Seat of civilisation
Saltwood Castle, Kent, part II The home of Jane Clark In the second of two articles, Clive Aslet looks at the revival of this great medieval castle as a country seat in the 1880s and its most recent history as the home of the Clark family
In the second of two articles on Saltwood Castle, Kent, Clive Aslet examines its revival and life as the home of Kenneth Clark
In its medieval prime, Saltwood Castle, set above the Cinque Port of Hythe in Kent, formed a magnificent spectacle, as impressive from ships in the English Channel as from land. Here were the power and splendour of the See of Canterbury incarnate. By the 19th century, however, most of the castle buildings had fallen in; earthquakes had struck in 1580, 1692 and 1755 (and occasionally still happen). Only the gatehouse survived, having been turned into what was probably an uncomfortable dwelling.
When Turner sketched Saltwood in about 1795, he showed the old wooden barn that stood next to it; other Picturesque artists included rustic figures, farm carts and cattle. By that point, it was owned by William Deedes, who had acquired it through an exchange of land in 1794; a couple of years later, he built Sandling Park, inland from Saltwood, for his own occupation. By the 1880s, the castle had ‘become unfit even for the purposes of a farm-house’.
Those words come from Frederick Beeston’s Archaeological Description of Saltwood, published in 1885. Beeston had just completed a restoration of the castle for the William Deedes of the day, which turned the gatehouse into a ‘suitable residence for a country gentleman’.
Battlements and machicolation were returned to the mighty circular towers, the base of the original latrine tower became a water closet and a vaulted hall led to what is depicted as ‘Mr Deedes’ Room’: now a continuation of the hall, it was at the bottom of the original 12th-century gatehouse, square in plan, with massively thick walls.
On the west side, facing the inner bailey, arose a castellated house, of two asymmetrical blocks flanking the square central tower. The southern range, with large mullion windows, contains the dining room; the northern block, lit by smaller windows of different shapes, contained the Housekeeper’s Room, Servants’ Hall and Butler’s Pantry, with the kitchen behind them. Other service rooms nestle in the curve of the rebuilt curtain wall, around a triangular yard.
Beeston believed that the best future for the castle was as a country house and the one he created, although perhaps difficult to heat, was quite compact by Victorian standards. nevertheless, the revived Saltwood would prove an albatross around the family neck.
It may have been that Deedes knew he had made a mistake from the first: in 1886, almost as soon as work had been finished, a firm of London land agents advertised, in a welter of display fonts, this ‘grand historical castle’ as being for sale. The restoration presented ‘an almost singular instance’ of a castle being ‘successfully adapted to a Modern Residence’.
no buyer came forward. Perhaps Deedes was already ill, because, the following year, he died.
The Deedeses were an army family. As William had no children, Saltwood was inherited by his brother, Col Herbert Deedes, a rifleman like himself, who had worked in the War Office. His eldest son—also Herbert, but generally known as William—fought in the Boer War. As a soldier, his career was eclipsed by that of his brother, Wyndham, a devout Anglican and social worker, who was knighted for his service in the administration of Palestine.
Seared by the Boer War, where he acquired a chronic stomach complaint, William came to loathe the British Empire. Dabbling in Labour politics, he was also completely
unsuited to running Saltwood and a heavily mortgaged agricultural estate. However, his mother, Rose, insisted that he should live in the castle, which formed the background to some painful years in the childhood of his son, William, Baron Deedes of Aldington, better known as Bill Deedes, politician and editor of The Daily Telegraph.
Saltwood Castle could only be maintained by selling land. Sandling Park had gone in 1897 and a further 5,000 acres or so went after the First World War, but so many other families were selling their estates that prices were low and the burden of castle life made Herbert mentally unstable. Alone with his three sisters, Bill would cut and roll a cricket strip on the lawn of the inner bailey, but, as he recalled in his autobiography Dear Bill: A Memoir, published in 1997: ‘It was pure fancy… Castles are lonely places, and Saltwood, with its moat and portcullis and thick walls, looked fairly unapproachable. Young friends did not feel drawn to it or to me.’
His parents argued. It was a relief to everyone when Knight Frank & Rutley auctioned Saltwood in 1925.
The successful bidder was Reginald Lawson, the grandson of Lionel Lawson, who—coincidentally, given Bill Deedes’s later profession—had been the printer of The Daily
Telegraph in the 1860s; he made a fortune and built the Gaiety Theatre. He was married to Iva Christian of Texas and the Lawsons were one of a group of enthusiasts who restored castles, particularly in Kent and Sussex, often with American money.
This included Lord Curzon, twice married to an American, at Bodiam, in East Sussex; Lady Baillie, whose father had married a Whitney, at Leeds Castle, in Kent; and the mountaineer cum art historian Martin Conway, at Allington Castle, Kent (Country Life,
February 15, 2015) with his first wife, Katrina, daughter of an American railroad magnate. As well as Saltwood, the Lawsons also bought Herstmonceux in East Sussex.
Their architect at Saltwood was Philip Tilden, an intimate of the Conways from his restoration of Allington. Although Tilden had Arts-and-crafts pretensions, he was not as meticulous a figure as, for example, Weir Schultz at Bodiam. His taste can be compared to that of Armand-albert Rateau, the French decorator who worked at Leeds Castle before Stefan Boudin. Both had a poetic feeling for the texture of old oak and stone, but were not above importing old ceilings, panelling and carved details—such as the French Renaissance door to one of the Saltwood bedrooms—or even vaults (Fig 4).
The flavour is given by a note in Mrs Lawson’s hand pinned to a wormy, apparently ancient cupboard that has been turned into a radiator cover; it turns out to be a copy of an oak dole cupboard of about 1600, found in a church near Salisbury.
In 1930, Lawson was found dead from a gunshot wound in the woods. His widow,
becoming something of a recluse, continued the restoration, softening what was thought to be the harshness of the Victorian work.
Into this seclusion, on a visit to inspect Tilden’s work, burst the now widowed Martin Conway, who had become Lord Conway of Allington, but had been castle-less since his wife, disapproving of his affair with a younger woman, had left Allington Castle to a daughter. In 1934, Iva became the new Lady Conway, although only three years were left before Conway’s death.
It was in Lady Conway’s second period of widowhood, with the France that was sometimes visible from the battlements now occupied by the Third Reich, that Country
Life last visited the house, in three articles at the end of 1942. The restoration project had lasted 15 years, only stopping at the outbreak of war; the barbican, which came last on the list, remains unrestored (Fig 5).
The photographs show a taste for rich fabrics, Renaissance furniture and wroughtironwork displayed against uneven white plaster or bare stone walls; the principal bedroom has a tasselled valance or lambrequin of old crimson damask all the way around the room at cornice level, a detail also seen in the Yellow Drawing Room at Leeds Castle.
As Christopher Hussey observed: ‘Relics of the pageantry of five centuries and a dozen nationalities breathe their aroma of romance through the once bare and ruined apartments.’ The romance has something of a Spanish—or Californian—flavour about it; does this betray the subconscious influence of Hollywood?
After Lady Conway’s death in 1953, Saltwood entered its present phase of existence. An advertisement in Country Life caught the eye of Kenneth Clark (Fig 1), the art historian, and his wife, Jane, then president of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers. This, as James Stourton describes in his new biography of Clark, came when his influence was at its zenith. As well as writing The Nude, he was active in the creation of the Royal Opera House and Independent Television and was also busy on numerous committees, including that of the Arts Council, which he chaired.
Saltwood was a vision of Tennysonian romance and provided somewhere for his library, which had overflowed the bounds of his Hampstead house. The Clarks unexpectedly found themselves at Folkestone, with time on their hands due to a French railway strike; they went over to view the castle unannounced. Miss Baird, who had been Lady Conway’s companion, warned them that Saltwood would not come cheap, to which Clark replied: ‘Oh that’s all right.’
Not only did the Clarks acquire the castle, but also its contents. Many pieces were expelled in a sale that December. They were replaced with Clark’s own collection, the pride of which was its Turner seascape. Other masterpieces came and went, whether to pay bills or to fund more purchases. A portrait of the collection is painted in John Berger’s novel A Painter of our Time: ‘It reflected the discerning, intelligent, catholic taste of a man who had a wide knowledge of European art and enough money to buy about a quarter of what he wanted. (Fig 7)’
The Clarks kept Lady Conway’s sumptuous textiles, using them as a background to set off Renaissance sculpture and other works of art, a taste derived from Bernard Berenson and his circle (Fig 2).
In 2014, Tate Britain reassembled the highlights of Clark’s collection for its exhibition ‘Looking for Civilisation’. A striking feature, even more evident at Saltwood, is the
large number of works by the Bloomsbury Group, including screens, rugs and jugs, one of the latter being decorated with Clark’s portrait. Other favourite contemporaries were Graham Sutherland and John Piper.
Although many of the finest pieces from the collection were sold to pay death duties in the 1980s, what remains now happily coexists with Pre-raphaelite and botanical paintings bought by Lord Clark’s son, the politician and diarist Alan Clark, and his wife, Jane. Thus, Saltwood continues to delight the eye with fascinating objects, placed in interesting juxtapositions: a fragment of Gothic sculpture next to a clock and a James Campbell plate, exotic shells beside Iznik tiles on a Renaissance table with griffin feet.
The most precious books were shelved in the drawing room (shown as the Housekeeper’s Room in Beeston’s plan). This room, as Jane says, still reflects her parents-inlaw’s arrangement, although, in their day, there were no photographs (Fig 3).
Lady Conway’s Audience Hall, restored as a memorial to her two husbands, became the library (Fig 6). As Hussey tactfully put it, this hall did not retain ‘full authenticity’ and Philip Tilden—summoned by his friend Martin Conway to ‘mend up what should be one of the finest great Halls in England’— acknowledges in his memoir True Remembrance that the lack of original detail gave him ‘a particular freedom of expression’.
As the walls rose, Tilden worked alongside the masons, carving some corbels himself. Springing from these are the trusses of a massive oak roof, perhaps inappropriate to the room’s period, but undoubtedly glorious.
Clark’s books, for which he commissioned bookcases from a joinery firm in Hythe, have now been catalogued, to celebrate the defeat of what might have been a disastrous infestation of death-watch beetle (as dangerous to books as to wood).
Clark kept Lady Conway’s tapestries, supplementing them with an early-renaissance altarpiece, carved and gilded Baroque figures and a 16th-century maiolica table fountain.
His study, where he wrote with a pad on his knee (Fig 8), is next door, reached through a small lobby (Fig 9); recently, Jane found that it contained the working script of Civilisation.