Mad for conservation
Christopher Booker
I wish to discuss, this week and next, the fate of two remarkable and unique nineteenth century buildings. The two have almost nothing in common, except that today the future of each hangs precariously in the balance, on a nod from Mr Peter Shore and his officials at the Department of the Environment. The story of one is daily in the newspapers. The story of the other, which I shall tell next week and which constitutes one of the most extraordinary 'conservation scandals' of the post-war era, has scarcely been noticed. But between them I believe that these two strange tales cast fascinating light on one of the most profoundly revealing dilemmas of our late twentieth century civilisat ion.
The first of my examples is of course Mentmore Towers, the great mysterious Rothschild treasure house which stands in 'Jacobean' splendour in the countryside near Luton. Years ago, reading Robert Rhodes James's Life of Lord Rosebery, [was haunted by the photographs of the Liberal Prime Minister's four houses; Barnbougle, a bleak little Scottish Baronial box standing by the Firth of Forth ; Dalmeny, a huge, almost equally bleak four-square Scottish mansion ; the Durdans, a cosy, low, ivycovered Victorian house near Epsom; and finally, by far the most impressive, the misty towers and pinnacles of Mentmore (which came to Rosebery as a result of his marriage to Hannah de Rothschild).
The little-known story of this fabulous Aladdin's Cave of a house, built by Joseph Paxton for the Baron Meyer Amschel de Rothschild between 1851 and 1854, has been so superbly set out by that admirable organisation SAVE in their new pamphlet 'Save Mentmore for the Nation' that I cannot but recommend anyone who is remotely interested to send for a copy (to SAVE, 3 Park Square West, London NW!, 40p including postage).
With the aid of an astonishing set of hitherto unpublished photographs, Marcus Binney of Country Life and a small team of experts have for the first time in this century brought to light one of the most extraordinary houses in Europe. Inside, Mentmore is a cross between the 'Italian Palazzo' style of Barry's Reform Club (the great Hall and Staircase), and a series of 'French Versailles' rooms—crammed with one of the greatest treasure troves ever amassed in private hands. For page after page, Binney and his colleagues lovingly unveil one glittering assemblage after another—Gobelin and Flemish tapestries, gilt Venetian lanterns from the Bucintoro, curtains of Genoese velvet and others worked on by Marie Antoinette, a mass of magnificent clocks, the great chimneypiece designed by Rubens for his house in Antwerp, an untold wealth of furniture, ranging from loot from the Doge's Palace to a vast rococo cabinet made for Augustus III of Poland in the 1750s, Sevres porcelain, jewels and objets de vertu, paintings by Titian, Rembrandt, Greuze, Boucher, a unique sporting scene by Gainsborough, two fine Turners—it is a haul of 'world importance.'
Even in the crudest economic terms, the SAVE team's case that Mentmore should be bought for the nation is unanswerable. The house and its entire contents have been offered to the government for a laughable £2 million (in lieu of death duties which would be payable anyway on the 6th Earl of Rosebery's estate). If the contents of the house go to auction in May, as seems likely, Sotheby's alone may well make more than half that sum, just in commission fees. As Marcus Binney suggests, it would be quite absurd of the government not to accept the offer, at least for two years while a 'permanent solution' to the endowment of the house can be explored—at the end of which time, if the search is unsuccessful, the entire £2 million investment could be recouped just by selling off half a dozen or so of the chief treasures.
It is only when the SAVE team goes on to outline what a 'permanent solution' for Mentmore might be that certain deeper questions begin to intrude themselves. Undoubtedly, they argue, such a house standing just half an hour up the Ml from London could become a major national tourist attraction. Even if it drew only 100,000 visitors a year, spending £1 a head on tickets, souvenirs, postcards and icecreams, that would yield the greater part of the £100,000 needed annually to run it. While the house's grounds and other amenities would lend themselves admirably to such other profitable uses as a 'national equestrian centre,' complete with three-day events, Princess Anne falling off her horse and all the rest.
Faced with this prospect of Mentmore transformed into a kind of 'cultural Longleat.' the Scenicruisers nose to tail in the new asphalt car parks, the aimless mass of
Spectator 12 February 1977 tourists wandering like bewildered sheep through those great, dead rooms, does not a terrible weariness of the soul set in ? In some ways, the spectacle of any great house transformed into a museum is always depressing. Similarly, one of the most extraordinary cultural phenomena of our time is the spectacle of tens of thousands of tourists wheeling endlessly through any stately home (or art gallery, or museum) somehow seeking a sense of significance from mere contact with the artefacts of the past that, even when there is a guide to tell them the exact value of each item and the dates of the artist, they simply do not know how to find. If this is true of a house which was once for centuries a home, how much truer would it be of Mentmore, which was actually built as a museum (or kunstkammer) in the first place, and was therefore in a sense never alive in the first place. One of the more curious claims made on Mentmore's behalf in recent days was that of James Lees-Milne in a letter to 7'he Times that it 'in the eyes of discrifninating people, constitutes one of the glories of Britain's peak of greatness.' The only 'British' thing (and indeed the onlY remotely 'creative' thing) about Mentmore is the house itself, designed by a Derbyshire gardener who was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and gifted Englishmen of the nineteenth century. But even Paxton s design was unashamedly an imitation of other models. The house is a magnificent pastiche, a masterpiece of that eclecticism which was in itself so telling a clue to the underlying spiritual nullity of the Victorian age. As for Mentmore's contents—what are they but simply the accumulation by a nal Jewish banker, of Austrian stock, of a great magpie jumble of pretty things, pillaged with discriminating indiscrimination from three centuries of the culture of p051 Renaissance Europe ? In a way nothing has reflected the spiritual decline of Europe more surely over the past five centuries than the different stages whereby supremely rich and powerful men have in succeeding centuries managed to build up these great treasure hordes—the Dukes of Mantua, the Hapsburgs, Charles I, the 'Grand Tour collectors of the eighteenth century, Beck ford and George IV, then the nineteenth century commercial and industrial magnates, from the Rothschilds to the Vander" bilis, finally shading off in our own time into the ultimate absurdities of the CitizeD Kanes, the clients of Duveen, Hitler and Goering. At every stage the distance between the collector and the spiritual roots of the art and craftsmanship that was .the object of his desire has yawned ever wider (at least the Gonzagas patronised Mail" tegna, Charles V befriended Titian, Charles I employed Rubens and Van Dyck). While today we see the final reductio ad absurdurn in the pillaging of Western culture fortrinkets and toys by the oil sheiks of Arabia' or Impressionist-hungry Japanese transistor billionaires. The severing of cultural roots i complete.s
That is why, while I applaud the SAVE
campaign for Mentmore (sic et non), the Prospect also fills me with a great melancholy—at the thought of that great, dead house as yet another tombstone to our rootless, disintegrated civilisation. We shall Wander round it (if it is saved), not with the Joy of new life in our souls, but with little
more than an increasingly oppressive sense of looking back to a life that has gone. This raises questions about the whole cultural significance of the great mania for conservation presently sweeping the world which, in a very different context, I would like to return to next week.
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