Overlooked Britain
Lucinda Lambton
‘Bournemouth, oh beauteous Bournemouth!’ In the late 19th century, the town was thus eulogised by its local hero par excellence, Sir Merton RussellCotes. For him, it was the most desirable spot in all England:
How shall I sing thy praise, fair
favoured spot, That nestles ’mid thy hills and silvery
groves Of fragrant pines? From out thy
dense alcoves, Bright villas peep – ’t has been my
happy lot To dwell amid thy shady nooks, I wot, Through many winters.
He published paeans of such praise, every syllable of which is well worth quoting for a pleasurable laugh. Determined that Bournemouth became a popular resort, he ensured that the railways were diverted there en route to and from London and worked tirelessly to promote the town.
In 1894, he was elected Mayor. Most sensational of all, for our purposes, he left the legacy of his strangely wonderful house, East Cliff Hall – jampacked to its rafters with treasures – to the people of Bournemouth, who still love it to this day. It is now known as the Russell-cotes Museum.
Built between 1897 and 1901 and described by the Dorset Magazine as ‘a sizeable mansion combining Renaissance with Italian and old Scottish baronial style’, it is a very rare survival of the middling-monied merchant’s house, where every inch was a swell one. Throughout the land, from Ealing to Edinburgh, there were houses like this, crammed and coated with splendour by 19th-century burghers. Now they have all gone – gutted and geared up to new roles as nursing homes, flats and guest-houses.
Stately homes have survived by the score, as has many a manor ‘of the middle size’; also umpteen terraces and tenements too. But what you can no longer find in Britain is this particular overblown opulence of the business bigwig.
The only way we can be reminded of it in this country is at the movies, with Ingrid Bergman surrounded by such glories in Gaslight, or Bette Davis enjoying the groaning splendours in Jezebel. Such decorative delights were the stars of the show in Orson Welles’s
The Magnificent Ambersons, starring Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead.
For Americans, their ‘Victorian’ past was their great past, to be proudly proclaimed, restored and revered. So it is that it has survived ‘from sea to shining sea’, with its wealth of wildly flamboyant architecture for the merchant princes, all replete with the bourgeois swagger of their creators. From Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Memphis, Tennessee, their opulence quite takes the breath away.
Such, though, is the bewitching singularity of the English East Cliff: an almost lone survivor of a 19th-century British business bigwig’s house, that looks like an American robber baron’s mansion has been hauled across the Atlantic to be grounded on Bournemouth’s shore. What a joyful surprise!
Never say, ‘See Naples and die’; rather, see Bournemouth and live! Here was the resort where, according to Russell-cotes, you enjoyed ‘water of the first order’. Russell-cotes was forever beautifying the place in all manner of ways; according to his autobiography, ‘to the rapturous approval’ of its citizens.
‘When I first came to Bournemouth, it was terra incognita,’ he wrote. ‘I determined to make it the talk of Europe.’
And so he did, thanks to his building and bequeathing of East Cliff with its wealth of remarkable contents, most particularly its art gallery, along with his original schemes of loaning the paintings to the locals.
Sir Merton and Lady Russell-cotes travelled widely. ‘What do they know of England, who only England know?’ was his mantra as they scoured the world over for curiosities to enrich his house; yet, however adventurous their forays, there was nowhere better than Bournemouth.
Their worldwide wanderings are woven into the very fabric of the house, giving it an extra air of the exotic. India emerges with a tiny Mughal chamber, designed to remind them of their visit to the Taj Mahal by moonlight, accompanied by an officer with a violin.
They made a mournful mission to Cawnpore, where they talked to an eyewitness of the massacre of 1857 and inspected every melancholy bullet mark from the siege of Lucknow, marvelling all the while at the heroism of ‘so many of the delicately nurtured ladies’. Their guide was ‘a young Hindu with a delightfully mellifluous Irish brogue – a very novel feature’.
Their adventures can be followed throughout the rooms of East Cliff. What about the tiny envelope containing volcanic dust that was plucked by Sir Merton from the jaws of scalding death – ‘A surging, rolling, splashing, tossing sea of molten fire’ – in a volcanic crater in Hawaii? There, the Russell-coteses had been guests of ‘The Right Honourable Archibald Leghorn and his wife, The Princess Like Like’.
They seemed to shed all convention when travelling. He wrote cheerily of Burma, for example, where ‘home life was lively rather than agreeable, with a shower bath of insect carcasses, including a green moth with a 12-inch wingspan falling on our food whilst dining…’
They preserved a veritable taxidermist’s menagerie from foreign parts, giving pride of place to the kea, the endangered, sheep-eating parrot from New Zealand. As for their English legacy, there is a humdinger assembly of paintings, including the famed Venus Verticordia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
And, as East Cliff amassed renown for Sir Merton, so his pals grew in stature. The actor Henry Irving was one, and his bronze bust gleams forth in a pink room gilded with mottoes and filled with objects from Irving’s life. The great actor’s make-up box is there, all in disarray, with the rouge that was powdered on those noble features. Locks of his hair lie beside his death mask and there is a quantity of stage props, such as the skull held by Irving as Hamlet, with, according to Russell-cotes, ‘his princely air, his tenderness and his power of suggesting doom’.
Sir Merton Russell-cotes was a hero-and-a-half to have left all this to the people of Bournemouth. As was written by an admirer at the time:
The Mayor’s a man on whom, ’tis said,
everybody dotes, So let us have three hearty cheers for
Merton Russell-cotes!’