Throwleigh Church (courtesy of Throwleigh Archive)
The St Olaves estate then passed into the hands of the wealthy Sutton family and became their rural retreat. Edmund Sutton, KC (1845-1922) was a successful barrister who had made his name and fortune on the Lancashire circuit. In 1911 he lived in a grand 24-roomed house, Broughton Hall, on the edge of the Salford/Manchester conurbation.
Sutton was a strong Anglo-Catholic (High Church Anglican), and this may have played a part in his decision to purchase St Olaves since Father Lowe, the incumbent at St Mary the Virgin, Throwleigh, was a prominent Anglo-Catholic. Significantly, on buying St Olaves Sutton also purchased the advowson of Throwleigh parish from the Lord Chancellor, giving him patronage rights over the local Church. This right passed to his widow Susanna, and then to his son Ralph, all of whom shared his Anglo-Catholic faith as well as his love of St Olaves as a rural retreat. It is said that when the Suttons were in residence they put strong pressure on their staff, who could number up to a dozen, to attend Lowe’s services at Murchington Chapel.
An example of fine Birdseye maple bedroom furniture
When Edmund Sutton died, in August 1922, he left an estate valued at £36,730 net. His widow Susanna Plumridge Sutton survived him for a further sixteen years. She came from a wealthy, well-connected American family; her father had been an American Consul to Britain and her Great-Grandfather, Samuel Livermore, had been acting President of the US Senate in the 1790s. In 1933, she crossed swords with the Bishop of Exeter over Lowe’s succession as vicar of Throwleigh. The Rev. P.L. Hesketh of Bovey Tracey, her initial choice, was blocked for refusing to acknowledge the Bishop’s right to dictate how he might conduct the Sacrament. But Susanna was not to be thwarted, securing in his place the Rev. Herbert Leslie Drew (vicar 1934-69), widely seen as an even more High Anglican than his predecessor Gambier Lowe.
When Susanna Sutton died she left a significantly larger estate than her husband, valued at £52,209 net at probate (more than £8,000 of which was surrendered in estate taxes). This included not only St Olaves itself but also the adjacent Murchington Farm, which had been occupied and farmed by John Newcombe for many years. Her will also mentions a collection of six Whistler etchings bequeathed to her daughter Katharine (born in 1883), along with monographed Plumridge family silver and a suite of birds-eye maple bed-room furniture at St Olaves. Not for her the fire-sell auction of all her possessions.
Like his widowed mother, Ralph Sutton (1881-1960) lived in London as much as Devon, but he appears to have continued to play an active part in life at St Olaves until suffering a serious stroke in 1954. He died at a nursing home in Sussex in October 1960, leaving an estate of £55,378 (nearly £20,000 of which was forfeited in tax). It was after Ralph’s death that the St Olaves estate began to be systematically broken up (or rather re-divided), into the separate properties that now constitute this tiny hamlet within a hamlet.