Category Archives: Country Houses

No shrinking Violet

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Harlaxton Manor: present-day faculty common room

Harlaxton Manor: present-day faculty common room

The interwar rescuer of Gregory Gregory’s vast Harlaxton Manor was as formidable and eccentric as the building – the English daughter of a coal porter and a washerwoman who invented Shavex, the first brushless shaving cream, Mrs Violet Van der Elst (1882-1966), the widow of a Belgian artist.

A succession of Gregory’s descendants had inherited this unforgiving pile and, with varying degrees of success, tried to live in it.  When Thomas Sherwin Pearson Gregory died in 1935 his son put it on the market with 500 acres “or as required”:  80 bedrooms are mentioned, though there was only one bathroom.  Jackson Stops & Staff’s plaintive advertisement in The Times – “To save from demolition…noble ancestral seat…probably the supreme example of domestic architecture of its period” – ignored the possibility that Salvin and Burn’s architecture was so substantial that demolition would be uneconomic.

Mrs Van der Elst paid £78,000 for the building and its surrounding land, renamed it “Grantham Castle”, vigorously modernised the plumbing and installed electricity on a suitably grand scale, and was invariably to be found at the great country-house sales of the time – Clumber, Rufford and so on – picking up furnishings, fixtures and fittings at bargain prices.  She made the estate an animal sanctuary, extending her protection even to the domestic mice in the Manor.

A glimpse of the house in Mrs Van der Elst’s day exists as a 1939 Pathé newsreel clip:  http://www.britishpathe.com/video/grantham-castle.

She was famed for her vehement campaigns against capital punishment, regularly turning up in her Rolls Royce outside prisons at the time of an execution.  She also made a practice of holding séances to contact her dead husband, and kept his ashes in an urn in the library, a dark, low room dominated by antique barley-sugar wooden columns.

Having shared the building with the RAF First Airborne Division during the Second World War, Mrs Van der Elst ran out of money and sold the house in 1948 for only £60,000.  When the house contents were auctioned Mr Van der Elst’s ashes were accidentally knocked down to an unsuspecting bidder and had to be discreetly retrieved.

The manor passed successively to the Society of Jesus, the University of Stanford, California, and then the University of Evansville, Indiana, who use it as their English campus.

Harlaxton Manor features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Quirks of fate

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Wentworth Woodhouse: east front (detail)

Primogeniture is a risky business.

Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920-2004) wasn’t expected to inherit until his older brother Billy was shot by a sniper in France in September 1944.  For the rest of his life, Andrew Devonshire was haunted by a feeling of stepping into his brother’s shoes:  “I’m Duke of Devonshire owing to a marksman killing my brother, so I’m here by proxy and I remind myself every morning when I wake up and again when I go to bed, that I am one of the luckiest men alive. And it does make me uneasy. I mean, it’s not right!” [Lynn Barber, ‘The Original Thin White Duke’, The Observer, October 22nd 2002].

Indeed, at the time that William, Marquess of Hartington died, it was possible that his wife of four months might have conceived – but it turned out she hadn’t.  Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington was the daughter of the former US Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy:  two of her brothers were Jack, the future US President, and his brother Bobby.

Her marriage did not go down well, particularly with her mother, Rose, because the Kennedys were staunch Boston Catholics whereas the Dukes of Devonshire were firmly Protestant. In fact, the only Kennedy to attend the wedding was Kathleen’s oldest brother, Joe Jnr, who was himself killed in action over Suffolk in August 1944.

The extraordinary grief of losing a brother and a husband within a matter of weeks would crush many people:  Kathleen Hartington wrote to a friend, “…life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage and death before the age of 25”.

She made a life for herself in post-war London, and fell in love with the unhappily married Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam.  Not only were the Fitzwilliams intransigently Protestant, but the necessity for a divorce was anathema to Rose Kennedy.  In the hope of persuading Joseph Kennedy Snr to accept their relationship the couple flew to the South of France in a private plane which encountered a thunderstorm and crashed into a mountain in the Ardèche region of France in 1948, killing all on board.  Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington is buried at Edensor, in the grounds of Chatsworth House:  her grave carries the epitaph “Joy she gave;  joy she has found”.

The Fitzwilliam title, the family seat at Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, and the extensive estates passed to Eric, 9th Earl, an alcoholic bachelor.  The next heir was not only distant but in doubt – one of two brothers, great-grandsons of the 5th Earl – of whom the elder, Toby, had a son and grandson, but whose legitimacy was uncertain, while Tom, the younger, had no male heir.  A court-case settled in favour of Tom, who duly succeeded as 10th Earl and died in 1979, taking the title with him.

So the Devonshire dynasty continues through the line of Billy Hartington’s younger brother and Chatsworth thrives;  the Fitzwilliam estates remain in the ownership of the 10th Earl’s descendants and the estate village of Wentworth is maintained by the Fitzwilliam Wentworth Amenity Trust, but the vast house, comparable in scale with Chatsworth or Blenheim, was sold off in 1989, and was until recently inaccessible to the public, though the East Front has always been visible from the bridleway that runs through the park.

The twentieth-century history of the Fitzwilliams is told in Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: the rise and fall of an English dynasty (Viking 2007), a remarkable achievement by a first-time author, not least because of the notorious secrecy of the family.  Tom, 10th Earl, ordered the destruction of those family documents that hadn’t been weeded by his predecessors:  the sixteen tons of papers took three weeks to burn.

Read the book.  It’s compelling.

For further articles on Wentworth Woodhouse and Wentworth Castle, simply type either name into the search box at top right of this page.  For detailed information about activities at and around Wentworth Woodhouse click here.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Chatelaine of Chatsworth

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

There was a time when Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire could claim to be non-literary.  When her friend Evelyn Waugh sent her a copy of his biography of the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, he inscribed it “For Darling Debo, with love from Evelyn.  You will not find a word in this to offend your Protestant sympathies”, and she noticed that every page was blank – “the perfect present,” as she described it, “for a non-reader”.

Her two masterly descriptions of her home, The House:  a portrait of Chatsworth (Macmillan 1982) and The Estate:  a view from Chatsworth (Macmillan 1990), showed her to be a charming, lucid and informative writer, with an unerring facility for the apt anecdote.

Since that time she has written extensively and has published an autobiography, Wait for me!  Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (John Murray 2010), which is characterised by the candour that contemporary memoirs allow, discussing her miscarriages and her husband’s alcoholism, with the comment, “Sixty years ago none of this would have been discussed:  it would have been swept under the carpet…in the pretence that it was not happening”.

(Andrew Devonshire, shortly before his death, wrote his own memoir, Accidents of Fortune [Michael Russell 2004], honest and modest, as befits a man who declared he won his Military Cross “for being cheerful”.)

In everything the Duchess writes, and in the interviews she gives, there is a characteristic astute common-sense, tipped with asperity – wondering, in a Sunday Times interview with Rosie Millard [September 7th 2008], if the media reporters who hounded her nephew Max Mosley had dull private lives, and vastly preferring Attlee to Blair among Labour prime ministers.

The survival of Chatsworth as a great house and a functioning landed estate is entirely attributable to the courage of Andrew, 11th Duke and to the business acumen of his duchess, Deborah.  When Edward, 10th Duke, died in 1950 four months too soon to escape death duties, it would have been an easy option for his son to sell up, pay the 80% duty and live the life of a prosperous publisher.

Instead, Andrew Devonshire took the view that he and his wife were “life custodians of what has been at Chatsworth for centuries”:  he sold outlying land, handed over Hardwick Hall to the National Trust and gave items from the Chatsworth collection worth four-fifths of the duty owed.  The debt on the actual death duty was settled by 1967;  paying off the accrued interest took until 1974.  Then, with a further sale of a single Poussin and a collection of 69 Old Master drawings, he set up a £21 million trust to maintain Chatsworth.  Visitor entry pays about one-third of the running costs;  the rest is met by the Chatsworth House Trust.

His Grace was always the first to give credit for the way his Duchess turned the estate into an extremely effective cash generator.  She took great pride in the fact that “there are no merry-go-rounds”;  her personal interest has always been in making the house and the estate popular and good value:  “I love shopkeeping better than anything.”

It’s Her Grace’s flair that created the Chatsworth Farm Shop [http://www.chatsworth.org/shop-eat/the-farm-shop], the Cavendish Hotel and Restaurant in Baslow [http://www.cavendish-hotel.net] and the Devonshire Arms Hotel, Bolton Abbey [http://www.thedevonshirearms.co.uk].

When the 11th Duke died in 2004 the title and the Devonshire estate passed to his son, Peregrine, and his wife Amanda.  They are now making their own mark on the house and the estate:  details of the Chatsworth Masterplan can be found at http://www.chatsworth.org/the-chatsworth-masterplan.

Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire died on September 24th 2014 at the age of 94, and is buried with her husband at Edensor on the Chatsworth estate.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Castle that’s not a castle

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Nottingham Castle

Nottingham Castle

When is a castle not a castle?  For many visitors, Nottingham Castle comes as a surprise, because it doesn’t have battlements or a drawbridge.  It did, of course, at one time, but the medieval fortress that guarded the crossing of the River Trent that is now a famous cricket ground disappeared after the English Civil War.

Nottingham was the place where King Charles I first raised his standard, signalling his military opposition to the forces of Parliament and triggering the conflict that led to his execution.  The old castle was “slighted”, that is, rendered indefensible, by order of Parliament in 1651, and its ruins and the park around it were bought after the Restoration by William Cavendish, a prominent Royalist and the first Duke of Newcastle.

He swept away the remains of the old castle and – well into his eighties – began a completely new, extremely modern classical palace that was completed, three years after his death, in 1679.  It cost £14,000.  (Curiously, the 8th Earl of Rutland, a Roundhead, had built a similarly splendid baroque palace in place of his slighted castle, beginning in 1654.  All that remains of this is a model, now displayed in the nineteenth-century replacement Belvoir Castle [http://www.belvoircastle.com].)

The seventeenth-century Nottingham Castle was little used in the decades that followed, and was virtually empty when in 1832 it was set alight by Reform Bill rioters.  Its then owner, the 4th Duke of Newcastle, was anything but popular:  in an election in 1830 he had evicted tenants who wouldn’t vote as he wished, saying, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I please with my own?”

Eventually, in 1876, Nottingham Corporation bought the Castle from the 6th Duke and commissioned the local architect Thomas Chambers Hine to rebuild the interior as the first municipal museum of art in England.

Now it is the Castle Museum [http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1036], centrepiece of a cultural quarter that also includes a fascinating series of caves, including Mortimer’s Hole, and, at the foot of the cliff on which the Castle stands, the Museum of Nottingham Life at Brewhouse Yard.

It may not look like a castle, but you can spend an entire day in and under it without getting bored.

 

Open House Day at Harlaxton Manor

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Harlaxton Manor

Harlaxton Manor

Harlaxton Manor is an exciting place to visit, yet most travellers only glimpse it as an astonishing vista to the south of the A607 Grantham-Melton Mowbray road.

Harlaxton is an exceptionally exciting building, designed between 1831 and 1837 by Anthony Salvin and William Burn for the eccentric bachelor Gregory Gregory (1786-1854), whose name is commemorated in Nottingham’s Gregory Boulevard, developed on one of his six landed estates.

Gregory Gregory’s intention in building such a huge house seems to have been first, to house his extensive art collection, and second to spite his heir, a distant cousin.  The result is a fascinating mixture of dramatic baroque interiors such as the Great Hall and Cedar Staircase and Victorian ingenuity – hidden doors so that the servants literally appeared out of the woodwork and an indoor railway viaduct to deliver coal by gravity to each floor.

In the spirit of the baroque theme, illusions abound.  The Cedar Staircase is nowhere near as high as it looks, and materials are not what they seem – wood turns out to be plaster, and what looks like solid plaster actually moves.  Room stewards will be available on Open House Day to explain the history of this strange building.

I’ve taken numerous groups to Harlaxton over the past twenty-three years, including one group of jaded teachers on a Friday-night near-the-end-of-term mystery tour.  As the coach trundled across the park in the summer evening, it seemed as if every window of the Manor glowed.  One lady (not a historian) thought she was at Disneyland.

Harlaxton Manor is well cared for by the University of Evansville, Indiana, who use it as their British campus.  The college website is at http://www.ueharlax.ac.uk/about_us/index.cfm.

Harlaxton Manor features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Madeleine moment

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Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John has provided further details of the Wurlitzer organ at Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire, which, as I mentioned in the previous blog, was bought second-hand from the Madeleine Theatre in Paris in 1937 for Sir Julien Cahn’s private theatre attached to his house.

The organ came, not from the Madeleine Theatre (1924), which still exists in the Rue de Surene [http://www.theatremadeleine.com/index-historique.html], but from another Madeleine Theatre, which is now an opticians, designed entirely as a cinema by Marcel Oudin in 1918, at 14 Boulevard de la Madeleine .  The Wurlitzer – one of only two French Wurlitzers – was installed by the then owners, Loew Inc, in 1926.  According to Ken Roe’s contribution to http://cinematreasures.org/theater/23874/ the cinema subsequently became the Gaumont Madeleine and showed films until at least the mid-1970s.

The website http://www.theatreorgans.com indicates this Wurlitzer was repossessed at some point after installation.  This modest instrument was an ideal purchase for Sir Julien’s 352-seat theatre – “une salle élégante“, as the French account has it.

The knobs and bells and whistles of the Wurlitzer have a more elegant tone when described in French:  les clochettes de traîneau [sleigh bells], les sabots de cheval [horses’ hooves], les vagues [waves], les oiseaux [birdsong], la corne d’auto [car hooter], le gong d’incendie [fire-alarm], le sifflet de bateau à vapeur [steamboat whistle], la sirène [siren], le tam-tam [gong], et la sonnerie de porte [doorbell].

Among his many talents, John is a church organist and confessed, many years ago, to an ambition to play a Wurlitzer like the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.  My influence in Blackpool runs nowhere near that far, but I managed to give him the opportunity to play the Stanford Hall Wurlitzer.

Sometime in the late 1980s I ran a WEA day-visit to country houses in south Nottinghamshire, and smuggled John into the orchestra pit of the Stanford Hall Theatre – then part of the Co-operative College – with an arrangement that when at the end of my tour I brought the group into the back of the auditorium and said, “And this is the private theatre…” John would press the lift-button on the console and rise from the pit playing ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’.

Which would have worked perfectly if John had realised how far up the lift goes, or I’d been aware that he suffers from vertigo.  It’s quite difficult to keep a grip when you’re playing with both hands and both feet.  I suppose buttock-clenching is the only resort and I’ve never liked to ask.

Certainly John’s performance had a certain bravura quality, and we’ve both dined out on the story ever since.

 

Security-minded millionaire

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Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Sir Julien Cahn (1882-1944), the millionaire owner of the Nottingham Furnishing Company, lived from 1928 until his death at Stanford Hall, near Loughborough, which he transformed to suit his distinctive lifestyle – part English country house, part Hollywood.

He employed Queen Mary’s decorator, White, Allom Ltd, to install pastiche historical interiors and modern Art Deco schemes including at least four bathrooms (Sir Julien’s in black and white, Lady Cahn’s in blue and white, a guest bathroom in tortoiseshell and another – which survives – in salmon pink marble).  He built an indoor badminton court with trellis-work, trompe l’oeil privet and a birdcage in the corner.

Apart from hunting and philanthropy Sir Julien had two major hobbies, cricket and magic, in neither of which – according to contemporary accounts – he particularly excelled, but both of which he took extremely seriously.

To provide a venue for charity performances, Sir Julien commissioned a sumptuous 352-seat private theatre with a Wurlitzer organ bought second-hand from the Madeleine Theatre in Paris.  Above the auditorium Sir Julien provided a wing of bedrooms for the visiting cricket stars who took part in the Sir Julien Cahn Cricket XI.

Below the auditorium is the most extraordinary feature of all – a capacious gas-proof air-raid shelter easily capable of accommodating the entire household, with decontamination facilities and an escape-tunnel extending thirty-six feet beyond the building line in case the entire building collapsed above.

The Cahns left their mark in the grounds too.  There was an open-air swimming-pool, which eventually cost £60,000, nearly as much as the theatre, and for his fifty-fifth birthday Lady Cahn bought her husband some sea-lions (their names were Charlie, Aqua, Freda and Ivy) and a suitable pool was duly constructed.

After Sir Julien’s death in 1944 Stanford Hall became the Co-operative College until 2001.

 

Security-minded aristocrat

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Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

Peckforton Castle, Cheshire

John, 1st Baron Tollemache (1805-1890) was not a figure to argue with.  Robust, traditional, solid character, full of vigour and strength, he lived life according to his own principles and died at the age of 85 from the effects of driving his trap through wintry weather.

He commissioned Anthony Salvin, one of the most versatile of Victorian architects, to build Peckforton Castle on his 26,000-acre Cheshire estate in the form of a fully equipped Edwardian castle (Edward I, that is,) complete with drawbridge and battlements, on top of a steep hill looking across to the genuinely medieval ruin of Beeston Castle on the adjacent hill.

If any Victorian architect could design a full-size thirteenth-century castle to be habitable by large-as-life nineteenth-century occupants, Salvin could.  Tough, gloomy, irredeemably masculine, the brand-new house had every modern convenience of its day, though some of them were in unlikely places.  All the spaces a Victorian aristocrat would expect in his house were provided, such as a billiard room, a library and a drawing room.  The main staircase is pentagonal.  The floor of the octagonal dining room sits on the central pillar of the annular wine cellar below.  There is also a long gallery, which is technically neither a medieval nor a Victorian feature.

Why did Lord Tollemache insist that his residence should be defensible against a thirteenth-century army?  Its dates are significant – 1845-50.  It seems that the baron, characteristically generous to his own tenants, feared an invasion of the Cheshire plain from the starving workers of the Lancashire cotton towns.  An Edwardian castle, quite as sturdy as Caernarfon or Conwy, could protect not only his family and his household, but also his tenants and, if necessary, their livestock.

The threat was virtually over by the time the place was finished.  But that didn’t make it any less real at the time it was started.

It seems unlikely that anyone other Lord Tollemache himself could have lived in the Castle with enthusiasm.  Descriptions of the house in the twentieth century suggest a plaintive attempt to soften and warm the interiors.  The Tollemache family never returned after the Second World War, and the entire contents were auctioned in 1953.

For years the place struggled to find a use:  it was invaluable as a film set;  at one point it was a venue for live-action role-playing games.  Since the early 1990s it has operated as a hotel.  It’s a particularly spectacular place to get married.

The Peckforton Castle website is at http://www.peckfortoncastle.co.uk.  Beeston Castle is in the care of English Heritage [http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/beeston-castle-and-woodland-park].  It’s a particularly steep climb to the top of the motte.  There is a charge for car parking.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Having a ball at Welbeck Abbey

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Welbeck Abbey: underground ballroom (1986)

Welbeck Abbey: underground ballroom (1986)

The eccentricities of the “burrowing” fifth Duke of Portland seem endless, and by no means all of the stories are true.  He was distinctive among his contemporaries for providing the very latest conveniences for his guests, even though he rarely entertained, and notoriously kept out of his guests’ way.  One of his most grandiose improvements to Welbeck Abbey was the vast ballroom 154 feet by 64 feet, entirely sunk below ground and top-lit by bull’s-eye domes, well-lit, centrally heated and not at all damp.  On arrival for a ball at Welbeck, guests were conveyed down to the ballroom, still in their carriages, by hydraulic lift to a gently-graded inclined tunnel leading them to the dance-floor.  However, the fifth Duke never gave a ball, and the gas-lit splendour only came into its own when the sixth Duke, a distant cousin who never met his predecessor, inherited in 1870.

The most recent, authoritative and succinct account of the fifth Duke’s life and works is Derek Adlam, Tunnel Vision:  the enigmatic 5th Duke of Portland (Harley Gallery 2013), which contains the full text of Elizabeth Butler’s Account of her life as a laundry maid at Welbeck, 1869-1879 (1931).

Nina Slingsby-Smith’s memoir of her father, George: Memoirs of a Gentleman’s Gentleman (Cape 1984 – out of print but available second-hand on Amazon), wonderfully captures the atmosphere of life above and below stairs at Welbeck in the sixth Duke’s time.  It includes a memorable story of an incident at dinner, when a luckless footman’s humanitarian dilemma nearly lost him his job, until King Edward VII saw the funny side:  the tale is far too good to spoil – seek it out on page 70 onwards.

Guided tours of the State Rooms (but not the underground rooms) are bookable in advance:  http://www.welbeck.co.uk/experience/visit/welbeck-abbey-state-room-tours.

Welbeck Abbey is one of the houses featured in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

 

More country-house railways

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Welbeck Abbey: basement railway

Welbeck Abbey: basement railway

The two railways at Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall are by no means the only examples of large country houses using rail transport to shift fuel, food, luggage and laundry around the capacious service wings.  Belton House [http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-beltonhouse.htm], on the other side of Grantham from Harlaxton and Stoke Rochford have hand-propelled railways, installed in the 1930s, connecting the kitchen in the courtyard with the basement of the main house.

Haddon Hall [http://www.haddonhall.co.uk/], near Bakewell in Derbyshire, was made habitable from 1912 onwards by the then Marquis of Granby, later the 9th Duke of Rutland.  Bringing the fully-fitted seventeenth-century kitchen into any kind of modern use was impractical, so a new kitchen was constructed in outbuildings a couple of hundred yards away.  This is now the tearoom for visitors to Haddon:  one end of the cable-operated railway can be seen inside the tearoom entrance;  the other is customarily hidden behind a dresser opposite the entrance to the medieval kitchen which forms part of the house tour.  The tunnel itself is blocked as a fire-precaution, but interested visitors are invited to ask a room-steward to show the remains of the railway within the medieval kitchen.

Most celebrated of all, but least seen, is the 5th Duke of Portland’s rail system in the cellars of Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire.  The “burrowing” Duke went to enormous lengths to live his later life out of sight of his servants, visitors and the world at large.    The railway, with hand-propelled carts, operated in combination with the technologically up-to-the-minute hydraulic lifts to streamline domestic freight in the Abbey.

A heated cart, like a grand Victorian predecessor of a 1950s hostess trolley, enabled His Grace to order food fast.  To avoid speaking to his servants he customarily sent his orders – “I shall only want rice pudding at one” – by means of twin letterboxes on the door of his suite in the west wing.   When in residence he had a standing order for chicken to be roasting twenty-four hours a day.  This fast food could be delivered to his apartment without fuss by the grace of contemporary modern technology.

Welbeck Abbey and Harlaxton Manor feature in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture English Country Houses – not quite what they seem.  For further details, please click here.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2010 tour Country Houses of Lincolnshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It contains chapters on Boothby Pagnell Manor House, Ellys Manor House, Belton House, Grimsthorpe Castle, Fulbeck Hall, Fulbeck Manor, Leadenham House, Harlaxton Manor and Stoke Rochford Hall.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.