Nuffield Place

Today we finally visited the home of a hero of mine - William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield, British motor manufacturer and philanthropist. He was the founder of Morris Motors Limited and took his title, Lord Nuffield, from the village of Nuffield, Oxfordshire where he lived.

The couple had no children and Morris set about dividing his fortune amongst charitable causes. He was Britain's greatest ever philanthropist and gave away the equivalent to £700m in today's money. He donated millions to medical research and funded Nuffield College, Oxford. During the polio epidemic of the 1940s and 1950s, he ordered the manufacture of 5,000 iron lungs and distributed them throughout the Commonwealth.

Despite all his wealth, he and his wife lived in a modest 4 bed house, which has been preserved as a 1930's time capsule, although he died in 1963, four years after his wife. The house originally passed to Nuffield College, which he founded, but has now passed to the National Trust and is well worth a visit.

Not sure I should have let Sav see Lord Nuffield's bedroom where he has turned a cupboard into a work station, as seen in one of the pics in my collage blip. Now we're about to buy our own house, it's given him ideas!