by John Challis
On the whole, the people we met welcomed us warmly, both in our nearest villages of Wigmore and Leintwardine and among the county set generally. I don’t doubt that there was a little sniffy resentment that a chap from ‘That down-market sitcom on the TV’ had taken over such a distinguished old house but it seldom surfaced.
As a result of our occupation of the Abbey, we came across a surprising number of wonderful, beautifully sited ‘Big Houses’ in the Marches, still occupied by the families that had lived in them for centuries. They understood very well the experiences and problems we faced and were genuinely sympathetic and encouraging. Stanage, for instance, was the home of Jonathan and Sophie Coltman-Rogers. Carol had a previous connection with Jonathan, who was godson to a cousin of hers. The house lay just over the Welsh border and not more than five or six miles to the west of Leintwardine and they asked us over. It was an extraordinary looking joint put together in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a lovely jumble of scatty fantasies that had made it the memorable star of the TV version of Tom Sharpe’s Blott on the Landscape.
On the way there, we passed Brampton Bryan, a seventeenthcentury house and twelfth-century castle, where during the Civil War, Brilliana, Lady Harley, had defended her house from a long siege by Royalist forces, and whose descendent, Edward Harley, still occupied the house and its rolling wooded park. Soon afterwards we met Edward and his mother Susan. Edward took an interest in all the ancient dwellings in the region and several years later became head of the Historic Houses Association.
Soon after we were settled in the Abbey, the Coltman-Rogers asked if we’d like to make up a table for dinner at a big charity bash, the Caribbean Ball, being held in the grounds of Acton Burnell, another big drum up towards Shrewsbury. Here we met a large number of the local great and good, most notably Ivor and Caroline Windsor – Viscount and Viscountess – of the Windsor-Clive clan – he a descendent of Clive of India, she of the family of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon.
Tall and patrician, the idiosyncratic Ivor Windsor was a firm Chelsea supporter, as you might expect, and a big fan of Only Fools & Horses. He had wandered up and introduced himself. ‘Ah, Boycie! I heard you were coming. You must come to lunch and bring Marlene!’ He became a great champion, introducing us to anyone who came into view with: ‘Have you met Boycie?’
We would have to follow that up by telling them our real names, and explaining what I did – not so many were Only Fools fans – and what we were doing in the Welsh Marches. They were interested in the Abbey, but some of the tweedier, more rosy-featured men and women wanted to know where we were going to shoot and with which pack of hounds we were going to hunt. We explained that, although we didn’t disapprove, we found it easier to get our meat from the butcher. But, townies that we still were, we were surprised to find how traditional country pursuits seemed to be absolutely the norm.
But we’d prepared ourselves for the change in culture, and didn’t want to be intolerant or judgemental. In any event, there was no doubt that being a face ‘off the telly’ at least gave us novelty value and by moving into a large, ancient house, we found we had at least that in common with a lot of the landowning folk – the old money, if you like. It seemed that we’d earned some respect for moving in to the Abbey in its parlous, crumbling state and, as Ivor Windsor so elegantly put it: ‘Having the balls to take it on!’
Ivor Windsor’s family home, Oakly Park, lay on the south bank of the fast-flowing River Teme, surrounded by tranquil, oak-filled parkland and an estate which follows the river down to the very edge of the rocky mound on which Ludlow Castle was built eight hundred years ago. With views of the distinctive wedge of Clee Hill to the east, it must be one of the most beautiful pieces of country in England.
Soon after the Caribbean bash, we were asked to lunch there – al fresco, on a beautiful, stone-flagged terrace beneath two vast, overhanging magnolias, where we were introduced to more engaging locals.
We soon found that one of Ivor’s particular habits was to create nick-names for all the people he came across regularly and he enjoyed using these obscure monikers in introductions. It was years before I knew the real names of some of the people I met with him – Chippy, Wedgie, the March Lioness, the Squire of Soddington, JJ and The Beast. He also introduced us to the Wrigleys, who lived in what he called Del Boy Hall – in fact, Delbury Hall.
Thanks to this great welcome, we soon felt that we were becoming part of the community and after years of living in aloof, sophisticated London, we were amazed how open and friendly everyone was, from David, who ran the garage and general store around which life in Leintwardine revolved, the ladies in the Post Office, the chaps in the wonderful old Sun Inn in Leintwardine, where nonagenarian landlady, Flossie, doled out bitter in jugs passed through a hatch, our farming neighbours, the obliging postie, the village coracle maker, and all the other colourful characters that are so much more visible out here in the distant sticks. It was, frankly, a far cry from all the competitive show-biz folk and bibulous tennis players I’d been spending most of my time with in London.
After a few months, Carol and I could take a deep breath and agree that we would be very happy here, and we knew we’d been right to choose the ridiculously risky, blind-fold plunge we’d taken in buying Wigmore Abbey and moving in to make a new life there. It was for both of us a major decision in our lives, second only to our decision to marry.
We also knew that our lives had changed fundamentally. We had to get used to a slower pace, where less happened but what did happen was somehow more vivid. Our lives were no longer Londoncentric; our everyday town was Ludlow, a fascinating and extraordinarily well-preserved medieval hill town. For bigger stuff we had to drive down the old Roman road to the compact, oldfashioned city of Hereford, with a cattle market, a cathedral and a population of just 60,000. Some Metropolis!
But before we could relax and enjoy ourselves, there was a lot to get through – a lot of building, bad judgement, disappointment, frustration, paperwork, harassment by officials with clipboards and dogmatic views and wasted wonga.
Inevitably, the Herefordshire Council had strong views about what we could and couldn’t do to the house. We were paid a visit by the listed-building department in a delegation led by a woman of military bearing, in practical clothes and sensible shoes. It soon became clear that they were thrilled to be there; the previous owner, we were told, had jealously guarded his privacy and had done all he could to discourage visitors, especially official ones.
They toured the house with a lot of disapproving coughing noises; they kicked drainpipes and instructed us to keep the drain gratings clear – as if we wouldn’t. They gazed at the windows, deemed hopelessly inappropriate and took their photographs with sharp intakes of breath through gritted teeth. They looked squiggly- eyed at the concrete mortar used on the stonework of the extension made in the 1970s.
In principal, we agreed with their view that the house should continue to look as close as possible to the ‘original’. But which original? There must have been half a dozen variations on the building over the previous 800 years and deciding at which point to freeze it in time seemed pretty arbitrary.
Luckily, the council was happy for the 1970s additions to be considered part of the existing building, as these hadn’t been done too untastefully – externally, at least and, despite the ‘wrong’ mortar, agreed that a complete rebuild wasn’t justified, which was good of them. Otherwise, they were pretty fussy. (One wishes that so much consideration to heritage and aesthetics had come into play when the same council started giving permission for avaricious farmers to plant hideous, inefficient windmills on sensitive horizons to generate sporadically paltry amounts of massively subsidized electricity.)
Three months after they’d been, we heard the result of discussions that had gone on among various county council committees about what we should be compelled to do with the house, including the treatment of our windows. The key problem was that when the place had been ‘done up
’ in the 1970s, flat modern glass had been used everywhere, giving a dull lifelessness to what you might call the eyes of the building – the windows to its soul. We were told what size of diamond-leaded lights we should use and the type of glass. We were very happy with the result when they were installed, although we didn’t think much of the cost involved.
By this time, we were beginning to get a clearer idea of what the whole thing was going to cost, although that could obviously be pretty open-ended, depending on how pernickety one was going to be in decisions about materials and quality of finish – in so far as the listed- buildings squad in the council allowed us much choice. One thing was certain, it was going to cost more than we had and my need for gainful employment was becoming more acute.
It was, of course, in line with the Law of Sod that as soon as the bigger bills came fighting their way through our letterbox, the phone stopped ringing and the work dried up.
I still had some useful stand-by voiceover work but with a six- hour round trip on the train to London, it was neither convenient, nor particularly profitable. I began to think that as far as most casting directors were concerned, I’d moved too far beyond the pale out of sight, out of mind – while the old safety net that Only Fools had provided for the previous nearly twenty years was gone. In moments of characteristic paranoia, I had bouts of thinking that in buying Wigmore and moving out there I’d made the stupidest mistake of my life.
Most of the time I found myself oscillating between periods of euphoria and bouts of terror – joy at just being in this beautiful, uncluttered part of the country, occupied with such an historic house and fear of never working again or being able to pay for it all.
As it happened, my buying the Abbey had generated a lot of media interest and as Sue Holderness and I had somewhat cornered the market in publicizing the continual showings of Only Fools and a plethora of merchandise that had sprung from it, we now found ourselves sitting on a lot of sofas in day-time TV studios, where I could easily be persuaded to talk about the extraordinary changes in my life and the pleasures of the rural idyll.
I think friends and colleagues were simply waiting for the novelty to wear off before we headed back with a huge sigh of relief to the safe and familiar surroundings of South West London, which we had inhabited for so long. But we never did and never have tired of being in Wigmore. We relished the glorious, unchanging landscape that surrounded us and coming back on the train from London, rattling north from the junction at Newport (one of the ugliest cities in Britain) up beside the mighty ridges of the Black Mountains, across Herefordshire and the Rivers Wye, Arrow, Lugg and Teme, to alight at the station in Ludlow, in itself a step back into a gentler time, always gave my heart a great lift, and still does.
A few months into our occupation of Wigmore Abbey, we got to grips with our most pressing tasks in repairing, restoring and making comfortable our own personal pile of medieval masonry. The first big mistake we made was not to recruit local tradesmen to start the work on our house. They would have had a better idea of what they were doing, they would have cost less and it would have been the right gesture towards the small rural community we’d joined. In our defence, our choice of builder was made for thoroughly impractical reasons of philanthropy, in trying to help out a friend. One of Carol’s oldest chums, Anna Hall, was married to a charming, handsome man called Nick Barley. Nick’s current occupation was that of a London property ‘developer’, which meant, we discovered, that he bought rough old, cheap gaffs in dodgy, possibly up-and-coming parts of London, did them up a bit and flogged them. Things hadn’t been going brilliantly for him, though, and he needed a decent job to help him out of the doodah. We weighed in with a promise to give him the contract for renovating Wigmore Abbey.
It was soon clear that this was a very silly decision. He imported all his workers up from the other end of the country. To start with they all lived in the house, with Nick trying to cook them greasy spoon breakfasts every morning in Carol’s still ramshackle kitchen. That arrangement didn’t work and was curtailed fairly quickly, when they all decamped to the Compasses in Wigmore, which gave us back some privacy but inevitably cost money.
Nick – soon to be divorced from Anna and taking quite a lot of her money with him – turned out to be a lot better at talking about the job than doing it. The idea that his experience of nineteenthcentury jerry-built artisan houses had equipped him to handle a Grade-I-Listed twelth-century stone abbot’s lodging was, in hindsight, absurd, but we were naive, as well as kind-hearted. He managed to get the work started. A new boiler was installed and miraculously, all forty-two radiators were operational. Some plastering and a few repairs to beams were started but there was an amateurish air to the whole process and we soon started to worry.
While we were making stuttering progress with the house, we’d barely looked at the vestiges of the old and vast monastery that occupied most of the five acres of wild garden that came with our house. The ruins were under the aegis of English Heritage, altogether snootier than the local listed-buildings officials and the senior organization responsible for all kinds of historic sites and ancient monuments in England.
It turned out that they had been itching to get their boots on to the site for years, while successive owners had denied them access. Now we let them in: they came, they saw, they monitored. They gave good advice, oversaw some critical aspects of renovation and hinted at further help to come.
Luckily, they didn’t use the services of our builder and selfappointed foreman, Nick Barley, from whom I can’t imagine they had derived much peace of mind. It had become abundantly clear that he had no idea what he was doing and even the tradesmen he’d brought with him were looking perplexed at some of his instructions, and shaking their heads with heavenward glances when he was trying to tell them what to do.
Talking to the English Heritage chaps, he was embarrassingly unconvincing.
‘My clients don’t have a lot of money,’ he told them, ‘and I’m really going to have to kick ass round here to get the job in on budget. Now,’ he went on, ‘let’s cut to the quick...’
By the middle of 1999, having demanded and pocketed quite a lot of our money for not always identifiable results, our drunken builder parted company with us, and not on the best of terms. Soon after that, he parted company with Carol’s friend Anna, too, and moved on, via rich new pastures, to a luxury re-hab clinic.
Fortunately we had by now done what we should have done in the first place and discovered skilled local craftsmen who were properly experienced in handling ancient, quirky buildings. Master plasterer, Stuart Preece, for example, who came to look at the job, sucked his teeth vigorously and did wonderful work on the internal walls. Outside he re-pointed large areas of the stone-work with proper lime mortar. Stewart left many reminders of his day’s work with dollops of plaster all over the floors, and limey footprints all over the garden. He knew his job all right and had to be called in to show TV builder Tommy Walsh, from Groundforce how to mix the lime mortar that was always used in building, up until the nineteenth century.
The roofer, Michael Morris, kidded us with a request for danger money as our roofs were so high. I protested, ‘That sounds like a soldier asking for danger money before going into battle. After all, that’s what you chaps do, isn’t it, clamber around at great heights?’
The man who came to sweep the chimneys with his own massive tickling stick was called Ken Dodd and the boiler was installed by a plumber called Trigger. He amused himself by signing the wall in the boiler-room, ‘Installed by Trigger.’
Progress was faster from then on; the house was becoming habitable, and we didn’t feel quite so mad to have taken it on. We were settling into a manageable pace of life when we were delivered a big blow in June 1999 – Buster Merryfield had died.
Buster had been ill with a brain tumour for some time and had refused visitors for the past few months. The last time I spoke to him, he said he didn’t want his friends to see him ‘in this state’.
He was 79, and had first appeared in Only Fools in 1985, his first real professional acting job, at the age of 65. That in itself was a bizarre story, but he’d had a strange career – as a gunner in World War II, as an amateur boxer, and for many years as a banker, ending up manager of the Thames Ditton branch of the Westminster Bank. But he’d always lived for the theatre, and when he retired and decided to risk a professional career, he had got the job of replacing Lennard Pearce’s Grandad. He had thrown himself with gusto and great charm into the job of being Uncle Albert, where he soon became one of the best-loved characters in the show. In private, he was a sweet, jolly bloke and an eternal optimist; I was very sad to think I would never see him sitting down at the piano again to bang out the old pub songs like he used to at the Nag’s Head. A tear came into my eye, I don’t mind admitting, as I watched Iris, Buster’s devoted wife standing tearfully beside the grave, while the rest of us reflected on the friend and colleague we’d all lost.
Later that year, in life’s eternal merry-go-round, Nick Lyndhurst was married to former ballet dancer, Lucy Smith. I was invited, and Ken Macdonald, but our wives were not, due to limited numbers at the venue. Ken and I went as a couple, though we could never decide who should wear the hat. It was a lovely laid-back wedding, but we all drank too much, and as a result, in the wedding shot of Nick, Lucy and the cast of Only Fools, which appeared in OK! magazine, they are demure and tidy; the rest of us are distinctly dishevelled.