When Guy Gregson married Oriel Leonie Lucas-Scudamore in Sherman, Connecticut, in 1945, he was marrying into a family whose roots ran as deep as his own — and in some ways deeper. The Gregsons traced their military tradition to a Major of Royal Engineers stationed in India in the 1870s. The Scudamores could trace theirs to a Norman stonemason who crossed the English Channel in 1042, nine centuries earlier, at the command of Edward the Confessor.
Oriel’s father, Colonel Edward Scudamore Lucas-Scudamore, held two estates separated by the Irish Sea: Kentchurch Court in Herefordshire, one of the oldest continuously inhabited manor houses in England, and Castleshane in County Monaghan, Ireland, an estate granted by Charles II. His name itself told the story of this dual inheritance. Born Edward Scudamore Lucas, he assumed the additional surname and arms of Scudamore by Royal Licence in 1900, to ensure that the ancient name survived at Kentchurch. He was a product of Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, a magistrate and deputy lieutenant, and an honorary colonel of the 4th Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. He died in 1917, having bridged two worlds that would both be swept away within five years of his death.
The house stands where the Golden Valley meets the Black Mountains, in the far south-west of Herefordshire, hard against the Welsh border. Its oldest stones — the lower three storeys of the great tower and parts of the gatehouse range — date to the fourteenth century, when Sir John Scudamore moved his family from the older settlement at Corras and built the first section of the court from the stones of the Corras chapel.
The external appearance that survives today dates largely from between 1795 and 1825, when the house was remodelled in the Gothic style by John Nash — the architect of Buckingham Palace and the Brighton Pavilion. Nash added battlements to the tower and east range, refenestrated the façade, and gave the house the castellated, Picturesque silhouette it retains. After 1822, the work was continued by Thomas Tudor, the family’s agent. A substantial internal modernisation had already been undertaken in the 1770s by Anthony Keck.
The Scudamores have lived here for more than six hundred years. The family still does. John Edward Stanhope Lucas-Scudamore and his wife Jan are the current custodians — the direct descendants of the knight who sheltered a fugitive Welsh prince in the tower above them.
The first Scudamore in the historical record is Ralph, who left Normandy around 1042 at the command of King Edward the Confessor. He was a stonemason, and he was sent to build a castle. The castle he built — Ewyas Harold, on the Dulas Brook in south-west Herefordshire — was one of only four pre-Conquest castles in England. It defended the Welsh border. Ralph settled in the village of Corras, near the River Monnow, and his family would remain within a few miles of that spot for the next thousand years.
By the fourteenth century the Scudamores had become a leading Herefordshire family: knights, sheriffs, Members of Parliament. Their heraldry — Gules three stirrups with leathers or, three gold stirrups on a red field — first appears on a seal dated 24 August 1323, now in the Huntington Library, California. Their Latin motto, Scuto Amoris Divini (“With the shield of Divine love”), was adopted by the 3rd Viscount Scudamore in the seventeenth century — a wordplay on the family name itself.
Seven Scudamores sat in Parliament between 1397 and 1448. The seventh Sir John fought for Lancaster at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross on 2 February 1461. His sons Henry and James were killed on the field — Henry was among the senior Lancastrian leaders executed after the Yorkist victory. The family paid the price of choosing a side in the Wars of the Roses.
But the most remarkable chapter belongs to an earlier Sir John — the man who built Kentchurch Court itself.
Owain Glyndŵr (c. 1349–c. 1415) was the last native Prince of Wales, who led a fifteen-year revolt against the English Crown that convulsed the Welsh Marches from 1400 to 1415. Sir John Scudamore, Mayor of Hereford in 1386 and constable of royal castles in south Wales, initially fought against him — defending Carreg Cennen Castle in Carmarthenshire under siege for a full year, around 1402.
Yet by 1410, Sir John had married Alys, Glyndŵr’s daughter. And after the revolt’s collapse, he sheltered the fugitive prince at Kentchurch Court.
The decision was not without cost. In 1433, Edmund Beaufort invoked a forgotten statute of 1402 — forbidding any Englishman allied to Glyndŵr from holding public office — and stripped Sir John of his positions. He retired to Kentchurch and died two years later.
How Glyndŵr himself died is one of the enduring mysteries of Welsh history. Adam of Usk recorded that he was buried in darkness by his followers, but his grave was discovered by his enemies and he had to be reburied in secret. Family tradition places his death at Kentchurch, and some believe he lies beneath the tower that still stands. Another tradition puts the grave at Monnington Straddel, seven miles away, where a mound near Monnington Court is scheduled by English Heritage as a probable burial site.
For six centuries, the Scudamores have kept their own counsel on the matter.
From the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, Kentchurch passed through three consecutive Colonel Scudamores — a century and a half of military command in the family seat.
| Name | Dates | Service | At Kentchurch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Col. John Scudamore | c. 1727–1796 | Colonel (regiment unrecorded); Hereford Magistrate; MP for Hereford, 1764–96 | Modernised the interior (Anthony Keck, 1770s) |
| Col. John Scudamore II | 1757–1805 | Colonel, Duke of Ancaster’s Regiment of Light Dragoons; MP for Hereford | Married Lucy Walwyn, 1797; she died in childbirth, 1798. Commissioned the Nash remodelling. |
| Col. John Lucy Scudamore | 1798–1875 | Colonel (regiment unrecorded) | Last male-line Scudamore. Only son died aged 9 (1832). Daughter Laura Adelaide inherited. |
When Colonel John Lucy Scudamore died in 1875, the male Scudamore line at Kentchurch died with him. His daughter Laura Adelaide — born in 1831, the year before her brother’s death made her the sole heir — had married an Irishman in 1852. Through that marriage, the Kentchurch estate would merge with another family’s story entirely.
The Lucases came from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where Thomas Lucas of Little Saxham served as secretary to Jasper Tudor, uncle of Henry VII. In the 1630s, Francis Lucas came to Dublin and married Mary Poyntz, who purchased the Castleshane lands in County Monaghan shortly before his death in 1657.
Charles II granted the family approximately seventy townlands, and by the mid-eighteenth century the Lucases held nearly ten thousand acres. They were not soldiers — they were politicians, lawyers, and administrators. The Right Honourable Edward Lucas (1787–1871) was the family’s most distinguished figure: MP for County Monaghan, Under-Secretary of State for Ireland in Sir Robert Peel’s administration, Privy Councillor, and first chairman of the Relief Commission that confronted the Great Irish Famine of 1845. The Castleshane house itself was rebuilt in 1836 in the Elizabethan style, with a four-storey tower, corner bartizans, mullioned windows, and Tudor chimneys.
But the Rt Hon. Edward Lucas had three sons, and two of them chose the army.
Captain Fitzherbert Dacre Lucas was the third son of the Rt Hon. Edward Lucas. A captain in the South Tipperary Militia Artillery, he was a traveller and speculator who found himself in Lucknow in 1857 when the Indian Mutiny made it too dangerous to leave the city by road. The pre-monsoon Gomti River was nearly dry. There was no way out.
He volunteered his services to Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief British administrator defending the Residency compound against overwhelming rebel forces. The siege would last from 25 May to 27 November 1857 and become one of the defining episodes of the Victorian era.
Fitzherbert was shot on 29 September 1857 and died within twenty-four hours. He was thirty-four years old. His son Edward was four.
His brother, Lieutenant Edward-William Lucas, served in the 88th Regiment of Foot (the Connaught Rangers). He inherited Castleshane on their father’s death but died unmarried in 1874, and the estate passed to his nephew — the orphaned Edward, now twenty-one, who had grown up at Kentchurch with his mother Laura Adelaide.
A wider Lucas connection adds a further dimension. Rear-Admiral Charles Davis Lucas VC (1834–1914), born at Druminargle House in County Armagh and almost certainly a collateral relation, earned the first Victoria Cross ever awarded when, on 21 June 1854, he picked up a live shell from the deck of HMS Hecla at the Battle of Bomarsund and threw it overboard as its fuse burned down. It exploded on hitting the water. Queen Victoria presented him with the medal at the first VC investiture in Hyde Park.
The first Victoria Cross and a death at Lucknow — two defining moments of the Victorian military age, three years apart, from the same Ulster family.
By 1874, the orphaned Edward Lucas held Castleshane in Ireland. Through his mother, he would inherit Kentchurch in Herefordshire. He was Eton and Christ Church. He became a colonel in the Herefordshire militia and a magistrate. In 1900 he married Sybil Frances Webber of Mitchelstown, County Cork, and on the same day assumed the additional surname and arms of Scudamore by Royal Licence. The Webbers were connected to Mitchelstown Castle, the largest neo-Gothic house in Ireland.
The playwright George Bernard Shaw was a friend of Sybil’s and a regular visitor to Kentchurch Court.
Edward and Sybil had three children, all born at Kentchurch: Jack (1902), who became a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy and married, thirdly, Lady Evelyn Scudamore-Stanhope, daughter of the 12th Earl of Chesterfield; Geraldine (1903); and Oriel, who would marry Guy Gregson in 1945.
Colonel Edward died on 9 March 1917 of a brain haemorrhage. Within five years of his death, both the Irish estates in his family — Castleshane (burned 1920) and Mitchelstown Castle (burned 1922) — would be destroyed in the Irish revolution. Only Kentchurch survived.
In 1945, in the small New England town of Sherman, Connecticut, Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Patrick Gregson married Oriel Leonie Lucas-Scudamore. He was thirty-nine, fresh from the liberation of Ghent and the Berlin Victory Parade. She was the daughter of a colonel whose family had held one of England’s oldest houses since the fourteenth century, whose grandfather had been killed defending Lucknow, and whose ancestral line reached back to a castle built before the Norman Conquest.
Why Sherman, Connecticut, remains unknown. The Lucas-Scudamores had wide Anglo-Irish social networks; Guy may have been on a liaison posting. The marriage was not to last — it broke down while Guy served in Korea in 1952–53. Their son, Marcus John Gregson, was born in London on 20 June 1946, and through him the Gregson and Lucas-Scudamore lines converge. Oriel married secondly Group Captain Paul Robert Foley of the Royal Air Force on 7 December 1954.
Marcus, then, carries the heritage of both families: the Lancaster Gregsons with their battleaxe crest and Vigilo motto, and the Scudamores of Kentchurch with their stirrups and Scuto Amoris Divini. The gunners and the cavalrymen. The men who served in India and the men who built castles on the Welsh border. Between them, the two lines span from 1042 to the present day — a nearly unbroken thousand years of English history.
| Period | Name | Service | Line |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1042 | Ralph Scudamore | Built Ewyas Harold Castle for Edward the Confessor | Scudamore |
| c. 1386–1435 | Sir John Scudamore | Knight; constable of royal castles; defended Carreg Cennen; Mayor of Hereford | Scudamore |
| 1461 | 7th Sir John Scudamore | Fought at Mortimer’s Cross; sons killed | Scudamore |
| c. 1727–1796 | Col. John Scudamore | Colonel; MP for Hereford | Scudamore |
| 1757–1805 | Col. John Scudamore II | Colonel, Duke of Ancaster’s Light Dragoons; MP for Hereford | Scudamore |
| 1798–1875 | Col. John Lucy Scudamore | Colonel; last male-line Scudamore at Kentchurch | Scudamore |
| 1819–1874 | Lt Edward-William Lucas | 88th Regiment (Connaught Rangers) | Lucas |
| c. 1823–1857 | Capt. Fitzherbert Dacre Lucas | South Tipperary Militia Artillery; killed at Lucknow | Lucas |
| 1834–1914 | RA Charles Davis Lucas VC | Royal Navy; first Victoria Cross (1854) | Lucas (collateral) |
| 1853–1917 | Col. Edward Lucas-Scudamore | 4th Bn KSLI; Oriel’s father | Lucas-Scudamore |
| 1902–1976 | Lt-Cdr Jack Lucas-Scudamore | Royal Navy; midshipman WWI, Lt-Cdr WWII | Lucas-Scudamore |
This page documents Marcus Gregson’s maternal heritage — the family Guy married into, not Guy’s own blood line. For the Gregson paternal lineage (Lancaster, Lowlynn, and the battleaxe crest), see the Family Tree.