The original PALACE of BLING
It was a Shangri-La in the Surrey Hills – a vast mansion with an underwater pleasure dome for nights of revelry. Just one problem: as a new book tells, it was built by a crook with a life as outrageous as...
Guests watched fireworks or gazed at stars magnified by glass and water r Many of Wright’s much-vaunted mining firms turned out to be duds
OF ALL the opulence of today’s oligarchs, dotcom billionaires and oil- rich sheiks, none has matched the sheer outlandishness of Victorian mining speculator Whitaker Wright or the vast pleasure dome he built for himself in Surrey.
His enormous house certainly scaled the heights of ostentation, yet what earned Lea Park its place in folklore was the extraordinary secret that lies to this day beneath the surface of one of the lakes Wright created in its grounds.
Invited to step into a small lakeside building, Wright’s guests first descended a spiral staircase before passing through a wooden door into a 350ft-long underwater tunnel lit by electric lamps, wide enough for four people to walk abreast. This in turn led to Wright’s pride and joy – a domed underwater glass chamber, 18ft high, sitting like an igloo on the lake bed that the contemporary press termed ‘a submerged fairy room’.
More than 200 panes of glass, each 3in thick and set between riveted ironwork, were used in the construction of this remarkable ‘smoking room’.
It had a mosaic floor and was furnished with settees, chairs, small tables and palms. Perched on top of the dome was a statue of Neptune, which protruded from the lake’s surface and was the only part of the structure visible from land.
An air vent emerged through Neptune’s mouth and wisps of smoke were sometimes seen drifting out of it when Wright and his friends were enjoying cigars.
To ensure clear views, Wright hired divers to keep the dome free from algae. Spellbound guests were able to watch fish and sometimes swimmers overhead. On summer nights, he switched off the lights so his friends could watch firework displays or gaze at the stars magnified by curved glass and water.
A short flight of steps led to another underwater room with concrete walls and a curved ceiling supported on cast-iron columns. Lit by porthole-shaped skylights and equipped with a billiards table and card tables, this was the Lord of the Manor’s secret gaming room, where the men could head off for post-prandial fun.
The ladies were catered for, too. From the gaming room, another staircase led to a stone viewing platform on the surface of the lake, where on summer afternoons his wife Anna and her friends could take tea.
Wright’s tale has fascinated me ever since I first encountered this underwater hideaway while researching architectural follies. I wondered what sort of person could have built such a place. And the answer, I found, was a man the Victorians called the Napoleon of Finance, whose epic story – the subject of my new biography – was in many ways a forerunner of more modern financial disasters.
Corpulent, grandiose and bull-necked, James Wright was an unlikely tycoon. Born in 1846, the eldest of five children of a Methodist preacher, he, too, became a minister before setting up a printing business in Halifax with his brother that promptly went bankrupt.
The pair narrowly avoided prison, and on their father’s death, both emigrated to Toronto. Wright – by now using his middle name Whitaker – was lured by an oil boom to Philadelphia, where he met and married Anna in 1878. He set up a series of businesses, again sailing perilously close to the wind. In 1877, he and four partners were accused of making false claims in the prospectus of a new company and charged with conspiracy to defraud stockholders.
Yet Wright escaped prosecution and, ever the adventurer, decided to became a prospector in America’s Wild d West. An outgoing man with a quick wit and a ready charm, he made friends freely in saloons and gambling dens. Indeed, he enjoyed the rough-and-tumble boomtown life and later claimed he had witnessed ‘fierce revolver fights in the dancing halls’.
It was in Leadville, Colorado, that he made his first fortune, talking up the prospects of a silver mine in 1880 and floating the company for $5 million (about £85 million in today’s money) on the New York stock exchange.
By the time the business went bust, Wright had made a fat profit and was long gone. He repeated the trick in Utah, California, Nevada and New Mexico, where he set up a company that initially, at least, rewarded its investors handsomely.
For the first five months it paid out $100,000 a month in dividends as more than $1 million in silver was brought to the surface. The company’s share price soared, but again the bonanza did not last. In 1889, with his reputati\on tarnished and creditors breathing down his neck, he decided to reinvent himself in the land of his birth. Wright began promoting West Australian gold mines on the London stock exchange and, as the money rolled in like never before, he looked for a country property befitting of his enormous wealth, in part to prove to himself and his family that he had left that early disgrace in Halifax far behind.
With money no object, he bought two
tracts of land at Witley, near Godalming, paying £150,000 for the Lea Park estate, which included a 19th Century manor house, and £100,000 for the adjacent South Park Farm estate.
Striding through his 9,000 acres, which contained 90 miles of roads and lanes, five lodges and ten farms, he set his swirling imagination to work. A small tributary of the River Wey meandered through the grounds, but Wright envisaged a series of great lakes, complete with islands. Most of the exotic ideas were his own. Under the direction of London architect Paxton Hood Watson, two wings were added to the existing manor house at the stupendous cost of £400,000.
The new west wing was adorned with a vast conservatory, which alone cost £10,000 (about £1 million today) and a large central glass dome filled with trees and exotic plants from across the world – a rival to Kew Gardens. The east wing, meanwhile, accommodated a domed observatory with a revolving copper roof.
Between these two great embellishments were 32 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and seven reception rooms, the largest of which, at more than 2,600 square feet, was the cedar-panelled ballroom, with a dancefloor capable of accommodating hundreds. Wright even found room for a small private hospital and, oddly, one of Britain’s first private velodromes.
The stable block, capable of holding 50 horses, was a centrally heated equine palace with a viewing space from which visitors could admire their mounts from the comfort of leather-upholstered settees shaded by palms. Months of work resulted in the creation of the square lake, the bathing lake and the big lake. A boathouse was home to a flotilla of electric launches, sailing craft and rowing boats.
It all came at quite a cost. Over the years his improvements to the estate cost an estimated £1,115,000 – then an extraordinary amount of money. But the overblown and impossibly extravagant house – he had a staff of 77 – was a perfect expression of his creator.
In Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee year of 1897, government Ministers and peers were among those who rushed to buy shares i n his booming London and Globe Company and other miningrelated companies.
To impress investors, Wright made a point of appointing Establishment figures as directors. Future prime minister Arthur Balfour and members of the SpencerChurchill family all invested. Even the Royal Family was said to have benefited.
Whether or not these rumours were true, they were widely believed and Wright did nothing to dispel them. He established another Royal connection when he struck up a friendship with the spendthrift Sir James Reid, personal physician to Queen Victoria – in 1896 he sought Wright’s advice on how to make a killing on the stock market.
To the world at large, it seemed he could do no wrong.
But like the latter-day conman Charles Ponzi, inventor of the fraud scheme that bears his name, Wright’s business acumen was not as it seemed.
Just as in America, many of his much- vaunted mining prospects turned out to be duds and he used accounting tricks to make them appear solvent in annual accounts All such frauds must, eventually, come crashing down.
And in a true fin de siècle moment, his house of cards collapsed on the last day of trading of the 19th Century.
Panic spread in the stock market. Shares in Wright’s companies halved and 20 firms of stockbrokers were ruined.
Wright fled to France and boarded a liner to New York, only to be arrested on arrival thanks to a transatlantic cable from Scotland Yard. He was brought back to London to stand trial.
On January 26, 1904, he was convicted of fraud at the Royal Courts of Justice and given a seven-year prison sentence, but he evaded justice by swallowing cyanide in a court anteroom almost immediately afterwards.
Magnificent as it was, Wright’s great project at Lea Park was never completed. After passing through a variety of owners, the big house burned down in 1952 and the buildings were demolished.
The underwater dome, still watertight after 120 years, is now a Grade II-listed building – a monument not merely to folly, but to a life of extraordinary excess.
He claimed he’d seen revolver fights in American dancing halls f n