Birch Grove

Birch Grove, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, England is a country house dating from 1926. It was the family home of the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, Earl of Stockton, who died there in 1986. During Macmillan's time, Charles De Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Jawaharlal Nehru and John F. Kennedy stayed as guests at Birch Grove. The house is now owned by the Scottish entrepreneur James Hay. Birch Grove is a Grade II listed building.

Maurice Macmillan and his wife Helen bought the estate, a large house and just over 100 acres of land, in May 1906 for £13,000. The house was almost completely rebuilt in 1926 at Nellie's insistence. At the same time, Nellie persuaded Maurice to disinherit Harold's two elder brothers and leave the house and estate to Harold, with a life interest for her. Nellie's devotion to, and support for, Harold was an important factor in his subsequent career - Nellie once admonished Harold's children when they were running through Birch Grove; "Don't kick that door. This house is going to belong to the Prime Minister of England one of these days". Macmillan's diary entry for 7 August 1951 records his return to the house after an absence of over a decade. "The furniture is unpacked and the vast confusion of twelve years is being sorted out. On the whole the damage is less than I expected...". On his appointment as Secretary of State for Defence in late 1954, Churchill offered Macmillan the use of Dorneywood. Macmillan declined, and subsequently made little use of Chevening in his time as Foreign Secretary, or Chequers as prime minister. He preferred his own home and "Lady Dorothy doesn't like weeding other people's gardens".

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