The Grange Book- Sample Copy

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THE

GRANGE

There are few spots in England more fertile or more pleasant; and none, I believe, more healthy.

William Cobbett, 1822

THE

GRANGE HampsHire 

TEXT BY

richard Osb orne DESIGNED BY

reub en Crossman

G R A N G E PA R K O P E R A

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Contents XXX

INTRODUCTION

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A fertile and pleasant place

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page 12 PART ONE 1662–1786

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Mr Henley’s delicate mansion

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page 18 PART TWO 1787–1816

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The Grange transformed

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page 32 PART THREE 1817–1827

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A new power in the land

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page 68 PART FOUR 1828–1848

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C rises and consolidation

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page 88 PART FIVE 1848–1869

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A Baron and two conspicuous women 

page 98 PART SIX 1869–1932

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Sailing towards the sunset 

page 130

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PART SEVEN 1932–1964

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The Wallach years

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page 232 PART EIGHT 1964–1997

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Saving a lost cause

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page 256 PART NINE 1997–1998

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The making of Grange Park Opera

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page 284 PART TEN 1999–2002

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New wine in an old bottle

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page 298

1998–2011

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Grange Park Opera productions

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page 316

Bibliography page 336

People who made the opera happen page 342

Acknowledgements page 349

CONTENTS

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10

11

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A Fertile and Pleasant Place

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

Introduction

Riding south towards Winchester on a warm Saturday afternoon in late September in 1822 William Cobbett found himself passing between two great estates. Both estates, he noted, belonged to the Baring family. ‘They are the great men of Hampshire. They are everywhere, depositing their eggs about, like cunning old guinea-hens in sly places, besides the great, open showy nests that they have.’

Two of their showiest nests were visible through the trees. To Cobbett’s right as he travelled south from the Candovers was Stratton Park, the estate of Sir Thomas Baring (‘who has supplanted the Duke of Bedford’); to his left Grange Park, the estate of Alexander Baring (‘who has supplanted Lord Northington’).

The latter point was not strictly true, though Cobbett can perhaps be forgiven for his abbreviation of history. Born in nearby Farnham in 1763, Cobbett grew up at a time when Grange Park and its elegant Jacobean mansion were indeed owned by the Earls of Northington. The Northington line ended in 1786 with the death of Robert Henley, the second Earl.

He was 39 and unmarried. In 1787 the estate was sold to a banker, but it was a Drummond, not a Baring. It would be another 14 years before the Barings bought property in the area. In 1801 Sir Francis Baring, the bank’s co-founder and principal wealth creator, acquired Stratton Park; Grange Park was not bought until 1816-17.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Sir Francis Baring (1740-1810) , John Baring (1730-1816) and Charles Wall, the three partners at the end of the 18th century, by Thomas Lawrence. The ledger is open at the account Hope & Co. of Amsterdam. Sir Francis bought Stratton Park in 1801, gave it a portico in 1803 and in September 1806 Lawrence went there to paint this triple portrait

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Cobbett was no friend of bankers, especially those who had grown fat on the proceeds of colonial and continental wars. He felt no great personal animosity towards the Barings, though he confided that he would have thought more of their charitable giving had they seen their way to paying their labourers more. And he would probably have agreed with Harriet Baring, no lover of the dynasty into which she had married, when she announced: ‘The Barings are everywhere. They get everything. The only check on them is that they are all members of the Church of England; otherwise there is no saying what they might do’.

One thing the Barings could not escape was Cobbett’s eagle-eyed observation of the state of their land. He was particularly displeased with Alexander Baring’s management of his trees in Grange Park: The latter has enclosed, as a sort of outwork to his park, a pretty little down called Northington Down, in which he has planted, here and there, clumps of trees. But Mr Baring, not reflecting that woods are not like funds, to be made at a heat, has planted his trees too large; so that they are covered with moss, are dying at the top, and are literally growing downward instead of upward…

The down, which before was very beautiful, and formed a sort of glacis up to the park pales, is now a marred, ragged ugly looking thing. The dying trees, which have been planted long enough for you not to perceive that they have been planted, excite the idea of sterility in the soil. They do injustice to it; for, as a down, it was excellent.

A fertile and pleasant place

InTrODUCTIOn

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16

ThE GrANGE

LEFT: John Speed's 1611 map of Hampshire showing "Grange"

A fertile and pleasant place

INTRODUCTION

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part ONE

1662–1786 Mr Henley’s delicate mansion

Mr Henley’s delicate mansion

ParT One

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1660 — 1786

Mr Henley’s delicate mansion The Grange’s modern history begins in 1662 when the 650 acres of undulating parkland which comprised the Northington and Swarraton estates were bought by a young lawyer Robert Henley, one of many men of means whose fortunes had been transformed by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

H

enley’s purchase reflected the changed temper of the times. After five decades of political uncertainty and a debilitating civil war, it was a time to reorientate and reassess. Andrew Marvell wittily distilled the mood, couched in the garden of Nunappleton House, home of Lord Fairfax, the Commonwealth’s most enlightened warrior: How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, the bays, And their uncessant labours see Crowned from some single herb or tree.

For men like Henley the 1660s were a time to put down roots and practise the arts of peace. It was also a time in which to build, and build in new ways. The old medieval order was gone. A new breed of educated and travelled patrons required dwellings that were airy, elegant and above all rational in their design and orientation.

Nor did their interests end at the front door. Gardens needed to be designed, landscapes managed. For the architectural profession and its legion of artisans a golden age was about to unfold.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Left: John Norden's 1607 map of Hampshire showing "Graung" Right: Miniature portrait by Samuel Cooper 1659, thought to depict Sir Robert Henley (c1624-1692) Victoria & Albert Museum, London RIGHT: Robert Henley (1708-1772), first Earl of Northington c1760 National Portrait Gallery, London

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Mr Henley’s delicate mansion

ParT One

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LEFT: Coleshill House built c1658-62. It burned down in 1952 RIGHT: The staircase and entrance hall of Coleshill House

John Aubrey’s ‘Mr Samuel’ was in fact William Samwell (1628-76), a lawyer and fellow member of Middle Temple. The lawyer-architect was something of a phenomenon in England in the seventeenth century.

They are often described as ‘gentleman architects’, lawyers who merely ‘dabbled’ in architecture to supplement their income. That this was far from the truth is demonstrated by the life and career of Sir Roger Pratt whose early masterpiece Coleshill House near Amersham (c1658-62, destroyed by fire in 1952) had a clear influence on Samwell’s designs for The Grange.

An Oxford graduate, Pratt had entered the Inner Temple in 1639. Helped by a small legacy, he spent the years 1643-49 travelling in Italy, France and the Low Countries, avoiding civil war at home and getting himself what he called ‘some convenient education’ abroad. He graduated from the faculty of law in Padua in 1645 but his tour had been more an education in architecture than in law.

As a practitioner, his advice to clients was simple: Resolve with yourself what house will be answerable to your purse and estate, then if you be not able to

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handsomely contrive it yourself, get some ingenious gentleman who has seen much of that kind abroad and been somewhat versed in the best authors of Architecture: viz. Palladio, Scamozzi, Serlio etc. to do it for you and to give you a design of it on paper.

The years following the Civil War marked a watershed in the history of domestic architecture. When Pratt remodelled Coleshill House, his first task was to remove the medieval Great Hall, a communal feeding place that had become redundant in an age when a newly educated class required private living spaces for private living. At Coleshill, Pratt replaced the Great Hall with an elegant doubleheight entrance hall and his pièce de résistance, a staircase, designated ‘imperial’, which rose in a single flight to a halflanding where it swept back on itself and advanced left and right in two symmetrical flights to the first floor.

Samwell’s Grange had just such a hall and imperial staircase. It was also, like Coleshill, a so-called ‘doublepile’ structure: the form (four rooms of equal height on each of two floors) which Inigo Jones had introduced into England in the early years of the century.

Pratt’s principal preoccupations were proportion, circulation, and how best, in Britain’s gloomy climate, to bring light into the main body of a Palladian house.

To assist circulation, he favoured the idea of a central corridor running the length of the house at right angles to the entrance hall, whilst simultaneously removing smaller rooms to the periphery of the cube. As to light, this was introduced into the centre of the house via a cupola placed above the main stairwell. For the servants, whose sleeping quarters were now at the top of the house and whose work was concentrated in the basement area, Pratt provided dormered attics and a half-sunk basement whose windows could admit light from their upper halves. Evidence of all these features can be found in what remains of Samwell’s Grange, either in surviving structures or in features which can be deduced from forensic study of the carcase of the 1809 conversion.

In addition to its entrance hall, staircase and corridor, Samwell’s ground floor contained an eating parlour, a drawing-room, and ancillary closets on each of the four corners. The pattern was repeated on the first floor, with a state bedroom above the drawing-room on

the house’s northern entrance side and a two-storied library above the eating parlour directly opposite on its southern garden side.

Samwell built his house in red brick with facings in Portland stone. A visitor in 1719 described it as ‘a neat brick house pleasantly situated being all surrounded by trees so that it cannot be seen till you come close to it’. A fuller memory appears in John Duthy’s Sketches of Hampshire published in 1839: It was a square building of brick, forming a considerable mansion for the residence of a country gentleman, and the times in which it was built. Externally it displayed little attempt at ornament. It contained some good apartments, tastefully and commodiously arranged according to the country habits of the gentlemen of that age: and the hall, without perhaps entirely justifying the extravagant eulogium bestowed on it by Horace Walpole, certainly possessed a graceful and pleasing character.

Walpole had described the hall and its imperial staircase as ‘beautiful models of the purest and most classic antiquity’.

Mr Henley’s delicate mansion

ParT One

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ABOVE: Piccadilly 1746 from John Rocque's map of London. Devonshire House "the pouting palace of princes" has been built. Cavendish House at the top of St James has been knocked down to make way for Albermarle Street. The hotel at the corner of Bolton Street is where Alexander Baring in 1820 would build Bath House OPPOSITE: 'The visit to Piccadilly; – or – a Prussian reception' by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey 12 July 1792

It was a desperate situation. Henry Drummond Snr, now in his 65th year, was also ailing. Anticipating his son’s death, he drafted a new will in which he honoured his request to make provision for Anne Drummond and the four grandchildren. Unfortunately, neither his own financial position, nor that of his son, was as robust as might have been supposed. The bank’s profits had soared in 1782 and again in 1791 but had dropped back dramatically in 1794. There was also a further complication. The bank’s statutes granted exclusive hereditary rights to the eldest grandson; there could be nothing for the siblings.

After Henry Drummond Snr’s death in June 1795, the executors concluded that, though there were insufficient personal assets to settle the two men’s accumulated debts, their ‘Real Property’ – their two London houses and the Grange estate – exceeded any claims that might be made against them. Anne Drummond had money of her own and, with judicious juggling, funds were found to secure the futures of the younger grandchildren. The winner in all this was the heir apparent, nine-year-old Henry Drummond.

To secure his inheritance, and to create income for the family until his coming of age in 1807, it was decided that The Grange should be leased.

The house and park were not long on the market.

George, Prince of Wales – recently married against his will to his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick – was looking for a shooting box to replace Kempshott House near Basingstoke. Not that seasonal field sports were the only thing the high-living and sexually predatory young man had in mind when looking for a secluded new place in the country. Mindful of the prince’s soaring debts, his advisers suggested putting the search out to competitive tender. But the prince ignored them. On 19 October 1795 he signed a 12-year-lease with the Drummond trustees at a hefty £900 per annum.

XXX

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The Grange transformed

ParT TWO

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RIGHT: George, Prince of Wales, 1792 by Richard Cosway (1742-1821).

Watercolour on ivory, mounted in a fine gold locket with a 'true-love' lock of plaited hair on the reverse suggesting that it was intended as a love-token for either Mrs Fitzherbert or Mrs Crouch, the Prince's lovers at the time.

National Portrait Gallery, London

The Prince of Wales’s relationship with The Grange was a somewhat on-off affair. In the spring of 1796 he called in Henry Holland, the architect of the prince’s lavish makeover of his London residence Carlton House and of the fledgling Brighton Pavilion, to assess the state of the place. Holland recommended repairing the roof leading, renewing the sash windows, repainting the exterior wood and ironwork, and carrying out minor renovations in the park. Yet no sooner was the work done than the prince attempted to rid himself of the place. After the Duke of St Albans declined to take it in 1797, The Grange was sub-let to Lord Lonsdale whose sister the Duchess of Bolton briefly took up residence.

In 1799 the prince returned and embarked on a fresh spending spree. New papers by Robson and Hull were hung in the principal rooms, carpets arrived from Kent & Luck, Morells were paid £500 for re-upholstery.

Bespoke statuary arrived by the cartload for the gallery, dining room and staircase, along with ‘two vase lamps with two burners each and shades, japanned and richly ornamented’ which later ended up in the Royal Pavilion.

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The partying in 1799-1800 was on a grand scale.

A larger than usual staff was retained and wine bill arrears topped £700. Yet by the autumn of 1800 the prince had grown tired of the place and left, taking all the recently imported furnishings with him. The harem of sisters he had kept at The Grange also left. Courtier and diarist Mrs Papendiek recalled, ‘The brother of the females was raised from groom to head of the stud stables and at his death buried with honours of the royal liveries and his sisters afterwards taken into the queen’s household as assistant dressers’.

The most important legacy of the prince’s brief involvement with The Grange comes in the form of the detailed inventory that was drawn up for the implementation of the lease in October 1795.

It survives in the Royal Archive at Windsor and has been meticulously transcribed by architectural historian Jane Geddes. As a record of the layouts and contents of Samwell’s house and of the Grange estate itself, it makes fascinating reading.

The preamble announces: Agree to let to George the capital mansion The Grange with offices stables outhouses coach house dove house erection and buildings to the same messuage with park garden pleasure grounds plantation sheep walks fields closes pieces of lands… After 12 years George will leave the estate in good repair that is to say dove house conservatory ice house and garden stocked and cropped as now maintaining fences walls and young plantation hay straw and fodder to be consumed on the estate and dung manure and compost to be laid and spread on the said premises… George will not make any alteration or addition to the building nor break up and convert to tillage the deer park or sheep down.

The inventory lists 400 deer, a dove house ‘well stocked’, ten swans, eight turtle doves, six canary birds, three peafowls, three boats on the water in good repair, and a sun-dial. The conservatory has 390 green house plants in pots (‘healthy’) and 94 roses. The list of produce from the two-acre kitchen garden is even more formidable:

The garden cropped as follows: 22 poles of spinach 150 bushels of potatoes 16 bushels of onions 30 bushels of carrots 1200 savoy cabbages 700 late cabbages 2000 early cabbages, 700 purple broccoli 700 cauliflower broccoli 2200 celery 660 brussel sprouts 1800 lettices of sorts 2600 endives garlick and shallots 8 beds of asparagus 8 rows of artichokes 10 poles of horse raddish 40 perches of strawberry land in the mead and 10 perches in the garden leeks parsnips and beet roots 60 perches of gooseberry and currant plants healthy ditto of raspberry of sorts 230 wall fruit trees upon the gardner’s house, farmhouse and garden walls of peaches nectarine pears plums vines and cherries in good condition 130 espalias of apples pears and plum trees 25 standard apples and plums ice house stocked, a meat wire safe on wheels.

After the prince’s departure the house and estate were overseen by Lord Henry Stuart, a young diplomat with local connections. It was Stuart’s death and that of his wife 11 days later in August 1809 which so upset William Cobbett. (A mutual interest in pointers had caused Stuart and Cobbett to strike up a friendship

The Grange transformed

ParT TWO

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Stratton Park

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John Sanderson’s 1731 design for the third Duke of Bedford was a Palladian mansion on a half-H plan with a piano nobile over a ground floor. The 15 bay south elevation was fronted by an Ionic four-column portico rising two storeys.

The fourth Duke who succeeded in 1732 and died in 1771, demolished the portico and the eastern 9 bays, lest Stratton Park’s attractions should induce his heirs to neglect the magnificence of Woburn which he had built 1748-61.

Although the Stratton bought by Francis Baring in 1801 was less than half of what it once was, there was still a direct resemblance to Palladio's villas.

Such villas were on a smaller scale. They were not places to live, more places to escape the heat of Venice or even working farmhouses. Porticos come and go but proportion remains.

Francis focused on just that: positions of the windows, shallow roof elevation and a general air of simplicity all of which inspired and entranced George Dance.

Hundreds of his meticulous drawings for Stratton Park, dated 1803-1806, are in the library at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

The Portico of Stratton Park Sanderson’s Palladian portico had stood on a base 12 feet above the ground with its pediment rising above the roofline. Dance’s Greek Doric portico grew out of the ground and was both practical, since it was a porte-cochère, and immensely dignified.

‘When a man has once got his name into a banking house, he rolls in money’ Jane Austen wrote in her teenage novel Lady Susan. She had been brought up five miles from Stratton and had moved to Bath the year before the Baring’s arrival.

Her friends at Dummer might well have entertained her with stories of the building of what was becoming a great conversation piece amongst the resident gentry. The Winchester Lodge of Stratton Park was also given a portico.

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ABOVE: c1867 The hatchment is for the first Baron Northbrook who had died in 1866. A hatchment would be displayed on the house for a year and then transferred to the church Winchester Museum Services RIGHT: Even the Winchester Lodge of Stratton Park was given a portico This photograph, supplied by the Winchester Museum Services, is by William Savage (1817-1887) who operated one of the earliest studios in Hampshire on the High Street in Winchester in the 1860s

The Grange transformed

ParT TWO

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ABOVE: Technical drawing of Ionic capital by George Dance LEFT / RIGHT: Hall of Entrance at Stratton Park BELOW: Drawing of gallery railing by George Dance INSET: Door and doorcase of breakfast room by George Dance

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LEFT / RIGHT: Watercolours by Caroline Waldegrave 1825

on 3 September 1811. Architect and patron were now related by marriage. Henry Drummond meanwhile had been gifted the parliamentary seat of Plympton Erle in Devon. In 1813 he successfully took through parliament an act ‘against embezzlement by bankers of securities entrusted to them for safe custody’ but resigned the same year, citing ill health. It would be 34 years before he returned to active politics.

Thomas Carlyle thought there was something of the saint about Drummond. (‘He was a singular mixture of all things – of the saint, the wit, the philosopher – swimming, if I mistake not, in an element of dandyism.’) There is evidence of this in his secular life: he was a humane and judicious employer of whom Cobbett remarked ‘I know no man in England more worthy of his estate’. But his religious beliefs bordered on the fanatical. It was these which began to take hold in his mid-20s and which were the principal reason why in 1816 he decided to sell The Grange.

Describing himself as ‘satiated with the frivolities of the fashionable world’ he announced that he planned to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He and his wife got no further than Geneva where Drummond fell in with the Scottish evangelist Robert Haldane whose campaign against Calvinist ministers who denied the divinity of Christ had already landed him in trouble with the authorities. Drummond took up the cause. In 1819 he co-founded the Continental Society whose aim was to evangelise continental Europe, rooting out not only the Roman Catholic faith but the Jewish and Muslim faiths too. Within these campaigns lay elements of the belief systems of the so-called ‘Catholic Apostolic’ church with which Drummond would later be closely associated.

Returning to England in 1819, Drummond purchased Albury Park in Surrey, enabling him to resume his role as an enlightened landowner whilst at the same providing a lavish study centre for his co-religionists.

It was there in 1826-27 that he hosted a series of conferences on unfulfilled biblical prophecies, from the apocalyptic (the Second Coming) to the more purely political (the return of the Jews to Palestine). As for

Drummonds Bank, the partners eventually bought Henry out. The much-touted heir to the dynasty showed little interest in banking and his dogma-driven anti-Semitism was a strategic embarrassment. (When Lionel Rothschild was admitted to the House of Commons Drummond denounced the event as ‘an intentional insult to that House and to Christianity’.)

Whatever Drummond thought about the success or otherwise of his transformation of The Grange, the experiment did not dim his enthusiasm for architectural innovation. Shortly after acquiring Albury Park he invited Augustus Pugin Snr to create a Gothic façade with a battlemented tower on its north-west corner; it survives to this day, complete with a corps de ballet of 63 exotic brick chimneys on the roof. At much the same time the spire of the medieval estate church was replaced by a cupola. In the late 1830s, Drummond resolved to decommission the church and build two new churches on the estate, one for the village, one for members of the Catholic Apostolic sect. William Wilkins, already in pain from the kidney disease which would eventually kill him, was brought back to advise on the changes. It was his last commissioned work. Once the new churches had been built, the decommissioned building was converted into a mortuary chapel for the Drummond family, a plain bare space to which the young Augustus Pugin was invited to provide a richly decorated south transept.

For the last dozen years of his life Drummond sat as MP for West Surrey, a Tory in name but in reality an admired maverick of no fixed political abode. After his death on 20 February 1860 his remains were interred in a memorial tomb beneath the south window of the Pugin chapel.

As for William Wilkins, he had died on 31 August 1839, the day of his 61st birthday, at his home in Lensfield Road, Cambridge: a neat brick villa to which, true to form, a small Doric portico had been added. It was demolished in 1955.

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The Grange transformed

ParT TWO

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part tHrEE

1817–1827 A new power in the land The arrival of The Barings and The making of The grange conservaTory

A new power in the land

ParT Three

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1817 — 1827

A new power in the land Henry Drummond set off to save the world; Alexander Baring, the man who in 1817 took up residence at The Grange, partly owned it. ‘It is not a very easy task to succeed in counteracting him,’ the Duke of Wellington wrote after the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. ‘He has to a certain degree the command of the money market of the world and feels his power.’ France’s Prime Minister the Duc de Richelieu – nobleman, diplomat, erstwhile officer in the Russian army, intimate of Tsar Alexander I, and the new Bourbon regime’s wisest counsellor – thought likewise. ‘There are six great powers in Europe: England, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia and Baring Brothers.’

N

ot that Alexander Baring’s influence was confined to Europe. His writ also ran large in the United States. In 1798, aged 25, he married Ann Louisa Bingham, the daughter of America’s wealthiest man, the Philadelphia-based banker and entrepreneur William Bingham, for whom Alexander had brokered a 1,225,000acre land deal in Maine. After completing the deal in 1795, Alexander had written to his father, ‘With every circumstance weighed and every object worth attention considered, I have closed this important bargain with the most perfect confidence of its being a most lucrative and secure investment’. This does not read like the language of a 22-year-old but Alexander was one of those children who are born old. ‘A rather heavy-looking young man with a hesitating manner but clear in his ideas and unassuming in his manners’ was how one contemporary described him. Those who did not care for this heavylooking gentleman with the shy manner and determined judgments thought him arrogant. In reality, he was merely a young financier of Protestant-German descent who was not easily taken in. (‘A complete Jacobinical brouillon’

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was how Alexander described one client to his father, adding ‘I advise you to hold tight reins with him’).

The Maine land deal was certainly secure, but by the time Barings extricated themselves from the investment 50 years later it had shown a negligible return. A far bigger success came in 1803, only weeks before France was once more at war with Britain, when Alexander masterminded the financing of the so-called ‘Louisiana purchase’: the Emperor Napoleon’s controversial sale, and the United States government’s equally controversial purchase, of a vast swathe of territory stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert’s Land in the north and from the Mississippi in the east to the rocky Mountains in the west.

Thomas Jefferson’s original intention had been to secure the Port of New Orleans for American trade at a cost of $10 million. In the end, he found himself doubling the size of the United States and doing so – such was Napoleon’s determination to sell – for a mere $15 million (about three cents an acre). Having promised to build five new canals with the proceeds, Napoleon spent the entire $15 million on financing of his planned invasion of Britain.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Advertisement: Perspecive view of the interior of a conservatory erected at The Grange, Hants. Thomas Clark, Metallic Hothouse Manufacturer, Lionel Street, Birmingham RIGHT: Alexander Baring, first Lord Ashburton, (1774-1848)

by Sir Thomas Lawrence c1836 The GranGe

A new power in the land

ParT Three

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RIGHT: Top: Section through the conservatory showing the construction of the beds and drainage Middle: Sketch plan of conservatory by Jones & Clark with opaque arch-roofed walkways and pitched glass over the beds. Also note the four columns inside which mirror the columns of the portico Lower: Plan showing the new conservatory and parterre 1826 in John Loudon’s Gardeners’ Magazine BELOW: The conservatory of Sandridge Park in 1933. Overlooking the River Dart, Sandridge was built in 1805

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ABOVE: Recently restored Camellia House at Wollaton Park, Nottingham also

by Jones & Clark. It has identical walks "under an arched covered way, formed of double plates of rolled iron between which is confined a stratum of air to prevent the escape of heat" Gardener's Magazine 1826 RIGHT: Londonderry House, Park Lane. View from the house into the conservatory.

A similar effect was achieved at The Grange. Photograph by Bedford Lemere & Co, 24 June 1886. Londonderry House was demolished in 1965 but there are wonderful photographs at http://viewfinder.english-heritage.org.uk/

In January 1823 Cockerell travelled to Lionel Street, Birmingham to discuss with Jones & Clark his plans for The Grange’s ‘place of perpetual spring’, its new conservatory. He thought Jones ‘a coxcombe but having judgm[en]t & taste’. Designs were discussed and an order placed.

The idea of a room where house and garden can make common cause, albeit in a controlled and cosseted form, was relatively new. John Nash and Humphrey Repton helped pioneer the idea and there were already fine examples, not the least in the lovely Italianate villa overlooking the River Dart at Sandridge in Devon which Nash had built in 1805 for Alexander Baring’s aunt Elizabeth Dunning, widow of Lord Ashburton of the first creation. Cockerell meanwhile would have been aware of the quietly beautiful ‘house and garden’ circular conservatory Thomas Hope had created at Deepdene in Surrey.

Like any good architect, Cockerell needed an idea that was imaginative in itself yet right for its context.

What was so remarkable about the design he now offered Alexander Baring was its daring juxtaposition of stateof-the-art engineering in cast-iron and glass with an

exquisitely ordered four-column (‘tetrastyle’) Ionic portico that both echoed the existing Doric east portico and helped humanise it. There was no question of the new portico upstaging the old. The two are beautifully scaled one to the other. Viewed from the lake, the one follows discreetly in the other’s footsteps, like a lion cub following the lion.

Cockerell’s new temple-cum-conservatory could be approached from one of three directions: from within the house, by the upper terrace which ran alongside the house or by a lower walk and steps in the garden beneath.

The Italianate gardens, which were integral to the 1824 plan, were also designed by Cockerell, the ‘ornamental scenery’ (as Gardeners’ Magazine put it) ‘partaking of the symmetry of [the building’s] architecture’.

The conservatory was not the first to be built in iron and glass – Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire appears to have had one the previous year – but as a design it was in a class of its own. With its three barrel-vaulted aisles separated from one another by a pair of ridge and furrow roofs, The Grange conservatory is often seen as a prototype for Joseph Paxton’s much larger Crystal Palace. If this was the case, it can be said to have distinguished progeny.

A new power in the land

ParT Three

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RIGHT: Decorative scheme 1830 for the staircase of The Grange by an unknown artist RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collection

What really happened will never be known. Bingham Baring cannot have been ‘badly injured’ since he was seen walking in Winchester the following day.

One witness, testifying under oath, said that Baring had received a glancing blow from the sledgehammer and that his hat had been knocked off. It was clearly a violent affray but it was by no means proven that 19-year-old Henry Cook, the lad wielding the sledgehammer who was later tried and sentenced to death, was deliberately attempting to kill Baring. It was not the rioters’ way.

Unfortunately Cook could not have chosen a worse place to make the assault than on land owned by Alexander Baring. He had inveighed against mob rule in the House of Commons and had his windows at Bath House smashed for his pains. Bingham Baring was a shy, scholarly man who is said to have been appalled by the boy’s fate and made ineffectual attempts to intervene.

Alexander, by contrast, was both a follower of the Duke of Wellington and a friend of leading members of the new hard-line Grey coalition.

Cook was brought to trial locally. Wellington himself attended in his capacity as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire and the prosecution was led by the AttorneyGeneral Sir Thomas Denham. Dozens of rioters were brought before the court yet there was a special focus on Cook. The Times and a number provincial papers helped orchestrate the proceedings by printing lurid reports of the event, describing how Cook allegedly … struck down with a sledgehammer one of the family of his benefactor; repeated the blow; and but that he was prevented by one more faithful than himself, an individual whose arm was broken in the attempt to save the victim, a valuable life might have been lost to the community.

Denham quoted The Times report in parliament and again at the trial, even though one of Baring’s servants gave evidence to the contrary. The local community was

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devastated when the death sentence was handed down, though The Times’s informant remained unrepentant: The fate of Henry Cook excites no commiseration. From everything I have heard of him, Justice has seldom met with a more appropriate sacrifice. He shed some tears shortly after hearing his doom, but has since relapsed into a brutal insensibility to his fate.

The matter would have ended there were it not for that fact that Cook’s case became caught up later that same year in the Grey administration’s unsuccessful attempt to prosecute William Cobbett for seditious libel.

In a number of cases which had come before the courts, the defendants had named Cobbett as their inspiration.

One such was the career criminal Thomas Goodman who had been sentenced to death for repeatedly firing stacks and barns near Battle in Sussex where Cobbett had held a rally on 30 October. In January 1831, as Goodman awaited execution, a series of written confessions were extracted from him. The last of these appeared in The Times on 7 January. In it Goodman claimed that Cobbett’s Battle lecture had ‘made a verrey great imprision on me and so inflamed my mind that I from that moment was determined to set stacks on fire’.

Shortly afterwards Goodman was granted a royal pardon and his death sentence commuted to transportation by Lord Melbourne, an amiable man of letters who had been brought into the Home Office to enforce the new ‘law and order’ policy.

During his own trial, Cobbett argued that the Goodman case had been manipulated by the government in an attempt to incriminate Cobbett. He told the court: It is a very curious thing, that a man whom it was clearly proved had been guilty of five fires from private malice should be pardoned, while the life of poor Cook was taken, who did nothing but strike the rim of the hat of a man who had five relations having votes in Parliament… Here was

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schoolmistress, and most of the servants were ranged on one side. Lord and Lady Ashburton, the Rector with his wife and two daughters, and the Carlyles helped dispense the presents. Carlyle had asked for a present of his own, a jigsaw of the world. ‘Thomas Carlyle, the scholar!’ called out Lady Ashburton, as the great man was summoned to claim his prize. Afterwards mummers performed – ‘country lads in paper dresses’ – and the visitors were served mugs of tea with chunks of currant cake. It was a fine occasion though Jane was shocked at how parsimonious the Ashburtons were:

LEFTT: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) salt print by Robert S Tait 1855 National Portrait Gallery, London

The whole thing had a very fine effect – and might have given occasion for a laudatory newspaper paragraph, but one reflection that I could not help making rather spoiled it for me – viz: that the whole forty-eight presents had cost just 2 pounds twelve and sixpence; having been bought in the Lowther Arcade, the most rubbishy place in London – with a regard of expense that would have been meritorious in the like of us but which seemed to me – what shall I say? – incomprehensible – in a person with an income of £40,000 a year – and who gives balls at the cost of £700 each, or will spend £100 on a china jar! – I should have liked each child to have got at least a frock given it – when one was going to look munificent. But everyone has his own notions on spending money.

The Carlyles stayed at The Grange throughout that Christmas season. In the week before Christmas guests included Macaulay, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Charles Wood, Earl Grey, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and his wife, and the Humphrey Mildmays.

After the servants’ ball on Boxing Day evening (a rowdy affair which ended at six in the morning), a fresh fleet of carriages arrived bearing, among others, Thackeray and the ‘riotous’ Miss Farrar, a family friend with a reputation for being ‘good with children’.

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RIGHT: One of the earliest photographs of the Grange probably dating from 1860.

It is from an album collected by Derek Sherborn (1924-2004) an Inspector of Historic Buildings with the Ministry of Works and Department of the Environment.

His extensive archive of photograph albums was passed to English Heritage by the Soane Museum in 2005. The identity of people in these early photographs is uncertain. This is possibly Louisa, William Bingham's second wife, with their nephew Alexander Hugh (in his twenties) and estate staff. Note Alexander's posture and the posture adopted in the photographic portraits in Part Six

Since Carlyle was determined ‘to see an aristocratic ball’, he and Jane were invited to one of the summer balls at Bath House. Carlyle’s ‘puir wee girlie’ expressed horror at having to appear scantily clad ‘after being muffled up for so many years’. A white silk dress was acquired and cut down ‘to the due pitch of indecency’.

I could have gone into fits of crying when I began to put it on – but I looked astonishingly well in it by candle light, and when I got into the fine rooms amongst the universally bare people I felt so much in keeping, that I forgot my neck and arms almost immediately.

I was glad after that I went – not for any pleasure I had at the time, being past dancing, and knowing but few people – but it is an additional idea for life, to have seen such a party – all the Duchesses one ever heard tell of blazing in diamonds, all the young beauties of the season, all the distinguished statesmen &c., &c. were to be seen among six or seven hundred people present – and the rooms all hung with artificial roses looked like an Arabian Nights entertainment. What pleased me best was the good look I got into the eyes of the old Duke of Wellington – one has no notion, seeing him in the streets, what a dear kind face he has. Lady Ashburton receiving all these people with her grand-Lady airs was also a sight worth seeing.

XXX In the winter of 1856-57, Harriet became more than usually unwell. She travelled to the South of France but was taken ill in Paris during her return journey in early May. The royal physician Sir James Clark attended and expressed no great alarm. (He would later miss Prince Albert’s typhoid.) Lord Ashburton was to have been in Paris but had been asked by Harriet to look out a house in St Leonard’s to which she might go if she felt the need.

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He went and took the house and so did not get to Paris till the Monday, when she had been dead two hours! I have never heard of so easy a death! She was dressing about four o’clock, felt faint and sent for Dr Rous. He told her in answer to her question ‘what is this?’ ‘you are going to faint, it is nothing; you mustn’t mind these faintnesses’.

He put his arm round to support her, she clasped her hands over his other arm, leant her forehead on his shoulder, gave a sigh, and was dead!

The funeral took place at Northington Church eight days later on 12 May. The Hampshire Advertiser reported:

As for the ball itself:

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A gossipy letter by Jane Carlyle takes up the story:

FUNERAL OF LADY ASHBURTON. – The death of Lady Ashburton has cast a deep gloom on the whole of this and the surrounding neighbourhood and her loss will be severely and deeply felt, as she was loved and respected by all who knew her. The funeral took place on Tuesday last at Northington Church and was attended by family mourners and friends As well as members of the Baring family, the mourners included ‘Lord Granville, Lord Aylesbury, Lord Dufferin, Mr Thackery [sic], Mr Carlisle [sic]’. The funeral procession left The Grange in solemn order at noon: Mr Benham, Bailiff Labourers Tradesmen and Mechanics Architect and Builder The Rev. Thomas Clarke of Popham Plumes and Feathers Mourning coaches, with mourners Ditto with friends Household servants

The service was conducted by the Rector who spoke of ‘the singular felicity that had been accorded to [Lord Ashburton] in love through years of happiness in the companionship of this gifted woman’. The Dean of Westminster, Richard Chenevix Trench, presided ‘at the vault’.

XXX With his beloved Harriet gone, Carlyle speculated, ‘I don’t think Lord Ashburton will marry again but I won’t answer for his not letting himself be married’. Jane put the matter rather more sharply: I expect some scheming woman will marry him – not because he is likely to care for anybody but because he does not know what to do with himself and would be glad that someone took the trouble of him off his hands.

The ‘scheming woman’ whom the 59-year-old Lord Ashburton married in November 1858 was the 31-year-old Louisa Stewart-Mackenzie. Lady Palmerston thought the marriage ‘a great pity’, not least because the second

wife seemed so very different from the first. She could not have been more wrong. By the most agreeable of chances, a young woman had strayed into Lord Ashburton’s life who in looks, manner, temperament and the capacity for love proved to be uncommonly like Harriet. Chronic ill-health dogged the final five years of Lord Ashburton’s life, yet it was a deeply happy time for him. Even Jane was won over. By the time of her own death in 1866 she had come to adore the second Lady Ashburton in way that had never quite been the case with the first.

Like Harriet, Louisa was a physically imposing woman, effusive, outspoken, and possessed of an easy mastery of the artistic and political worlds which she had known since her teenage years. She was, it has to be said, a more manipulative creature than Harriet. She was also more widely admired by other women, some older, some younger, several of whom were in love with her. It was a whirling world at whose still centre Lord Ashburton once again found himself.

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LEFT: Hugues Bernard Maret, Duc de Bassano (1763-1839) RIGHT: 'The gout' by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey 14 May 1799

from London. It was a successful intervention, though it was Louisa not Quain whom Ashburton praised: ‘I am alive and owing to Loo. She does not belie the race she sprang from and rises above the heroic’.

In the spring of 1862 Louisa again became pregnant but suffered a miscarriage. Her grief was as much on her husband’s and her ailing mother’s behalf as on her own.

Unable to face another English winter, the Ashburtons resolved to leave for the South of France in late October.

It proved a disaster. The large party of family and servants travelled via Paris where Lord Ashburton was immediately taken ill. Maysie was sent south but Lord Ashburton and his attendants were stranded in Paris for eight months, first on the mezzanine floor of a hotel, later at a rented house in the rue des Bassins. By November his life was despaired of (‘gout all over, dropsy, lungs and liver both affected’). As word of his illness spread, tributes and letters flooded in from all quarters. Carlyle was at his most grandiloquent:

God go with you, guileless, brave and valiant man, who have accompanied me in my Pilgrimage so far, and been friendly to me like a Brother; whom I shall soon follow.

Farewell! Yours and his, faithful till I also die.

Queen Victoria expressed sympathy, asked for news and later sent an inscribed copy of the late Prince Consort’s Principal Speeches and Addresses, a curious offering in the circumstances. Thinking to cheer Lady Ashburton, Napoléon III loaned Louisa his imperial box at the Théâtre des Variétés. She also had the use of Mrs Francis Baring’s box at the Opéra. The daughter of Hugues Bernard Maret, Duc de Bassano, a minister in Napoleon’s government, Hortense had married Francis, the wildly attractive black sheep of the Baring brood, in Paris in 1832.

As Lord Ashburton lay on what many took to be his death-bed, Louisa received a laconically worded telegram from the butler at Brahan Castle. ‘The lady died here this morning.’ The death of her mother was a profound blow to Louisa. As Virginia Surtees writes in her biography of Louisa, The Ludovisi Goddess:

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RIGHT: By the conservatory portico c1860. From the Sherborn album (see page 108). Again identities are not certain. Probably Alexander Hugh, who would become fourth Lord Ashburton, holding a Border terrier which appears in other Sherborn photographs. The woman could be Louisa, Lady Ashburton, or one of his uncle's sisters

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BELOW: Xx RIGHT: Xx

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LEFT: Alexander Hugh, fourth Lord Ashburton, detested extravagence and was horrified by his sister's use of a barouche with four horses and postilions.

This is an equally stylish traveller at The Grange c1860, possibly his father's sister Louisa of whom he said "she thought the wolf was at the door if she had less than ÂŁ16,000 in her current account"

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ABOVE: Game books This page, bottom left, January 1889. Alexander, fourth Lord Ashburton, was on his new yacht, Miranda. Frank, his eldest son, had Viscount Hood join the party.

He would marry Hood's daughter, Mabel, a few months later.

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ABOVE: Top left, October 1889. Alexander died in July and Frank, fifth Lord Ashburton, signs himself A

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~

One Hundred Households

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1871

The 1871 census gives an insight into lives around The Grange. The Norfolk-born households would have come to Hampshire when the fourth Lord Ashburton sold his Norfolk property in 1869.

There are families in this census written about by Aurea, daughter of the fifth Lord Ashburton, 20 years later in the 1890s.

XXX

RIGHT: Above: Harvesting and gleaning at Newdown Farm near Micheldever, 1871.

After the harvest, women and young children gather any remaining corn into small bundles Below: Estate workers outside the conservatory, August 1870

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No 11 Thomas Renison Ann Renison Charlotte Renison Caroline Renison Charles Renison William Renison Elizabeth Renison George Hains William Cheairs Henry Batcher Charles Hains

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Head Wife Daughter Daughter Son Son Daughter Lodger Lodger Lodger Lodger

39 42 11 10 7 5 2 20 20 19 16

Carter

No 12 Newhouse cottage William Bell Head Helen Bell Wife William Rowland Lodger

31 29 27

Carter

No 13 William Collis Margarum Collis William Collis Alfred Collis Edward Butler

Head Wife Son Grandson Lodger

64 62 26 16 35

Shepherd

No 14 Northington Down lodge Joseph Hall Head Maria Hall Wife

60 58

Gamekeeper

Candover Hampshire Southampton Hampshire

No 15 Northington Farm cottage John Pebworth Head Ellen Pebworth Wife

40 31

Farm bailiff

Caston Hampshire Caston Hampshire

Carter Carter Carter Carter

Painter

Painter

Brown Candover Hampshire Stratton Hampshire Stratton Hampshire Stratton Hampshire Northington Hampshire Northington Hampshire Northington Hampshire Mitcheldever Hampshire Stratton Hampshire Bighton Hampshire Mitcheldever Hampshire

E Stratton Hampshire Mitcheldever Hampshire Sour Brent Devon

Candover Hampshire Candover Hampshire Northington Hampshire Northington Hampshire Isle of Wight, Newport

No 16 Northington Down Farm John Mask Head 30 Farmer of 1385 acres employing 35 men and 11 boys

Montacute Somerset

Julia Mask John Mask James S Mask Hedley F Mask Annie M Mask Anna J Gard Fanny Grace Cornelia Coward Ruth Russell Caroline Weeks

Netherbury Dorset Northington Hampshire ditto ditto ditto Mortock Somerset Westbury Wiltshire Handley Dorset Twyford Hampshire Somborne Hampshire

Wife Son Son Son Daughter Visitor Servant Servant Servant

35 5 4 3 1 24 21 22 21 26

Governess Cook Housemaid Nursemaid

No 17 Northington Down cottage William Lewis Head Elizabeth Lewis Wife Amy Young Niece

45 41 1

Carter

No 18 Henry Haskell Caroline C Haskell James J Haskell Harry Haskell William Haskell Horatia Haskell Matilda Haskell

43 44 16 11 9 6 3

Groom and gardener

Head Wife Son Son Son Son Daughter

Farm servant

Caston Hampshire Twyford Hampshire London Middlesex

Mitchelworth Hampshire Hursley Hampshire Hursley Hampshire Shidfield Hampshire Shidfield Hampshire Shidfield Hampshire Stoke Charity Hampshire

No 19 William Cross Ann Cross

Head Wife

74 74

Laborer

Northington Hampshire Aldbourne Wiltshire

No 20 Stephen Allen

Lodger

72

Lab

Kings Worthy Hampshire

No 21 Dower House James Cottrell Ann Cottrell Charles Cottrell Henry R Napier Jane Benwell Serena J Pitha

Head Wife Son Grandson Lodger Visitor

82 74 61 2 86 13

Lab

Woolstone Berkshire Swarraton Hampshire Northington Hampshire Northington Hampshire Swarraton Hampshire Reading Berkshire

No 22 David Hall Anne Hall Henry Hall

Head Wife Grandson

79 69 10

No 23 Frances Leach Caroline Smith

Head Sister

57 47

Field Laborer

No 24 James Littlefield Jane Littlefield Sarah Linwood

Head Wife Sister-in-law

38 37 48

Gardener

No 25 Charles Gainsther HarrietGainsther Henry Gainsther Rose Gainsther Laura Gainsther Ellen Garnester Harriet Garnester Charles Garnester Frank Garnester Lydia Garnester

Head Wife Son Daughter Daughter Daughter Daughter Son Son Daughter

No 26 Aaron Astridge Eliza Astridge George Byfield Frede Kneller

Head Wife Boarder Boarder

42 39 15 13 11 9 7 5 2 6 mth

45 47 21 13

Lab

Laundress

Sawyer Bricklayer’s lab

Laborer Laborer

Candover Hampshire Hursley Hampshire Northington Hampshire

Swarraton Hampshire Swarraton Hampshire

Woodmancote Hampshire Woodmancote Hampshire

Sutton Scotney Hampshire Easton Hampshire Itchen Stoke Hampshire Itchen Stoke Hampshire Itchen Stoke Hampshire Northington Hampshire ditto ditto ditto ditto

Northington Hampshire Leckford Hampshire Shotton Hampshire Bishton Hampshire

Alexander, the fourth Lord Ashburton, established a new carpenters' shop, wood yard and forges to facilitate the work of maintaining fences and driveways, lodges and cottages No 27 Thomas North Elizabeth Ganaway George Page Hampshire William Browning No 28 Jane Thompson Jane Thompson John Thompson Frederic Thompson Frank Thompson

Head Housekeeper Lodger

59 51 21

Blacksmith master Blacksmith

Northington Hampshire Lewes Sussex South Warnborough

Lodger

20

Blacksmith

Cheriton Hampshire

Head Daughter Son Son Son

53 28 19 16 14

Ag Lab Lab

Northington Hampshire Northington Hampshire Northington Hampshire ditto ditto

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Trains & C ars

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The railways were arriving. The line between London and Southampton was completed in 1840 with the opening of the Basingstoke to Winchester section including Micheldever Station.

On their honeymoon in 1864 Leonora and Alexander had used a train and “a fly from the station” to visit William Bingham, the second Lord Ashburton at The Grange. Micheldever station’s wide canopy was to accommodate such horsedrawn carriages.

In 1895 The The Hon. Evelyn Ellis transported his Daimler-engined PanhardLevassor, across the channel and then by train to Micheldever Station where he received delivery on the platform. Ellis then made the first automobile journey in Britain, driving the vehicle to Datchet, and testing an Act of Parliament that required all self-propelled vehicles on public roads to travel at no more than 4 mph and to be preceded by a man waving a red flag.

Ellis was not arrested and the Act was repealed in 1896.

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RIGHT: Micheldever station 1873

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ABOVE / RIGHT: Sketches by Mabel of her children

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~

The Diamond Jubilee Ball

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1897

Mabel and Frank were invited in 1897 to the magnificent Diamond Jubilee Ball at Devonshire House.

From The Times Of all the private entertainments for which the Jubilee has provided the occasion, none is comparable with the magnificent fancy dress ball given last night at Devonshire House by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Amid all the public excitements of the last few weeks, when the world, one might have thought, has been sufficiently occupied with the procession, the two reviews, and the garden party, the inner circle of what is still called society has preserved in the background of its mind an anxious preoccupation - namely, how it was to appear at Devonshire House, supposing it was fortunate enough to be asked. Never in our times has so much attention been paid to old family pictures, never have the masterpieces of portraiture in the National Gallery been so carefully studied, while for weeks past the Print-room at the British Museum, commonly given up to quiet students, has been invaded by smart ladies and gentlemen anxious to search the prints and drawings of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries for something in which they could obey the Duchess's summons to appear "in an allegorical or historical costume dated earlier than 1820". Never in our time have the costumiers been so busy, and the houses so well-known to everybody who has ever organized private theatricals, such as Messrs. John Simmons, of the Haymarket, Messrs Nathan, and Messrs Alias, have been driven distracted with orders and counterorders. As usual on such occasions, the gentlemen, it is said, have proved far more exacting than the ladies; for the stronger sex, when once it makes up its mind to desert the sobriety of plain broadcloth, knows no limit to its requirements or to its suddenly developed fastidiousness. But, whatever may have been the anxieties and the difficulties of the preparation, there can be no doubt as to the splendour and beauty of the result.

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ABOVE: The Hatching Book. Brown and Chalk are photographed opposite.

H Baveridge is in the 1871 census, age 5, living at No18 Swarraton

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~

For Sale by Auction

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1932

At The George Hotel, Winchester on Monday June 20th, 1932 at 2.30 pm In 1 or 55 Lots

ABOVE: The Entrance Hall c1910. Photograph by Newton & Co

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~

Winter ď ¸

1943

ABOVE: Ionic portico with spectacular chinese vases

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The Wallach Years

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RIGHT: Ionic portico 1963 BELOW: Smoking room 1963 FOLLOWING PAGES: A guest walking from the dining room to the conservatory would walk through this ante-room with its ornate cupola. August 1963

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LEFT: From the Sale Particulars 16 November 1964 3pm at the Royal Hotel, Winchester RIGHT: Charles Saumerez-Smith in the Ionic portico, 6 September 1979

In 1969 Baring submitted a new request for permission to demolish. Hampshire County Council indicated that this would be forthcoming, but a plea from Pevsner, Lord Kennet and others that the building be taken into guardianship by the government caused the application to be referred to the Historic Buildings Council. It was to no avail. The Council acknowledged that The Grange was ‘unique and superb, with a spectacular beauty’ but gave five reasons why it could not advise the Minister of Housing and Local Government to exercise his rights in the case. (i)

The building’s advanced state of disrepair and the high cost of putting this right. (ii) Its immense size and the lack of any known source of financial support. (iii) The unattractiveness of all but one of the interiors. (iv) The owner’s desire to demolish. (v) The distance of the house from any public road.

On 17 July 1970 permission to demolish was granted by Hampshire County Council, who, having gone through

the procedures, were not greatly amused to receive a letter from the new Conservative Minister of State ‘regretting the decision to allow demolition’. That same year an eloquent brief essay on The Grange by J. Mordaunt Crook appeared in a Festschrift for Sir John Summerson. On the essay’s final page the author observed that ‘this short account of Grange Park may well have to serve as its obituary’. It was not to be. But there, for the time being, the matter rested.

XXX Had John Baring immediately called in the bulldozers or, as was rumoured at the time, ordnance from the Royal Engineers, the building would have been demolished.

Or most of it. It had always been Baring’s intention to retain ‘as a sort of memorial folly’ Cockerell’s smaller Ionic portico and the building behind it. The fact that he did not act immediately was certainly due in part to his wife Susan. Having spent the early part of her marriage coping with the upheaval caused by the demolition and rebuilding of Stratton Park, she had never been overly

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LEFT: Ceiling of the double-height entrance hall 1970 RIGHT: Dining room 1970

A letter from Cambridge academic Peter Inskip stressed the building’s relationship to its landscape. ‘It is the combination of the Regency landscape and the Greek temple that makes Grange Park the epitome of the English marriage of Neo-Classicism and Romanticism.’ Another correspondent, Anthony Jaggard, recalled that both the National Trust and the government had, on various occasions since the 1930s, refused to accept the house into its care. He also questioned the view that The Grange was the unique work of neo-classical art its supporters claimed: Many gifted architects worked on the Grange, but each compromised with his predecessor and it is not and never has been the unique work of neo-classical art that was to be found in the Euston propylaeum and is still to be found at Belsay Castle in Northumberland.

Lurking in the long grass was the question, to what extent does a man have the right to do as he pleases with his own land and property? The Times gave little space to the question, confining itself to a single letter accusing Baring of putting self before society.

Interesting as these letters were, their impact was as nothing to a telegram, simultaneously released to the press, sent by the Council of Europe to Prime Minster Edward Heath at midnight on 7 September: The Council of Europe wishes to express its deep concern at the imminent destruction of one of Europe’s great Neo-Classical monuments in Britain, Grange Park. We earnestly hope that a solution will be found which will keep [it] for future generations of Europeans.

With the United Kingdom shortly to join the EEC, it was an early indication of Europe’s proprietorial interest in its new partner.

The Council’s intervention at Prime Ministerial level, and the opening of its exhibition The Age of NeoClassicism two days later, forced John Baring’s hand.

He called in architects Hugh Casson and Francis Pollen and asked them to look afresh at the building and conduct a survey as to what might be involved in leaving a ‘romantic ruin’ on a rather scale larger than the one he had originally envisaged. He told The Times

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LEFT: The gallery cupola 1981 BELOW: Picture gallery 1982

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RIGHT: Staircase 1979 BELOW: Staircase 1871

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part NINE

1997–1998 The making of Grange Park Opera

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1997 — 1998

The making of Grange Park Opera ‘If you’re going into Hampshire,’ said the Countess of Selborne ‘you must talk with the Barings. For anything to do with Hampshire, the Barings are important.’ It sounds like an exchange in a novel by Anthony Trollope but as Wasfi Kani will tell you it happened in 1997 and was the chance remark which took her to The Grange.

W

hat makes the story doubly curious is that as she talked with Lord and Lady Ashburton over supper one August evening in 1997 there was no thought of The Grange being the venue for the new summer opera festival which she and her colleague Michael Moody were planning. A deal had been all but finalised with Tim and Sarah Watkins the owners of Coles near Petersfield, the 26-acre rhododendron- and azalea-rich garden in which lay a disused flint quarry ripe for conversion into a small open-air theatre.

It had been an eventful year. In April Coles Opera had been established in principle under the chairmanship of Sir David Davies, the banking world’s most sought-after arts adviser. During June and early July Wasfi conducted seven performances of Haydn’s I pescatrici at Garsington, the country house opera festival she had managed for the past four years, including an opening night during which disaffected locals attempted unsuccessfully to disrupt proceedings with a cacophony of lawnmowers, motor

horns and low-flying aircraft. On 10 July the Coles Opera board met to agree timescales and project budgets.

Then, in mid-September, the project foundered.

The lease had not been finalised and it was decided to go back to square one: finding a venue.

As the dust settled, it was Sally Ashburton who said ‘What about using The Grange?’. It was a generous thought but a daunting one. The Coles negotiation had been simplicity itself in comparison with what would be required at The Grange, a reclassified Grade 1 listed building which Lord Ashburton owned and English Heritage managed and protected. Still, the idea was too tempting to let go. On 9 October Wasfi Kani wrote to David Davies, ‘Of the [various possibilities], The Grange interests me most; it is a very important building, there is a real prospect of opera taking place inside, there are no neighbours, no one lives there’.

PREVIOUS PAGE: 2001 Così fan tutte RIGHT: The Doric portico is used as the opera champagne bar 1998

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ABOVE: 2011 Tristan und Isolde LEFT: 2006 Elixir of Love BELOW: 2004 The Enchantress

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RIGHT: 2010 Tosca BELOW: 2010 Tosca

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People who made the opera happen XXX

First tem ple Donald Kahn & family John & Anya Sainsbury Michael Spencer Simon & Virginia Robertson The Geoff & Fiona Squire Foundation

Ian Rosenblatt & Emma Kane Richard & Victoria Sharp Ed & Lulu Siskind Paul & Rita Skinner Johnny, Marie & Anne Veeder

Thir d tem ple Second temple The Clore Duffield Foundation Sir David Davies Ronnie Frost & family Lord Harris of Peckham Lydia & Miles d’Arcy-Irvine The Carphone Warehouse Sir Christopher Ondaatje Sarah & Tony Bolton James Cave David & Elizabeth Challen William & Kathy Charnley Jane & Paul Chase-Gardener Hamish, Sophie, Ismay, Ottilie & Cecilia Forsyth Simon Freakley Mr & Mrs William Friedrich William Garrett Gazprom Marketing & Trading Malcolm Herring James Hudleston Geoffrey & Caroline de Jager Neil & Elizabeth Johnson Laurent-Perrier Champagne David & Amanda Leathers James & Béatrice Lupton Elizabeth Morison Richard & Chrissie Morse Cameron & Heike Munro Francis & Nathalie Phillimore

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The GranGe

Mr & Mrs Gerald Acher Mr & Mrs David Anderson Mark Andrews Mr & Mrs R Atkinson–Willes The Band Trust Baring Asset Management Tom & Gay Bartlam Mr & Dr J Beechey Christina & Timothy Benn Rupert T Bentley Nic Bentley Kevin & Corinne Bespolka William, Judith, Douglas & James Bollinger Mr & Mrs Paul Brewer Duca di Bronte Mr & Mrs Tony Bugg The Bulldog Trust Tom Busher & Elizabeth Benson Mrs Peter Cadbury Sir Euan Calthorpe Bt Christopher & Katie Cardona Nigel & Elisabeth Carrington David & Simone Caukill Bernard Cayser Trust Sir Peter & Lady Cazalet Mr & Mrs Bernard Cazenove Samantha & Nabil Chartouni CHI & Partners Pam Clarke Alastair & Tiana Collett Oliver & Cynthia Colman

GRANGE PARK OPERA