Smoke under the water
At Witley Park, Surrey, millionaire fraudster Whitaker Wright built a splendid underwater smoking room before coming to a grisly end
There cannot there be many spots in the British Isles as bewitching as the great glass underwater smoking room at Witley Park in Surrey.
Today in a sorry state of decay, it was originally lushly comfortable, with semicircular padded sofas, a mosaic floor and, as a decorative bonus, a whopping great palm tree, taken, no doubt, from the whopping great palm house on the estate.
It was part of a labyrinthine network of ramps, tunnels and chambers – some decorated in the Oriental style – built both in a lake and underground, created in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
The star of the show, though, is the smoking room, at the end of a 400-footlong tunnel, reached by a spiral staircase leading from a lakeside entrance. Strolling down it seems already to be an unbeatable experience to enjoy in Surrey – until, suddenly and gloriously, you are enveloped by the delights of the dome.
What a shock and a half! It is 80 feet high and perched on by – you know but cannot see – a winsome, life-size statue of Neptune. By now, you are submerged beneath the surface of one of three interconnecting lakes: the square lake, with a 30-foot-high cascade into the bathing lake, and then there is the big lake, covering 50 acres, once peopled with a wealth of statues and fountains.
All of them were man-made and what a man it was who made them: a multimillionaire fraudster called Whitaker Wright, whose architectural forays were as adventurous as any built in Britain.
Over seven years, he employed between 400 and 600 men to toil at transforming his parklands, working day in, day out, on the grandest of schemes. Hills were levelled and refashioned elsewhere and there were temples and statues galore, as well as a boathouse and a bathing house designed by Edwin Lutyens.
A fountain of a dolphin’s head, carved from a single 80-ton block of marble, was sent from Italy – but it was so enormous that when it arrived in Southampton the railways refused to transport it north.
Nothing daunted, Whitaker Wright dispatched a traction engine to haul it home. When the engine came to bridges that could not be passed under, Wright ordered that the roads be lowered until there was room. He built grottoes and Oriental pavilions and commissioned ‘gorgeous stables’. They were centrally heated and, according to the Royal
Magazine in 1903, ‘of a blatant sumptuousness that must have embarrassed the horses’.
There was lavish praise of ‘the wonderful way in which Mr Whitaker Wright had “improved nature” at his home in Surrey … hills were removed and built again by hand’.
He was lyrically described as ‘a sombre silent man in black from the City of London who strode about the park, carrying a great oak staff whilst superintending: “We will have a great lake here,” ’ he said, in effect. ‘ “This hill blocks the view – take it away. Cut down this wood. Here we will have a grotto. An Italian fountain would look well here. But first have a wall built, ten feet high all round.” ’
This wall was built solely to give employment to the locals and still stands there, ever useless, to this day.
He also commissioned a lumpenly hideous, neo-tudor house – albeit with a theatre, an observatory and, if you please, a velodrome – but making up for this ugliness in spadefuls was the creation of the quite magical smoking room. Once again the Royal Magazine flowed forth:
‘It is a wonderful place – a fairy palace. In summer, it is delightfully cool – in winter, delightfully warm, for the
temperature is always fairly even. Outside, the clear crystal glass is a curtain of green water – deep, beautiful green at the bottom, fading away to the palest, faintest green at the top, where little white wavelets ripple. Goldfish come and press their faces against the glass, peering at you with strangely magnified eyes. On summer nights, one looks through the green water at the stars and the moon, which appear extraordinarily bright and large, for they are magnified quite ten times by the curved glass and water.’
Hurray! It cost £20,000 and was of course created with utmost care. For if one of the square panes of three-inchthick glass should break, the smoking room would be filled with water within only five minutes.
Wright had his critics, such as an elderly Derbyshire shareholder, the Rev Randle Feilden, who groused that he ‘felt that a man who entertained his friends under water was not to be trusted’.
Whitaker Wright was extraordinarily rich; by the time he was 31, he had lost two fortunes and made three, through his worldwide mining speculations, along with a quantity of finance companies in England. He made a vast fortune in America and Australia promoting mining companies; it was a fortune for himself and himself alone, in that he never paid a penny back to any of his investors.
In 1900, they all crashed, dragging numerous small investors with them, including Wright himself, who was prosecuted for having manipulated the accounts and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for fraud.
After accusations of excessive ‘window dressing’ of the balance sheets, as well as the loss of some £8m, within minutes of the verdict he killed himself with cyanide. With his usual extravagance, he swallowed enough to kill several men and it was said that every organ in his body emitted the stench of prussic acid.
The scandal was immense, with his supporters – among them such swells as the ex-viceroy of India, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava – suffering grave public humiliation.
One particularly intriguing aspect of this sensational saga was Whitaker Wright’s financing and building of London’s Bakerloo Line, when he enlisted the help of Charles Tyson Yerkes, controller of the Chicago tramways. With Sir Robert Perks, Yerkes was to buy up and develop London’s Underground system from the late 1890s. Together they built two tunnels under the Thames, which were the important forerunners of Witley Park’s 400-foot-long route to Whitaker Wright’s smoker’s paradise.
The Oldie