om had considerable additional land outside the estate, which itself had 399 a. of accommodation holdings (including Park Farm, 138 a. in hand). Almost all this had been ploughed up by order during the war, whereas before 1939 about 254 a. had been pasture. The let accommodation land produced a further £211 a year.
The estate included 92 cottages in 1945, of which 27 were let with the farms. Of the rest, seven were condemned (although four were occupied under licence), another seven were let on service tenancies, one was the village reading room and club, and another was a better-class property with an acre and a half of land. The remaining 49 were occupied by estate employees, pensioners, widows or descendants of employees. Apart from Glebe Farm, the only property in the parish not owned by the estate was one condemned cottage, the White Lion (a fully licensed tied house), a one-acre housing site acquired by the R.D.C., and the school, which Lord Penrhyn retained. None of the estate cottages had bathrooms and only two had w.c.s: the water supply, provided by the estate, was inadequate to cope with any increased demand should the houses be modernised. In other respects the cottages were in good repair, with many of the thatched roofs recently overhauled. The cottage rental was £411, plus £25 for the village allotments.
As well as Park Farm, the estate kept 267 a. of woodland in hand, of which 200 a. had been clear felled during the war, although at the time of the Penrhyn sale a good deal of mature oak remained in some of the coppices, as well as hedge and field timber.
At the time of the 1945 sale, the Wicken estate was let for £4,074 gross, £2,100 net. The Merchant Venturers were advised that it was a first class investment: although about £1,000 would have to be spent on immediate repairs and wages, and initially there might be no net income, within about five years the estate should be producing 2½-3 per cent. Farm rentals should be raised as opportunity allowed; the mansion should if possible be let, rather than sold, as the Society tended to do elsewhere; and about £7,000 could be raised quite quickly from the sale of timber, after which the woods should be let to the Forestry Commission.
The Society generally followed these recom mendations over the next thirty years and also sold (unmodernised) the cottages not let with the farms. Apart from two cottages built in 1949 for Wicken Park Farm, the Society left the provision of new housing to the local council, to which they sold building land as required. The former estate water supply was also transferred (as a gift) to the R.D.C. in 1948. (fn. 313) The mansion was let almost at once to a private schools syndicate, (fn. 314) and in 1949, after timber to the value of £12,000 had been sold, the woodland was leased to the Forestry Commission for 200 years at £43 16s. 6d. a year. The estate was extended in 1951 by the purchase of 128 a. of glebe land and cottages, bringing the total outlay to £103,000 for 3,170 a. At the end of 1958 the gross income had risen to £9,116, net £5,242, or 4 Per cent on capital invested, better than the prediction made in 1945. The average rent (including woodlands) was then 57s. an acre.
By 1964 only 37 a. had been sold at Wicken for a total of £25,000. This included land for council housing and a new parsonage, the old estate yard, and some of the cottages, which made between £250 and £350 when the first were sold in 1956. Others followed at prices ranging from £900 to £1,350 and by 1970 a total of 52 had been sold. The first major disposals came in 1967, when Manor Farm was broken up and the house and buildings were sold for £13,600, together with 103 a. of land. By 1972 sales had realised £65,000; since the Society had spent £106,000 on improvements, the estate then had a net book value of £144,000 for 3,075 a. By 1961 farm rents had risen to an average of 61s. an acre; in 1974 they reached £10. The net yield on the estate was then 4.6 per cent. There were no further disposals in the 1970s, apart from some cottages (of which over 60 had 