GEORGINA Babey gave a talk entitled Alice in her Wonderland.

Alice Pleasance Liddell was born in 1852 and as a young child lived in Oxford, where her father was Dean of Christ Church.

Here the family met Charles Dodgson, who became a close friend.

On one of their outings, rowing along the Isis, he began to tell the story about a girl called Alice and a white rabbit.

Alice begged him to write it down and he later gave the handwritten manuscript Alice’s Adventures Under Ground to her as a Christmas present.

Three years later it was published as Alice in Wonderland under the pen name of Lewis Carroll.

In 1880 Alice married Reginald Hargreaves, heir to the Cuffnells estate situated between Lyndhurst and Bank.

Alice saw Cuffnells for the first time the week before her marriage, and declared: “Alice has come to her Wonderland at last.”

The large country house was set within 168 acres with formal gardens, lakes and a wilderness area for children.

Life at Cuffnells included house parties, shooting parties, soirées and dinners.

Every summer a forerunner to the New Forest Show was held in the grounds.

The couple had three sons, two of whom were killed in the First World War, which devastated the family.

Alice was widowed in 1926. Her third son Caryl converted Cuffnells into a hotel in the 1930s, but it was requisitioned during the war and demolished in 1947.

Alice died at Westerham in Kent in 1934, and her ashes are buried in the churchyard at Lyndhurst.

The society next meets on Tuesday, November 4 at 7.30pm in Morgan’s Vale and Woodfalls Village Hall, when Phoebe Merrick will present ‘Preparing Horses for WW1’, all welcome.