Bring back the people and the dogs
Mark Girouard
ENGLISH MANOR HOUSES by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes Laurence King, £40, pp. 236, ISBN 1865669221 The latest product of the fruitful Massingberd-Sykes partnership deals with 40 country houses of moderate size, dating, for the most part, from the Middle Ages to the early 17th century. Some of these houses have been continuously occupied by the same family, but many were abandoned by their owners when they moved off to grander or more up-to-date houses in the 18th century. They became farmhouses, or were left to decay. The years around 1900 were the great years of rediscovery, when old manor houses were bought and lovingly restored by sympathetic new owners, or the original families moved back into them, as they have continued to do. The fashion for all things Georgian has put such houses a little in the shade, but only a little, for they are lovable and livable-in places. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, with his eye for architecture and strong feeling for the qualities and vicissitudes of families, tells their individual stories with style and perception. Christopher Sykes's photographs have stimulated me to reflect on the history of country house illustration.
When I first started to work for Country Life in the 1950s, the photographs illustrating its country house articles were taken according to rigid and long-established principles. In each room the photographer (supplied with sketch plans on which viewpoints were marked with arrows, for he was seldom there with the writer of the article) cleared out the foreground and weeded out and rearranged the furniture, The room was carefully lit so that there were no dark corners; the ideal was an even, overall light and dramatic effects of sun or shade were avoided. Flower arrangements in large numbers were virtually compulsory, and a few books or ornaments were allowed to remain, tastefully disposed on chimneypieces or table-tops; but the owners' personal belongings were ruthlessly cleared away. The owners themselves were, of course, never to be seen; very occasionally, and with great daring, their dog was left in front of a fireplace, which was never allowed to have a fire in it. Outside gra
cious emptiness reigned under permanently sunny skies: entrance courts in which nobody arrived, gardens in which nobody walked, stable yards into which nobody rode, parks in which, if animals grazed at all, they did so as inconspicuously as possible. As architectural records the resulting photographs were invaluable; as evidence as to how the houses were lived in they had no value at all, and indeed were positively misleading.
Since then a more atmospheric school of country house photography has gradually developed, and it is to this that Christopher Sykes belongs. There may have been a little skilful rearrangement in some of his photographs, but on the whole they show the houses as they are lived in, from the attics to the back yard and not just in their showier parts. In 50 years' time they will vividly evoke the anti-minimalist life style of a particular class of owners in the years around the millennium. Moreover, as the interiors are all photographed by daylight, they are full of the light and shade that is part of their individual character. This can have disadvantages for architectural historians; chiaroscuro can almost efface details of decoration. But the book is not produced for architectural historians, and as compensation even for them are other details of plasterwork or carving modelled by daylight with the greatest beauty. It is the recording of light, inside and out, that makes many of the photographs memorable.
The owners appear to own no televisions, no prams, no cars even, and they have all gone out for the day. In this the photographs are closer to the old Country Life style than to the long tradition that preceded it. From the 17th up till the late 19th century country houses, first in paintings and drawings and then in photographs, were normally shown accompanied by both humans and animals, often in very large numbers, to give them scale and interest. Sykes selected many evocative examples for his own anthology, A Country House Camera. It was, perhaps, the arrival of the professional photographer which brought in the convention of compulsory emptiness; even so, in Cassell and Company's Historic Houses of the United Kingdom (1892) the many illustrations, mostly re-engraved from professional photographs, are still filled with life, so that the Prime Minister, Salisbury, reads his newspaper before the library fire at Hatfield, and Lord Dumfries and a friend smoke their cigars in the Summer Smoking Room at Cardiff Castle. Then, around 1900, the great freeze set in.
In 1985, when I collaborated with the American photographer Fred Maroon for an article on country houses in the National Geographic (and the book which developed out of it), he had no English hang-up to prevent him from featuring both people and animals. It was sad that at Houghton he could not persuade Lady Cholmondeley to be photographed looking, as a splendid old lady, at her portrait by Sargent; but his two cleaning ladies resting on their mops in the hall at Castle Howard and 80 or so little schoolboys having breakfast in the Great Chamber at Gilling Castle are among my favourite country house photographs. I owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Pakenham for forcing me to let him include people in what became the cover photograph of my Life in the French Country House. The château which this features has, incidentally. English owners, and all the people in it, myself in a boat included, are English. But it is at least in the tradition of old postcards of chateaux which, unlike their English equivalents, are enlivened by every form of activity.
The Sykes score amounts to three humans (very small, on a bench before Norton Conyers), three dogs, one cat, five cows, six sheep, one dove, one cock, one hen and an assortment of ducks. It is a step in the right direction and a pleasure to have them at all. The five cows, nice and big, are grazing on very rough grass in the garden enclosure at Sandford Orcas in Dorset; neither cows nor roughness would have survived the old Country Life technique. Even more evocative is the view of Lady Grantley's moated Markenfield Hall, with a cock and hen rootling on one side of its moat, and a greenhouse and long row of flower-pots plastered to the outside of its 14th-century wall on the other. But the beautiful Deirdre Grantley features only as a modern carving on a boss in the vaulting which does her the opposite of justice. If she and other owners, along with their families, friends, dailies, gardeners, couples and cars could at least occasionally be allowed to feature as well as their animals and sofas, it could be an agreeable return to tradition.
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