When Biddy and Bill Cash saw a tumbledown, brick-built Jacobean manor house on a list of ‘Threatened Houses of Architectural Interest’ in June 1970, they couldn't resist the urge to investigate further. Bill was thirty-one and making his way in a career as a lawyer. Their son, William, had been born four years earlier, and Biddy and Bill liked the idea of establishing roots by means of a place in the country. On their first visit to Upton Cressett in Shropshire they found a completely derelict ruin. Pigs roamed freely around the wood-panelled rooms of the main house. The previous tenant, a farmer, had left behind the detritus of piles of grain and abandoned farm equipment. “It was a hot day,” Bill later remembered, “the ground floor stank like a summer farmyard. There was chicken and pig manure everywhere.” But there was to be no turning back. Biddy and Bill had fallen in love. William, their son, now explains that “my par-ents had become afflicted with that most British and expensive of diseases: the ‘dream’ of finding an old English manor house and restoring it, the more of an overgrown ruin beyond hope, the better.”

The family moved in and began the slow and painstaking task of restoring the property. None of it was easy. Bill decided that the best option, as a way of keeping control of budgets, was to renovate one room at a time, and never to spend more than a few hundred pounds per room. Plaster was repaired and painted white. Floors and roofs were made good. Biddy and Bill spent as much time as they could there, supervising builders when they weren't doing the work themselves. It was the saving of Upton Cressett. As William now says, “if a buyer or leaseholder hadn't been found, the house might have been yet another to fall victim to the wreckers’ ball as a way of avoiding a costly Conservation Order.” Instead, Bill applied his detailed understanding of the law of listed properties to the business of his own restoration work. Bill shared his expertise by preparing a “Manual of Legislation Affecting Historic Buildings and the National Heritage” for the HHA in 1976.