WRITING in COUNTRY LIFE (April 3/10, 1997), the magazine’s former Architectural Editor the late Giles Worsley referred to stately Grade I-listed Trafalgar Park, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, as ‘the Flying Dutchman of the property world, endlessly seeking an owner and being sold on while the fabric slowly decayed’. The fine country house built by John James of Greenwich in 1733 for City grandee Sir Peter Vandeput was nevertheless described as ‘an estate agent’s dream, a house that always seemed to come back on the market’.
Sir Peter died in 1748 and, four years later, Standlynch Park and its surrounding estate were bought by William Young, later Governor of Dominica, and sold by him to Henry Dawkins MP, who added the north and south wings designed by John Wood the Younger of Bath. Dawkins also commissioned his friend and fellow member of the Society of Dilettanti, Nicholas Revett, a founding member of Britain’s Greek Revivalist movement, to design the portico, interiors for the north wing and a number of chimneypieces. He then commissioned fashionable Italian painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Cipriani to paint the scenes in his music room, now known as the Cipriani Room. Following Dawkins’s death in 1814, the Standlynch Park estate was bought by the Crown on behalf of the Nelson family as reward for the Admiral’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805. Horatio Nelson having died in the battle, Standlynch Park, renamed Trafalgar House, its estate and a substantial pension were settled on his brother, William, an unassuming Norfolk clergyman who was created 1st Earl Nelson. Enriched by marriage and inheritance, his successors expanded the landholdings to 7,196 acres by 1884.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
