Welcome to the ho-ho-ho hotel

Natalie Paris visits the hideaway where the designer of the first Christmas card lived

If you look closely at the first ever printed Christmas card, you can see a picture of a little girl grabbing hold of her mother’s glass of wine and having a good old guzzle. Not surprisingly, the temperance movement had something to say about this back in 1843 and a number of complaints were made about the card, which was designed by John Callcott Horsley and commissioned by Sir Henry Cole.

The image provokes just as much interest today, at the Victorian lodge where Horsley once lived. Orestone Manor is now a hotel, and guests are given copies of his Christmas card each December. I went there last week to pick up some cards, having left my little girl at home (this mummy doesn’t share her wine). It wasn’t, I learnt, that the narrative painter Horsley was lacking in moral fibre.

Far from it. The satirical magazine of the day, Punch, once poked fun at him for his objections against the painting of nudes, going so far as to call him Mr J C(lothes) Horsley.

Still, the image on the Christmas card is an intriguing one. Two couples – one older, one younger – raise their glasses at the painter, while in the background a gaggle of children appear to be spearing a goose. “The originals of the cards fetch more than £20,000 now at auction,” explained Neil D’Allen, who runs Orestone Manor with the help of his family. According to London’s V&A Museum, where one of the original cards is exhibited, the scene depicts three generations of Cole’s family raising a toast. This middle-class revelry is offset on either side by depictions of acts of charity. The overall message seems to be one of goodwill and a reminder to think about the poor at a time when society was just waking up to its civic responsibilities. Cole had a few years earlier helped introduce the penny post and was perhaps thinking of ways to get more people to use it. He later became the founding director of the V&A Museum.

In the year that the card was produced, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. The 1840s also saw the introduction of Christmas trees and by the 1870s, the trend for celebrating Christmas at home was firmly established.

Orestone Manor sits above Maidencombe Beach, a small, red cliff-backed cove once used by smugglers. It’s a secret, private kind of a place that you wouldn’t find unless you knew to look for it. Rudyard Kipling discovered it, settling in the house next to Orestone to write in 1896. He later left, complaining that the house was haunted.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel came to Maidencombe too, with his wife, who was a sister to Horsley. The families got together at Horsley’s Orestone Manor on a number of occasions – indeed, the portrait of Brunel that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery was painted by Horsley here. Having also fallen for the place, Brunel began to build his own estate in the Domesday-listed hamlet, though he would die of a stroke in 1859 before the house got beyond its foundations.

Hidden down a winding lane, just off the South West Coast Path between Teignmouth and Torquay, Orestone’s location and distant sea views appeal to visitors in summer. The 14 rooms are spacious, some with stone window seats that gaze out towards the sea. My room’s outdoor hot tub, set to one side of the stone and red-tiled house, overlooks the subtropical gardens and out on to the calmly dimpled sea. The fact that I could enjoy sitting in a hot tub at all in late November helped me understand why they call this area the English Riviera.

In winter, people mainly come to Orestone Manor for its award-winning food. The menu reads like a dream and makes good use of local produce. On the way here, my train had pootled past the Teign river, where my mussels came from; I also devoured rolls of smoked salmon filled with buttery Brixham crab and an exquisitely cooked piece of stone bass with the crispiest of skin.

The head waiter in the double AA-rosette restaurant is Assyrian and so we ended up discussing my Assyrian friend who moved to Toronto years ago to find herself an Assyrian husband. Afterwards, as I sat by the fire with a pen, a pack of Horsley’s Christmas cards and a glass of port, I imagined this friend sending her cards back to family in the UK, where she grew up. When her parents put them up, it probably feels as if part of her is there in the living room with them.

My own Christmas card list is always rather short. I have another friend who is clearly a better person than I am, as she sends lots of cards – even her dog walker gets one. I vowed then to take a leaf out of her book and to carve out more time to think about friends and family, especially those I never see. An old newspaper advert suggests that the first Christmas card aspired for something similar. Kept by the Postal Museum, the ad describes Horsley’s card as a “picture emblematical of old English festivity to perpetuate kind recollections between dear friends”. Everyone likes to be remembered.

At Orestone, Neil and Catherine The classic Christmas scene, above; the card designed by John Callcott Horsley in 1843, below; Natalie Paris sits down to write her own cards at Orestone Manor, left keep their family close and joke that working alongside each other, day in, day out, has given them a strong, almost telepathic bond. Their son and his wife, Laura, look after front-of-house. They also have another son, just 19, who served me dinner and who is doing an apprenticeship with them. “I see him talking to people and I think ‘Oh, you’re quite nice really aren’t you,’ and I feel proud,” Catherine laughs. They have just finished putting up the hotel’s decorations and are preparing to cater for the repeat customers who come in for a Christmas lunch or a Christmasthemed afternoon tea.

Back in the 1800s, Cole’s diaries state that he spent Christmas playing charades with the children and in 1849, putting up a tree. His 1843 run of a thousand Christmas cards, priced at a shilling each, was a commercial flop. But the mass printing of cards that would otherwise have been individually hand-drawn was one of the first steps towards a new retail phenomenon and the commercialisation of Christmas. Despite this, the commercial aspect of today’s Christmases feels far removed from the quiet of Orestone, where Catherine does all the baking and where the Christmas puddings follow a recipe passed down from Neil’s grandfather. Having enjoyed the wonderful food and pretty red beach, I left the care of the D’Allen family and vowed to try a bit harder this year to keep the tradition of writing Christmas cards alive.

Rooms from £110. To read a full review, see: telegraph.co.uk/ tt-orestonemanor. A two-course dinner from the set menu is £25.

ROUND ROBIN