HISTORIC HOMES OF ENGLAND Attingham Park
This beautiful home belies a turbulent past, Isobel King learns . . .
ITHINK that affection for places, or at least for things, grows in proportion to the personal effort which one expends on them. If Attingham had been in perfect order when I first came, I should have admired it very much, but my pleasure in it would would have remained impersonal. The thought and trouble my husband and I took in trying to bring out the beauty of the old treasures here made them doubly dear to us,” wrote Teresa,
Lady Berwick, for The Townswoman magazine in May 1951.
It is an article written with quiet yet overwhelming love for the Shropshire house and estate near Shrewsbury
which Teresa and her husband, the 8th Baron Berwick, Thomas Noel-Hill, dedicated their lives to restoring. For Attingham Hall, with its composed and noble Palladian exterior standing in a serene Repton landscape, belies a turbulent, tragic and excessive past, making it amazing that it has survived at all into the 21st century.
No-one could describe Attingham better than Lady Berwick herself. She talks with tenderness of the “soft yellowy grey” of the stone façade; the “very tall, slim columns of the central portico”, repeated on a smaller scale along the flanking colonnades; “the cedars near the river and a rookery of oaks on the way to the stables” and
the deer park with “the deer flitting across the slope, horses and cattle grazing on the intervening meadow, swans or waterfowl on the stream”. Inside, one wanders through the grand reception rooms “finely proportioned . . . with tall cheerful windows” which make the house a bright airy space – not just from the light but from the continuity with the expansive landscape beyond their panes. Setting aside the romance, Attingham Hall, like so many country houses, was built as a major statement of wealth and power. In 1782 Noel Hill commissioned Scotsman George Steuart to design and build an impressive new house and stable block on his inherited country estate. A Queen Anne-style house, Tern Hall, already stood there, and Steuart designed Attingham to wrap around and mask the former house, incorporating Tern Hall into the new structure. This added 100 rooms to the former building and, of course, a more fashionable façade. Noel Hill was able to do all this thanks to the shrewd investments and clever political manoeuvrings of his earlier family members. As Saraid Jones, Research and Interpretation Officer at Attingham, points out, Noel himself “was making his way through the political ranks” and “had grand plans to out-do his cousins at Hawkstone Hall”, situated nearby. As MP for Shrewsbury, he astutely supported Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger in the reorganisation of the East India Company and was given a title, 1st Baron Berwick, for doing so. The family had attained an echelon which previously they could only have dreamed of. The interior of the mansion was, and still is, set out in the French style with a symmetrical masculine (west) wing and a feminine (east) wing. The Drawing Room, Sultana Room (a smaller, more intimate drawing room in an exotic, middle-eastern style), East Ante Room and Boudoir form the feminine side of the house, while the Dining Room, Inner Library, West Ante Room and Octagon Room make up the masculine side. These gender references were more about interior decoration than segregation though, with pale, soft colours throughout the feminine wing and bold crimsons through the “masculine” rooms. The Entrance Hall is “all about symmetry, all about illusion,” Saraid says. It features false doors, scagliola columns (which look like solid marble but which are actually hollow and made from marble chips) and paint schemes cleverly fashioned to appear as carved stone reliefs. This playfulness was the fashion of the day, Saraid tells me, and not all about economising. As you move through the rooms from the hall at the centre, the spaces become increasingly intimate, from the grandeur of the Drawing Room and Dining Room through to the Boudoir and Octagon rooms which are the most private are on the (the main level of the house). At basement level lie the vast domestic staff areas. Largely unaltered, they bear witness to the nobile piano
lavish entertaining and many servants the house had in Attingham’s heyday and are also open to visitors, from the large kitchen to the Housekeeper’s office. The space is also used by schools for a WWII programme where the children come as evacuees.
“Some of them get really into it,” Saraid says, “and they think they’re not going back to their parents!”
The upper floors, once sitting rooms, morning rooms, dressing rooms and bedchambers, are now temporary exhibition spaces.
Noel died suddenly in 1789, never to see Attingham complete. The title passed to his son – 19-year-old Cambridge university student Thomas Hill – and so did the family motto
QUI UTI SCIT EI BONA. “Let wealth be his who knows its use”.
The motto proved ironic. The family fortune, that was nearly 300 years in the making, took the 2nd Baron Berwick and his teenage wife, Sophia, just 30 or so years to squander. By his own admission, Thomas couldn’t “abstain from Building and Picture buying”. Sophia, a scandalous match as she was formerly a courtesan and whom Thomas married in his forties, was no better.
“Sophia, having the command of more guineas than ever she had expected to have pence, did nothing, from morning till night, but throw them away,” wrote her own sister, Harriette Wilson, herself an infamous courtesan of the day.
In fairness, a lot of the money was spent on remodelling and completing Attingham and structually speaking, it is as much Thomas’s vision as his father’s that we see today. Keen to show off his extravagant purchases from the Grand Tour, Thomas got John Nash (later of Brighton Pavilion fame) to create a huge picture gallery at the centre of the house in 1805-7. Attingham Research Volunteer, Ian Purchase, calls this a “radical alteration,” which involved
“truncating the entrance hall, removing and recreating the grand staircases and adjoining service stairs [and] building an innovative, glazed, coved ceiling and roof”.
“The roof leaked from the start,” says Saraid, but the National Trust finally fixed it as part of major restoration work between 2012 and 2016.
How far was Thomas to blame for the family’s dramatic fall from grace? We might view his spending in context of the extravagance of the Regency period and the fact that many of the landed classes lived on credit. They became unstuck when the economy suffered during and after the Napoleonic Wars and creditors urgently called in their debts. But the suffering of the rural economy meant worse hardship for tenants and working people and Thomas’s staff weren’t even paid.
He was reputedly a difficult man to work for, as Saraid tells me. There was an incident where “Lord Berwick got really angry and threw a hot leg of
mutton at his footman’s head because the cook hadn’t adorned the shank bone with a smart piece of paper”.
Two house sales in 1827 and 1829 to meet Thomas’s debts left Attingham stripped of its contents and furnishings and he and his wife fled to Italy, where he died in 1832 aged 62.
Walking through the grand reception rooms today, though, carefully restored to how they would have been in the Georgian era, is a wondrous experience. Attingham is now resplendent. In the Drawing Room there’s beautiful white and gilded Italian furniture from the early 1800s which previously belonged to Maria Theresa, Queen of Sardinia. It was brought over by William, the 3rd Baron Berwick, who was a diplomat in Italy. Look up here and you’ll also see the beautiful plasterwork ceiling and large cut-glass chandelier.
The Sultana Room, with its attractive recess, glows with fine red silk drapery (now over 200 years old) designed by Gillows.
The exquisite painted walls in the Boudoir have been painstakingly cleaned to reveal patterns of flowers, birds and Cupid’s arrows, and the Dining Room is stage set for a banquet, the extended mahogany table decked with silver tableware made by the Prince Regent’s silversmiths.
Not all the splendours are big and bold, an example being the delicatelypainted portrait miniatures of members of the Hill family. Painted on sliced ivory, with locks of hair clasped to their backs, the detail and skill required to create them makes the mind boggle.
Thomas’s brother William, the 3rd Baron Berwick, is partly to thank for Attingham’s survival. He bought what he could at the 1827 sale, desperate to save the family’s reputation, and when he inherited the title he brought his own collection of Italian furniture and art from his years working as a diplomat in Italy to the house.
Attingham’s astounding silver collection, which is now held in a vault in the basement (once the wine cellar) and can be viewed when visiting, also came from William. He was supplied with 5,833 ounces of silver and 1,066 ounces of gold which he had made into the fabulous silver tableware by Paul Storr, London’s finest silversmith in the early 1800s. This was used to entertain important dignitaries and although due to be “returned on demand”, William retained it, possibly as part of a deal to encourage him to leave his post in Naples to make way for Lord Palmerston’s nephew.
But William was also a helpless bon viveur and big spender. So much so that even Lord Byron was impressed when they dined together, describing him as “the only one of the
diplomatists whom I ever knew who really is Excellent”.
William and his brother Richard (Noel’s third son who succeeded William as the 4th Baron Berwick), also cleared none of Attingham’s debts. Despite the exceptional work of Richard’s eldest son, who became the 5th Baron in 1848 and commissioned repairs and alterations to the mansion, removing what remained of the original family home, Tern Hall, Attingham was in need of major modernisation by the time Thomas, 8th Baron Berwick inherited it at the age of 21 in 1897. The intervening 6th and 7th Barons had had little affection for the estate, the 7th Baron spending much of his time on a yacht to avoid his creditors, selling family heirlooms, in contravention of the 5th Baron’s will, to abet his financial straits.
Thomas, 8th Baron Berwick, introduced electricity, improved heating and, with the help of his wife Teresa, judiciously reinvigorated the interiors worn by time and use. The house had been used as a convalescent hospital for injured servicemen during World War I, and later by a Birmingham girls’ school and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during World War II.
On a budget, Thomas sought out carefully chosen furniture, artwork, books and two statues in the style of Canova, which can be seen in the Drawing Room. James Lees-Milne, who was the National Trust Secretary in the 1930s, says they lived at Attingham “in the utmost simplicity, out of necessity” pouring what they had into the house and grounds rather than attempting to lead the lavish lifestyle of their predecessors.
Thomas gave Attingham to the National Trust in 1947 upon his death. At first only three rooms were open to the public but in the late 1970s more rooms were opened up, following the tragic death of Lady Berwick and her friend near the Attingham entrance gates in a car accident in 1972. Also, the withdrawal of the Shropshire
Adult Education College which had been at Attingham since 1948 released rooms as well.
Of course, Attingham is more than just the mansion at its heart. The estate covers 4,000 acres, including Pleasure Grounds consisting of a Mile Walk, Deer Park and Walled Garden as well as wider woodland and tenanted farmland. The Pleasure
Grounds were initially developed by Thomas Leggett who was engaged by Noel Hill in 1770, and later by Humphry Repton who, according to Ian Purchase, “increased the sense of scale of the landscape” around the house, “widening the [River] Tern to create a larger body of water [and] clearing some of Leggett’s planting to open up vistas of the Shropshire Hills”.
Today the Trust looks after veteran trees, some dating to the early 14th century, and manages the grounds which were designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 2000 by the Council for English Nature.
In the summer, Attingham’s main draw has to be the Walled Garden which is perhaps the loveliest spot to soak up the sun in the county. The walls act as a wind block, keeping the garden warm, and deckchairs are laid on the lawn for visitors to relax and enjoy the tranquillity.
This productive garden used to supply the Berwick household with all its fruit and vegetables throughout the year and has recently been restored to its former glory, with an abundance of produce now being grown to be sold in the visitor café and shop. Alliums, legumes, brassicas, roots and salads grow along with soft fruits such as peaches, nectarines, apricots and even chuckleberries (which are to all intents and purposes just big, fat, sweet blackcurrants).
Come summertime, the borders are a riot of gladioli, helenium, lycanthimums and astors, along with peonies, roses, iris and lavender all releasing their heady scents.
“The volunteer florists from the mansion come up here,” says Rachel Barnes, one of the hard-working gardeners. “They know they can pick pretty much whatever they want for floral displays in the house.”
At the centre of the garden lies the Dipping Pool.
“It was thought watering the plants with water directly from the well would shock them,” Rachel reveals, “so they would have filled this pool with water . . . to bring up the temperature, then dipped their cans and gone off and watered the garden. Thankfully we have hose pipes these days!”
In the Frameyard, a separate space to the main garden, stand the glasshouses: the Pinery-Vinery where pineapples used to be grown, the Tomato House and the Melon House where the team still successfully grow Cevane melons. It’s here you’re likely to find Attingham’s “most important volunteer” – Scrap the cat, sitting on one of the heat mats.
“Pineapples used to be a status symbol,” says Rachel, “so if your head gardener could grow them, that said something about you and your estate. Pineapples were even hired out to houses which couldn’t grow them, to adorn their dining tables.”
As I wander back down to the hall along the sun-dappled path, full of its own twists and turns, I ponder Attingham’s turbulent past which contrasts so sharply with its happy state now. The Berwicks may have felt that all was lost in the 1830s, but while their fortunes never fully recovered from Thomas’s mismanagement, this did arguably lead to the estate becoming a place for everyone to enjoy.
Perhaps the way Attingham came through all the neglect, recklessness and tragedy imbues it with a character which, as Lady Berwick herself found, enables us to appreciate it all the more.
It’s a tale full of achievements and failings – and who couldn’t empathise with that?