PEOPLE in Worcester are being asked to repay the generosity of a city-born benefactor who made a welcome contribution to its 20th century health care.

The National Trust has launched a £600,000 appeal to help secure the future of the home of philanthropist Lord Nuffield – the car magnate William Morris – whose many gifts to medical causes included £26,000 to build a new wing at Worcester Royal Infirmary in 1932.

Lord Nuffield gave Nuffield Place near Wallingford in Oxfordshire to Nuffield College – one of the many institutions and charitable causes he founded when he died in August 1963, aged 85.

The college has now offered the home to the National Trust, which needs to raise the money – for essential preservation work and to provide visitor facilities – before it can consider taking it on.

Morris was born in October 1877 at 47 Comer Gardens – a terraced house in St John’s, Worcester.

He was the eldest of seven children of Frederick Morris and his wife Emily Ann.

In 1919, 400 Morris cars were produced. By 1925, this figure had risen to 56,000 and Morris was on his way to amassing a fortune thanks to the world-famous firm.

But he lived frugally and became a big philanthropist, particularly towards medical causes.

One of his factories made 5,000 iron lungs to give away to hospitals. It is estimated that during his lifetime he gave away a sum equal to a massive £11 billion at today’s prices.

The Nuffield Foundation and Nuffield College, Oxford, are the two best-known of his legacies. Morris was made a baronet in 1934 and a viscount in 1938, taking the name of the Oxfordshire village where he lived from 1933.

The National Trust has described the house as being modest and unostentatious for a man of Lord Nuffield’s wealth. It is just as it was when Lord Nuffield and his wife lived there with much of the original decoration and many of the furnishings, making it a rare example of a complete 1930s country home.

In a final nod to Lord Nuffield’s roots and the city he never forgot, among the furnishings and personal items left behind is a display case of blue and white china.

And in pride of place is a small porcelain ball – a grinding ball from Royal Worcester of the kind which would have been used by children as marbles when discarded by the pottery, but which was presented to the viscount when he was granted the freedom of Worcester in recognition of his gift to the city.

For more details visit nationaltrust.org.uk/savenuffieldplace.