Mary Bilson-Legge, the Hampshire Heiress, must have been a highly sought after young woman, but she was 23 years old before my great-grandfather, John Dutton, persuaded her to fall into his arms. How he secured this prize, I do not know, but it was anyhow a case of money marrying money for John was the only son of the 1st Baron Sherborne and heir to very large properties in Gloucestershire. This wealthy couple were married with some pomp at St. George's, Hanover Square, on 11th August 1803, and their marriage lasted, happily so far as I know, for 59 years.
The last Lord Stawell, Mary Bilson-Legge's father, had died in 1820, and for 30 years or so following his death the personal connection of the family with Hinton was slight. At some time anything which appeared of family interest was removed to Sherborne; this included pictures, miniatures, plate and the Stawell diamonds. But the furniture seems to have disappeared, and no doubt it was considered old fashioned and not worth transferring the 80 miles or so to Gloucestershire. Even before Lord Stawell's death the house appears to have been often let, since in the aquatint dated 1819 of the Hampshire Hounds meeting in the park on the south side of the house Hinton is called 'The Seat of R. Heysham Esq.'. And earlier in the century a family named Kingscote was in the house for some years. The baptisms of several children appear in the Registers, also there is a small marble slab in the floor of the church nave close to the pulpit commemorating Louisa Frances Kingscote who was born and who died on the same day, 22nd February 1804.
But a tenant for much the longest space was Mrs. Augustus Legge, the widow of the 5th son of the and Earl of Dartmouth, and so a near cousin to my great-grandmother, the owner. In 1822 she presented the stained glass in the pair of tall lancet windows at the east end of the church. In their crude colouring and repetitive pattern they seem now an unfortunate choice, but perhaps having once been admired they will be so again. She was probably well established in the house at that date, and she is recorded as still being the tenant of Lord Sherborne on the Tithe Map of 1839. She did not die till 1863 and may have remained as a tenant until near the time when my grandparents came to inhabit the house in 1857.
There is no reason to suppose that my great-grandfather ever came to Hinton, and certainly no building of any sort was carried out during the lives of himself and his wife. On the Hartley Mauditt property, however, several cottages were built about 1835, so as a landlord he was not entirely neglectful.
My great-grandparents had three sons, James, born in 1804; John, my grandfather, in 1810; and Ralph in 1821. It seems to have been early decided that the two younger sons would divide their mother's property on her death, John to inherit Hinton and Hartley Mauditt, Ralph, Timsbury and Bedhampton. It was a happy and amicable arrangement. Fortified by this prospect, my grandfather married in 1836 the more or less penniless daughter of the 5th Earl of Macclesfield.
This would have seemed a suitable occasion for the young couple to move to Hinton, which was eventually to be their property, but no, they continued to live at Sherborne with John's parents. The house is enormous, but nevertheless it seems strange that they did not wish for an establishment of their own. However, John had been born at Sherborne, he had spent his youth there, and he remained there. His obedient Lavinia raised, I suppose, no objection.
They were a completely compatible couple, and serious discord was I believe unknown, but there was one major reverse - the years passed and no children were born to them. At last after ten years of barren marriage they decided to try the waters of Bad Kissingen, which had an international reputation as an aid to fertility. My grandfather kept a diary of the journey. They left England soon after Christmas 1845, travelling in their own carriage and accompanied by a courier. This was as far as comfort went: the roads, the inns, the drunken postilions must have made the journey to our ideas a nightmare.
However, they arrived at last and settled down for a few months of curative water-drinking. In April, with joy, my grandfather was able to write in large capital letters in his diary 'Lavinia is with child'. This might have seemed a prudent moment to return home, but no, they decided to rattle away across the Alps and spend the summer in Italy, in Florence, Rome and Naples. In the late autumn they returned to Bad Kissingen, Lavinia fortunately still with child, and after a further spell with the waters there, they returned to England. The journey, one would have supposed, would have been dangerous for someone in my grandmother's condition, but it was successfully achieved, though with not much time to spare. They reached England at the end of the year, and on 17th January 1847 my father came into the world.
He was born in London, but the family soon returned to Sherborne and continued living there for another ten years during which time four children were born to them of whom one daughter died at the age of one year. My uncle, the last child, was born in 1857, the year in which they eventually transferred to Hinton, and it may have been this addition which finally decided them to make the move.
Although my grandfather did not inherit Hinton till his mother's death in 1864, he began in the '50s making journeys to Hinton, presumably in order to keep an eye on the estate. He made short entries in his very unilluminating diary 'to Hinton', and a day or two later 'home again'. The house must have been available for these visits, but perhaps was only rudimentarily furnished.
I personally feel so much part of Hampshire, that I find it difficult to understand my grandparents' apparent reluctance to leave Gloucestershire. But it was perhaps natural. My grandfather had lived all his life at Sherborne, my grandmother came from the neighbouring county of Oxfordshire, many relations lived in the area, so that leaving the wide spaces of the rolling Cotswold hills for the rather small-scale landscape of Hampshire may have seemed like moving into a foreign country.
It was not only the landscape which was small-scale: there was also the house. To leave the palatial environment of Sherborne with its great stone-pillared Renaissance facade and endless rooms for the modest yellow brick box at Hinton, must have seemed a rude descent in the social scale, and they may have felt that their standing in their new county would be far lower than in the one they were leaving. This is, of course, surmise, but social values were important considerations in the nineteenth century.
The style too of Hinton was, in 1857, about as far out of fashion as it could be. The Great Exhibition was only a few years in the past, and the influence of the taste there shown was constantly growing. Elaboration and decoration were highly admired, and the simple, rectangular lines of Hinton must have seemed bleak indeed. However, John and Lavinia were not very well-off, and the restricted size of the house was well suited to the scale of their assets.
The house had to be furnished, and they were able, with some difficulty, I believe, to obtain from Lady Sherborne some of the pictures and other objects which had belonged to her family and had come from Hinton. There was the portrait of Sir Hugh Stewkeley by Hudson, very conventional portraits by Dahl of the and and 3rd Lords Stawell, some pictures of the last Lord Stawell's racehorses and so forth. But a charming portrait of Mary Bilson-Legge as a child by Opie, and a handsome picture of Henry Bilson-Legge in his robes as Chancellor of the Exchequer by William Hoare my great-grandparents were unwilling to part with. The Opie is now in America and the Hoare still hangs at Sherborne. However, to make up for these omissions, my grandparents were sent off with some silver, a few diamonds, and a number of miniatures. Thus with these mementoes of their pre-decessors at Hinton they set up their modest establishment.
My grandmother's activities in photography, still a fairly new amusement in the 1860s, were generally confined to outdoor subjects, romantic views and so forth which, though technically excellent, are not of much interest today. However, she was successful in taking one time-exposure of the drawing-room at Hinton. From the appearance of the room the family would seem to have been installed for several years, so I would suppose it dates from 1862 or 63. My grandmother had obviously achieved that first requisite for a mid-Victorian room - fullness. It appears to have been crammed with little tables, wood-framed semi-easy chairs, china ornaments heaped on etagires whatnots and so forth, while the windows were well draped with curtains and the simple marble chimney-piece was partly concealed by a heavy pelmet on a mantel-board. The room had perhaps a certain cosy charm, but there was nothing in it of the remotest value, and I am inclined to doubt whether 'artistic' visitors looked on it as a satisfactory example of contemporary style.
I imagine that during these first years at Hinton my grandfather spent much time considering how he would convert his plain, moderate-sized house into something more suited to the taste of the period so soon as circumstances allowed. This, of course, meant the death of his mother, when the Hinton and Hartley Mauditt properties would come into his possession and provide him with a satisfactory income. They were much the same sentiments as possessed his grandson 75 years later.
Lady Sherborne died in 1864 and was buried at Sherborne, being the only one out of eight owners of Hinton from Sir Hugh Stewkeley to my father who was not buried either in the vault or the churchyard. My grandfather, now in a happy position of comparative affluence, seems to have lost no time about considering plans for transforming the house. It was not, however, without great thought that the final design for the monstrosity which arose was reached. As with Sir Christopher Wren at St. Paul's, it was the third design which was finally accepted.
The first intention was to demolish the existing house entirely, and to start afresh on the same site. With these instructions, plans were produced by a competent architect, but unfortunately his name nowhere appears on his designs. The house he proposed consisted of a large main block of three floors, with six reception rooms on the ground floor, to this was connected by a narrow neck, a spreading service wing built round an open courtyard. The whole was to be built of brick with a slate roof, but it is difficult to say what style of architecture it was intended to represent. There was a slight Tudor flavour, although the plate-glass windows prevented it from being a very successful essay in that manner, but at least it had the complete lack of symmetry or even of balance, which was much admired at the time.
In order to persuade a possibly doubtful client, the architect produced a large and attractive watercolour. The house itself was no doubt drawn in his ofHce and the picture was then handed over to an artist for the purpose of softening and embellishing the rigid lines of the structure. The building thus rose from agreeable bosky surroundings of trees and shrubberies, while a landau and pair at the entrance with a liveried footman on the door-step and a few crinolined figures drifting along the drive, indicated clearly how delightful life could be in the house if built. These blandishments, however, my grandfather resisted. Possibly he felt that the 40 or so bedrooms that the proposed house would contain were slightly beyond his financial status. Anyhow the plans were rejected, and it was necessary to start again.
The second design seems to have come from another hand, although here again there is no name on the plans, but the presentation was simpler and the architecture very different. Once again, however, the design came from an architect who knew what he was about, and the plans showed a perfectly workable building. His suggestion was to retain the existing house, to add a large drawing-room to it at the east end, a dining-room and a very long service wing on the west. The architecture was to be Ruskinian Gothic with tall, pointed windows flanked by marble, or stone pillars. The straightforward lines of the Georgian house were to be cleverly concealed behind this elaborate Gothic cloak. The architect, whoever he was, had clearly lately read and well digested The Stones of Venice which had been published some years earlier.
Once again, however, my grandfather was not satisfied, and the plans were rejected, but on what grounds I do not know. He then decided to abandon architects altogether, and to employ simply a capable builder. His choice fell on a Mr. Kemp, of Alton, who had erected a number of particularly hideous buildings in the neighbourhood. Purely as a builder there was nothing amiss with his work: as a planner and designer his ignorance was abysmal, and I fear I should add that my grandparents cannot have been much better.
My grandfather's instruction to Mr. Kemp were apparently simple: there must be a large drawing-room—my grandmother insisted on this - a very high kitchen, about 30 bedrooms all told, and no bathroom. The last injunction was important: my grandfather had once caught cold in one of these new-fangled contraptions and there was to be nothing of the sort in his house. Mr. Kemp was then obviously shown the 'second' plan in order to provide him with a few ideas. Had he copied this plan more closely, the house would not have been so disastrously inconvenient.
Following his instructions Mr. Kemp planned a large double drawing-room at the east end of the house, the whole of the north side of the existing house was made into an entrance hall with a new stair at the west end, while the two rooms on the south side were a library and a dining-room, the latter enlarged by throwing out a bow-window to the south and a deep recess bulging into the hall to the north. Then came a long, long, 'L '-shaped service wing. The style of architecture adopted was, I think, Tudor. The heavily stone-mullioned windows would seem to have indicated this intention, and this was borne out by the gables with heavy wooden bargeboards, and the battlements surmounting the bow windows. The whole was solidly built in brick, red stretchers and blue headers, with dark blue pointing. This was intended, no doubt, to give an air of antiquity but in effect produced an apoplectic colour little relieved by stone quoins and a stone Tudor-esque moulding which ran round the main part of the house below the first-floor windows.
In front of the house a spacious gravelled forecourt was dug out of the ground, which sloped slightly upwards on the north side. Into this a new porch, with a three-sided bay-window on the first floor, projected and the front door was reached by a rather well-arranged flight of five or six steps. The date on the rainwater heads was 1867, a middle date I would suppose between beginning and completing, for the whole operation took between two and three years, during which time my grandparents lived in a rented house in the locality. I have no knowledge of how they felt about the house when they saw what they had created. I trust that after so much trouble and expense they were pleased with the result. In any case they were now housed, if not with elegance or convenience at least, on a scale which seemed to them suitable. The charms of the interior I will describe in a moment.
My grandfather died in 1884, but for ten years or more before that event my father had been living contentedly at Hinton, after a few years in the Rifle Brigade, perfectly happy to spend his life quietly in the country with his hunting and his shooting. I have the impression that he had no intention of marrying, and looked to his younger brother to carry on the line - a purpose which in those days was considered important. Unluckily, however, his brother died in 1886 and my father, then just on 40, felt he should search for a bride. A year later he became engaged to my mother, Blanche Cave, who was exactly half his age.
When making his proposal he had said: 'Will you make this house your home', thus modestly offering the house rather than himself. Had my mother been sensitive to architecture she might well have replied: 'I will take you, but I can't face the house.' However, this impasse did not arise, and after a token period of reflection she accepted the offer which I think she had been for some time eagerly awaiting.
For the first few years of her marriage my mother kept a rather sketchy diary. At the beginning all was excitement. To find herself the mistress of a large country house instead of just one daughter in a family of five children, and never on the easiest terms with her mother, was an exciting experience. The pages of the visitors' book for the summer of 1888 were filled with the names of her relations who had come to stay and see how happily little Blanche was settled.
But gradually the tone changed, and there were constant references to 'this barracks of a house', for she was obviously beginning to find that life was far from easy in this exceedingly ill-designed building. She came from a wealthy family, and her father had inherited about a million on the death of his miserly father. Ever since this event shortage of money was unknown in her family. But this had not been so before this welcome death: her parents had been so poorly provided for that they had left England to live in Florence, like a number of other impoverished English. There my mother was born, and did not come to England until she was three years old. But in the '80s all this was happily changed, and there was the large country house which her father had built at Ditcham near Petersfield, a house in Lowndes Square, and a steam yacht of considerable size. At Hinton the situation was sadly different.
When my grandfather had rebuilt Hinton agricultural prosperity was at its height, and since his income came principally from land he had been rather well-off. No doubt he had spent a part of his available capital on the house, and then on the church, and a little later on providing an entirely new church on his property at Kingsley, near Alton. All this left his income from land intact, and there was no reason to suppose that there would be any change in the future. About 1875, however, the prosperity which agriculture had enjoyed for a number of years past suddenly collapsed, and this national industry, on which a large section of the community depended, ceased to provide both employment and support. The cause of the disaster was the importation of large quantities of foreign wheat, chiefly from the new corn-growing areas of America where costs were low. The English market was thus flooded with cheap corn; and at the same time, by an unfortunate chance, English farmers suffered a succession of three ruined harvests. Few farmers had any capital to fall back on, and they were thus unable to carry on.
In these circumstances farm rents fell heavily, and farms which had become vacant were almost unlettable and sometimes were left derelict. My father, I know, had to take over one or two farms in addition to the home farm since tenants were not to be found. At the time of his marriage in 1888 my father's financial position was still very indifferent, and he certainly hoped that a bride from an affluent family would improve his situation. But in this he was rather disappointed, for my mother was given only half of what her elder sister had received on marriage, the remainder not following until her father's death. In fact I think my maternal grandfather had found that he was dissipating his large inheritance rather too quickly. Like my paternal grandfather he was an enthusiastic builder, and had erected not only the house at Ditcham but also a Catholic church and priest's house in Petersfield; for he and my grandmother had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1882 under the guidance of Father (later Cardinal) Gasquet, a devoted friend.
Thus my parents' early married life at Hinton was distinctly threadbare, and my unfortunate mother found herself called upon to deal with a situation which was entirely new to her. Servants, it is true, were usually available and wages were disgracefully low, but already they were to some degree able to choose places where life was fairly comfortable and pleasant, and Hinton can hardly have been one of those.
In 1892 my father's financial position was materially improved by the death of his uncle, Ralph Dutton, when the entailed properties of Timsbury and Bedhampton came into his possession, while in the last year of the century my maternal grandfather died and my mother inherited the second half of the dowry that had been hoped for on her marriage. Thus when I first became conscious of my surroundings, there had already been a softening of the austere conditions which had prevailed at Hinton in the nineteenth century. The way of life and the domestic discomforts seem so remote in these days that they are perhaps worth describing.
My grandfather's injunction that there was to be no bathroom in the house was faithfully carried out, and as my father had a dislike of change which amounted to a phobia, the house remained without this almost essential convenience until 1919. As planned, however, there were four W.C.s, one above the other for convenience of drainage, with a fifth in the wing for the maids. For the period this was perhaps an adequate supply, but unfortunately owing to a miscalculation on the part of the builder only two out of the four superimposed 'Loos' functioned. The one in the cellar, designed I suppose for the use of the men-servants, was found to lie below the level of the drains and so was quite useless, and indeed was quickly done away with; that on the second floor on the other hand was above the level of the water supply and so was almost equally unsatisfactory. While my parents were childless - as they were for the first six years of marriage - the bedrooms on the second floor were not used so that it was immaterial whether the W.C. functioned or not, but when there were nurseries on that floor something had to be done. There was no water pressure for the usual 'pull-up' contraption, but eventually a low-level cistern was devised into which water entered very slowly so that the plug could only be pulled at long intervals. It was, at least, better than nothing.
The water for the W.C.s came from a tank filled by rain-water from the roof. In a dry spell the tank of course emptied very quickly and when this was found to be the case it could be filled, with great labour, by a hand pump from another rain-water tank beneath the terrace. In wet weather all sorts of curious things were swept off the roof into the tanks and so found their way into the W.C.s, thus greatly adding to their interest, but unfortunately frequently blocking the pipes. The intention of this unsatisfactory use of rain-water was to lessen the amount of water pumped from the old well in the orchard, the well, as I have already mentioned, which had lain under the floor of the kitchen in the Tudor house. From this well the water was raised to inadequate tanks in the roof of the house by a pump worked by a superannuated carriage horse. Every morning this elderly Dobbin was led off to his dreary task of walking round and round on a narrow path dragging the beam of the pump. Once started he would continue till he was stopped, so that no superintendence was required. It was anyhow quite an easy and undemanding employment.
Thus, although rather precarious, a water-supply to the house existed; but naturally there was no electricity supply, and lighting depended on lamps and candles. In country houses electric light was not very usual until the first years of this century, and at Hinton, which was hardly avant-garde, there was no supply till 1913. An engine was then installed which produced a dim 50 volt light.
The house was, however, built with a very restricted system of central heating. This consisted of two coils of very large pipes, one in the entrance hall and one in the north end of the drawing, room. Both were encased in cast iron cages with white marble tops. The water was heated by a small boiler in the cellar, which required stoking every few hours. This was the job of the footman, and thunderous echoes from the pipes indicated that he was busy at his subterranean task.
When I was a small boy the decoration of the house still remained much as when it was built, and I remember the gloomy aspect of the rooms fairly clearly. The entrance hall, which faces north, was anyhow rather dark, and its sombre appearance was not helped by the fact that the windows were filled with opaque glass. This had been an idea of my grandmother's, so that, when visitors called, she could escape from the drawing-room to the staircase at the other end of the hall without being observed by those in the carriage at the front door. It was a practical notion, but not one designed to add to the gaiety of the room.
The window glass was not the only sobering feature of the hall. There was a heavy varnished oak chimney-piece, surmounted by the family arms and the doors were in the same material with coarse mouldings, which would have been better forgotten, picked out in shining black paint. Lincrusta, in shades of dark green and cream, was freely used for a dado up to the uncomfortable height of 4½ feet, for a deep frieze, and on the ceiling where panels of it were set between plaster ribs painted to imitate oak.
The walls between the dado and the frieze were naturally not left to themselves but were covered with an assortment of objects supposed presumably to have ornamental value. There were sundry antlers and horns, a pair of alarming looking long-muzzled guns and a number of pistols. Amongst these trophies were prints and a few oil paintings of horses which intimated to a visitor that he was entering a sporting rather than an aesthetic house. There was also a quantity of furniture, of which a large writing table was the most solid piece arranged for two writers, who would dip their pens into bronze inkstands fashioned as dogs' heads.
Opening out of the hall at the east end was the drawing-room which had fulfilled my grandmother's stipulation for a spacious room. It was in two parts, an anteroom, with a wide opening into the southern or main section. This was lit by a large bow window to the south and other windows to the east. Early photographs show the room rather sparsely furnished, and perhaps the agricultural depression had begun to set in before it was properly filled with bric-a-brac. The furniture from the previous drawing-room would anyhow have been inadequate to fill the new room. The curtains, however, were rather lavish in canary yellow and Prussian blue, with deep silk pelmets hung from gilt cornices and edged with silk-covered wooden 'bobbles'. In the 'greenery yallery' period of the '90s my mother found these brilliantly contrasting colours offensive, and she had the wide blue velvet borders removed, but fortunately kept the material, and this was put back again half a century later when Victoriana came into fashion once again.
Suitable pictures to cover the spacious bare walls were obviously a problem, as there were not nearly enough family portraits to make an effect. This was partly remedied by having copies made of portraits from both sides of the family and these, when set in heavy gilt frames, created an imposing effect. But the largest picture was a life-sized group of my father with his brother and sister as children painted about 1860. The artist was Edwin Long, who later was to gain a great reputation for his vast subject pictures, but who is now quite rightly forgotten. His most famous picture was 'The Marriage Market' - a very different subject to the prim little Duttons - which was bought by Mr. Holloway for £7,000 and now hangs in the gallery at the Royal Holloway College, that remarkable building at Esher which emulates and excels in size the Chateau de Chambord in Touraine.
The ornaments consisted of a large quantity of china, for my grandmother was an eager, if undiscriminating, collector. An in-elegant glass-fronted cabinet of Dutch manufacture contained a part of the collection, and the remainder was displayed on tables and on clumsy gilt side tables backed with mirrors. Nothing was of any merit, and the value of the whole contents of the room would be very small.
The adjacent library calls for no particular remark. There were bookshelves on the walls filled with a fine selection of sermons, a heavy chimney-piece of brawn-like marble, and dark green rep curtains. In the dining-room the curtains were of the same material but crimson in colour and a Turkey carpet covered the floor. On the walls were two large nineteenth-century seascapes of little ships being tossed about on angry yellow seas. They were not at all the sort of pictures to study during meals. The furniture was rather sensational, and consisted of an extensive suite emanating, I would say, from the Low Countries. It was made in some cheap wood but stained almost black to imitate old oak and was elaborately carved. The largest piece was the sideboard in which a pair of 'sedent' lions holding shields supported the board, above which rose a great expanse of mirror set in a carved frame. As a small child I enjoyed crawling about amongst the lions but quite early it dawned on me that this was one of the ugliest pieces of furniture ever created.
From the service door of the dining-room a long stone-flagged pasage stretched away to the distant kitchen, passing en route the pantry, the butler's bedroom, the housekeeper's room and the still room on the north side, and the back stairs, the brushing room (where the footman slept) and a dismal little room known as the smoking-room on the south side. The latter had been broad-mindedly provided by my grandfather for the use of my father and his friends, and having a door into the garden the unpleasant vapours could easily be expelled. In later years, when its use as a smoking-room had long since vanished, it was called instead the gun-room, though I do not remember ever seeing a gun in it.
The kitchen, I think, was the creation of my grandfather. It extended upwards for the whole three floors of the house, 35 or 40 feet, I suppose; this extraordinary height being intended to keep it reasonably airy. This would have been more effective if the builder, with his complete disregard for aspect, had not placed it on the south side of the house, but even so some of the heat from the impressive range of stoves no doubt found its way into the upper regions. The stoves were divided into three sections: in the middle was the usual type of huge range, on the left of it was a contraption designed for cooking with charcoal, and on the right a very large hot-plate. Neither of these two latter was ever used in my conscious lifetime.
Elaborate cooking arrangements were necessary when one considers the number of meals the cook and her two assistants were expected to produce every day. There were meals for the dining-room, for the schoolroom, for the nursery, for the housekeeper's room, and for the servants' hall; and all this in a house run on austere economical lines. Certainly the schoolroom and the nursery did not exist for very long as separate entities, and no doubt the housekeeper's room and the servants' hall were only individual for some meals. Nevertheless the work must have been enormous.
When I altered the house in 1936 and the floor of the kitchen was taken up it was found that the stone flags were precariously lodged over a fairly deep well. Fortunately this happened to be in the middle of the room, and so under the massive kitchen table. Had it been otherwise the cook might at any time have disappeared suddenly into the underworld.
There were also, of course, larders and a big scullery with a bread-oven in one corner, and round these offices the kitchen passage wound desperately towards the back door, at times dimly lit, at others plunged into inky darkness. At the end of the northward pointing branch of the wing was the servants' hall, and from this a staircase ascended to three bedrooms for visiting men-servants, cunningly planned so that intercourse with the resident maids would have entailed a long and hazardous journey.
The whole service wing in fact was designed on a scale quite out of proportion to the polite part of the house which was relatively small. Possibly this disproportion was usual in houses of that date, but I would suppose that my grandparents being used to a really big house were inclined to think that all this extensive paraphernalia was essential.
The first floor followed the lines of the ground floor. In the main part of the house were a number of spare bedrooms, and in the middle facing south my parents' bedroom, a dressing-room, and my mother's sitting-room over the dining-room. When my father's younger brother had died in 1884 his furniture and effects had been put into this latter room, and my mother had taken it over just as it was; and thus it remained for the 48 years she lived at Hinton. She introduced her books of which she had many, and a table covered with plants in the window, but these were almost the only additions. Although she had a rather vivid personality, she in no way imparted this to her surroundings.
Away from the main part of the house a bleak, institutional passage stretched away to the maids' quarters. The builder with his usual obtuseness had placed the back stairs and windows lighting the passage on the south side, so that here were only two sunny rooms, while those on the north received no ray of sunshine.
The two south rooms were the schoolroom and the governess's bedroom. The former was one of the few agreeable rooms in the house, for my mother, as her brood increased, added a bow-window which, unlike other windows in the house, which were either too high in the room, or too low, or in one corner, lighted the room admirably. It contained the usual sort of schoolroom furniture, a large oak table in the middle with a green leather top on which we did our lessons seated on robust Victorian mahogany chairs; against one wall was a cottage piano on which my sisters hammered out their scales and little pieces. It was early decided, apparently, that I was not a musical type, and no time was wasted on tuition in this direction. A bookcase contained the lesson books, and a little simple reading in French and German - Les Malhettrs de Sophie and so forth - while for entertainment there were a number of books of fairy stories - Hans Andersen, very sentimental, Grimm, frightening, and Andrew Lang, a varied selection. In the window was an ottoman for repose above and with a useful receptacle for oddments below, but I remember no pictures on the flowered wallpaper, nor indeed any single object of any beauty in the room which could have inspired the youthful mind.
In the little adjacent room the sequence of four German governesses who superintended the education of my two elder sisters, and myself before I went to school, spent many hours of their dreary lives. These ladies were Fraulein von Brandt, Mehrendorf, Bomark and Wedekind. I think I got on quite well with all of them, even Fraulein Mehrendorf, a formidable, moustached figure, but Fraulien Wedekind was the only one for whom I had any affection.
The first and the last were unfortunately suffering from affairs Of the heart while they were at Hinton. Fraulein von Brandt, who was young and pretty, had become engaged to the son of her former employer, a German princeling, and had been sent over to England to get her out of the way. Angelika Wedekind was passionately in love with, and thought she was engaged to, a Herr von Schoning in her home town of Altona. We knew his appearance well from a photograph, a rather flashy-looking man with an upturned moustache like the Kaiser. There were tears in the schoolroom when no letter came as expected, and we children were begged to pray in church that Monday morning would remedy the situation. But I fear our prayers were not generally efficacious.
One day, however, a very disturbing letter arrived saying that Herr von Schoning was in financial difficulties and could his Angelika help him. Several days of intense Sturm und Drang followed, and we children proffered useful advice. Eventually Fraulein Wedekind sent off to Altona what must have been the greater part of her small savings. Thereafter the letters became fewer than ever, until they ceased altogether. Herr von Schoning, I very much fear, was an adventurer.
While these dramas were being enacted on the south side of the passage, all was peace and quiet in my father's rooms on the north, so long as he was left to himself. My parents, economical in all else, were prodigal in their use of rooms; and indeed why not? There were plenty. Between them they had a bedroom, two dressing-rooms, two sitting-rooms, and my father's carpentering-room.
The first room along the passage was his sitting-room, which had considerable character, in fact was the only room in the house which had any character at all. The walls were closely covered with pictures, many being Bartolozzi prints representing mythological subjects, which here made their rather unexpected appearance. Possibly they had belonged to his mother. More in keeping with my father's interests were a number of agreeable aquatints of famous horses; but dominating all else were three large oil paintings of his favourite dogs.
These needless to say had been painted before he had been burdened with a family, but all through his life he very sensibly greatly preferred his dogs to his children. The former gave him undemanding companionship and devotion, the latter seldom provided these comforts. The central picture of the three represented a brown and white spaniel, John Rover, whose bones had already been resting for several years in a quiet corner of the garden when I was born. He was painted life size and full length - horizontally, of course, like Sir Brooke Boothby in Wright of Derby's portrait in the Tate Gallery - and stories of his intelligence still lived. My father would tell us that when he came in from shooting John Rover would scamper upstairs and come down with his slippers in his mouth. Possibly this story contained a hint for his children, but if so I fear it was a hint never taken.
There was much else in the room. The panels of the door had been painted by my father's sister, my Aunt Louisa, with scenes of kingfishers flying amongst reeds, and she had also worked a brightly coloured cushion for the window-seat. Over the chimney-piece was an overmantel made up of panels carved by my father. On the left of the chimney-breast was a bookcase containing the books one would expect. Surtees and Whyte-Melville, books on shooting, hunting and pugilism interspersed with a number of late Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies. On the table by my father's chair there was generally to be seen one of Marie Corelli's uplifting novels. Behind the chair was a glass-fronted case containing his most prized possessions - his guns. These were never trusted in the gun-room but were kept here under his eye where they could be oiled, polished and generally fondled.
There was a good deal of furniture, but it was particularly the writing table which used to interest me when I was young since it was loaded with little gadgets for which my father had a great weakness. There were a number of knives for trimming his quill pens, a stamp for dating letters, an address stamp for insignificant correspondence, a mechanical contrivance for sharpening pencils, a variety of little machines for clipping together papers, and all the other appurtenances of a Victorian desk. The use of all these labour-saving contrivances occupied a great deal of his time.
Next door to the sitting-room was the carpentering-room, in which my father spent many happy hours. He was remarkably deft with his fingers, and when younger had embellished with carving many otherwise harmless pieces of furniture. The last of his rooms was his dressing-room. It was strangely placed, as far as could be from his bedroom; but his father had used it as such, ostensibly in order to keep an eye on the maids whose bedrooms lay beyond the baize door, and so he continued the inconvenient arrangement.
On the top floor, in the rooms which filled the area of the Georgian house, were the nurseries, which later became the bedrooms for my three sisters and myself. In one of the north-facing rooms was the fire-escape which was an object of great childish interest. It consisted of a thick canvas chute attached at the top to an iron frame hinged to the window-sill. When required for use, it was simply tipped up and the tube fell outside to the ground where the hammock-like end could be held out to receive those descending. It was a practical contraption down which a child could be sent with safety.
Every few months we would have an exercise. Men-servants and gardeners would be assembled below to hold the hammock, and we would be at the top awaiting our turn to descend. There was a rope in the tube, but the secret of making an easy descent was to press outwards with bottom and knees and so regulate the speed of descent. To give us confidence my mother would go first. Wrapping her long skirts round her ankles she would descend with great poise and arrive unruffled in the hammock on ground level. Then we children would go down rather enjoying the excitement and sometimes having a second shot. Lastly it was the turn of the nurserymaid; the nurse would never attempt it and apparently would have preferred to burn to death.
Although the nurserymaids changed, the performance was always the same. Almost fainting with alarm, as if being taken to the scaffold, she would somehow be coerced on to the window-sill with her feet in the mouth of the terrible monster whose gullet opened below her, and too terrified to move. Eventually, probably pushed by the nurse, she would slip over the brink but clinging for dear life to the rope would stick a yard or two down. From ground level, where we awaited her arrival, the canvas tube looked like a snake which had swallowed too large a rabbit. At last exhorted from below the poor girl would leave go of the rope and forgetting all injunction about bottom and knees would shoot down to arrive in the hammock in a state of complete disarray with her skirt over her head, greatly to the amusement and delight of the men assembled below.
From the nursery landing a short passage led eastwards up some steps to two large attics which covered the area of the drawing room on the ground floor. Although, when I was young, the house had been in existence for only about 40 years the amount of lumber which had here accumulated was remarkable. These large rooms were both crowded with it. There was furniture, pictures, books, stuffed birds in glass cases, portfolios containing an assortment of prints and drawings, the debris of discarded amusements, broken croquet mallets, the paraphernalia of toxo-phily, a box of mahogany bowls, and everywhere evidence of my grandmother's passion for collecting china, huge Dresden ornaments, figures, candlesticks, dinner and dessert services and much else.
An object which greatly interested me was my grandfather's shower-bath. This consisted of a small circular tank raised on 6-foot supports with a pan below. The tank was presumably filled with water of a suitable temperature by a footman standing on a chair; my grandfather then stepped into the pan, pulled a string, and down came the very transitory shower. Another form of bath which had found its way into the lumber-room was my father's Turkish bath. This was a wooden box which would be set up in his dressing-room; he would sit inside it with only his head and hands emerging through holes as if in the pillory, while an oil lamp at the side puffed hot air into the box. I think it must have been rather soon discarded. Another aid to health and beauty was a back-board. It was an austere contraption covered in green baize with a depression for the back of the head. It could be propped up at an angle of 30° from the floor, and there the victims would lie as long as was bearable. It had been contrived for my Aunt Louisa, who was born with a twisted spine, but I fear that in her case it failed in its objective.
I have often wished that when I came to disperse this extraordinary collection in 1936 that I had had a wider knowledge as amongst the assemblage of junk there may well have been some objects of value. Some things I did save, amongst them some handsome late seventeenth-century oak balustrading, which had somehow made its appearance here. This now slightly altered serves very happily as altar rails in the church.
On the west side of the central block a sinister passage wound away through the top floor of the wing. Starting fairly normally with a few maids' bedrooms it then abandoned all attempt at sanity and disintegrated into extraordinary dark corners, box-rooms, cupboards, tanks, trap-doors into the roof, and so forth. In one dark corner stood my mother's trousseau trunk, a huge black affair lined with linen and with her new initials, B.D., painted in red on its arched lid. One wonders whether the high hopes with which this trunk must have been packed were fulfilled. It seems astonishing that anyone could have seriously designed anything so impracticable as this passage: for children's games of hide and seek, however, it was perfect.
This, then, was the house into which my mother had married and which, in spite of heroic efforts, remained little changed when she left it almost half a century later. My father's rigid objection to any alteration made improvement almost impossible, and had he been left to himself, he would have allowed the house to fall about him rather than do anything to repair it. This is not an unusual complex: there are a number of country houses about England - some of architectural interest - where the owners see ruin descending without making the smallest effort to retard it. In the case of the Victorian Hinton this would not have been of great moment.