I built my Souls a lordly pleasure house, wherein to
dwell
Max Egremont
CLOUDS
by Caroline Dakers Yale, £35, pp. 278 Clouds delighted Percy and Madeline Wyndham when they took possession of it in September 1885. Given the tendency of its owners and their descendants to gush in a rather ethereal way, Clouds might have been a name given to the house in a moment of particularly breathy enthusiasm, but it came in fact from its first freeholder In the 16th century, a certain John Cloud. Set near the village of East Knoyle, in beautiful Wiltshire countryside, the house and estate of over 4,000 acres seem an astonishing expression of aristocratic self- confidence, a sign that even a younger son of a landed family could aspire to a posi- tion of feudal power. It was almost as if Percy wished to rival his older brother Lord Leconfield, the inheritor of Petworth, and establish a small kingdom of his own.
Clouds is not beautiful, and was described by one contemporary as 'the largest and ugliest house in England'. I remember my impression of block-like tedium when I first saw it, and how at odds this seemed to be with the romanticism of the Wyndhams and their children and grandchildren. In this diligently researched and intelligent history of the house, Caro- line Dakers makes no great claims for its aesthetic qualities. She proves, however, that Clouds shows certain aspects of English taste, not least because Percy and Madeline, and their son George and his nephew Dick Wyndham, collected works of art, and also, in the case of Madeline and Dick, were artists themselves. In choosing Philip Webb as their archi- tect, Percy and Madeline had opted for a disciple of Ruskin and a stern opponent of the picturesque. A socialist, Webb rarely stayed at Clouds for longer than a day and does not seem to have been particularly close to the Wyndhams although they accepted most of his ideas. He brooded carefully over his creation, wanting Clouds to reflect his profound love of everything English, even the weather, which is perhaps the reason for its forlorn aspect that seems to subdue even the strongest sunlight.
The building of Clouds is only a part of its story. Of equal interest are the works of art that the Wyndhams bought to fill their new country house. Percy and Madeline were serious, if unadventurous, collectors, influenced by their veneration for the Ital-
ian Renaissance. Given the immensely high prices of late Victorian popular artists, the Wyndhams spent freely. Involved in the early days of the Grosvenor Gallery, they bought pictures by Burne-Jones, Watts, Leighton, Rossetti, Sargent (commission- ing his celebrated portrait of their daugh- ters, 'The Three Graces'), Orpen, William Morris, Prinsep, Edward Poynter and (a rare example of the avant-garde) one of Whister's 'Nocturnes'.
At first it seemed as if the dream of a new country house and estate, Henry James's 'most perfect' of English creations, had come triumphantly true. Percy Wynd- ham had been a Conservative member of parliament, his son George had political ambitions and wrote poetry, and the Clouds guest list showed it to be a place where Arthur Balfour and his Soul circle gathered to amuse themselves and discuss affairs of state. The three Wyndham daughters, the graces of Sargent's huge portrait, made suitable marriages, one to Lord Elcho, another to the very rich and very dull Eddie Tennant and the third to the respectably landed Charles Adeane. Only Percy's bad temper, supposedly a Wyndham trait, could blight the atmo- sphere. Once during a shoot, enraged at not being able to hit the pheasants, he opened fire at a nearby gamekeeper, a larger and less agile target: a reminder of how much the servants, who made life pos- sible in a place like Clouds, had to endure. The fire of 1889, which destroyed much of the upper part of the house, caused only a brief set-back; the rebuilding, under Webb's supervision, was quick and the joy- ful life began again.
There was, of course, trouble ahead, and, as in all books about this period and class, one seems to hear early on the low roar of the guns of 1914, like the approach of a distant tidal wave. Percy died in 1911, leav- ing the property to George who had had to abandon a successful political career (he reached the cabinet as Irish Secretary) because of drink. The management of Hunt at Clouds, 1909, to celebrate the 21st birthday of the heir, Percy Wyndham, the grandson of Percy and Madeline, who was killed in 1914. Clouds, and his rather nebulous ambition to create an ideal rural community based on mediaeval lines, gave George some sat- isfaction, even if it seemed at odds with the turbulent times. Still drinking heavily, he died in Paris in 1913, probably in a brothel. His corpse was carried back to the Hotel Lotti where it got stuck in the revolving door,. an undignified end for such a talent- ed, if unstable, man.
George's widow Sybil and his mother Madeline took the death bravely, believing that George had gone to a greater happi- ness and was therefore almost to be envied. It was a sentiment that was to be repeated Often during the First War when many of their other relations, sons and grandsons, were killed. With the deaths and occasion- ally convoluted wills came inheritance taxes and demanding annuities. After 1918, an agricultural depression added to the prob- lems face by Dick Wyndham, George's nephew and now the owner of Clouds. The difficulties of maintaining such an estab- lishment without a large injection of capital soon became all too clear.
Dick had survived the war, winning the Military Cross, but was wounded physically and mentally. Both his marriages failed, Partly because of his moderately sadistic sexual tastes, and his paintings seemed insipid beside such admired contempo- raries as Edward Wadsworth and Wynd- ham Lewis. Like most artists who have inherited money, he found it hard to estab- lish friendships with other artists, many of whom sponged off him or failed to take his work seriously. Drifting into the cham- pagne bohemia of the Sitwells and the Younger Tennants, he attracted young writ- ers like Cyril Connolly and Peter Quennell, devotees of the literary end of the country house circuit, but also lcnew serious figures like Lewis and Matthew Smith. For estate management or Clouds he had little incli- nation, perhaps affronted aesthetically by ttie house's grim bulk and dark emptiness. Dick preferred his cottage at Tickerage in
lissex, from where he would set off on Journeys and jaunts, writing a successful travel book about the Sudan, The Gentle Savage, before his death at the hands of a sniper while covering the Arab-Israeli war for the Morning Post in 1948. Charming but sad, given to bouts of wild humour and deep melancholy, Dick Wynd- ham seems now to be typical of his time, a sensitive youth left defenceless and con- fused by the horrors of the trenches. Clouds could at least be used to finance Dick's way of life, its destruction partly a revenge against that old world which he felt had betrayed him. Slowly the collection was sold off, the house itself going in 1932. Passing through the hands of speculators and others, it is now a treatment centre for alcoholics and drug addicts. This book, siMultaneously sharp and sympathetic, does full justice to an architectural monu- Ment to the hopes and optimism of the late Victorian age.
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