Monthly Archives: July 2024

A Few Days in Malvern Part 3

by thehistoryinterpreter

We ventured north again and after a minor satnav fail we arrived at Witley Court, this time exploiting our English Heritage life membership. After a walk up through the woods to the house we were just in time for a short talk about the history of the house by Stephen. Built on the site of a Medieval Manor owned by the Cooksey family, who married into the Russells, the current Witley Court began life in the 1630s as a redbrick Jacobean manor house. The Russells supported the king in the English Civil War and Witley was sold in 1655, probably to pay the price for being on the wrong side.

Eight generations of Thomas Foleys then owned the house. Their money came from iron works and as such they had to strive to become accepted as landed gentry. To this end, they purchased a great deal of land, as well as making substantial additions to the house. In order to be fashionable, the red brick was covered with stucco. In the early nineteenth century, an advantageous marriage provided funds to employ John Nash to design a huge portico and make other changes.

In 1833, the estate was sold to William Ward. The owner of more than 200 coal mines, William was one of the richest men in the country, due in part to the enslavement of others. He was knighted to become the 1st Earl of Dudley. In the 1850s, Ward employed the architect Samuel Daukes to make further alterations in the then popular Italianate  style. This include a new curved wing and a large conservatory. At the same time, the stucco was replaced by a facing of Bath stone. Lavish entertainments were held, with the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and his entourage visiting. Guests would stroll round the gardens between banquet courses and find that whilst they were eating one course, the gardeners had replanted the beds with different plants.

In 1920, Sir Herbert Smith a carpet manufacturer bought the court. He had been knighted for chairing the little known carpet rationing committee in World War One. The house was only partly used and a devasting fire in 1937 destroyed half the house. Lacking the funds to repair the building, the contents of the remaining half were sold off and some of the building materials, including the lead from the roofs, were sold for scrap. Neglect took a further toll and eventually, in 1972, the forerunner of English Heritage acquired the site and began a programme of preservation.

We had a long chat with the head gardener who told us that the elaborate formal garden is an exact copy of that designed in the 1850s by William Andrews Nesfield. This included replicating the mistakes in the elaborate swirling box hedges that were planted in the nineteenth century. Nesfield’s enormous Baroque fountain is quite a feature. The sculpture is based on the story of Perseus and Andromeda and on the hour each hour the fountain plays for about ten minutes. The main jet reaches more than thirty five metres high.  The pumps were originally steam driven but since restoration in 2002, they are electric. Witley village was in the area where the fountain now stands but not wanting to be too close to the villagers, the family had the occupants moved out and the cottages demolished.

We were told that the neighbouring church, which is still a functioning parish church, was ‘not like other churches’ and Stephen was not wrong. Built by the Foleys in 1735, to replace the previous church, many of the fittings were purchased twelve years later from a private chapel at Cannons Park in London. Billed as ‘the finest Baroque church in the country’ this is probably not an extravagant claim. If we thought the church at Brockhampton was ornate, it had nothing on this. With painted ceilings by Antonio Bellucci, and copious amounts of gilding, it was to be seen to be believed. The church is now designated as a Major Church, one of the 320 most significant in the country.

Then the obligatory cake sampling trip to the tea rooms. Today’s toffee cake rated highly.

We started our last day by travelling westward to St Wulstan’s RSPB Reserve where we had a brief walk amidst a distinct lack of wildlife. We drove up to the base of the Malvern Hills and arrived a little early to  visit Picton Garden. We were allowed in anyway. This small garden is home to the national collection of Michaelmas Daisies. To me a Michaelmas Daisy is a Michaelmas Daisy but no. The nursery cultivates 430 different varieties. Michaelmas Daisy was on my plants wanted list so I chose one. A bit more of a drive through the Malvern Hills. The clue is in the name and we felt that hill walking might be a little strenuous for us. In addition, the weather was a bit uncertain, so it was off to visit a final family history related parish before returning to the van. Then home the following day.

A Few Days in Malvern Part 2

by thehistoryinterpreter

You’d think I would remember that it isn’t a great idea to tour churches on a Sunday but no. With my children’s family history in mind, we went for drive and walk round Hanley Swan and Hanley Castle. Sadly, most of the buildings are too late to have been family residences but we were able to get an overview of the area. We arrived at the church at 10.15am. Good news, the service wasn’t until 11am and the church allegedly was open from 10am daily, except that today it wasn’t. I was able to photograph the outside though.

On to Upton on Severn. This was Blues Festival weekend so roads were closed and the streets were crammed with street food vans, buskers, festival outlets and people. It made for a lively vibe but not ideal for photographing churches, one of which was a gig venue so I couldn’t even get near to it.

After an afternoon back in the van we headed to Llanthony Secunda Priory in Gloucester for an outdoor Fisherman’s Friends Concert. A very quick stop off to look at Ashleworth Tithe Barn on the way and we reached Gloucester. There was a slight issue accessing a car park that didn’t require us to do something complicated online on our phones but that overcome we took a short walk through the docks to the venue. The Augustinian Priory was established in 1136 as a second house to Llanthony Prima in Wales.

We were carrying our own chairs and I decided I could get away without encumbering myself with the umbrella or a coat in addition to my fleecy zip up top. As black clouds loomed I doubted this ‘wisdom’ but the umbrella was not needed. By the end, I did wish I had brought my coat but my noble companion sacrificed his. What is it about open air venues that makes people think it is ok to talk loudly throughout? We were probably the only audience members not to avail ourselves of the bar and food offerings at inflated prices. The concert was excellent of course but there was a teeny difficulty locating the car park for our homeward journey. We found a car park easily enough, just not the right one. It wasn’t helped by the fact that places looked familiar because we’d driven past them in the quest for a car park in the first place. I am sure we could have done something clever with our phones when we got out of the car but ‘clever with our phones’ is not us. After what I will describe as a ‘slight detour’ round Gloucester Docks thankfully the car hove into sight.

The next day, we headed north into Herefordshire to visit the Brockhampton Estate, definitely highly recommended. First up was the fifteenth century house with its sixteenth century gatehouse. The archetypal Tudor timber-framed home sports white wood and not the traditional black but apparently this is historically accurate, Black and white was not popularised until the Victorian era, when tar replaced limewash on the wood. Tar however was later found to trap moisture and cause rot. Brockhampton house’s wood has been limewashed and was therefore white. The original, cruck-framed building was constructed in the 1420s for John Domulton and his wife Emma Brockhampton. Later owners were the Barneby and then the related Lutley families. Renovations in the 1870s were overseen by John Chessell Buckler. Buckler was known for his work on Lincoln Cathedral. He was also the runner up for the design of the new Houses of Parliament when they were rebuilt after a fire in 1834. By the nineteenth century the house, was the home of estate workers. The whole estate was given to the National Trust in 1946.

The rooms in the house have been furnished to show different eras of occupation from the 1400s to the 1950s. The table in the main hall was set with square wooden trenchers. Each one contained a mini biography of a different inhabitant of the house from its earliest times until the twentieth century. There were plenty of interactive opportunities and items that could be handled. The house should be commended for its efforts to be disabled friendly, with captions in braille, and typed descriptions of each room, that are suitable for those who can turn text into audio. You could also borrow noise cancelling headphones and fidget toys.

Armed with a map of the estate, we decided to embark on the yellow route walk. To be fair, this was flagged as being ‘hard’ but we have cut our walking legs on ‘strenuous’ sections of the coastal footpath and we rashly decided that National Trust’s ‘hard’ might not be too bad. It was more difficult than we anticipated, mainly because it was uphill, at least on the way out. Once at the top of the hill, we swapped to the red route to see the advertised views. The views were good but perhaps not worth the mile and a half uphill walk to get there, especially as we could have driven up there and parked in an auxiliary car park.

We looked round the chapel, built in the late eighteenth century in a very ornate in style, with perhaps a Russian influence in the panel behind the altar.

Next, to another parish church with family history connections before returning to the van via a supermarket shop.

A Few Days in Malvern

by thehistoryinterpreter

As the rigors of the job I must not mention were abating, last week, we embarked on a short trip to Worcestershire. Years ago, we began a campaign to spend a few days in every county and although this has somewhat fallen by the wayside, Worcestershire was not one we had ticked off, so this was an opportunity to remedy that.

After a slight pause, because we set off without the extending mirrors that allow the driver to see round the caravan, we were on our way to Malvern. The journey was smooth and uneventful but true to form, we found ourselves travelling on the hottest day of the year so far. This was designed to be an opportunity to relax and twenty eight degrees was too hot for us to want to do much beyond rest in the van, so apart from a wander round the site once it began to cool a little, that was it for the day.

The next day was forecast to be the rainiest day of our trip, so we decide to visit somewhere with some indoor opportunities. Croome House was our destination of choice. It turned out that today Croome was the location for the start of a bike race so, although we arrived as it opened, the car park was almost full. It was a bit of a walk through the park to the house but the views were impressive. Guides were allegedly thin on the ground and Mike seemed to pop up in every room. We learned a little of the history from a rather whimsical video.

Originally the home of the Earls of Coventry, George William, the 6th Earl, inherited Croome on the death of his brother in 1744. He had a utopian vision to create the perfect home, in an idyllic setting. He gathered like-minded visionaries to bring his dream to fruition, including Robert Adam, James Wyatt and Lancelot (later ‘Capability’) Brown. The red brick house was transformed into a Bath stone-faced Palladian mansion set in parkland. The gardens contained imported plants from across the world. When the 8th Earl died, in 1843, many plants were sold off. The National Trust, who own Croome, are gradually replanting shrubberies and trees to Brown’s design but we seemed to miss the evidence of this.

The 9th Earl was noted for his racehorses and also for his herd of Herefordshire cattle, some of which were sold to Australia. Croome was requisitioned during the Second World War and RAF Defford was built in the parkland. After the war, Croome was used as a Catholic Boarding School, then a centre for Hari Krishna and finally a private home, before the National Trust took over in the early twenty-first century. The house has been stripped of almost all its furniture and artefacts and is now used more as a museum space, home to some art installations. One of these was an ‘archive’, a spiral bookcase full of box files, some of which contain information or artefacts relating to the house at various stages of its history.

We were fortunate to have visited on a day when Peter was on duty. Peter does fortnightly tours telling the story of the house’s time as a school. He kept us entertained for nearly two hours with his account of the punitive regime that he endured before he moved to the senior school at the age of thirteen.

We also looked at the RAF Defford museum, which is in the grounds. The airfield was the home of radar testing and the site of the world’s first fully automated aircraft landing. Most of the buildings were demolished, leaving just the runway and a handful of buildings beyond the wood as a reminder of the site’s time as an airfield.

We timed our visit well as the rain began just as we were leaving. We did make a very quick detour to photograph a church of potential family history interest at Pirton.

Things that go Wrong

by thehistoryinterpreter

It has been a bit of a week regarding things that should work. Firstly, the car. I don’t use my car a great deal so a planned solo trip some thirty miles over the border into Cornwall was a big event for it and me. Off I set. About twenty miles in, a little orange light showed up ABS. I was aware that this was something to do with brakes, a tad essential but I thought I’d keep going and hope it went away. Next a red light that looked like someone with a ball on their lap. I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that this was something to do with the airbag. I have been in a car when the airbag goes off; it definitely hadn’t but this now looked more serious so I pulled into a layby to summon assistance. Said trusty assistant, who was some forty minutes away, said ‘you are nearly there, keep going slowly and I’ll come along and have a look when you get there’.

I hang up and turn the ignition. Nothing, zilch, not even the strangled cow coughing noise. Another call to the trusty assistant who is on his way. I am now in a layby, in full sun, on the hottest day of the year with nothing at all to do for forty minutes. I am really bad at ‘nothing to do’. I am reluctant to use my phone whose battery drains like something that drains very quickly. The only blessing was I had opened the windows, which of course are electric, before everything died. I run through Cornish vocabulary in my head. This is frustrating as I have no means of looking things up when I can’t remember. The large lorry in front of me pulls out leaving a blessed patch of shade. More in desperation than hope, I try the ignition, ta dah! All working, I pull forward.

Trusty assistant and I have tracking things on our phones, not because we are obsessed with what the other is doing but in case I go for a walk on my own and fall in a ditch. I can see he is only ten minutes away. He arrives and agrees to follow me the remaining miles to my destination. We set off. A few minutes later the yellow light reappears, then the red light. I persevere. Just as I reach the outskirts of a town the CD player stops, then a few seconds later so does the car, with a gentle sort of ‘I’ve had enough’, it grinds to a halt. Good job I was only going slowly. I am now on the main road through north Cornwall, stationary, just as there are bollards to aid crossing the road on my right. My trusty assistant is behind me. We are totally blocking very a busy road. He rushes to my aid. I am not sure that a man of his advancing years should be pushing a car when the temperature is in the high twenties but needs must. Two slightly more appropriate car-pushers come to assist. My steering has locked, I am now stuck on a high kerb. We rectify this and I am able to pull on to a grass verge outside a vets, with my assistant behind me. A very long queue of traffic escapes. By now it is a good two hours since I left home. A big shout out to Penbode Vets in Bude. When I went to explain why I was parked on their verge, they offered refreshment, toilet facilities (hurrah) and the use of their air conditioned waiting room. I availed myself of one of these.

We ring the recovery service; I am covered under the breakdown cover of the trusty assistant. Oh. It turns out I am not, that’s new. The lovely vets have also provided the phone number of the garage. They can recover me in about an hour for an eye-watering sum (the garage is less than half a mile away) but can’t look at my car for a fortnight. Alternatively, they can recover me to a garage near home for very little extra. We opt for that. Trusty assistant meanwhile delivers me to where I was heading, only an hour late and returns to guard the car. In the end he was there two hours, then bless him, he waited to collect me from my day out. I did leave early but at least it wasn’t a totally wasted trip, even if it was an expensive one.

Then the dishwasher. I am new to dishwashers; this one came with the house. Apart from commercial dishwashers in places of work, I had never had anything to do with dishwashers before. I’ve been using this one a couple of times a week since I moved. I’ve run ‘cleaning washes’. I’ve even taken out the filter thingy and given it a bit of a wash, Increasingly though, things have come out of the dishwasher covered in stuck on gritty mank. I sought advice from dishwasher owning friends (pretty much everyone I know). ‘Maybe you’ve run out of salt’. Salt? Dishwashers need salt? ‘Or rinse aid’. This was getting more complicated by the minute. Sure enough I have red lights that indicate that I need both rinse aid and salt, who knew? ‘Oh and clean out the blades’. With a bit of tugging I remove the blades and they are best described as pretty unsavoury. With the aid of a needle and tweezers I even removed a piece of tape that ties up bread bags from those tiny holes. Some more expensive ‘three in one’ tablets were purchased. To be fair, the ones I inherited were also three in one but were probably a couple of years old. Do dishwasher tablets go out of date? The first wash went like a dream, the second one not quite so much – no mank but not everything was clean. Maybe I still need salt and rinse aid.

I am still not convinced I ‘get’ dishwashers. Mine is meant to take ten place settings – goodness knows how. My plates are too large for the underneath section and surely what you really want to wash is pots and pans. I can’t fit in all our roast dinner for two pots and pans without piling them up, which I understand is a no no. So my understanding is, you have to rinse stuff off (probably more than I have been) before you put it in and some stuff doesn’t always get clean, so you need to wash it afterwards, so really you might just as well wash it properly by hand in the first place. At the moment it just seems like a way to use electricity and a lot more water for not great results. It is however still a bit of a novelty, so I may buy the salt and rinse aid and persevere for a bit. The jury is definitely out.

Oh and good news about the car. It was a faulty alternator. This was new only a couple of months ago, so they replaced it totally free of charge, not even charging for the labour. Good job I went to my own garage and not the one near to where I ground to a spectacular halt.

Just because things are good, here is last week’s sunset, minutes from home.