Bradley Manor, originally mediaeval and uniquely evoking the unpretentious existence of minor rural gentry, was given to the National Trust by Diana Firth (1908–1999), daughter of Cecil Firth, the Egyptologist, and the artist Freda Hansard (1871–1937) (a descendant of the official printer of reports of the proceedings of Parliament), in 1938.
The following year she married a grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, Commander Alexander (‘Sandy’) Woolner, and whose mother, ‘Maisie’ Ionides, Mrs Hugh Woolner (1871–1945) is depicted in a pair of Burne-Jones drawings there.
The paintings, accepted by HM Treasury in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the National Trust in 2002, range from the sublime, with an unusual landscape by Thomas Woolner (1825–1892) and the lovely marriage portrait of his bride Alice Gertrude Waugh (1845–1912) by Arthur Hughes (1832–1915), commissioned in September 1864, as a wedding gift from Francis Turner Palgrave (1825–1897), to the rustic, with two paintings of prize cows and one of a prize bull by G. E. Hysum.