Winter Solstice Roundup

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–This letter appeared in a recent issue of The Times newspaper:

DECLARATION OF WAUGH
Sir, The late Duchess of Devonshire showed me a book given to her by the Roman Catholic Evelyn Waugh, having an inscription by him along the lines of “nothing in this volume should disturb your Protestant sensibilities.” (Letters, passim) The lettering on the spine gave the name of the novel. I think it was Brideshead Revisited. It was not till quite a lot later the Duchess discovered that all the pages were completely blank.
Barry Joyce
Wirksworth, Derbyshire

Your editor sent the following email to Mr Barry Joyce in Derbyshire:

Dear Mr Joyce. You may be interested to know that the blank book sent to Deborah Mitford was bound and labelled as “The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox” (1959). This is described in a contemporaneous letter from Deborah to her sister Nancy reproduced in “The Mitfords: Letters Between Sisters” (Ed. Charlotte Mosley, p. 319).  If you would like to see her letter please let me know and I will make a copy and send it.

Waugh did in fact send a copy of the first edition of “Brideshead Revisited “to Deborah and her husband.  This was the specially bound page proof sent to 50 friends as Christmas presents in December 1944. When she died in 2016, that copy was sold at auction for ÂŁ52,500.

Sincerely, Jeff Manley

I was unable to find the blank-page Knox biography in Sotheby’s 2016 auction sale catalogue.

–An article in the Daily Telegraph is entitled “Britain is turning twee–and is the worse for it” and is written by Madeline Grant. After describing several examples of excess tweeism, the article concludes:

Perhaps the biggest canary in the coal mine was the dominance of The Great British Bake Off, awash with tea-and-bunting kitsch. I knew the twee epidemic was real when an acquaintance, a music journalist, who no doubt spent the Noughties snorting God-knows-what off God-knows-where at the Groucho Club, raved about rushing home to watch Bake Off. If the ex-rockers are packing it all in for a Viennese Whirl, there really is no hope. Worship at the altar of cake, lay your sacrificial cream puffs at the hallowed feet of the Virgin Mary Berry. All must surrender to the twee! Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lard! There’s even a Bake Off: The Musical in the offing. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a line of Cath Kidston bunting throttling the human neck – forever.

The slow march of cultural cringe is turning jokey self-deprecation into self-parody. Irony, savage wit and darkness have always been key to the British sensibility; from the novels of Evelyn Waugh to the impotent rage of Basil Fawlty. Yet these edges are increasingly being sanded down in favour of a Disneyfied version of national identity. Sadly, the twee-ification of Britain looks unstoppable.

—The Spectator has a review of the recent (and recently mentioned here) book Hellfire by David Fleming. The review is by the editor of Waugh’s letters, Mark Amory. After a discussion of the Oxford chapters, in which he focuses on how Harold Acton was responsible for organizing the Hypocrites Club into something more interesting than a rowdy drinking venue, the review concludes:

After this, Hellfire becomes a little more serious – and more about Waugh. Families, and the second world war, feature, while drink and ill-health catch up with some of the group. But Fleming writes just as adroitly as the gaiety recedes. He is fortunate to have such a subtle observer as Anthony Powell popping up and recording shrewd comments in a stream of novels and diaries. Indeed, the whole book reads rather like a Powell novel, with unexpected meetings and reversals. If the centre cannot quite hold, it is a constant pleasure.

–The Financial Times has a story by Ella Risbridger, author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies, and entitled “Our eternal obsession with literary property.” This opens with the example of the recent auction of Waugh’s home Piers Court. Here’s an excerpt:

There are many reasons why a person might want to hang on to a stately home for the everlasting rent of ÂŁ5 a week. But it takes a certain kind of person to explain that — far from being just about the money — it’s about the art. The current residents of Evelyn Waugh’s former home Piers Court, paying ÂŁ250 a year, claim to be the author’s “superfans”, friends of the family and, in some senses, curators of his legacy. That Piers Court “takes a lot of living up to”, as Waugh wrote in his diary, seems undeniable: eight bedrooms, six bathrooms and a ÂŁ3.16mn price tag. Prospective buyers had to bid sight unseen, since the sitting tenants paying their peppercorn rent refused any viewings before the auction. And yet it’s hard to ignore that the tenants have a point. If it was all about the money, the rest of us wouldn’t care. Bankruptcies, sitting tenancies and disputes are always part of the real estate equation. But we care about the Piers Court sale because Waugh lived there. Literary houses are a hot ticket. The Financial Times listed five notable properties this summer, including Hogarth House — home of Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press — and a 1920s mansion, complete with pool house, on the site of Mark Twain’s country pile. Even the childhood homes of authors such as Dorothy Sayers are of interest, selling for a genteel ÂŁ2.35mn…

–A recent issue of the Evening Standard carried a story entitled “Pemba: the secret island the It-crowd don’t want to know about.” After a discussion of the attractions of Pemba that make it preferable to neighboring Zanzibar, the article closes with this:

Woven into the island’s cultural tapestry, along with an abhorrent slave trade history and spice trade, are certain traditions. Both Pemba and Zanzibar have long been centres for so-called voodoo rituals and continue to draw in those seeking alternative healing for physical or mental affliction, or a transcendent form of enlightenment that Western culture is unable to offer. On visiting the island in the 1930s, British writer Evelyn Waugh affirmed the island’s role as the centre of this practice, detailing in his travel book Remote People (1931) that Pemba drew in budding “witch doctors” from as far as the Great Lakes of central Africa and even Haiti to finesse their skills. Today, many islanders still seek the advice of both medics and more alternative doctors when they are unwell or faced with a threat, though tourists are rarely offered a window into this world.

These traditions, along with the signature waft of cloves, Sultan lore, ethereal pools of light dotting ancient forests and boulder-strewn beaches lends Pemba its air of mystery and enchantment. A land of mangrove swamps, deserted beaches and magic.

 

 

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Piers Court Sold at Auction

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

According to the auctioneers and several press reports, Piers Court sold yesterday for ÂŁ3,160,000. Whether and how the new owners will take possession has not yet been fully explained. According to yesterday’s  Evening Standard “the eight-bedroom house has sold online today for ÂŁ660,000 over its reserve price of ÂŁ2.5 million. The auction was contested by four people, who collectively placed 49 bids for the property.”

Here are excerpts from the report in the Guardian relating to the reactions of the current occupants:

…Bechara Madi [one of the current occupants] said this week: “It’s our home, for the short term and for the long term. We will be putting our Christmas tree and decorations up in the next few days. We are going nowhere.

“We have spent a lot of our own money on the upkeep of the house, it’s our home and we have no plans to move,” he told MailOnline, adding that they had put a share of their money into the company that bought the house. “We are not tenants, we have a major share in the house and have put in hundreds of thousands of pounds of our own money.”

Helen Lawton [Mr Madi’s partner and the other occupant] claims to be friends with Waugh’s family, and told the Evelyn Waugh Society that she was planning a party to bring together many of his relatives at the house. Duncan McLaren, of the Evelyn Waugh Society, writing of a chance meeting with Lawton in 2019 while walking along a public footpath through the grounds of the house, said: “In recent weeks she has been very excited to learn about the Evelyn Waugh associations of her new home.”

Duncan McLaren kindly sent me a link to the Guardian article and noted in his email message: “If you recall, I spoke to Helen Lawton shortly after she’d ‘bought’ Piers Court.” A link to Duncan’s description on his website of that 2019 meeting with Ms Lawton is provided above.  I am not myself personally aware of any other contacts she may have had with members of the Evelyn Waugh Society.

The Daily Mail article written by Tom Bedford, which was posted in the MailOnline and cited in the Guardian, concluded with this:

…Ms Lawton, who describes herself as ‘eccentric’, even bought herself a Georgian horse-drawn carriage to go with the house of her dreams. The couple say they had a ÂŁ10,000 survey carried out on the property when they first moved in and had started restoration work when the Covid pandemic struck.

Ms Lawton said Waugh’s son Septimus, the writer’s seventh child, who lived in the house when he was young and died of cancer last year, was backing their plans. She said: ‘I had lovely conversations with Septimus about his time at Piers Court. He could remember the staircases and the chandeliers. ‘I had hoped that whatever time I had left I would be doing my utmost to restore the house and the grounds.’

But in August Ms Lawton and her partner were served with an eviction notice when the bank they borrowed ÂŁ2.1 million from called in the loan. A firm of receivers was brought in after their business partner Jason Blain was sued over an alleged unpaid hotel bill of ÂŁ740,000. […]

The shareholders said they had proof of funds to redeem the mortgage but they were ignored and the property was put on the market even though Ms Lawton and her partner refused viewings to prospective buyers. […]

London auctioneers Allsop declined to name the new owner who had been warned: ‘The property is occupied under a Common Law Tenancy at a rate of ÂŁ250 per annum.’ The buyer paid ÂŁ660,000 over the guide price but, according to Ms Lawton and Mr Bechara, they still have a bargain. They believe the mansion is worth in excess of ÂŁ4 million.

The couple, who own a multi-million pound flat in London, have accused the bank and receivers of acting ‘aggressively and in an underhand way’. Financier Mr Madi, 60, said: ‘Until contracts are exchanged there is no formal sale – we need to speak to Jason (Blain) about this to assess our position. We will have internal talks to see what our next move will be.’

Finally, the Evening Standard and The Times have published correct information about two common errors in previous press reports. As noted in the ES:

Waugh was gifted the country estate by his wife Laura Herbert’s grandmother in 1937. He, Herbert and their children lived there for 19 years — except during the second world war, when the mansion was let to a convent school.

He wrote many of his novels in the house’s library, including Helena, The Loved One, Men at Arms and Officers and Gentleman.

Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s most famous novel, was written in a hotel in Devon in 1944, during the house’s convent school years.

And The Times printed this letter:

HOTEL BRIDESHEAD
Sir, You report (Dec 14) that Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited at Piers Court in Gloucestershire. In fact he wrote it at Easton Court hotel in Chagford, Devon, while on leave from military training after a parachute fall; although he was living at Piers Court at the time he regularly used hotels to write, to avoid the distractions of home. The Devonshire tranquillity, “uniquely agreeable for both work and rest”, allowed him to recover from his injury while writing his fine novel.
Alexandre Guilloteau
London W9

The letter, apparently inadvertently, suggests that Waugh was “living” at Piers Court “at the time” he wrote Brideshead in Devon. For avoidance of doubt, he and his family did not in fact reoccupy the house until 10 September 1945, according to the chronology in published volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Prior to that, during 1944 when he wrote Brideshead he was living in Army or other temporary accommodations such as the hotel in Devon, when not with his family who were at Pixton Park, the Herbert family residence.

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More Details of Piers Court Auction

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times in a story entitled “Spoiler Alert: Evelyn Waugh fan could stymie mansion sale” has provided more details of the upcoming auction of Piers Court scheduled to take place tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt:

It is a story worthy of a book by Evelyn Waugh himself. A Waugh superfan could thwart the auction of the writer’s Cotswold mansion after setting herself up as a sitting tenant. Helen Lawton, 64, fulfilled her dream of living in Piers Court, a grade II listed eight-bedroom Georgian manor in Gloucestershire where the author wrote Brideshead Revisited.

The house is due to be auctioned tomorrow at a guide price of ÂŁ2.5 million. As well as a library, topiary garden, cellar and dovecote, the house comes with two live-in tenants: Lawton and her partner Bechara Madi, who have a Common Law tenancy of ÂŁ250 a year. Such tenancies fall outside the 1998 Housing Act and tend to be reserved for properties with exceptional high or low yearly rent under a private contract between the tenant and the landlord. The couple are said to be refusing access to prospective buyers…

Several other papers and internet media have reprinted the story, including the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. It is also noted that it was the trespass on Waugh’s property by reporters from the Daily Express that turned him against the house and motivated him to sell it. The article in the Express explains this in more detail:

…Waugh’s feelings towards Piers Court seemed to sour in 1955 after two Daily Express reporters gate-crashed in a bungled attempt to meet their “favourite idol”. The disturbance on 21 June is said to have affected Waugh who is reported to have told the reporters, Nancy Spain and Lord Noel-Buxton, to “Go away”. He is said to have told the pair in a rage: “Go away! You read the notice didn’t you? No admittance on business.”

In his diary entry for the day Waugh penned: “I sent them away and remained tremulous with rage all the evening.” On 22 June his diary simply adds: “And all next day.” He is reported to have told estate agent Knight Frank of his wish to sell the property with the words “I felt as if the house had been polluted”.

The Daily Mail has also posted a background story in its “FEMAIL” column placing his ownership of Piers Court within the context of a brief description of Waugh’s life. This is based to some extent on the writings of Alexander Waugh and Paula Byrne and includes several photographs which are worth a look. Most of the stories unhelpfully repeat the incorrect assertion that Waugh wrote the novel Brideshead Revisited while living in Piers Court. As explained in previous posts, he was the owner of the house when the novel was written, but it was occupied by an evacuated convent school while he was writing it in a Devon hotel on leave from the Army. Hopefully, all of this press interest will result in further reports of the results of tomorrow’s auction.

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Roundup: Piers Court Auction (yet more)

Posted on December 11, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The national quality press has finally picked up the story of the upcoming auction of Piers Court. The Guardian has posted an article by Rupert Neate which explains how the sale came about:

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Roundup (More on Piers Court)

Posted on December 4, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–A feature length article in The Oxford Blue (a new independent newspaper) discusses a Waugh novel. This is “Literature of Love” by Alice Clara State. Here’s an excerpt:

…I want to talk with you about a few texts that deal with love in a way that is at once indissolubly beautiful and emphatically enduring – I am afraid I will only mention ‘classic’ literature, however. […]

The ‘Oxford novel’ beckons to us to begin our foraging, wandering trail of literary love. I hope it is a good place to start. (By the ‘Oxford novel’, I mean none other than Evelyn Waugh’s – graduate of Hertford College and alum of The Isis magazine – seminal Brideshead Revisited.) The early portions of the book, its first soaring overtures, reveal and speak of a life that has been eclipsed even to us as Oxford students one hundred years (to the year!) since the two protagonists, Charles and Sebastian, matriculated. (Hang on – I am going to leaf through the novel now, as I write.) You can open this book to any single page, I should think, and happen upon something hauntingly gorgeous. It is a reservoir, at times still, at other times its tranquillity besmirched by a skittering pondskater, or the disturbance of an unfolding lilypad, and then, at the uncurling of a fist, the fingers flexing openward, the water’s surface sliced into by a launched stone or pebble. Waugh takes his time with his words, he will not stand to be rushed. Arranged like mille-feuille, he plates morsels of dry truth, hungrily-whetted mouthfuls of discovery, and moments of human fragility as light and small as slumbering fairies: precious and injurable—tread carefully—as a heap of crepe dresses and stitched rose-petals and transparent cobwebbed wings. The premise of the book is this – one uncertain boy of eighteen begins at Oxford, blithely unaware of himself and his own desires, and is suddenly waltzed into a great enactment of love and vision by the hands of Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian is a listless, yet mesmerizingly beautiful and unthinkably wealthy young gladiator amongst the pearly amphitheatre of love and boisterous youth. “I am not I: thou art not he or she / they are not they,” Waugh promises us readers in his author’s note, we try to believe him without protest, but catch a hangnail on an inkling of disbelief—you do not need to trawl far in a biography of Waugh to unearth Brideshead’s parallels with his own life. It is this recounted, replaited sadness and memory that helps form the spectral threads of this haunting tapestry of love…

Other authors considered include two poets–John Donne and Frank O’Hara–as well as Jane Austen.

—The Spectator has an article by Douglas Murray entitled “The new vandals: how museums turn on their own collections.” This describes “wokeist”actions exemplified by the Tate Gallery with respect to works by Rex Whistler and Stanley Spencer. The article opens with this:

This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.

—The Australian has a story reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, an affiliated publication. This is entitled: “Taylor Lautner and Taylor Lautner? What Happens When Couples Have the Exact Same Name.” After describing the complications arising from this and other recent same-name unions, the story concludes with this:

Back in the 1920s, when the British author Evelyn Waugh married the socialite Evelyn Gardner, their friends differentiated between the two by calling them “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn,” according to Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of the author.

–Writing in The Oldie’s Blog, editor Harry Mount describes “the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read, saw and heard in 2022”. Among them is this:

  • “I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high-born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink, which after all are easy to bear, as troubles go nowadays.” Evelyn Waugh writes to Coote Lygon about Brideshead Revisited, 1944

–A Daily Mail gossip column comments on the recent announcement of the sale of Piers Court mentioned in a previous post. Here’s an excerpt:

…former BBC executive Jason Blain […] is selling his ÂŁ2.5 million Gloucestershire home.

But those who fancy the six-bedroom property once owned by Evelyn Waugh are going to have to trust their instincts – and pictures of it taken back in 2018 – as no one is allowed to view the house in person before they buy it. Not even agents Knight Frank have seen the property since Mr Blain, who worked in business development at the Beeb, bought it in 2019…

So far, the Mail seems to be the only paper commenting on the sale. The Mail earlier this year (11 January 2022) reported a story  about Jason Blain in which they referred to an allegedly unpaid hotel bill which was the subject of a lawsuit and gave his residence as Perthshire. No mention was made in that earlier story of his ownership or occupancy of Piers Court. See link.

Ironically, the hotel involved in this earlier dispute was Waugh’s favorite London venue in the war and post war years. It was then called the Hyde Park Hotel and was managed by Waugh’s Army friend Basil Bennett. Here’s an an excerpt from the hotel’s history posted on its website:

The wicked delights Of Evelyn Waugh – The irascible Evelyn Waugh stayed and visited the hotel on a regular basis between 1942 and 1964 and enjoyed nothing more than playing pranks, such as mixing up the shoes left outside the bedroom doors or satirising fellow guests in his novels. He once sent Basil Bennett, owner of the hotel, a postcard ‘from Adolf Hitler’ requesting a room, but signing it off, ‘I am a respectable Spanish gentleman’!

 

 

 

 

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Alexei Sayle Podcast: “Outsider (An Evelyn Waugh Special)”

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The 31st installment of the comedian Alexei Sayle’s podcast series that was entitled Outsider (An Evelyn Waugh Special) was posted earlier today on the internet. Here’s the link. The subject and participants were described in the written announcement on the website: “Evelyn Waugh experts Barbara Cooke and Paula Byrne join the podcast to talk all things Waugh. The life and writings of Alexei’s favourite author are explored and picked apart in this Evelyn Waugh special.” The interviewees are both well known in the Waugh studies community. They have both made presentations at Waugh Conferences and have written books and articles on the subject of Waugh’s life and works.

Their participation in the podcast was suggested to Sayle by Penguin Books. This was based, in turn, upon the two scholars’ recent introductions written for a new edition of Waugh’s books being published by Penguin. Byrne prepared the introduction for Brideshead Revisited and Cooke for Decline and Fall. More on this below.

Sayle began the podcast by proposing that they discuss Waugh’s life and work from the beginning. Cooke and Byrne then offered information about his childhood and Oxford years but they soon became sidetracked to his religious conversion. Sayle wanted to discuss what he deemed Waugh “sucking up” to aristocrats at Oxford and later but the Waugh scholars were having none of that. When Sayle noted that Waugh spent little time with coal miners, Byrne and Cooke pointed that he also had difficulties getting along with upper class friends and was, if anything, an equal opportunity snob.

Attempts were made to discuss individual books. For example, Sayle noted that Put Out More Flags raised an interesting subject of an incestuous relationship between Basil Seal and one of the characters but the subject soon broadened to encompass Waugh’s treatment of homosexual characters in several books.

Sayle also introduced the theme of the post-WWI choice between Communism and Catholicism that confronted writers of Waugh’s generation. But although Sayle is well known as an outspoken leftist, he was unable to steer the subject into politics as the scholars raked over other religious/philosophical interests of Waugh.

This lead Sayle into a discussion of Sword of Honour which he professes to be his favorite among Waugh’s novels. This topic took up much of the remainder of the 75 minute interview, as the three discussed several aspects of that work. As this drew to a close, a question was raised by another voice, probably that of the podcast’s producer, who was just beginning to read Waugh and was in the middle of the new Penguin edition of Decline and Fall. The interview closed with a discussion of Captain Grimes and Waugh’s attitude toward aesthetes at Oxford.

Sayle was disappointed that, even though the discussion was animated and wide ranging, there were several books they failed to cover such as Black Mischief, not to mention Scoop, Pinfold, Handful, Helena that were barely alluded to,  as well as travel books, biographies, etc. Sayle hoped that this neglect could be the basis for the convening of another session in the near future.

The new Penguin editions that were the inspiration for Sayle’s podcast were published in October without much fanfare (in the US, at least, where they are not for sale). They are hardback editions in the Penguin Classics imprint. Brideshead is selling on Amazon.uk for ÂŁ16.99 and Decline and Fall for ÂŁ13.33. Other titles issued in this new format also have written introductions: Handful of Dust (Philip Eade), Scoop (Alexander Waugh), Sword of Honour (Martin Stannard) and Vile Bodies (Simon James). Penguin has posted the introductions to each of these novels on its website at this link. This will bring up the page for Decline and Fall and the introduction can be found under “LOOK INSIDE”. You will need to scroll down. If you return to the D&F page and go to the bottom, the other 5 novels will appear and their introductions can each be similarly linked .

UPDATE (3 December 2022): A link to Penguin Books’ website was added.

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Piers Court to be Sold at Auction

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Real estate agents Knight, Frank have announced the sale by auction of Evelyn Waugh’s former home at Stinchcombe, Dursley, Gloucestershire. The sale will take place online on 15 December 2022. Details and contact information are available from the website of Knight, Frank and a link to the website of the auctioneers Allsop is copied below. Excerpts of the house description and sale procedures from Knight, Frank refer to an:

“8 bedroom house for sale in Piers Court, Stinchcombe, Dursley, Gloucestershire, GL11: 23.58 acres

Offers in excess of  £2,500,000.

Unless sold prior to or withdrawn Piers Court will be for sale by Auction on Thursday 15th December 2022–On the instruction of the joint fixed charged receiver.

The property has not been visited by the selling agents since 2019. All images dated 2018. It is NOT possible to view the property.

HISTORY

Perhaps best known for being the home of author Evelyn Waugh, Piers Court has many historical connections. It was used for royalists during the Civil War. In 1640 the local wealthy mill owning Pynffold family acquired Piers Court where they remained for 150 yrs. After the fall of Bristol, it is thought that Piers Court was ransacked by parliamentarian troops while searching for Prince Rupert, the King’s cousin. In the nineteenth century Piers Court saw little change until 1937 whenEvelyn Waugh was given the property by his parents in law. [Emphasis supplied.]

This Grade II* listed Georgian manor house is approached up a long drive. Piers Court is nestled in its extensive grounds enjoying views over its own land. Once described by Pevsner as a ‘dignified and elegant house’, Piers Court displays a classical 18th century façade with the central crowning pediment bearing a coat of arms which is supported upon enriched pilasters. Piers Court has not been inspected since early 2019 when purchased by the current owners. The property at the time was extremely well presented and benefits from both an imposing, formal layout ideal for entertaining, yet to the rear of the property lies a more homely arrangement of rooms ideal for family
living.

The front door opens into a classical Georgian hall with a flagstone floor and cantilever staircase. Off the main entrance hall was the formal drawing room and library, both of which provided the grandeur that would be expected of a Georgian manor house. On the west side of the library was a large bay window.The drawing room looked to the front of the house and down a copper beech avenue.The Elizabethan rear of the house, had slightly less formal rooms. The kitchen had a range of traditional wooden cabinets and a terra cotta tiled floor. The wine cellar comprised two rooms and wine bins.A self-contained staff wing lead from the kitchen.

The first floor offered the primary accommodation with an en-suite master bedroom with south westerly views of the parkland. There were four further bedrooms on this floor, all of which had en-suite.The second floor had three spacious double bedrooms which would be ideal for guests. Servicing these bedrooms was a family bathroom. It
is from this floor that a large attic space was accessed which provided
storage space.

Outbuildings
Positioned close to the house is the stunning William and Mary coach house
which is a Grade II listed building. In 2019 it provided 5 loose boxes and an
office/tack room on the ground floor and an upper floor with a loft and a
dovecote. The nearby mews, constructed in 1987 of stone elevations, had a
two bedroom apartment on the first floor with 5 five garages on the ground
floor. There were 6 loose boxes / garden stores with in the grounds.

Garden and Grounds
The front garden was lawned with a circular clipped yew. There was a croquet lawn and tennis court and many other garden components. The park was pasture with parkland trees including horse chestnut, lime, oak and copper beech. Lying to the south of the parkland were further grass paddocks. A footpath crosses part of the land to the west of the house.

VIEWINGS
It is NOT possible to view the property. The photographs [available on Knight, Frank website linked above] are from historic marketing in 2018. The vendors agents are able to discuss the property from historic viewings.

To access legal pack, go to www.Allsop.co.uk

Tenure: The property is occupied under a Common Law Tenancy at a rent of ÂŁ250 per annum. A Notice To Quit has been served on the occupant on 19 August 2022 and a copy of such notice was affixed to the property gate on 22 August 2022. A prospective purchaser should take their own legal advice regarding this.”

The auctioneers Allsop advise that pre-registration is required in order to bid. Their terms and and procedures as well as a detailed description of the property with photos may be visited and downloaded at this link.

 

 

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Derek Granger (More)

Posted on November 30, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Several newspapers and other media have run obituary notices for Derek Granger. The most comprehensive are those in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian, for example, mentions some of his other TV work for Granada:

When he took over as the second producer of Coronation Street, from 1961 to 1962, he learned an early lesson in overcoming unforeseen problems. A seven-month strike by Equity members meant that only 13 actors on long-term contracts could appear. Granger’s ruse of using tall children to deliver milk and post failed to impress the union, so he put one of the characters, Dennis Tanner (played by Philip Lowrie), in charge of a theatrical agency and filled out scenes with snakes, sea lions, pigeons, dogs and a chimp.

He then switched to sitcom to create and produce The Bulldog Breed (1962), starring Donald Churchill as the disaster-prone Tom Bowler and Amanda Barrie as his girlfriend, Sandra Prentiss. He returned to comedy with the Coronation Street spin-off Pardon the Expression (1966), relocating Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe) to the branch of a national chain store as assistant manager. It was a massive hit, but Turn Out the Lights (1967), a spin-off of the spin-off, with Swindley as a ghost hunter, bombed.

Earlier, in 1964, Granger had a run as executive producer of World in Action. Among the episodes during his time in charge was Seven Up!, featuring seven-year-olds whom Michael Apted, the researcher, would subsequently visit as director of stand-alone programmes every seven years to chart the ups and downs of their lives. Granger also presented Granada’s regional programme Cinema during 1964 and 1965.

The Daily Telegraph cites Derek’s 1952 interview of Waugh in Brighton:

In the early 1950s he interviewed Evelyn Waugh who was convalescing at a local hotel. Contrary to the received image of the famous novelist as rude, snobbish and overbearing, Granger found him “amazingly nice and wonderfully funny”. As they parted after a two hour talk, the writer murmured gravely: “Ours is a very exacting trade, Mr Granger, is it not?”

The Telegraph also mentions, in its closing paragraphs,  an anecdote from the filming of Brideshead of which I was not previously aware:

A lifelong cat-lover, he tried to get felines in all his films. No fewer than 40 were scheduled for one scene in Brideshead, to lap up milk spilled in a road accident. On shooting day in Manchester, it rained and the cats declined to appear. Only one could be coaxed into the shot.

After retiring in the early 1990s, Granger, an engaging talker with an impish mien and relish for the absurd, returned to Brighton where he served as vice-president of the Regency Society and was involved in campaigns by various Brighton societies concerned with development threats to the city’s historic centre.

The Argus (Brighton) also runs an obituary which includes several recent photos of Derek. Ironically, although it refers to Derek’s status as a former employee (his first job after leaving the military in WWII), it fails to note that his 1952 interview of Evelyn Waugh appeared in its sister paper the Sussex Daily News.

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Derek Granger: 1921-2022 R.I.P.

Posted on November 29, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The producer of the 1981 Granada TV series of Brideshead Revisited Derek Granger has died at the age of 101. According to The Independent (Ireland) Derek was reported by close friends to have “died peacefully at his home.”  The obituary appearing in the Hollywood Reporter is thus far the most definitive:

Derek Granger, the British producer and screenwriter who served as the driving force behind the acclaimed 1981 miniseries Brideshead Revisited, died Tuesday at his London home, screenwriter Tim Sullivan told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 101.

Granger teamed with Sullivan and Brideshead writer-director Charles Sturridge on the grand period films A Handful of Dust (1988), starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Judi Dench, James Wilby, Anjelica Huston and Rupert Graves, and Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), featuring Graves, Helena Bonham Carter and Judy Davis.

A onetime journalist and frequent Laurence Olivier collaborator, Granger in 1958 joined Granada Television, where he was head of drama and produced the famed soap opera Coronation Street; the epic 1972-73 series Country Matters, starring Ian McKellen; a 1976 adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Olivier, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner; and, of course, Brideshead Revisited.

Based on Evelyn Waugh’s sprawling pre-World War II novel first published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited was voted the 10th best British program of all time by the British Film Institute in 2000. Starring Jeremy Irons, Diana Quick and Anthony Andrews, the ITV production raked in seven BAFTAs and was nominated for 11 Emmys, including the one for outstanding limited series.

“It was very highly experimental for the day because nothing like it of that scale had ever been done all on film except Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was just a year before, but with nothing like the production values,” Granger recalled in 2017.

“There we were with foreign locations 
 hunting scenes, scenes on Atlantic liners 
 very grand houses 
 It was enormously spectacular. I don’t think anybody had quite worked out how it should be done. And of course we were making it. I mean, we started off to do six hours and ended up making 11!”

Born on April 23, 1921, Granger served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, then reviewed plays for the Sussex Daily News and Evening Argus in Brighton, England. Olivier liked his writing and recommended him for the job as the first drama and film critic for the Financial Times, where he helped launch the newspaper’s arts page.

However, Granger “was bored stiff with reviewing,” he told The Telegraph last year, “and was aching to go into television. At just that moment, I got a phone call from Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada TV, asking me if I’d like to join the company.

For 10 months in 1961-62, Granger was the second-ever producer on Coronation Street, where he introduced storylines that could span multiple episodes. He also produced its spinoffs Pardon the Expression and Turn Out the Lights as well as the documentary series Cinema and World in Action.

“With great sadness the production team at Coronation Street and ITV Studios would like to send heartfelt condolences to Derek’s family and friends,” ITV said in a statement.

He left for stints at London Weekend Television and the National Theatre (as a literary consultant to Olivier) before returning to Granada to produce six plays, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Harold Pinter’s The Collection, starring Helen Mirren and Alan Bates.

Brideshead Revisited — which won just one Emmy, for Olivier’s supporting turn — cost several millions to make and, interrupted by an ITV strike in 1979, three years to complete.

Because of the work stoppage, Granger was forced to replace his original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had a previous commitment, with Sturridge, an inexperienced protĂ©gĂ© of his at Granada who was in his 20s. “He turned out to be incredible,” he said.

Granger noted he and his team were driven to producing “something that is incredibly close to the feeling of the novel and would echo it. And I think 
 the television experience is as good, if not slightly better. But that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to be true to the Waugh.”

He retired in the early 1990s. His husband and partner of 66 years, interior designer Kenneth Partridge — he worked on homes for John Lennon and Ringo Starr and Beatles manager Brian Epstein — died in December 2015 at age 89.

Derek was a good friend of the Evelyn Waugh Society. He appeared at the society’s 2011 conference at Downside. He had met Waugh personally in 1952 while a reporter for the the Sussex Daily News. A copy of the interview and Derek’s own memoir of how it came about along with his personal assessment of Waugh are reproduced in vol. 19 of the Complete Works 0f Evelyn Waugh (A Little Learning), pp. 517 ff.

 

 

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Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 26, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Iona McLaren writng in the Daily Telegraph considers the problem posed by readers who want to be warned against reading something that might upset them–in this case about books in which animals die. The article opens with this:

The US writer David Sedaris tells the story of his sister Lisa refusing to see a film because she had heard that a dog gets killed in the first 15 minutes. “I reminded her that the main character dies as well, horribly, of Aids, and she pulled into the parking lot, saying, ‘Well, I just hope it wasn’t a REAL dog.'” On behalf of Lisa – and, frankly, most English people – I am pleased that Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been given a trigger warning by the University of Greenwich for depicting “animal death” when the mariner admits: “With my crossbow/I shot the albatross.” This is a poem in which many sailors die, some in quite imaginative scenarios, but it takes the betrayal of a seabird to get the eyes stinging. It’s because, as Lisa Sedaris says, “human suffering doesn’t faze us much”. We see ourselves parodied in Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Tin of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, trying to get 1930s Africa compliant with the RSPCA. As GK Chesterton once put it: “Wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice.” […]

One somehow expected a suggestion of a trigger warning for Black Mischief that included references to avoidance of descriptions of racial prejudice and/or consumption of human flesh. However, after discussing several examples of trigger warnings that involve animals and other matters of readers’ potential concerns, the article concludes:

Of course, it’s good to feel something, sometimes, and the great thing about trigger warnings is they could help. Of Mice and Men, Bambi, and White Fang would all be there in the “WARNING: animal death” section of the library. And me? I’d be amusing myself in the “WARNING: child mortality” section for, as Oscar Wilde said of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

–The Chelsea Arts Club has announced the presentation next week of a one-man play by actor Bob Kingdom entitled Bloody Brideshead: Both Sides of Evelyn Waugh. In this he explores “the complexities behind Evelyn Waugh.”  The performance will take place on 4 December at the club, 143-5 Old Church Street, SW3. You must be a member of the club or guest of one to attend. See above link for details.

—The Times has an article in its “Feedback” column about what was once known as the “fourth leader” on its editorial page:

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a light-hearted leading article from 1946 celebrating the return of bananas after the war. This prompted Mark Negin to write from Ramsgate. If his memory wasn’t deceiving him, he says, “it was a regular exercise in the English class of my small prep school, evacuated to Wales, to write a precis of the fourth leader. It was always humorous and witty. When and why was the fourth leader dropped?”

Welsh prep school? This sounds like a scene from Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. My colleague Rob Nash tells me that Times leaders were also deployed at his boarding school, where he had to copy one out if he’d been naughty. It’s nice to know that they’ve had their uses.

Anyway, the banana fourth leader, as Mr Negin suspected, was a classic example of the Times institution kicked off by the paper’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, in a telegram to the editor from Paris, dated January 25, 1914: “Humbly beg for light leading article daily till I return — Chief.”

Northcliffe, who also owned the Daily Mail, was determined to get The Times into profit by broadening its readership, and introducing a bit of frivolity on the leader page seemed a good way to start. Whether it worked or not, the light leaders — they might have been the third or the fifth, but were always known as the fourth — continued to appear until 1967, when William Rees-Mogg became editor. Bent on raising the paper’s gravitas, just as Northcliffe had aimed to lighten it up, he axed the fourth leaders on his first day…

–The Spanish language publication La Diaria Cultura based in Uruguay has a brief article on Waugh’s career. After a review of his life and works, the article concludes:

With a long and prolific publishing life in Spanish during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, his work was published copiously by Losada, Alianza, EmecĂ©, Criterio and Sudamericana, with translations written by Guillermo Whitelow, Pedro Lecuona, Floreal MazĂ­a, Clara Diament and Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, among others–, Evelyn Waugh’s work deserves … all that attention, although for the average reader the mere mention of his name signifies a woman (there is a great joke about it in the film Lost in Translation, by Sofia Coppola), if not the comfortable and obtuse reductionism of placing him among the reactionary writers, “from the right”, that stoned seat to which authors such as Knut Hamsun, Curzio Malaparte, Ernst JĂŒnger, Louis-Ferdinad CĂ©line and many others, all apostrophized as conservatives and other epithets as useless as stupid. Of course, Evelyn Waugh himself would not be interested in the praise of his contemporaries or the worship of generations to come, since he knew that the fate of the world is nothing other than decadence. Not in vain in an interview for The Paris Review, from 1962, when asked what period of history he would have liked to live in, he replied: “The 17th century. I think it was the time of the best drama and the best romance. I think he might have been happy in the 13th century, too.”

The translation by Google leaves something to be desired in this particular case. Here’s a link to the original.

–The Guardian has a review of the BBC’s drama series SAS Rogue Heroes. This is by WWII historian Anthony Beevor. The article opens with this:

 I really have to take my hat off to Steven Knight. The writer of Peaky Blinders has adapted Ben Macintyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes, the authorised history of the Special Air Service, and turned it into the best dramatic series the BBC has produced for ages.

After a discussion of the plot and characters, Beevor continues with this:

In the desert, there was little time for snobbery. Right from the start, we see the SAS coming together as an unholy alliance of upper-class thugs, mostly from Guards regiments, along with “pirates” from other backgrounds who are equally violent and determined to fight the advancing Axis forces. In what was almost inevitably a misogynistic environment, men were judged on their courage and stamina. Several of them…may even have been suppressing gay instincts as they fought and drank men from other units into oblivion back in the fleshpots of Cairo’s red-light district. It was Evelyn Waugh, an officer from the Middle East commando unit known as Layforce, who claimed from personal knowledge that most gay men in the armed forces did not conform to popular stereotype. “Buggers were jolly brave in the war,” he wrote later to Lady Diana Cooper.

Randolph Churchill makes an appearance in Episode 5. The series is also discussed in previous posts.

UPDATE (28 November): Randolph referenced re SAS Rogue Heroes and typo corrected.

 

 

 

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