Jesse Watts-Russell

Jesse Watts-Russell (6 May 1786 – 26 March 1875)[1] was a landowner and Conservative MP for the rotten borough of Gatton in Surrey.

[1] Their youngest son was John Charles Watts-Russell, born in 1825, who emigrated to New Zealand in 1850 where he held a seat on the Legislative Council and became a successful sheep farmer.

He commissioned James Trubshaw to build a new hall in the Gothic Revival style, to the designs of the architect John Shaw.

[12][13] He received a large inheritance on his father's death in 1820,[1] and bought the Biggin Hall estate in Benefield, Northamptonshire two years later.

[1] Watts-Russell remarried in June 1843; his second wife, Maria Ellen Barker, died giving birth to their only son, Edward, in October 1844.