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Marketing was in full swing from the moment we opened the doors to the public. The more we promoted the Hall and Gardens the more we began to research and find out about the house. The Georgian part of the house is believed to have been built in the 1730s on the site of part of the Jacobean house. The design of the stairs is significant in that this type fell out of fashion by 1800 so it gives a fairly accurate date for the house, as does the fact that the Hoppers purchased the site in 1720. The Hoppers were either excellent recyclers, a practice which I wholeheartedly applaud, or short of cash. The original house is believed to have been a four-storey construction with dormer windows in the roof. In the early eighteenth century window tax was prevalent so the Hoppers were able to demonstrate to the city below their immense wealth – twelve windows. However if you look around the back there are very few windows. It seemed that all the money went into showing off.
A feature of Georgian architecture was symmetry. The Crook Hall builders compromised such symmetry. The front elevation would have been symmetrical but they had to use the doorway that remained from the Jacobean building, although it was converted to a classic Georgian doorway. In the drawing room this compromise continues because the builders chose to use the footprint of the previous building, thus saving on a new chimney and retaining some of the pre-existing walls. The wall between the dining room and kitchen is definitely earlier than 1700, being constructed of rubble and hewn stone. The front elevation is two bricks in depth while the back wall is just one brick thick. This use of the previous building is evidenced by a vaulted cellar which predates Georgian times; so again, we can assume the foundations were reused. The top step into the cellar clearly shows that a floor has been laid over a pre-existing one.
In the drawing room there were originally two matching fireplaces, one of which has now been relocated downstairs. At one stage both had been removed and kept in an outhouse because they were deemed offensive (those nipples again!). After The Great Fire of London building regulations were introduced. Fireplaces were no longer allowed to be made of wood so these particular ones were painted to look like marble.
The height of Georgian rooms was also specified by the new regulations; 10 ft on the first two floors, 9 ft on the third floor and 8 ft 6 inches on the fourth floor. This was followed to the letter at Crook Hall. The six-over-six panes in the windows were very fashionable but were only put where they would be seen. Likewise there were fashionable shutters in the drawing room and front bedrooms but nowhere else. All the floorboards were reused from the Jacobean house. Unusually, all the doors had six panels rather than four. They had been acquired from elsewhere and cut down to fit the openings. You can see this by looking at the bottom of the doors. In the centre of the room is a dove holding a fruit hopper which is a play on the family name of ‘Hopper’ rather than a coat of arms. Maggie thinks it was a poor craftsperson who did this as the bird looks more like a bad tempered bird of prey than a dove. The alcoves in the room were added later and used to show off collections, a great pastime of the Georgian gentry. We follow the practice of using the alcoves to display old tea sets and teapots some, of which have been passed down through our families. It was in this drawing room that James Raine would have met Wordsworth and Ruskin and the local diminutive Count Boruwlaski, who was only three foot three inches tall. It was said that the Count would be lifted up to sit on the mantelpiece at times so he could hold court with his friends and be seen more clearly.
Outside the drawing room the staircase is classic Georgian with a carved balustrade on each tread and it goes up four flights even though there is no reason to have it on the fourth floor. This was either to impress the visitor or for future plans which were never implemented.
Thus a lot of what you see at Crook Hall was all front and designed to impress. It seems the Hoppers were followers of fashion without a budget to match but they did well; the end result is beautiful.
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Opening your house to the public is a great privilege. Most of the general public who visit us are wonderful. Many appreciate that they are entering someone’s home and treat it as such. Some even bring presents to add to the historical papers the Hawgoods have left with us.
Probably the two most interesting gifts were a splendid sideboard and some ancient books. The Redpaths, who lived here in the 1970s, phoned out of the blue and said they were downsizing and did we want a piece of furniture which they no longer needed. This was a sideboard which was in the Hall when they moved here and that they had taken with them when they left. They felt it might want to come home. It now sits back in the Jacobean room and is much admired.
Another person got in touch to offer us some books which were initially owned by James Raine who lived here in the 1800s. The books are now back home and can be seen in the display cabinets.
The Fowler family who owned the house for over one hundred years presented us with a history of their family which included photographs taken in the walled gardens. Real treasures. People are very generous. We have been given so many china tea sets, tables, chairs, plants, mirrors, coin collections and paintings. But above all visitors have brought their enthusiasm, good spirits and kind hearts and have shown a real sense of appreciation to us for sharing our home with them.
Other visitors have been able to let us know where some items from Crook Hall have ended up. A visitor from Canada told us that her uncle had lived at the Hall and had taken a snooker table from here across the Atlantic. Evidently he used to play on it when it was all set up in the snooker room which is now the kitchen. She described it and it sounded a superb piece of furniture which would not be out of place at the Crucible. Another person had tracked down a large refectory table which had a brass plate on it stating that it had come from the Hall. This is now in Cadbury in the Midlands. It’s no wonder then, that when we arrived there was no furniture. We did bring some pieces with us and also had some made. I will not tell you which ones are the reproductions. I had to smile to myself when I watched one visitor admire a piece of reproduction furniture and say to her friend, “They don’t make things like this anymore.” I knew it had been made within the last month.
We were advised by friends as well as our insurers to be careful opening our home to the public. Some had visions of the public behaving like Vikings rather than genteel visitors. This has not been the case although we have certainly taken security quite seriously, with alarms installed throughout, and we have had a few unpleasant incidents. One day our takings were stolen. It could only have been someone who worked for us. We thought we knew who the culprit was. The police urged us to prosecute, but as all our employees would have had to have their fingerprints taken we were not prepared to give the go ahead. We did not want the rest of our hard working team to be treated like criminals. We just made sure that the suspect knew that we were on to him. He didn’t work for us again.
As for customers, we once had a family who stole from our shop, almost clearing the shelves. We realised later that one of the daughters had been on the lookout as other family members secreted items in their bags. Security was heightened after that incident.
We used to try to suss out people who we thought looked suspicious, and I have got to say that appearances can be deceptive; I remember spotting four guys sitting at a table and talking intently. They did not look like our typical demographic – more like they were four criminals planning a bank robbery.
I got into position so I could eavesdrop on their conversation only to hear one of them ask his friend, “I think the mistle thrush is indigenous, do you?” There followed a heated debate about British birds. I could not quite believe it. Since then I have stopped second guessing.
I am sure there will be some rogues out there but most of our visitors are wonderful. People had advised us against having the public in our house, warning of damage and theft. This cannot be further from the truth. We have found that the vast
majority of people are considerate, respectful and honest. Yes, we have lost a few books; a treasured one about weddings, which I admit was a loss, and one on Scottish tartans which my Scottish mum gave to me. However, I think in the twenty years we have been open, apart from the raid on the shop by the aforementioned family, we have lost no more than that.
On the contrary, we have had several people send money through to us after they had forgotten to pay in the coffee shop. In one instance a couple picked some apples thinking it was our apple picking weekend during which we give away free apples. When they got home and looked at our leaflet they realised that they had got the wrong day. They immediately sent us a note apologising for their mistake and enclosing more than enough money to pay for the apples they had taken.
The money we were generating from opening was much needed. It was all being ploughed back into the Hall and Gardens. We had some large bills to pay in addition to the normal bills most households face. Constant repairs and patching to the roof were required from the first year we moved in and were cripplingly expensive. Owning a grade one listed building adds additional costs to any repairs and any work has to be very carefully handled. We used some of the income to replace doors, windows and shutters which were all looking very tired.
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In 2001 we re-laid the whole courtyard. When we arrived it had been a sloping concrete space covered with ivy. We had made it safe when we restored the coach house by building some steps and giving it a general tidy up. Six years later, we felt it needed a facelift. The work we carried out then can be seen today and looks as if it has always been there. One of our volunteers, a chap called Peter, built the little fountain.
5
Developing The Gardens
We had our work cut out developing new areas such as the maze, ponds and the Cathedral Garden, while not forgetting about the existing areas which needed continuing tender loving care. With only one gardener, Ian, on the books at the time and the help of one labourer, Maggie and I, together with my parents, took to shovels spades and forks to do our bit.
My father was Trojan building paths, gazebos, walls and the smaller pond. The rest of us had to put up with his endless monologues explaining his painstaking progress as he reworked his physical activity with words rather than a spade.
Our gardener, Ian, was a huge, young and energetic individual who had a good eye for design and who worked incredibly hard. He used to work with headphones on digging, planting and pruning to the accompaniment of heavy rock music. He made many fabulous additions to the gardens. One of his first tasks was to make the whole site rabbit proof. When we first arrived we liked to see the rabbits running around. Our pet rabbit even joined them (by chance rather than design) and we loved watching him cavorting with his new friends. However, one morning I went into the vegetable patch to assess the progress of the newly planted lettuce only to find that they had been completely nibbled away. I stomped around in a fury like Mr McGregor. After that the rabbits were less welcome.
Initially we had acres of lawn. I estimated that it took over twelve hours to cut it all and that was with a tractor lawnmower. It didn’t help that I was not the best driver of this little red beast. Very early on I managed to put my foot onto the accelerator rather than the brake. This should not have caused enormous difficulty, just a quick readjustment of feet on pedals. Not this time though. I was driving it into the shed where we kept it. The accelerator was sharper than I thought it would be resulting in the tractor racing into the shed then crashing right through the back wall. It was only the newly constructed rabbit fencing that stopped me and half the shed from shooting into the field. A second occasion I frightened Maggie by staggering into the kitchen bleeding profusely. It was this experience and the time it took to mow the lawn that drew me to the conclusion that creating a pond and a maze would be a good idea. They would halve the time taken to cut the grass and the other benefit was that we could sell that little red beast which I had grown to hate.
Ian planted the maze and sunk the large pond. The pond liner arrived on the back of a lorry. It was huge and very, very heavy. How were we going to get it in place? The driver asked whether we had a forklift; I said no but that we had a gardener. The driver looked very unsure.
Ian and I pushed this liner, which was the size of a mini car, across to the large excavated hole which was to be the site of the pond. Two days and much sweat later the liner was in place. A garden hose was taken down to the pond and with great ceremony the water was turned on. We left it on overnight.
That night Maggie woke me in a panic. She was concerned that the pond might be overflowing and would flood the city. On reflection this was rather ironic as centuries earlier the Crook Hall estate provided the water supply to the city. A previous owner of the Hall had been brought to task for cutting off Durham’s water supply and here my wife was worrying about too much water finding its way from Crook Hall to the city. I very much doubted that the pond would be anywhere near full. However, she was insistent so I got up at half past one in the morning and dragged myself out to the pond or should I say liner with a puddle in the bottom. I reported back.
It took two weeks to fill the pond and we remain forever grateful to Northumbria Water for their contribution.
Our children loved the pond. They thought we had created a swimming pool. That summer they spent most of the time down at the pond in their swimming costumes with their friends and lilos making the most of it.
Our dog found another game – chasing rabbits around the pond. On one occasion a desperate rabbit ran into the pond and managed to swim across it only to be met by a very excited collie at the other side. I saved the rabbit and thought it deserved a second chance. I took it over the fields and let it go. No doubt it was back in the gardens that evening.
Sometimes I still pinch myself and wonder how we have been so lucky to live here. On a warm summer evening sitting beneath the elm tree down near the pond and looking across the gardens to the fields is a sheer delight.
Having a pond in a garden is not just about the aesthetics but also the wildlife it attracts; the heron each morning, the birds coming to take a drink each evening, the moorhen who has set up home in the reeds and the duck who comes every year to show off her brood. At closer quarters you can see the newts and frogs as well as the many insects including dragon flies and may flies. Maggie has seen kingfishers a number of times. I always fail to spot them. In the early days we had a large number of golden rudd, which on sunny days bask in shoals just under the surface of the water and then retire deep enough to avoid the prying eyes and piercing beak of the heron. One of the severe winters saw their demise. We have restocked the pond and, if you look carefully in the summer months, you will see the fish gliding between the water lilies. The pond area is one of our favourite places in the garden. We often sit there with our neighbours, Chris and Elaine, and share a bottle of wine or two.
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Ian was not just a gardener who did projects. He could also turn his hand to some of those mundane gardening tasks. One day I found him scraping out the weeds on a herringbone brick path. If you have ever tried doing that job you will know that it is mundane to the extreme.
“Ian, how on earth have you the patience to do that job?” I asked him.
He did not hesitate in responding,
“I have no patience and it is extremely boring. The only way I can manage to do it is to imagine that the judges from Chelsea Flower Show are coming tomorrow and I want this path to win a gold medal. So it just has to be perfect.” I strolled away delighted that we had such a professional working with us.
Our labourer, Alan, was a character. I first met him in my time as a personnel manager and knew him to be extremely hardworking. His reliability was unquestionable and was demonstrated when heavy snow hit the North East bringing traffic to a standstill. I opened the shutters at 6.30am and there, in the wintry scene, was
Alan who had turned up thirty minutes early to clear snow. His knowledge of gardening was limited, even after he had worked with us for five years, but his loyalty and hard graft were unquestionable.
He found some of our planting ideas very strange. On one occasion he grumbled to me, “There are ower many flowers here you canna see where to stand. Canna see the grass for the flowers.”
Another day he asked me, “Keith, what is that flower? It is very bonny.“
“A snowdrop.”
“Can I take some yam for wor lass?”
“Of course you can,” I replied, “Just take some.”
“That’s grand they’ll look champion outside wor house.”
He then asked, “Have you any other colours rather than white?”
He was so hard working. I gave him a reference file with pressed weeds in, five in total including nettle and Himalayan balsam. Armed with his file and a variety of tools he rid the whole garden of all these weeds. We no longer have any Himalayan balsam in the garden. What a thorough job.
Less thorough was the job I gave him of mowing the grass maze. He cut a straight line from the entrance to the middle. When questioned he said he had found it too difficult to find his way in and out using the previously cut path. I had to explain that that was the purpose of a maze. After Alan’s intervention the maze was no longer remotely challenging. It was the easiest maze in the world. Something had to be done. Ian decided to plant it up with cotoneaster which, unlike yew, changes colour throughout the year. Although the maze was easy at first it would become more challenging with each year that passed. Ian’s design was circular which made it unusual. Alan continued to find cutting the grass in it a challenge.
Blood, Sweat and Scones Page 5