CAVENHAM HALL, SEVEN MILES NORTH-EAST OF BURY ST EDMUNDS, was the mansion house of an estate renowned in the late nineteenth century for its shooting. The manor was held in medieval times by a number of noble families: Fitzgilbert; de Clare, the Earls of Hereford; de Stafford, the Earls of Stafford and the Dukes of Buckingham. In 1590 it was held by Thomas Bedingfield and later by Sir Edmund Lewknor. In the first half of the eighteenth century Cavenham belonged to Richard Long and then to Robert Johnson. After a short period of ownership by Joseph Watkin, the property was sold in 1767 to Thomas le Blanc. In 1794 it was bought by the first Marquess Cornwallis, and fifteen years later sold to Henry Spencer Waddington. The cost was £35,000.

The Waddington family owned Cavenham for ninety years. On the death of Henry Spencer Waddington in 1864 it passed to his son of the same name, who was a Member of Parliament and was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1876. Spencer, the son of his marriage to Caroline, a daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir William Proctor Beauchamp, third baronet, inherited the estate in 1895, and three years later sold it to Herbert Ernest Matthew Davies.

THE OLD HOUSE, a rectangular U-shaped house with its courtyard facing the road through the village and with outbuildings located between it and the road, did not long survive its acquisition by Herbert Davies. In 1898 it was replaced by a new house positioned further from the road than its predecessor and surrounded by parkland. The new stable buildings and coachman's cottage occupied ‘the position of an old range of stable buildings’ and were described as ‘charmingly situated between the present house and the garden’, with ‘only the gate piers retained from the previous building’. As frequently occurred when a new house was being built the old house served as lodgings for the builders. The architect of the new house was Andrew Noble Prentice and the contractors were Waring & Gillow Limited.

The house was designed in a late Renaissance style in ‘a strikingly free and opulent plan’, and was built of dark red narrow bricks (laid five courses to the foot) with Casterton stone facings.8 Some walls on the entrance front had figured plasterwork.