Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Chapter 14
Lord of the Manor
'My own life is rather dull these days. I sort of won the Maharajah of Jaipur's luxury Sussex estate in
a poker game . . .' (Note in the Explorers Log from Dr L. Ron Hubbard, Explorers Journal, February
1960)
• • • • •
Saint Hill Manor was a Georgian mansion on a landscaped estate two miles from the little market
town of East Grinstead in Sussex. The countryside thereabouts was much favoured by the landed
gentry in the eighteenth century for the beauty of its verdant, gently rolling hills and its proximity to
the court in London, only a few hours away by horse and carriage, and Saint Hill was one of a
number of large country houses in the area.
Built for a wealthy landowner in 1733, the manor could not be described as one of the glories of
Georgian architecture (indeed, its sandstone façade had a faintly brooding aspect), but it was
sufficiently imposing to merit a ballroom with marble columns and grounds of fifty acres with a lake,
surrounded by a dense boundary hedge of rhododendrons. By the time it passed into the
ownership of the Maharajah of Jaipur, the house boasted eleven bedrooms, eight bathrooms and
an outdoor swimming-pool. While the Maharajah spent a considerable sum on interior
improvements, including commissioning the artist John Spencer Churchill to paint a mural in one
of the first-floor rooms, he only lived in the house intermittently. When the fortunes of the Indian
princes wavered after Independence in 1947, he decided to put his English estate on the market
and was happy to find a buyer in the unlikely shape of L. Ron Hubbard.
The arrival of an American family at Saint Hill Manor in the spring of 1959 occasioned almost as
much excitement in East Grinstead as that of the exotic Maharajah had done some years earlier.
Alan Larcombe, a young reporter on the East Grinstead Courier was despatched to interview the
new owner and found him to be extremely co-operative, happy to pose for a photograph with his
wife and children and more than willing to talk about himself.
'An American and his delightful family find a haven at Saint Hill', the Courier reported in its issue of
29 May 1959. Describing 'Dr Hubbard' as a 'tall, heavily built man whose work for humanity is
known throughout the world', Larcombe made no attempt to explain the nature of Dr Hubbard's
work, but contented himself with a recap of his subject's career, starting, naturally, with breaking
broncos and hunting coyotes on his grandfather's cattle ranch. 'When he inherited his grandfather's
cattle estates in Montana and all its debts, he wrote it into solvency, turning his hand to anything:
essays, fiction and film scripts.'
The inheriting of his grandfather's insolvent cattle estates was a titbit of information Hubbard had
not previously disclosed, as was his revelation that he was deeply involved in the study of plant life.
'The production of plant mutations is one of his most important projects at the moment. By battering
seeds with X-rays, Dr Hubbard can either reduce a plant through its stages of evolution or advance
it.'