Patricia Gibb thought she’d found the perfect
free entertainment for a wet Sunday after-
 noon. One March day in 1994, she took her
 son Bany and her old friend Amanda Harris-
Deans to nose around Higham Park, an 87-
 room mansion just outside Canterbury that
was for sale. No one would be crazy enough to buy this
house, they giggled, picking their way through the
barbed wire around the crumbling balustrades outside.
What a relief that they wouldn’t be the ones paying out
thousands of pounds to restore peeling paint, cracked
plasterwork, a rotten roof and 25 acres of overgrown
gardens. Then they went off to tea in Patricia’s warm,
modern bungalow nearby. Ainicably separated from
their husbands, their children grown up, Patricia, then
54, and Amanda, then 44, enjoyed comfortable,
leisured lives, breeding ponies and playing bridge.
But that Sunday, perhaps there was a mysterious,
life-changing ingredient in the tea. They found
themselves making an offer to buy" Higharn Park,
having worked out they could do it if both women sold
their houses. Patricia’s son Barry, 30, who works for
the French bank Parabar in London, threw his savings
into the pot too. ‘We bid a million pounds: so ridicu-
lously low the estate agent didn’t bother to send an
acknowledgement,’ laughs Patricia. Instead, Higham
was sold to a property developer who had sweet-talked
£2 million out of a bank to convert it into a swish 200-

bedroom hotel. After that, whenever Patricia and
Amanda drove past the estate, they peered up the drive
to see what the builders were doing. But they saw no
sign of work. Eventually, they asked the estate agent
what had happened. It seems that on the eve of
completing the sale, Higham’s buyer had disappeared
abroad with the bank’s money. The house was back on
the market, in the hands of the Official Receiver.
Over the next few months, prospective buyers
including, it was rumoured, Richard Branson)
/'\
surfaced, then pulled out, as there was so much restora-
tion work involved. But Patricia, Amanda and Barry
hung on with the same ‘paltry’ £1 million offer. Their
grit impressed the Official Receiver so much that he
supported them Now, the friends are proud chatelaines
of one of Britain’s most offbeat great houses.
The two self-confessed amateurs, who knew more
about horses than houses, have restored and decorated
it on modest incomes with little professional help.
These ladies, who barely knew how to plant a rose from
Woolworths, have raised acres of formal gardens from
the dead, embellishing them with rare plants in
complex colour patterns. The massive roof still has dry
rot. Until it is repaired, they
can’t begin work on the upper
floor with its maze of bedrooms ‘
and rusting bathtubs. But, whe . .
it comes at last, a grant from
l
Canterbury Council will help
them. It’s the least the Council
can do for Hrgham Park, which
holds visitors in thrall with i
its gardens and glittering history
that includes Julius Caesar,
Mozart, Jane Austen, General de
Gaulle, and even the fabulous car
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
For the ladies, the present is
rather less glamorous than the
past. ‘We don’t have much time to
socialise,’ confesses Patricia, in the brisk no-nonsense
tones of a woman used to telling a horse to mind its
manners at a tricky fence. ‘Every day, we get up at
5.30am and work in the garden till llam when we
change, ready to do public tours. I man the gate or
the tearooms. We hardly »=speak during the day.’
The house is closed on Fridays and Saturdays so they
can mow and weed all day with the aid of Barry, who

20 Weekend - 26 August 2000 '

Room with a view
Just one of the 87
rooms needing
renovation -
Amanda and
Patricia have yet
to start upstairs