cruised around the Baltic Sea and the Norwegian coast, often alone.

Thoresby

After her father’s death in 1955 Rozelle inherited Thoresby. Marie-Louise lived in Thoresby Hall until her death in 1984, but Rozelle managed affairs from afar. In 1953 she married Major Alexander Beattie, a former Coldstream Guard. Beattie masterminded opening Thoresby Hall to the public for the first time in 1957, arranging for the glamour model ‘Sabrina’ to be in attendance and writing the text of the first printed brochure.

Engagement photograph of Lady Rozelle Pierrepont and Alexander Beattie in the grounds of Thoresby Hall, 1953 (Ma 10 Ph 203/127/1)

Rozelle continued working in London and divorced Beattie in 1961. In 1965 she married Dr Richard Hollings Raynes (‘Dick’, 1933-2014), a deputy medical officer in Newham. The couple were devoted to each other and their shared interests of sailing, motor cars, and work in deprived communities. In the 1970s Rozelle and Dick developed a successful project to take groups of east London boys from difficult backgrounds and teach them to sail on the ‘Martha McGilda’.

Photograph of Dick Raynes and Lady Rozelle Raynes at their house in Narrow Street, London, c.1980-1990 (Ma 10 Ph 203/53)

The couple built a new home on the Thoresby estate in the mid-1980s and retired there. Rozelle helped refugees from the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, offering them accommodation at Thoresby and helping them to settle. She wrote seven books (as Rozelle Raynes) about her varied life experiences.

The Manvers Collection

A large collection of material from the Thoresby Estate Office has recently been catalogued as part of the Manvers Collection (Ma 10). Brochures, plans and letters relating to public access to the Thoresby Estate feature in the Country lives exhibition. Thoresby Hall remained open to visitors into the 1980s before being converted into a hotel. The Thoresby Courtyard, housing an art gallery, shops, military museum and cafe, was developed in the 1990s and 2000s. Access to the Major Oak and parts of the ancient woodlands of Birklands and Bilhaugh was managed from 1969 by the creation of Sherwood Forest Country Park in partnership with Nottinghamshire County Council.

In the 1970s Rozelle nominated two distant cousins to inherit the Thoresby estates, Hugh Matheson and Ian Thorne. They moved to Nottinghamshire and took on farming responsibilities. The complexity of managing the family estates meant that queries and decisions were recorded in detailed correspondence with the resident Agent at Thoresby. The files of the agents Hugh Tapper and Rowan McFerran (Ma 10 B and Ma 10 F) provide a rich resource documenting the history of the Thoresby estate in the second half of the twentieth century. Rozelle’s own personal archive does not form part of the collection, but some chance survivals in the Agent’s files, such as photographs, postcards, letters and a few sailing logs, give a sense of this remarkable woman.

Interested in exploring the collection? 

To book an appointment in our reading room to view items from the collection, please contact mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk. The Manuscripts and Special Collections website also has some useful pages giving an overview of the Manvers Collection and the Pierrepont family.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn