Home, sweet Gothic home
Ever since moving into the Old Rectory at Hedgerley 40 years ago, I’ve kissed its walls every day
During these troubling times, there can surely be no more suitable building for me to write about than my house for 40 years, the Old Rectory at Hedgerley in Buckinghamshire. I have daily kissed its walls with love for the place.
The rectory was built in 1846, replacing the parsonage of 1740. I have always assumed the architect Benjamin Ferrey was responsible for our Old Rectory, though I cannot prove it.
He was a contemporary and a friend of the great architect Augustus Welby Pugin, whose father he had lived with and worked for. Also a church architect supremo, Ferrey was responsible for the pleasingly flint-covered St Mary’s Church in Hedgerley. This stands a mere half-mile away from the Old Rectory, while only a mile to the other side stands the great neo-tudor pile of Bulstrode, also designed by Ferrey.
Bulstrode was the site of the house belonging to villainous Judge Jeffreys, where he lived during his Bloody Assizes, condemning 800 people into slavery and 320 to death. Particularly vicious was his decree that one Alice Lisle be burnt alive for sheltering a supporter of Monmouth.
Surely, then, our house must be a luscious, Ferrey-filled sandwich. Spicing up the rectory yet further was the Rev Edward Baylis, who had his initials E B and the date 1846 writ large in burnt bricks above the diaper brickwork embedded into the whole house. On taking over the parish, he bought the ‘advowson’, the right to appoint the vicar, which he did straight away – by appointing himself!
He then set about building his rectory, having to borrow £500 of the total cost of £1,000 from the Queen Anne’s Bounty fund set up for indigent vicars. There were obviously degrees of indigence: a long row of his domestic servants were buried in the churchyard. He created his Victorian Gothic rectory with certain aspirations to grandeur: the hall is some 30 feet long and nine feet wide.
Pugin wrote that ‘Gothic is more holy the nearer it reaches heaven’ – and so it is: when you’re surrounded by the style, your spirits do most certainly soar. We have ourselves enhanced the rectory no end with four eight-feet-high paintings of angels and with great gold papier-maché stars that were stolen – by me, I fear – from a due-to-be-demolished Edwardian circus in Liverpool, where the smell of animals still hung heavy in the air.
Adding to the atmosphere at Hedgerley are golden stars on a blue ceiling above a Gothic memorial to departed dogs, inscribed with the words ‘Joyfully barking in the Heavenly Chorus’. Arches leap round over ram’s heads above a painted motto, ‘He who sows Thistles shall reap Prickles’, honouring two mongrels. Their pawprints are embedded, Hollywoodstyle, into the floor.
Thistle and his mother, Clover, are painted on either side of a dachshund coat of arms, quartered with pawprints, rabbits and bones. A rampant dachshund, and another in armour, rule over everything!
Staring forth are the somewhat incongruous death masks of Goethe and Schiller; while Cromwell’s, warts and all, is scrunched into a dark corner. Most gloriously Gothic of all is the conservatory, with spires, pinnacles and a floor of particularly exciting encaustic tiles I first saw in the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Encaustic tiles of terracotta inlaid before firing with a different-coloured (in this case, cream) clay were created by the Cistercians in the 12th century. The process was lost with the Dissolution of the Monasteries but then revived – encouraged by Pugin and others – by Herbert Minton in 1843. Soon they were coating the floors of most Victorian churches as well as innumerable other buildings. With the onset of plain tiles in the 20th century, their popularity faded.
But in 1974, when the Smithsonian wanted to restore and replace theirs in Washington, they discovered that their original makers were Mintons, now H R Johnson, of Stoke-upon-trent, who
stirringly applied themselves to relearning the craft again from scratch.
I saw those revivals in Washington and how I cheered those pathfinders. HURRAH! Here was an English medieval industry, which had been revived and then died in the 19th century, now given a full-whack rebirth in late-20th- and 21st-century America. In our conservatory, Pugin’s tiles, designed for the Foreign Office, streak off in one direction, while those for his Palace of Westminster go off in another. Taking particular pride of place, to acknowledge their American saviours, are the tiles made for the 1876 reconstruction of the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia.
I see this house as a giant cabinet of curiosities, with rooms jam-packed with objects, ‘whatever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced’
– Francis Bacon’s words in 1594, when, in the age of discovery, you strove to encapsulate the whole world in your collection, as is my aim in this house.
In the drawing room, there is a wooden stick, half painted red, with which I am sent spinning off to Louisiana, where one like it is used in New Iberia to test the ripeness of peppers for Tabasco sauce.
And then there’s the picture of one of my favourite buildings in the world: Lucy, the Margate Elephant, in New Jersey in 1881, whose trunk was a pioneer trash disposal unit! T S Eliot knocked the nail bang on the head when he wrote, ‘Even the humblest material artefact which is the product and the symbol of a particular civilisation is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes.’
To be surrounded by this multitude of objects is to feel cosily entwined with the roots I have planted throughout my life. That very ‘shuffle of things’ was an essential and most beguiling part of the cabinet’s charm, where, say, a stuffed dodo might be next to a bracelet fashioned out of the thighs of Indian flies.
How I relish being able, at one glance, to submerge myself into the place whence a certain object came. When seeing my copy of Mark Twain’s life mask – bought in his house in Connecticut – I am infused with a sense of excitement for the place and a delight in remembering my discovery that the great man’s mother was a Lambton – most especially as I had, 30 years earlier, unknowing of this, called my son Huckleberry!
With each and every room, there is an exhilarating caper down memory lane.