By Kyle Wright
I’ve heard tell of wives asking their husbands to go to the store for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk, only to have them return with something else entirely. A rack or ribs, maybe, or chocolate-covered bacon. In September of 1915, Mrs. Mary Bella Alice Finch Chubb requested that her husband, Cecil, a local lawyer, swing by an estate sale in search of dining room chairs. He came home the proud owner of a prehistoric, megalithic monument. Because Lot 15 of that Salisbury, England, auction was a 30-acre plot of land, and on that 30-acre plot of land stood a peculiar circle of stones, each one standing some 13 feet tall and weighing close to 25 tons—otherwise known as Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is located on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. Its name translates to hanging stone or hinge stone, which, if one is even passingly familiar with its dimensions, obviously makes a lot of sense. Construction on the monument began around 3000 BC and lasted some 1500 years. Stonehenge was most likely used for ritual purposes, considering the number of burial mounds in the immediate vicinity and the fact that its stones are aligned with the summer and winter solstices. In his wife’s eyes, though, Cecil’s ring of stones must have looked like a handful of Jack’s magic beans.
I can just picture old Cecil, bored senseless from looking at dining room chairs all day, trying to guess which set his wife would like best and knowing in the back of his mind that she’d likely find something wrong with whatever he brought home, snapping to attention when Lot 15 was described. He’d been born and raised in the very shadow of Stonehenge, his birthplace of Shrewton lying just four miles west, so he would have been well familiar with the landmark’s lore. It made perfect sense then that when the auctioneer called for bids, Cecil raised his hand. It’s hard to imagine that he would have had much competition for the lot, at least not locally. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t foreign investors interested in the plot of land and its standing stones, though. Whether there were or not, Cecil wasn’t about to let an outsider claim ownership of Stonehenge. In the name of the Crown, he bid on, and ultimately won, the lot.
Cecil Chubb paid £6,600 for Lot 15, no small sum of money in 1915. More than what his wife had planned on spending on a set of dining room chairs, for sure. In today’s money, £6,600 works out to be £850,281.76, which in turn, if I’m doing my math right and the conversion calculator I used was accurate, works out to be $1,073,195.12. Still, even a million dollars and change is a small price to pay for a legendary landmark and the source of a nation’s pride. Three years later, though, in 1918, due either to his unwavering patriotism or his simply being sick of having to weedeat around it, Cecil Chubb donated Stonehenge to the people of Britain, making one point abundantly clear:
Cecil was not the type who’d ask his wife for permission to buy a watch.
