Preserving the landed
Simon Blow
Seldom has the spirit of conservation directed itself so wholeheartedly towards the plight of the landed class as in the last year. With an unprecedented £8 million grant the National Heritage Fund rescued Belton House in Lincolnshire, and recently the Government relaxed a point of law to ensure the preservation of Calke Abbey — a house that will be a record of a vanished way of life. Beginning with the saving of that charmed manor house, Canons Ashby, governments now seem set to recognise the need to protect at least the history of our landed life. But does this mean that behind these gestures there is also a desire to preserve the remnants of that Life? Is there even a twinge of regret that so much has gone? The relentless breaking-up of estates has brought in turn an end to the tranquillity in our countryside. Perhaps the day will come when the badgered and persecuted landed will be even allowed to recover some of their lost dignity.
Pondering these matters, I have just returned from a tour of houses — among them two of the above-mentioned — to see how, as museums, they can reflect that in- herited pattern of life and outlook. I was also interested to see what effect the ac- cumulating years of threatened extinction have had on some families. But I began my visit near to London, at Ham House in Richmond. I have known Ham all my life, for the house once belonged to my Tollemache kinsmen. It was given to the National Trust by the aged Sir Lyonel Tollemache (he was 94) in 1948 as the shock of a late inheritance at eighty, involving transference from Eastbourne to Ham, had proved too great. It was a sad decision, and in a book on the family written by my great- uncle Teddy Tollemache, I used in tender years to drift to sleep on the following pur- ple sentence: 'Perhaps at nightfall, when the sightseers have left, the ghosts of long- dead Tollemaches — some eccentric, some brilliant, and many handsome — once more take possession of the rooms, galleries, and gardens that they loved so much.'
As happens with antique families, Uncle Teddy was proud of being a Tollemache and proud too of the lovely family houses. But how disappointed he would be today were he to return to Ham. The administra- tion of the house is carried out by the Vic- toria and Albert Museum and it was decid- ed that sufficient 17th-century furnishings and hangings relating to the reign of the ex-
travagant Duchess of Lauderdale existed to strip the house back and renovate it to that period. And so 300 years of Tollemache family life (the house being entailed to them by the Duchess's first marriage to Sir Lionel Tollemache of Helmingham) were swiftly erased. Had the V & A not interfered so autocratically with the house, we should have been able to look not only at the treasures but also to experience the Sleeping Beauty quality for which the house was famed, and to know a little of those weird obsessions that not infrequently took hold of the family. What has happened, for ex- ample, to the weights dropped by the 19th- century William Tollemache (Lord Hun- tingtower) because he disliked ringing bells? And why has the traditionally named Cabal Room — a reputed meeting-place of Charles II's ministers — been renamed The Queen's Bedchamber? Muttering a few complaints about this lifeless restoration, I was told that the surviving son of old Sir Lyonel does occasionally look in. On the subject of the restoration I was informed that he has but one comment, 'A load of rubbish!'
Ham must be an object lesson on how to kill atmosphere through pedantry. If a house must become a museum then I believe that those who open it have a duty to attempt to reflect the different interests and lives of the people who have left their mark there. Turning towards Northamp- tonshire I went to Canons Ashby, former home of the Dryden family, and opened for the first time by the National Trust in April. Again it has been extensively restored, but with a difference. I had originally seen the house in its severe state of dilapidation just before the Trust acquired it. For many years the family had been unable to afford to live there, and the house had been let to a number of tenants. If funds had not been there for the National Trust to acquire it, Canons Ashby would certainly have become a ruin. But contrary to a variety of current criticism levelled at the Trust, no smart decorator was called in and the Trust has not fossilised it. Every effort has been made to recreate the life that was. Unlike at Ham, the furniture and decorations have been reassembled to reflect the house as left by this line of civilised squires before finan- cial decay set in. And there have been in- teresting discoveries that do not detract from the presentation of the house, but add to it. For instance, the wall paintings which had been executed for Sir Erasmus Dryden in the late 16th century and had lain hidden for 200 years behind a section of 18th cen- tury panelling. It is thought that they could be chivalric scenes, influenced by Spenser's Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser being a frequent guest of the house. It is the kind of find that any private house-owner would be proud of.
And yet one does regret the ever- decreasing number of houses that are lived in, for inevitably a museum cannot bring back the people that made up that confi- dent landed society of yesterday. It was a pity that death duty taxation should have dispersed them so utterly while a much richer and less honourable jet set survive unharmed. Those people brought security to their counties, and the farmers depended on them. 'The trouble is there's no aristocracy left,' a Midlands farmer said to me recently, bewailing the slap-dash behaviour of a newly-installed Master of Hounds. Of course, he did not simply mean the titled, but all those reliable landed types who were — and by a fraction in some places, still are — the backbone of country living. The kind of erect, tweed-suited, and often moustachioed figures who warm an introduction with: 'I don't suppose by the remotest chance you might know my good friends the...' ... 'How extraordinary, you mean you dined with them last week.'
Those country houses that do remain tend now to exist in pockets of isolation, there being so few others nearby to keep up that tradition of sociable exchange. And moving on from Northamptonshire I called to see Prestwold Hall in Leicestershire. I had not been to Prestwold since my childhood when I recalled a rather well- dressed couple who mixed very strong cocktails. They were the Packe-Drury- Lowes, and the house and estate now belong to their son, Simon. The house is a thoroughly handsome seat elegantly enlarg- ed and refaced by William Burn in the 1840s. Coming out from the porte cochere, Simon welcomed me as an old friend: `I'm a bit bats now, I'm afraid. It's leading this life that does it.' At once we proceeded to the church, placed adjacent to the house. It is filled with several splendid Packe monuments, and in particular a recumbent effigy of a young Packe who died of scarlet fever whilst at Eton. (Pevsner's comment here is 'very pathetic'.) Although only in his middle forties, Simon announced that he was having his coffin made. 'You've got to have it done now, otherwise the oak doesn't season properly.' With death in our minds, we then sat down to an excellent lunch. He informed me that he sees few people: `The thing is, there really isn't anyone to see.' I left a little later with revived memories of those potent cocktails that I had sniffed long ago, and a fresher memory of the Packe-Drury-Lowe beer still brewed in their own brewhouse.
My last visit was to the lately much discussed Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. Built of Derbyshire sandstone, the house nestles grandly in its valley. Grand, because with its broad facade of multiple pilasters and recessed portico, the family had hoped that such a display would win them a mar- quessate. In the event, the lavishness was in vain and they had to be content to continue as baroneted squires. But even this has ceas- ed, as Henry Harpur-Crewe's grandfather, Sir Vauncey, was the last of the male line and there was nothing more to be done but for Henry and his late brother, as the suc- cessive inheritors, to revert to the family name by deed poll. However, in spite of that 18th-century bid for attention, shyness has long been the hallmark of this family, and Mr Harpur-Crewe is no exception. Baf-
fled as his reclusive brother was by the capital transfer tax which had put Calke at risk, Henry Harpur-Crewe is equally bewildered by the focus that has suddenly descended on him. 'It's worth saving, don't you think? I mean the trippers will enjoy it,' he said, brushing an arm over his face, which is his shy habit when talking. I strongly agreed; after that, I was encourag- ed to wander through the many dust- sheeted and forgotten rooms.
Left to myself to roam Calke's deserted passages, I was reminded of other similar passages in houses partially closed since the war, where rooms had been sealed off due to lack of staff. In this way, Calke, as much as its reputation for each room being a life- story, with treasured bric-a-brac exactly as its last occupant left it, is also a parable of country-house decline in our times. The reduction in domestic servants that began with the Depression and then was really felt in the austere post-war years, is very much a part of what we see as Calke's romantic abandonment. In the grander rooms there, I thought of the two maids in Henry Green's wartime novel, Loving, who dance
in the dust-sheeted ballroom to the accom- paniment of a wind-up gramophone. And in a room crammed with photographs, chests and collections of butterflies, I also found an ancient gramophone. I picked the top record from a pile and put it on. It was the Eton Boating Song.
But outside in the stables there was bustle and movement. Mr Harpur-Crewe is fond of horses, and several filled the boxes. In one, a lad was strapping down what ap- peared to be a good-looking animal. I asked a few questions. Within no time the horse was being exhibited for possible purchase by Mr Harpur-Crewe's hospitable Irish trainer. The horse, I was told, had jumped Becher's and almost made it round Aintree. But on its being trotted towards me I notic- ed a definite dragging of a front leg. 'Ptah,' the trainer said, 'You mean the arthritic knee. To be sure, that's nothing. The horse has jumped Becher's.' The lad nodded his confirmation, 'You don't need to worry when a horse has jumped Becher's.'
If country house survivors can still show this measure of resilience, then surely there is a case to be made for their rescue.
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