THE construction of Castle Drogo was a task of daunting complexity. As we heard last week, Lutyens conceived a gargantuan modern castle for his client, Julius Drewe, on a remote and exposed site. The original plans were considerably reduced in ambition, but the project still required scores of masons, carpenters and labourers for 20 years. Considering that four of those coincided with the First World War, the miracle is that it was ever finished. In this, the hero of the piece is John Walker, Drewe’s agent on site, without whom Drogo would not have been built.
A Yorkshireman, Walker had previously been Clerk of Works at various country houses, including Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, which, from 1905, was being rebuilt after a fire. He appears at Drogo in 1912 and his work over the next 17 years can be followed through the copies of his letters kept in the castle. Each time Walker wrote to Drewe, Lutyens or a supplier, he put his freshly handwritten letter in a press that took a faint copy by a chemical reaction on very thin paper— a method that had been used since the mid- Victorian period and was being replaced, in the age of the typewriter, by carbon paper. The copies were later bound together in fat letter-books. There are about 6,000 letters.
Everything on the estate fell to Walker’s care, down to organising the celebrations at Drewsteignton for Adrian Drewe’s coming of age and, similarly, for the election of another Drewe son, Cedric, as an MP. The main focus of his energy, however, was the building work and an early task was recruiting masons at 8½d per hour for time worked (they had to pay their own railway fares and lodgings).
この記事は Country Life UK の May 24, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の May 24, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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.
