‘It was like growing up in a goldfish bowl’

GREAT ESTATES Anna Tyzack visits Beaulieu Palace House as the Montagu family prepares for Christmas

While many stately homes go into hibernation in winter, the lights are ablaze at Beaulieu Palace House in the New Forest. Each year, the staff spend weeks decking every room with twinkling Christmas trees and garlands of seasonal foliage. In the grounds, there is also a scented fire garden, singing trees and a tunnel festooned with 100,000 lights.

The pièce de résistance is the 24ft Norway spruce in the hall, with a star atop that almost brushes the rafters. “It’s taking Christmas trees to extremes,” says Mary Montagu-scott. Her ancestor, the 1st Earl of Southampton, bought the house from Henry VIII in 1538 after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Montagu-scott, who grew up at Beaulieu Palace House and now lives in a property on the estate with her husband and two children, isn’t in the slightest perturbed by the public wandering through her childhood home. In fact, the Montagu family have made their Christmas spectacle even bigger this year, with a festive light show in the grounds, open until Christmas Eve.

In her determination to innovate, Montagu-scott, a deputy Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, is not unlike her late father, Edward Douglas-scott-montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu. In 1952 he was one of the first aristocrats to open his stately pile to the public. It was, in his view, the only option: his father, a Conservative MP and a motor car enthusiast, died when he was a toddler; when the 3rd Baron took on the house aged 21, it had been in trust for two decades and was in a bad state. “My father couldn’t afford to live in it any more,” she says. “He didn’t have wild animals or a collection of Canalettos, but he did have a few motor cars belonging to his father. He opened the house with these in the hall as a tribute to the father he never knew.”

The property is one of Britain’s finest examples of a gothic country house, built in the 13th century as the second gatehouse to Beaulieu Abbey, which shares the same grounds. The Tudors, Jacobeans and Victorians all played a part in extending it into a sizeable country house, still with the monastic arched doorways, corbels and vaulted chapel. It is remarkably unspoilt, with the servant bell system in the kitchen, and a portrait room hung with likenesses of Montagu-scott’s ancestors, including the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare’s patron.

Despite the scale and grandeur of the formal rooms and the 20-odd bedrooms, the Palace House isn’t as stiff as other stately homes. Montagu-scott and her brother, Ralph (now the 4th Baron Montagu), lived in a separate apartment away from the visitors, but the family regularly used the “public” rooms for parties and gatherings. In the evenings, they would congregate in her father’s book-lined study to watch television.

Family relations weren’t exactly straightforward for the Montagus. An unusual conversation piece by the artist John Ward hanging on an upstairs wall shows Lord Montagu with his two wives – Montagu-scott’s mother, Belinda Crossley, whom he divorced in 1974, and his second wife, Fiona Herbert, mother of Montagu-scott’s halfbrother, Jonathan. “I think my mother thought it was a little odd, but there we go,” she says.

From the outset, Beaulieu was a huge success as a tourist attraction, largely due to the car collection. To keep the visitors coming, Lord Montagu bought more cars, housing them in sheds around the grounds before constructing the National Motor Museum in 1972. “By the Seventies we were getting more than 600,000 visitors a year,” Montagu-scott explains. Mick Jagger and Britt Ekland visited, and Michael Jackson came for lunch with Liberace. “My father would invite them down and bask in the ensuing publicity,” she says. “It was like growing up in a goldfish bowl; there was never any privacy but it was great fun.”

Another wacky addition by the transport-mad late Lord Montagu was the monorail, the first in Britain, which connects the house to the gardens and the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, and passes right through the roof of the National Motor Museum.

When Montagu-scott’s father died in 2015, Ralph, as the eldest son, inherited the barony and the estate. “Since my father died, we’ve opened up more of the house to the public,” she says. “It was always his wish that it be shared.”

Montagu-scott is now a director of Beaulieu Enterprises, which runs the house, as well as Buckler’s Hard, a former shipbuilding village with maritime museum, and the National Motor Museum, which is home to more than 250 cars and motorbikes. “We employ more people on the estate now than we ever did in Victorian times,” she adds.

Tomorrow, as has been the tradition for decades, staff from the estate and their children will gather by the Christmas tree in the drawing room for carols, mulled wine and presents from Father Christmas. When they leave, the Montagu family will have the house to themselves for Christmas Day, the only day of the year Beaulieu is closed to the public.

Montagu-scott believes her father would approve of the Christmas lights. He would be most proud of the fact that the estate is still in the family. “Over the past 50 years the role of families like ours has changed,” she says. “We used to be pure landowners but now we have to be businessmen, too.”

‘We employ more people on the estate now than we ever did in Victorian times’

Sunday 23 December 2018

How to play Basics: Griddlers are solved using number clues to locate solids (filled-in squares) and dots (empty squares) to reveal a picture.

Each column and row has a series of numbers next to it. These refer to the number of adjacent squares that should be filled as solids. If more than one number appears, that line will contain more than one block of solids.

The solid blocks must appear in the order that the numbers are printed. For example, a row that contains the numbers 11.5 would contain, somewhere, a block of 11 adjacent filled-in squares (solids), then a gap of one or more empty squares (with dots in) and then a block of five adjacent filled-in squares.

Strictly’s Craig Revel Horwood is in panto at the New Victoria Theatre in Woking, Surrey. Who is he playing? (a) Cinderella’s Wicked Stepmother (b) Aladdin’s Wicked Uncle Abanazar (c) The Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked

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