A Norfolk not an Essex man
Hugh Massingberd
HUMPHRY REPTON’S MEMOIRS edited by Ann Gore and George Carter Michael Russell, £15.95, pp. 160, ISBN 0859552950 Aspecial thrill when visiting country houses — as I used to do every week in the unconvincing guise of what Evelyn Waugh described in A Handful of Dust as a ‘very civil young man’ engaged in chronicling family seats — was the occasional opportunity of handling one of Humphry Repton’s original ‘Red Books’. This had been beautifully prepared and bound in red morocco for the owner’s late-Georgian predecessor by the great landscape gardener in order to provide the client with a visual explanation of his ideas for ‘improvements’. The pièce de resistance was the ingenious use of flaps, or ‘slides’, devised so as to give ‘before’ and ‘after’ views by means of charmingly illustrated perspectives, complete with clumps of trees.
These captivating volumes were often given an added piquancy by Repton’s lively obiter dicta which might touch on current fashions in horticulture, the insensitive behaviour of upstart ‘nouveau’ landowners or the lack of appreciation for his Art (old Humph could have given the Australian cricketers a few lessons in whingeing). For example, I remember a Red Book at one Norfolk seat in which Repton recorded his familiar gripe that ‘the prophet’ (himself) had not been honoured in ‘his own county’. Although born in Suffolk, partly educated in Holland and ending up in Essex, Repton regarded himself as a Man of Norfolk. He had started out as a general merchant in Norwich before being taken up as a protégé of William Windham of Felbrigg and eventually, in his late thirties, turning his ‘hobby into a profession’ and becoming a landscape gardener who was to be immortalised in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
In her biography of Repton the late Dorothy Stroud rightly regretted the loss of his Memoirs. ‘How entertaining ... how revealing they might have been,’ she mused, ‘but the possibility of our enlightenment now seems unlikely.’ Happily, though, they (or at least the chapters from 1788 onwards) subsequently emerged in the saleroom and — hey, presto — here they are. For all architectural and horticultural enthusiasts this volume is therefore a major scoop, but there is much here as well to entertain the general reader.
Repton had a beady eye for the eccentricities of his clients. While accompanying one foul-mouthed MP on a walk in his park, he put 25 pebbles into his waistcoat pocket and threw away one on every oath uttered: ‘I found every pebble was gone in a quarter of an hour!’ Typically, another country house owner refused to pay him as he ‘never did anything in consequence of my advice’. William Wilberforce’s priggishness is perfectly captured by his assertion to Repton at a concert in Cambridge that his principles would not allow him to hear music at ‘theatres and operas’. Repton’s description of the bizarre decoration of the Hermitage at Louth, Lincs, which featured sheeps’ trotters, horses’ teeth, skeletons of mice and small birds and glittering snails’ trails might provide inspiration for Laurence Llewelyn Bowen.
Repton regales us with ghost stories and a jolly assortment of anecdotes, including one about him being chased by a bull. My favourite passage concerns a coach journey with a village schoolmaster in Derbyshire who goes into paroxysms of obeisance when the carriage stops to make way for a grand procession by Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam: ‘The poor man bolted up and stretching his long neck out of the front window, his hand and body were in perpetual motion, incessantly bowing with the most ludicrous gestures.’ Dear old Humph wasn’t averse to a bit of toadying himself. We are assured, for instance, that the Duke of Portland’s ‘sense of smelling was exquisite’. Compliments from ‘the Immortal Pitt’ and Lord North (strangely credited by the editors in a footnote as having had a ‘distinguished’ parliamentary career) are lovingly recorded. One can only wince on the old boy’s behalf as his assiduous sucking-up to the Prince of Wales (later George IV) at Brighton comes to naught.
Yet our hero is admirably philosophical about these setbacks and the difficulties that he encountered with such fractious contemporaries as Nash, Soane and those two exponents of the ‘Picturesque’, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. The acidulous diarist Lord Torrington complained that Repton was ‘of so many words he is not easily shaken off; he asserts so much, and assumes so much, as to make me irritable’, but I found this delicious, unknowing absurdity in his character to be rather endearing. His Memoirs, in short, are a wonderful ragbag of well-observed vignettes that tell us much more about lateGeorgian England than many stout works of social history. Full marks to the publisher for producing such an elegant and delightful volume, worthy indeed of Repton’s own Red Books.
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