Ralph Dutton, the 8th and last Lord Sherborne, died in 1985 at the age of 86 after a fall at his house at Hinton Ampner. He bequeathed his estate to the National Trust and both house and garden are now open to the public. Some 17 years before he died he wrote this account of the place he loved and in which he had spent his childhood. It is a portrait of a corner of rural England and of the people connected with it, but unlike so many other country communities now swallowed up by urban development, or taken over by weekenders, Hinton Ampner still retains its essential character. Only 8 miles east of Winchester and with Southampton and Portsmouth a mere 20 miles or so to the south, the little village lies in an unspoilt sweep of chalk countryside, a cluster of cottages round parish church and manor house. To visit it today is to recapture the England of Thomas Hardy and William Cobbett and to imagine for an afternoon that you have left the twentieth century behind.
Ralph Dutton's house and garden maintain this illusion. Although both are creations of the mid-twentieth century, and are of importance for this alone, they seem rooted in the past, part of a historical continuum reaching back to the Middle Ages and forward into the future. This sense of timelessness, of a building and its setting as part of the landscape, owes much to the vision and sense of history of Ralph Dutton himself. The estate he inherited from his father had been successively in the hands of the Stewkeley, Stawell and Dutton families for nearly four hundred years, but the haunted Tudor manor house which once stood here was demolished in 1793, its site now marked by the orchard beside the church, and the Georgian house then built to the south was encased in a gabled Victorian shell and much enlarged by Ralph Dutton's grandparents. The garden too reflected Victorian taste, with numerous borders and five large greenhouses to provide flowers for the house, and an old-fashioned and unsuccessful rose garden which needed replanting every two years or so. Ralph Dutton's father had no interest in the garden and was unwilling to countenance alterations to something which he considered unnecessary. His artistic mother would have made changes if she had been allowed to, and she was responsible for the balustrade to the south of the house which frames the view from the principal rooms.
Today the sense of unity in the garden is striking. With the help of his head gardeners, Walter Holloway and, subsequently, Herbert Gray, Ralph Dutton created a series of garden 'rooms' of varying shape and perspective, all individual in character, but contributing to a coherent whole. Part of the charm of the place lies in the numerous changes of level, often linked by brick steps which have now mellowed to a pleasing rusty red. And yet the garden is not closed in upon itself, but shades easily into the park and countryside beyond. From the broad terrace in front of the house there is no other building to be seen in the great sweep of Hampshire before you. At harvest time, the ochre of the stubble fields sets off the dark green foliage of the trees in the park. In the foreground a flight of brick steps leads to the sunken garden, the stone balustrades on either side covered in yellow lichen. The whole is a composition in the English tradition of landscape gardening, a vision translated into reality. When he first inherited, Ralph Dutton planted several hundred trees in the park and on the hills beyond to soften the hard lines of the fields in the distant views from the house. The remains of an old lime avenue, part of the Tudor layout, were cleverly linked to the garden by a grass walk on the same axis. Pairs of Irish yews flanking the Long Walk exaggerate its length and frame a vista into the park at one end. When this walk was planted, the yews were only two feet high; it is we who have benefited from one man's faith in the future.
The house too shows the same delight in proportion and effect, with everything in it chosen and placed in accordance with Ralph Dutton's admiration for the taste of the Regency period. He remodelled the Victorian house, creating a Georgian building in warm red brick, now clothed in magnolia, honeysuckle and other climbing plants. Eighteenth-century fittings were acquired from houses in London and the country that had been, or were being, demolished, and Hinton was filled with a distinguished collection of furniture and obets d'art supplemented by decorative paintings that reflected his interest in Italian seventeenth-century painting. When the house was almost completely destroyed by fire in April 1960, Ralph Dutton immediately set about rebuilding it and refurnishing it as beautifully as before.
If Ralph Dutton had lived two or three hundred years ago, he would not have been remarkable, but for a man who reached adulthood as the First World War ended, his achievements are impressive; with his great knowledge of architecture, interior decoration and gardens he was a true connoisseur and one of the last of his kind. Although his father had longed for a son, he took little interest in Ralph as a boy, regretting his lack of enthusiasm for hunting, shooting and other sporting activities. It was his mother who arranged his education, sending him first to West Bowns Preparatory School near Winchester, then under its first headmaster. She was a major influence on her son and from her he inherited his artistic nature. She was musical, a painter and an accomplished linguist, speaking French, German, Spanish and Italian fluently. Even as a small boy, Ralph showed considerable interest in architecture and would spend hours designing imaginary houses. He too was a linguist, and many of the books he bought for the library to replace those lost in the fire were French.
After preparatory school Ralph followed in his father's footsteps to Eton and then spent a year at Christ Church, Oxford. This was one of the happiest periods of his life and at Oxford he made many friends who were to remain close in the years that followed. While at Oxford he formed the Uffizi Society and invited eminent speakers from the artistic world to address it. He once showed a photograph of this small group, whose members included Lord David Cecil and Lord Holden, with whom he was later to write a book, to his father, who is said to have remarked that he would have preferred to see a picture of a cricket eleven.
Oxford was followed by a course at Cirencester Agricultural College and then, until he inherited Hinton Ampner in 1935, Ralph Dutton lived and worked in London, first at the College of Arms and then at Lloyd's. Even when established in Hampshire, he continued to spend the week in London at his flat in Eaton Square, which he furnished as beautifully as his house. In London, until his sight failed, he led a sociable life, returning every weekend to the peace of his beloved Hinton. He was a frequent visitor to horticultural shows, ordering plants on the spot if he saw something he liked.
Some of his collection was bought at auction and some from London dealers, but many of his finer pieces and pictures were bought on his travels abroad, particularly in France and Italy. He loved Venice and went there every year, staying with his friends Mr and Mrs Paul Wallraff, who would accompany him on his visits to the city's galleries. When in Italy he was also often the guest of Sir Osbert Sitwell at Montegufoni. Nearly all the pictures at Hinton Ampner were Italian landscapes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but to his great sadness three of the best, as well as some family miniatures, were taken in a burglary and have never been recovered. In his purchases for the house, as in his remodelling of the garden, Ralph Dutton showed a remarkable ability to carry a vision of what he wanted in his head. Every picture and every piece of furniture was bought for a particular position and nothing was ever found to be unsuitable for its planned location. He was fond of hardstones and in particular of porphyry and bluejohn. A giltwood side-table in the drawing-room with a top of white marble and bluejohn was once in Lord Curzon's house in Carlton House Terrace and was bought by Ralph Dutton with the fee of £100 earned from his book The English Country House, first published in 1935. And it would have given him great pleasure to have known that his ormolu bluejohn perfume-burner, a purchase of which he was especially proud, was to be one of the pieces selected to represent the work of Matthew Boulton at the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition held in Washington in 1985.
Later in life Ralph Dutton's knowledge and experience benefited several national institutions and charities. He was a Trustee of the Wallace Collection from 1948 to 1969 and a member of the Executive Committee of the National Art-Collections Fund from 1952 to 1970. He also served on committees of the National Trust, while he was generally best known for his many witty and authoritative books on architecture, internal decoration and travel. He loved to show visitors his house and garden and was host to many parties from abroad, particularly from America and France. His garden was opened each year under the National Gardens Scheme and in aid of the Red Cross and other charities.
Distinguished visitors to Hinton Ampner included his friends Sir Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, the Husseys of Scotney and Rudyard Kipling's son-in-law and daughter Elsie, Captain and Mrs George Bambridge, who bequeathed Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire to the Trust. The pleasure of staying in a house full of beautiful things must have been enhanced by the fact that Ralph Dutton's appreciation of the finer things in life extended to the soap and the linen; and the cooking of his housekeeper Mrs Cross was superb. Afternoon tea was not served when the master was alone at Hinton, as he preferred to be out walking on the estate, but Mrs Cross would always bake one of her magnificent cakes for his guests.
As the patron of the living, Ralph Dutton took a paternal interest in the welfare of the little parish church. He was not a deeply religious man and never took Communion, but he attended services, often read the lesson on Sunday and did much to improve and beautify the modest nineteenth-century building that lay only a few paces from his front door.
Among other alterations, he replaced glazed Victorian tiles by the present stone floor. He also commissioned the striking stained-glass windows from Patrick Reyntiens, one a tongue of flame, the other a study in blue and grey, representing the pillars of fire and cloud which led the Israelites out of Egypt. When A Hampshire Manor was written, the family vault in the church had not been discovered (see page 27), but in 1969, when a new heating system was being installed and improvements made to the flooring of the chancel, the steps leading down to the vault were found just in front of the altar rails. Ralph and his sister Joane went into the vault, which was found to contain a large number of coffins of the Stewkeley and Stawell families. Some were very grand, covered in velvet and studded with nails, and at least one bore a coronet; others had disintegrated. Exposure to the air began to cause further deterioration, so the vault was resealed and is now marked by a circle of porphyry in front of the altar. It was also by his initiative that the handsome seventeenth-century family wall monuments were moved to Hinton Ampner Church from the disused and decaying church of St Mary at Laverstoke near Whitchurch.
Ralph Dutton's ashes lie in the old churchyard, a stone's throw from the garden he made and loved. Neither he nor his sisters had married and although he was a man who rarely showed his feelings, his friends knew the strength of his desire to ensure the survival of the Hinton estate after him. Some years before he died he wrote to the National Trust to say that he had decided to bequeath to it his house, most of its contents and his estate, expressing the wish that the estate should be retained intact for as long as possible. In doing so he demonstrated the generosity and modesty that was characteristic of him and also his faith in an organization in whose purposes he believed deeply and with which he had been for so long associated. It is impossible to know now what was in his heart, but his memorial, let into the floor of the chancel in the little church, speaks to us eloquently. Composed by Ralph Dutton himself, the inscription reads: 'The last of his line'.