‘Five years ago it was still Upstairs, Downstairs here’
The six sculleries were the first things to go when centuries-old Birdsall House’s new occupants made it into a home fit for a modern family, writes Eleanor Doughty
On a good day at Birdsall House, which sits on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, you can see halfway to Doncaster. Lady Cara Willoughby, the chatelaine of Birdsall, has had this pleasure for the last 14 years.
For most of that period, she lived with her husband, James Willoughby, eldest son of the 13th Lord Middleton, in a farmhouse on the estate. The big house was run by James’s grandparents, Michael Willoughby, 12th Lord Middleton, a former Coldstream Guards officer who took part in Operation Market Garden during the Second World War, and his wife Janet Marshall-Cornwall. The late Lord Middleton, who died in 2011, lived in the house for 70 of his 90 years, says Lady Cara.
When Lady Middleton died in 2015, it was the new generation’s turn, and in October 2017 the young Willoughbys moved in with their three children – Tom, now 12, Flora, 10, and Rupert, eight.
The house they inherited was of the old world, explains Lady Cara. “It hadn’t had a lot of updates, so we were able to do a couple of generations’ worth.” The biggest of these was the family kitchen, which this week was named winner of Historic Houses’ inaugural kitchen award. It is the heart of Birdsall, with a giant island surrounded by tulip wood cabinets that was made by a local joiner, estate tenant Michael Middleton. The kitchen chairs – brown, wooden, not flashy – are by Chippendale.
The original kitchen, a succession of six former sculleries and store rooms, couldn’t be further from this modern family room. The only available table sat three, which was no good for the Willoughbys.
“It was a service kitchen with a fulltime cook,” Lady Cara, 43, says. “There wasn’t a family area that we could live in. The last way of living was Upstairs, Downstairs, and the house was run like that until five years ago.”
Nor was it open to the public. Today, it is no longer sustainable to keep the house closed. In 2018, Birdsall opened as a part-time wedding venue, the number of ceremonies capped at 10 a year to keep it homely. Any other commercial events are scheduled during the week if possible, so that the children aren’t unduly affected. “While they are little it has to be a family home,” she says.
There is plenty of history for the children to take in. Lady Cara was born Lady Cara Boyle, the eldest daughter of the 15th Earl of Cork and Orrery, a submariner whose ancestor Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, was first ennobled in 1616. The Boyle estates over the years included Lismore Castle (now the Irish home of the Duke of Devonshire, into whose family the Boyles married in 1748), as well as Burlington House on Piccadilly in London.
The Willoughbys go back even further: paperwork dates to the 13th century and Thomas Willoughby was ennobled as Baron Middleton in 1712. In time, their estates grew too. Middleton Hall in Warwickshire came into the family in about 1435; in 1588 Sir Francis Willoughby built Wollaton Hall, a prodigy house in Nottingham. In 1719, when Thomas Willoughby, a younger son of the 1st Lord Middleton, was lost in the Yorkshire Wolds, he happened upon Birdsall, home of the Sotheby family. He soon married Elizabeth Sotheby, daughter of the house, who brought Birdsall with her. There was nearby Settrington House too, bought by the 6th Lord Middleton in 1826, as well as land in 12 counties.
This couldn’t last forever: death duties following the deaths of Captain Francis Willoughby at Flanders in 1915, and his brother Commander Henry Willoughby at Jutland in 1916 forced the family to sell 80 per cent of their assets to meet the tax bill, explains Lady Cara. “They went around the houses and cherry-picked the pieces of art and furniture that meant the most to them as a family.” As a result, Birdsall is “a distillation of five houses’ worth of stuff ”. While Reynolds paintings of Willoughbys past line the walls, part of an unbroken line of family portraits from 1573, “most of the Old Masters were sold”.
Birdsall was built on a former monastic site by the Sotheby family in the 16th century. In 1729 the Willoughbys remodelled the house, and by 1873 two wings had been added. Today, it sits in a 13,000-acre estate, the farm run by Lord Middleton.
The house is big, though not gargantuan. Lady Cara much prefers it to Wollaton Hall, which she describes as “pre-corridors, with a series of rooms around the central hall, so you have to go from room to room”. Birdsall’s Oval Room is said to be the width of the 5th Lord Middleton’s horse’s jump in 1790 – “it must have been a big horse, and a five or seven-bar gate”.
In the process of clearing the house, the Willoughbys discovered significant structural issues. “When we took the pictures off the walls, there were big cracks. We tested the oak beams over the ballroom and they were 100 times over their stress limit,” explains Lady Cara. By removing the weight of heavy concrete floors upstairs, the beams returned to their original position.
The couple were able to redecorate, creating nine bedrooms for the events business – “some with snoring rooms for guests who drink too much port”. Restoration hasn’t been exhaustive: “These houses are big personalities in their own right,” says Lady Cara. “It’s important that you learn to live together.”
Lady Cara, who grew up between Argyll and Sussex, has grown to love Yorkshire. She met her husband at university knowing nothing of Birdsall. “We were properly going out before he showed me a picture of the house. I do appreciate it, but it certainly wasn’t what I set out looking for in life.” Despite her background, she had scant experience of “big houses”. “We lived in a lovely house but it wasn’t anything like this,” she says. “I never moved in here thinking we could live the life of a couple of generations ago.”
Yorkshire, she says, isn’t cliquey. “No one cares about the car you drive as long as you can look someone in the eye.” Over the last decade, the nearby town of Malton has had a facelift, thanks to Tom NaylorLeyland, heir to the local Fitzwilliam estate. “What Tom has done with Malton is incredible,” she says. “It was sleepy, and he’s made it more upmarket. It’s a much nicer place to live.”
Lady Cara has no great ambitions for Birdsall, she says: “I just want a good home life.”
‘The house hadn’t had a lot of updates, so we were able to do two generations’ worth’