Overlooked Britain: Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire
Lucinda Lambton
Huzzah for Harlaxton in Lincolnshire!
It’s a most marvellous monster of a mansion. The outlandish style and extravagance defy comparison with most houses in the country.
Part neo-elizabethan and Jacobethan, Harlaxton Manor was blown up by the baroque, with an alarming degree of individual flair and fancy.
It was built by the pleasingly named Gregory Gregory for himself and himself alone between 1832 and 1851. He was helped by three architects, Anthony Salvin – expert on the faux medieval; Edward Blore, who completed Nash’s schemes for Buckingham Palace; and William Burn, a pioneer of the Scots Baronial Revival.
Gregory never married, disliked his heir and never entertained. Instead, he channelled all his energies and passions into the building of his vast palace.
‘Nothing can be more perfect than it is, both as to the architecture and the ornament,’ wrote Charles Greville, who went to watch it being built in 1838.
Greville explained how Gregory travelled to all parts of Europe ‘collecting objects of curiosity, useful or ornamental, for his projected palace’.
Greville added, ‘The grandeur of it is such and such is the tardiness of its progress that it is about as much as he will do to live till its completion.’
He was right: after ‘embodying himself
in his edifice’ for over 20 years, Gregory Gregory was eventually to live in it for only three, enjoying a bachelor existence, with only one bath and over 120 rooms.
He employed a butler, housekeeper, three footmen, seven maids and two grooms, having installed the startling convenience of a train to bring in wood and coal for the fires. This was to trundle along a brick viaduct built specially for the purpose. It is no small adventure coming upon those still extant tracks.
The exterior of Harlaxton is like a great golden town at the end of its dead straight, mile-long drive. Towers, pinnacles, gables, ornamental chimneys, strapwork cresting, cupolas and spires all soar forth from the hefty body of the building. With baroque gate piers curving round and with ‘Elizabethan’ turrets shooting up – all with such vim and verve – this massive pile appears lively and light with movement.
Just you wait until you step inside, to find yourself suddenly dwarfed by the colossally proportioned, wildly ornate staircase, seemingly soaring to the skies.
Harlaxton has swags and swirls of shining, white-fringed plasterwork; and clusters of fruit, ropes and tassels – which, as a brilliant bonus, swing at a mere flick of your finger.
You are quite overwhelmed by what can be described only as sheer magic. Merbabies cling onto the ropes that festoon the walls, all surging up to bright, blue and white-clouded skies (pictured).
Two life-size figures of Father Time rule overall, brandishing real scythes: one emblazoned with a medallion of Gregory Gregory in relief, the other unfurling plans of Harlaxton.
In 1837, there was a roof-raising ceremony, with Gregory Gregory giving a dinner for all those who had worked on the house. Two-thirds of it had already been built – ‘enough’, according to a local report, ‘to show that, when perfected, it will confer honour on the arts of this country and hand down the name of its founder with distinguished éclat to remote posterity’.
A flag was hoisted up the central tower, ‘unfolding itself in the bosoms of the heavens’. Mr Weare, the clerk of works, roared forth a speech from a newly-built turret:
‘May prosperity of every kind attend the projector of this noble dwelling! May he live to complete it, and enjoy possession of the same for many, many happy years to come.’
This was followed by ‘nine cheers and one more’.
A procession then marched to the feast in the village. The workers carried the tools of each of their trades: the labourers with mortar hods; the masons with squares, levels and compasses; the bricklayers with plumb rules and trowels, all of them decorated with ribbons and evergreens. Guns were fired, songs were
sung and ‘recitations and sentiments gave a variety and effect to this most gratifying commemoration’.
In 1935, Harlaxton was taken over by a woman as remarkable as the house.
With all the appearance of a comic grandee in a Marx Brothers film, Mrs Violet Van der Elst was always described as ‘the daughter of a coal porter and a washerwoman’. She made millions from founding a company selling face creams, beauty lotions, soap and most especially Shavex, the first brushless shaving cream. She poured most of her fortune into vigorous campaigns against capital punishment.
Mrs Van der Elst was regularly relished for her appearances in a veiled and feathered hat, in a Rolls-royce, outside prisons and courthouses, accompanied by sandwich-board men patrolling around her with slogans denouncing capital punishment. She also organised planes to fly overhead, towing anti-hanging banners.
Having unsuccessfully run for Parliament three times, she died aged 84 in 1966, a year after the abolition of the death penalty. She had spent almost her entire fortune on her campaigns.
Harlaxton has one more surprise in store: it is now the British campus of the University of Evansville in Indiana.