GREAT ESTATES
Combermere Abbey is open for business after the lockdown halted holidays and weddings, finds Eleanor Doughty
Manor, hall, palace – the country house community has them all. But it’s not every day that one comes across an abbey. Sarah Callander Beckett is the proud custodian of one: Combermere Abbey in Cheshire. An abbey might not seem like a practical set-up, but Callander Beckett wouldn’t be anywhere else.
Born Sarah Burn-Callander, the eldest of Penelope Crossley and Major Ronald Burn-Callander’s three daughters, she took over at Combermere in 1992, her mother having given her the option to inherit. “The concept of primogeniture had fallen away as my mother didn’t have a son,” she explains.
“I was the oldest so she invited me to consider it. If I hadn’t wanted to take it on then she would have offered it to my next sister, and so on.”
Callander Beckett, 68, was living in New York at the time, working in public relations for Laura Ashley. Having thought about it for a few months, she left the US for England. “Combermere needed energy. My mother’s passion was farming, and the listed buildings on the estate were in terrible shape.”
The family had moved to Combermere when Callander Beckett was seven, her mother having inherited the estate from her grandfather Sir Kenneth Crossley, who bought it in 1919. Theirs was a typical country house lifestyle of the 1950s, “freezing, with pails of water in strategic places”.
Combermere was originally a Cistercian abbey, built in about 1133. Following its dissolution in 1538, it was given to the Cotton (later Stapleton-Cotton) family and in 1563 Richard Cotton redesigned the building, creating a substantial Tudor manor. In 1814, Stapleton Cotton was promoted to Baron Combermere (later Viscount Combermere in 1827) and this meant a grander house was needed.
He promptly commissioned one in the gothic style for Combermere but, lacking the funds to build a new house from scratch, he wrapped the Tudor base in render, adding castellations, pointed arches and two new wings.
“The library is the remains of the monastery, and sits on stone walls that were part of the cloister wall,” explains Callander Beckett.
Outside, the walled gardens were extended and new stables built, with “extra floors put in for servants – there was a whole wing for visitors’ servants”.
The Duke of Wellington came to stay over Christmas 1820, with a new wing built in his honour. This lifestyle could not be sustained, and in 1881 the house was let to Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and then, from 1900 to 1916, to Katherine, Duchess of Westminster.
In 1919, Sir Kenneth, son of engineer Sir William Crossley, bought Combermere from the fourth viscount. “My great-grandfather lived in south Manchester and wanted to move to the country,” Callander Beckett explains.
At that time, the house still had a big staff: “When my grandmother started seeing my grandfather in the 1920s, there were 11 people working in the house,” she says. “They had 18 groundsmen, and grooms and stable hands on top of that. You were never alone.”
Upon the death of Sir Kenneth in 1957, his son Anthony having predeceased him, Penelope Callander, mother of Callander Beckett, took over, moving to Combermere with her husband and young family.
When the couple divorced in 1969 she married David Lindesay-Bethune, 15th Earl of Lindsay, but after his death in 1989 she considered moving on from Combermere. In 1992, Callander Beckett inherited and a year later married Peter Beckett, a banker. Their son Peregrine was born in 1996, and they embarked on reinvigorating the estate.
Making the stables fit for purpose was first. “I wasn’t into horses, and at the time there weren’t any holiday cottages in Cheshire,” she explains. The stables opened as nine cottages in 1994, before a friend married on the estate
telegraph.co.uk/ propertynewsletter the year after – and before they knew it, they had a wedding business too.
Now, they host more than 60 a year. These have inevitably been affected by lockdown. Helping disappointed and emotional couples move their weddings into next year has “been something of a rollercoaster”, says Callander Beckett.
But the holiday cottages are now reopening, which “is going to be a lifesaver”, she says.
More than that, she will be pleased to have people back on the estate. “It’s been strange having nobody around. We had the most beautiful spring, and people have missed out on that.” With staff furloughed, she has been picking up the slack. “I’ve become very good at weeding and edging – I’ve got no nails; I’m desperate to go to the manicurist.”
Despite Viscount Combermere’s specification that the building should “look large in the landscape”, it is not huge. “It’s a middle-sized country house,” Callander Beckett says. “It’s more functional since my mother took off a couple of wings, and modernised the kitchen.”
Still, parts of it were crumbling, and a project to restore the north wing began in 2014, involving reroofing and completely redecorating the building. For this, help came from Callander Beckett’s old friend, the interior designer Nina Campbell.
Some reorganisation ensued. “The old drawing room is now the dining