Willoughby

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Willoughby is the name of several places:

• Willoughby, New South Wales is a suburb of Sydney, Australia.
• City of Willoughby - local government area
• Electoral district of Willoughby - New South Wales state electorate
• Cape Willoughby on Kangaroo Island, South Australia.
• Willoughby, Ohio is a city in the United States.
• Lake Willoughby is a lake near the town of Westmore, Orleans County, Vermont.

Willoughby Spit is a peninsula of land in Norfolk, Virginia.

There are several villages in England called Willoughby:

• Willoughby, Warwickshire
• Willoughby, Lincolnshire
• Willoughby Waterleys
• Willoughby-on-the-Wolds

[edit] People

• Willoughby is also the name of two families of British aristocrats,

1. whose head has held the title the Baron Willoughby de Eresby, since 1313 and
2. whose head held the title the Baron Willoughby of Parham, from 1547 until 1779.

• The Willoughby family line is complex and inter-woven. A branch of the family who took their name from Willoughby-on-the-Wolds made their fortune from coal at Wollaton in Nottinghamshire and eventually built Wollaton Hall in the late sixteenth century on the back of coal revenues. As he had no son of his own Sir Francis Willoughby, the builder of Wollaton Hall married his daughter, Bridget, to Sir Percival Willoughby of Bore Place in Kent in order to secure the line. Burke's Peerage also validates that this line was the one which received the hereditary Baronetcy - Lord Middleton. The aristocratic line still survives and the current Baron lives near Malton in Yorkshire.

Thomas Willoughby came to Norfolk, Virginia in 1610 and received a land grant in around 1625. Willoughby's son, Thomas II, was living there in the 1660s, and legend has it that his wife awoke one morning following a terrific storm (possibly the "Harry Cane" of 1667) to see a point of land in front her home, where there had been only water the night before. The Willoughby family, it is said, were quick to apply for an addendum to the original land grant, giving them ownership of the "new" property. The Willoughby's came to the new world in 1610 on a passenger ship named the Prosperous. They were one of the first settlers in that area. Unfortunately, Thomas Willoughby had only four daughters, so after that the name Willoughby was only carried on in middle names. There are several decendants of the Willoughbys, the most notable would be Miss Mary Willoughby Romm.

• William F. Willoughby was an American Progressive Era political scientist and scholar of public administration.

[edit] Fiction

• Willoughby Wooster is one of Bertie Wooster's uncles in the work of P. G. Wodehouse.
• John Willoughby is one of the main characters in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.
• Willoughby is the name of the dog in the 1941 Tex Avery short The Heckling Hare.
• The Twilight Zone episode A Stop at Willoughby is about a man who dreams about a town named Willoughby during his train rides home.

[edit] References

• Marshall, P (1999), Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family, Nottingham Civic Society.