Innholdsfortegnelse for November 6, 2024 i Country Life

The Northern Court Lathom House and Knowsley Hall, Lancashire THOMAS STANLEY, 1st Earl of Derby, was the stepfather of Henry VII, having married as his second wife Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, in 1482. He famously switched allegiance on Bosworth Field in 1485, swaying the outcome of the battle and handing the throne to Henry Tudor. His reward was commensurate. He was created Earl of Derby two months later, on October 27, 1485, and laden with royal offices and confiscated Yorkist lands to augment his already substantial revenues and holdings. His elevation to an earldom and the close association to the new dynasty anointed the rise of the Stanleys, by origin a knightly family from the Staffordshire-Cheshire border and Lords of Man from 1405. The 1st Earl was referred…

‘A whispering and watery Norfolk soundTelling of all the moonlit reeds around’Sir John Betjeman, from ‘Norfolk’ (1954) BROAD—as in a large sheet of water. Open, expansive. The Norfolk Broads were discovered in 1952—or, rather, in that year they were shown to be medieval peat diggings that had flooded and were not, as assumed, a natural phenomenon. It was in this year—the same one in which George VI died and Elizabeth II became Queen—that archaeologists Dr Joyce Lambert and J. N. Jennings took 2,000 core samples across various broads. Each and every site proved to be vast pits 10ft or 15ft deep. Even by 21st-century standards, when mechanical excavators can dig 50 tons of earth per scoop, the Broads are big holes. Something in the region of 900 million cubic feet…

ANDERSON shelters, more than 3.5 million of which were dug into the back gardens of British homes during the Second World War as a last line of defence against the Luftwaffe’s deadly bombing raids, offer an exemplar of this country’s indomitable spirit of fortitude and pragmatism. Not only did they provide an economical, no-nonsense way for Britons to turn a ‘stiff upper lip’ to Hitler’s existential threat to everything we hold near and dear—they also, rather handily, afforded the opportunity for doing a nice spot of gardening at the same time. Named after Sir John Anderson, the Lord Privy Seal in charge of air-raid precautions (ARP), these 6ft 6in long by 4ft 6in wide by 6ft high tubular shelters were made from curved sheets of corrugated iron, crudely bolted together…

GÉRARD DE NERVAL, the romantic poet, had a pet lobster called Thibault, which he took for walks on a blue silken lead. Crassus, the Roman orator, dressed his pet eel with jewellery ‘just like it was some lovely maiden’. Lord Byron, forbidden by Trinity College, Cambridge, to bring his dog into college, brought in a tame bear instead and took it to lectures. The Marquis de Lafayette was devoted to a pet alligator. Edmund Kean, the actor, shared his house in London’s Clarges Street with a lion. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s house in Cheyne Walk, SW3, was home to dozens of animals (‘who were disruptive, noisy and sometimes escaped causing havoc in the neighbourhood’), but his favourite was a wombat called Top. The grand eunuch Zheng He of China had several…

Shop of the month The Lacquer Company, 6, Newson’s Yard, SW1 JUST off Pimlico Road in Newson’s Yard—a former Victorian timber yard, that has recently been redeveloped as a design destination by the Grosvenor estate—The Lacquer Company is a one-room shop devoted to every incarnation of lacquer you could dream up and plenty that would never cross your mind. There are waste-paper bins and umbrella holders in every colour, potted orchids settled into trays with wavy edges and a low-slung ‘telephone table’ on casters, ready to roll behind you as you chat on the landline. Many of the details, once you lean in, are playful: a circular dining table, topped with a hale asparagus fern, is supported by bamboo-shaped legs and a pencil pot has battlements along its top, like…

The garden at The Old Vicarage, Wormingford, Essex The home of Jeremy Allen THE ancient village of Wormingford perches on the Essex/Suffolk border. John Constable used to visit often, sketching the meadows in fat notebooks as he walked along the River Stour to see his aunt and uncle. John Nash moved into the village after the war to paint its barns, ponds and winter skeletons of trees. He called himself an ‘artist-plantsman’, his love of botany and horticulture informing the way his paintbrush would catch Nature’s rhythm and pace. A short walk from the graveyard where Nash lies buried, hidden in a dell ringed with magnificent trees, sits the Old Vicarage. Dating from the 1500s, with Georgian and Victorian wings, the house shelters under a beech of gargantuan proportions. Jeremy…

I AM married to a man with an aversion to night-time noise, which is odd considering that, for much of the week, we live on a busy London road. It’s not the roar of a passing motorbike or the screech of car brakes that bother him, it’s what you might call ambient noise—a consistent, low-level buzz or hum. The tick of a clock, for instance, will drive him crazy. Arriving in an unknown bedroom, I can see his ears start to flap, searching out that tiny sound that might drill into his brain and ruin his sleep. Many years ago, we were staying in a hotel on the edge of Versailles. Together with our children—quite young at the time and on a force-fed diet of French history—we spent two days…

ONE of the busiest sectors of the market for auctioneers interested in anything earlier than yesterday seems to be art and design from 1860. No doubt investors will move in, but for the moment this is an area that is not too expensive and there are high-quality things to attract real collectors. Many of the specialists let go by the international houses are now working for themselves or other auction houses, both in London and around the country. Last month, Woolley & Wallis of Salisbury held one such art and design sale, beginning with a large collection of what might be termed semi-industrial art pottery, Clarice Cliff wares and Goldscheider Pottery figures, which had apparently filled the home of William and Elizabeth Kidd at Bedlington, Northumberland, ‘to the brim’. Notable…

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk GENTLEMEN come in many guises, yet there are characteristics that will always lend themselves to being a good egg. Do you belong to any of these categories? Then, to misquote Rudyard Kipling’s If—you are a gentleman, my son! 1. The man who is calm in a crisis ‘If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you’ There have arguably been few men placed under greater stress than Sir Winston Churchill, yet he consistently broadcast courage to the nation. In a galaxy slightly farther away, the level-headed Yoda delivered words of wisdom such as: ‘Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.’ 2. The patient soul ‘If…

Fishing for souls FAR from standing for people’s souls (‘Gone fishing’, October 16), the Christian significance of the fish is that it is in Greek ichthus, which is an acronym for Iesous Christos Huios [tou] Theou, Soter (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). Revd Roger Turner, London Remake, remodel I ENJOYED reading Hetty Lintell’s entertaining account of recycling ‘Granny’s chips’ (‘In with the old’, October 23). My late mother was an early adopter of a mismatched pair of earrings. I never wore them and had them made into a much more (to me) wearable and accessible brooch. Although an absolutely classic 1980s design, I think it now has a more medieval feeling to it. In a further coincidence, the earrings were also made by Cassandra Goad. Alexandra King, Hampshire Love…

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row IN 1915, Lt-Col John McCrae, a Canadian army surgeon working in the field in France in the First World War, wrote his famously moving poem about the flowers that refused to die amid the carnage of Flanders. It was to mark the death of a friend killed in the Second Battle of Ypres and was published in Punch that December. McCrae’s poignant words quickly gained traction, being used in recruitment propaganda and to raise money selling war bonds. McCrae (1872–1918) didn’t survive the war—he died of pneumonia and is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves near Boulogne, France. However, his words had a huge impact and the idea of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance caught on.…

THE feeling that ‘whatever the weather is like now, it will soon change’ is the overarching theme this month: ‘Ice in November to bear a duck, nothing after but mud and muck.’ Despite the cold and dark, there is still a chance of an ‘Indian summer’, a term that is commonly used for any spell of mild and sunny autumnal weather, but which specifically means a warm spell on the days between Martinmas on November 11 and November 20. Characterised by sunny, hazy days, it is also known as Martinmas Summer and is thought to have been first noticed in connection with Native Americans. Martinmas sets the direction of the wind, too, and, therefore, the severity of the rest of winter: ‘If the wind is south-east on Martinmas, it will…

THE stinkhorn, a fungus with a Latin name that tells you everything you need to know about its shape—Phallus impudicus (‘shameless phallus’)—is not all it seems. It’s not even what you think it seems. It uses mimicry to survive and replicate, but not in the visual way that led male members of Victorian society reputedly to cudgel it down, lest passing ladies should require the smelling salts. (Charles Darwin’s daughter Etty enjoyed a game of seeking out stinkhorns, but felt she had to burn them secretly ‘because of the morals’ of her maidservants.) The stinkhorn’s most effective mimicry comes from what it smells like—rotting flesh. This attracts blowflies and other insects to feed on its thick, spore-laden slime. They duly fly away and disseminate its undigested spores. Mission accomplished. The…

BEFORE things really heat up, I need to start with a word about location bias, because the best Sunday lunch is one from which you can get home with minimal friction. I live with my family in west London and the places I am loyal to tend to be in that part of town. I’m full of other biases, too. For instance, that Sunday lunch should feel domestic and a little frowsy, regardless of whether you’re eating with relatives. You should be at ease, leaning in, accidentally dragging an elbow through mustard. The service shouldn’t be stiff and the guests, if they can help it, shouldn’t be too demanding. There are plenty of first-rate restaurants that do not foster that type of familiarity and none of them are on this…

WHEN I first got the urge to grow vegetables, it was broad beans, green beans, early potatoes and carrots that dominated my kitchen gardening space and time. When looking through Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book—highly recommended—for ideas about how to make the best of them in the kitchen, I read her words about salsify and scorzonera. I hadn’t heard of either. A long, slim carrot in shape, both apparently tasted somewhere between asparagus, globe artichoke and oysters, with scorzonera dark-skinned to salsify’s white. They sounded too good to be true. I found seeds for salsify and sowed them in spring. It was the first plant I grew that I’d never tasted before growing. That first taste, six months later, was a quiet revelation: I couldn’t pick out more than a faint…

Make a hotel home THERE’S little better than a hotel—apart from a standalone villa on hotel grounds. Imagine the added privacy and ease of having everyone you’re travelling with in one place, plus all of your favourite hotel amenities: restaurants, room service, spas and pools. Few do it better than Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France, where staff are busy preparing a fourth villa in time for the 2025 season. La Guettière will be the hotel’s largest when it opens—sleeping 18 adults in nine en-suite bedrooms (some with private terraces). As well as cinema and fitness rooms, guests will also have access to a golf cart in which to whizz around the hotel’s grounds. In Tanzania’s Serengeti, Singita Milele—three years in the making—is already in full swing. The 10-person safari…

ART and architectural historian Hubert Pragnell discovered Joan Russell in the archives of Canterbury Cathedral in Kent. He was working on a research project when he came across a large, bound sketchbook of her drawings, which she had presented to the church in the 1960s. They documented in minute detail the city in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, before wrecked buildings were cleared, new ones built and views obscured. ‘I don’t know of another city outside London where there was a systematic attempt to record the area that was damaged by the bombing,’ says Dr Pragnell. Russell’s effort to chronicle the devastation wrought by war seems to have been deliberate: ‘In her pictures, there are hardly any people—only silent streets. Her aim seems to have been to…

Jewish Country Houses Edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green (Profile, £45) THIS is a hefty volume masquerading as a coffee-table book, but which is, in fact, a series of scholarly, yet engagingly readable chapters illustrated with superb photography by Hélène Binet, who consciously avoids mugshots and photo-cropping for precisely framed images. It is pan-European in its scope, covering the usual English suspects, such as the Rothschilds’ Waddesdon Manor and Benjamin Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor, both in Buckinghamshire, but also featuring houses in France, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany. In England, there are some striking revelations, as at Strawberry Hill, London TW1. It is usually associated with Horace Walpole, but book contributor Nino Strachey has discovered that two subsequent owners, Lady Frances Waldegrave and Geraldine Stern, had Jewish…

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SOTHEBY’S and Charleston—the East Sussex home of the Bloomsbury group—are collaborating on a first-of-its-kind exhibition, celebrating the bohemian spirit of the artists and writers who, much ‘like the Beats or the Punks’, shook up the legacy of Victorian Britain, says Charleston vice-president Kim Jones. ‘Radical Modernity: From Bloomsbury to Charleston’, a private selling and loan exhibition, opens this week at the auction house’s New Bond Street, London W1, headquarters and will feature significant pieces from the Charleston (and private) collections. Some of these are not normally on view, including recent acquisitions made via its ‘50 for 50’ campaign launched earlier this year, a hunt for bequests of Bloomsbury works in private collections in the lead up to the charity’s 50th anniversary in 2030. A log box, which usually sits beside…

LABOUR has, in a single Budget, destroyed any chance of gaining the confidence of country people. Its decision to tax family farmers so they won’t be able to hand on their farms to their sons and daughters undermines the whole basis of the rural economy and rural life. It is fundamentally a betrayal, because Steve Reed, the Secretary of State responsible for agriculture, gave his pledge that Labour had no intention of changing farmers’ tax regime. (Perhaps his resignation letter has been lost in the post.) This move is also clear evidence of the Government’s ignorance of the facts of the countryside. It claims that small farmers will all be protected, but it hasn’t bothered to do the maths. The average farm in England is just over 200 acres and…

DANIEL MCALPINE, a private in the Highland Light Infantry, was sheltering in a tunnel under the Somme village of Bouzincourt, France, when he pencilled his name, service number, unit, home town of Glasgow and the words ‘Wounded 3 times’ into the soft chalk. It was early 1917 and his battalion had fought in the Battle of the Somme the previous year. The reference to his wounds rings with pride and hope that he had suffered his share of bad luck—and might survive. McAlpine’s inscription is among more than 10,000 to have been catalogued on the Western Front, most of them in old limestone quarries underneath the fertile fields of Picardy that witnessed some of the bloodiest battles. Each such trace tells a story. Five months after McAlpine immortalised himself in…

THIS month marks the 50th anniversary of what was a new dawn in the history of the English house. It was a claim championed by COUNTRY LIFE for more than a century, that the great houses of England belong to the nation, as well as their owners. In the decades since the Second World War, these houses had disappeared at roughly two a week. War, neglect, dilapidation and lack of family resources had been their ruin. Then, in 1974, taxes were to be introduced by a Labour government that would have made inheritance prohibitive and ongoing family ownership all but impossible. One event was to signal that dawn. A London museum went shamelessly political. The V&A Museum’s new director, the young Roy Strong, collaborated with two enthusiasts, John Harris and…

HERE’S American Stanley Tucci, actor, writer, epicurean and leafy-south-London resident, in a proper zinger of an autumnal ensemble; pale-blue, windowpane-check suit in best Harris tweed, dark-blue, polka-dot scarf tied loose and louche around his neck, a navy linen flat cap at a rakish, baker-boy angle atop his head. New York-born, 100% Italian and total Anglophile, Mr Tucci is unafraid of clashing spots and squares or bold, tone-on-tone arrangements. His popping colour choices are zesty and uplifting, but never comedic, lairy or attention-seeking. He pairs silks with wools against cotton poplin and merino with stylish abandon. On the television, he’ll team a happy, Pinot Noir foulard with a yummy Neapolitan sauce. In the summer, he may go confidently sockless in that easy, freewheeling way that only summering Calabrian men can. At…

Gloucestershire, £2.25 million In a prominent spot on the High Street of Moreton-in-Marsh, Grade II*-listed Palladian The Steps has been extensively renovated by the current owners, enhancing period features such as Modillion cornices and a Venetian window. There are six bedrooms and the principal has a dressing room and Jack and Jill en suite. Mostly lawned gardens stretch to about half an acre, with a raised terrace. Knight Frank (01451 600617) London N6, excess £3 million Highgate’s Holly Village, a collection of 12 Victorian Gothic Revival cottages built by Baroness Burdett-Coutts—philanthropist and heir to the Coutts bank fortune who helped found the NSPCC and the RSPCA—is accessed via a dramatic Gothic arch with wrought-iron gates on Swains Lane. Completed in 1865 around a quadrangle, a stone’s throw from Parliament Hill,…

DEPENDING on who you ask, you might get the sense that London’s pub scene is either dying or thriving, with no in between. The past four years have seen record closures (the pandemic; remote working; cost of living), but also record openings. And big ones to boot. Take The Devonshire, near Piccadilly, W1, which has achieved the impossible: creating a genuinely cool address in a part of town best known for billboards and casinos. Or The Hero in Maida Vale, W9, launched by the same brains behind The Pelican in Notting Hill, W11, and The Bull in Charlbury, Oxfordshire—arguably the best pub in the Cotswolds (order the pie, says Giles Coren). Back in the W postcodes, London’s first-ever Allsopp’s Brewery pub, The Blue Stoops, opened last month on Kensington Church…

Roasted cauliflower and monkfish with saffron hollandaise and capers Ingredients Serves 4 1 medium cauliflower, cut into floretsA splash or two of olive oil1tspn smoked paprika350g–400g monkfish tailsor 4 fillets1 lemon, zest and juice For the easy saffron hollandaise Pinch of saffron threads2tbspn hot water3 egg yolks1tbspn lemon juice150g unsalted butter, melted To serve Fresh herbs (parsley/chives)CapersLemon Method ▸ Preheat the oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. ▸ Toss the cauliflower florets with olive oil, smoked paprika, salt and pepper. Spread them out on the baking sheet in a single layer and roast for 25–30 minutes or until golden and tender, turning half-way through. ▸ When the cauliflower is roasting, season the monkfish fillets with salt, pepper and lemon zest. Heat a splash…

I GREW up knowing Mallorca as a place of pilgrimage. Not because of the famous Jacobean stone path that runs from the Santuari of Lluc in Escorca to Palma and forms part of the Camino de Santiago in the Balearic Islands, but because my maiden aunt, Sylvia, went there twice a year, every year—always staying in the same room—for more than 30 years. She visited, she said, for the almond blossom in the spring and the almonds themselves in the autumn. She stayed for a month in the grandest hotel, at the time, in Palma. A gin and tonic (with lime) was delivered to her balcony at precisely 5pm every afternoon. She got to know everyone to the extent that her arrival was announced in the local newspaper. She regaled…

WHEN Muirhead Bone moved to London in 1902, he made the nocturnal city his stamping ground. Trained as an architectural draughtsman, he was enthralled by the shadowed edifices looming out of the darkness, the moon ‘scouring the stains from the buildings,’ the ‘deserted blackness of Westminster,’ the huge silhouettes of the lions in Trafalgar Square. From a borrowed house in Cheyne Walk, he went on late-night sketching trips, trudging miles around Brompton, Southwark and Billingsgate, or through Wapping, Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, ‘haunting, seeing, considering; everywhere seeing my harvest ripe for the reaping,’ as he wrote to his fiancée, Gertrude Dodd. The young Glaswegian drew Wren churches, Thames bridges and buildings such as New-gate Jail that were undergoing demolition. He was particularly drawn to the ‘fine pictorial strangeness’ of structures in…