7981 oak trees
5012 beech trees
125 ash trees
320 chestnutt trees
3 walnutt trees
10 Sycomore trees
14493 tillers [young trees] and pollards of the above sorts
The Sissinghurst woods had begun to make their recovery from the depredations of the Civil War and were now valued at £5,302, nearly eighteen times as much as the damaged house. Among these trees, so carefully counted, are most of the big oaks and beeches now growing at Sissinghurst.
In 1796 a lease was taken by the parish of Cranbrook on Sissinghurst Castle Farm, the idea being that the farm would provide work for those able-bodied men who would otherwise be incapable of earning their living, especially during the winter months.
This Cranbrook poor-relief scheme was exceptional. The general rule at the time was to give outdoor relief as a supplement to low wages, the Speenhamland system, which had the effect not of subsidising wages but of depressing them, causing the widespread misery of which William Cobbett was the fiercest scourge and critic. Cranbrook’s hiring of Sissinghurst Castle Farm meant that housing, shelter and food were provided for up to a hundred men at a time. The farm made a good profit, which meant that Cranbrook local taxation, the rates, did not rise too high and the desperate poverty of farm-workers in other parts of southern England was avoided.
Because of the income derived from the Castle Farm, Cranbrook rates throughout the early nineteenth century were consistently running at a third and even a half lower than in surrounding parishes. Farmers in need of casual labour could hire men from this farm, paying the parish a fee according to the current level of wages. Men could come and go from Sissinghurst whenever they pleased. Between 1813 and 1818, with grain at a wartime price peak, this farm earned £1,000 profit, which was given to the parish for the poor. Even in the widespread post-war depression in the 1820s, Sissinghurst Castle Farm lost only a hundred pounds a year, a small price for its benefits as a whole. When the violent Swing Riots broke out in the 1830s and agricultural labourers, demanding a weekly wage of 2s 3d in winter, 2s 6d in summer, burned ricks, destroyed threshing machines and threatened and shot at employers, Cranbrook, almost alone of all the surrounding parishes, had no trouble. This farm, overseen by the group of Cranbrook men who had signed the lease, had done its part in maintaining some kind of social cohesion. The rest of England was in the full flood of laissez-faire market capitalism. Sissinghurst, not through any interest of the landlords, the Manns, who had by now become the earls of Cornwallis, but through the leaders of the local community, remained an island in which the poor had been treated as more than economic cogs to be used and rejected at will.
After the economy recovered in the 1830s, Sissinghurst started to pour money into Cranbrook’s coffers. The Frittenden brick kilns were opened on the northern edge of the estate and there was a sawmill set up next to them, both making a profit. Between 1842 and 1847, £2,500 was credited to the parish from the farm, which was fondly called ‘The Old Cow’, which could be milked and milked and would always deliver. Assistance was given to Cranbrook families wishing to emigrate. Money was provided for the repair of churches. Only with the downturn of the late 1840s, and an overdraft growing to £1,500, did the parish trustees decide to pull out. Having first traded their way out of that debt, in 1853 they found themselves in pocket, surrendered the lease to the Cornwallises, handed to the parish, with which the Vestry Hall in Cranbrook was built, and considered sixty years of poor relief well done.
The buildings were in a fairly ruinous condition. The South Cottage was a thatched hovel. Both the Tower’s turrets had lost their upper prospect rooms and in the 1830s were roofless. In 1839, the Mann Cornwallis estate repaired the roofs with oak-shingled conical caps, surmounted by some beautiful weathervanes marked ‘MC 1839’.
Nevertheless, the Cornwallises were keen to get the farm back in hand. In 1853, when the farm here was still rented out to the Overseers of the Poor in Cranbrook, a report had been made on the condition of the Cornwallis estates. Of Sissinghurst, the Cornwallis trustees had written:
This is the most important farm on the estate in the Weald. We incline to the opinion that it is much more desirable to have a respectable tenant residing on the farm and farming on his own account than to have so many non-resident Trustee tenants, who could not feel the same interest in it that he would feel. The only objection to this change which presents itself, is the heavy outlay which must necessarily be incurred in erecting a good farmhouse and suitable buildings, many of the present ones being very old and inefficient for an occupation of this extent. The farm is not in so good a state as it was ten years ago, and about half of it requires draining.
When the poorhouse was closed, Sissinghurst entered a period of high Victorian farming. A dynamic and highly cultivated young man, George Neve, whose father was a land agent, managing several large aristocratic estates, was chosen as the new tenant. George had worked with his father and this was his opportunity. A big brick farmhouse, called ‘The Castle Residence’, was built in 1854/55, a large family house approached by an asphalted carriage drive and sweep, with seven bedrooms on the first floor, a bathroom and a flushing loo, four more bedrooms above, four stalls for hunters and two loose boxes, a harness room and two coach houses. The house was surrounded by lawns, shrubberies and gardens. There was a greenhouse and a vinery, ‘with the remains of Sissinghurst Castle close by, which are a prominent and pleasing feature to the property and full of historic interest’.
The new asphalted carriage drive, which is the present lane, was built in a long curve down from the main road to arrive at the front of the new house, where cedars, laurels and rhododendrons were planted. Twenty-five acres of ancient woodland were cleared from in front of the house, leaving only the older trees standing in a stretch of what became elegant new parkland, ‘which is of excellent grazing quality and beautifully timbered with oak, chestnut, silver birch, ash and walnut’. Chestnut coppice was planted throughout most of the old woodland and over some of the older fields called Roughter near the Biddenden road, turning them into woods ‘which produce some of the highest priced Chestnut and Ash in the district, as well as being Splendid Game Coverts’. The field pattern that had been imposed on the abandoned Park in the eighteenth century was regularised, some new, mainly hawthorn hedges planted and others taken out. A small stream between Large and Lodge fields was canalised. George Neve was a great advocate of dry land as a way of preventing sickness in animals, and drains were installed in most of the Sissinghurst fields. New oast houses with four kilns were built. There was stabling for ten carthorses, more for the bailiff’s and shepherd’s horses and a new brick dairy. There were cow sheds, fatting lodges with pits, two chaff steaming rooms, wagon and implement sheds. The large Elizabethan brick barn had the windows that had been opened for the prisoners’ hospital filled in. Huge wheat and barley stacks were made on the stack plat to the north of the barn. Every winter the threshing teams would arrive with their giant steam-driven machines and the corn in sacks was hauled up by hoists in the barn and then stored in the upper floors of the granary beside it. Beyond the new dairy, there was a range of hop-pickers’ huts with a cooking house beside them.
The Neves’ coachman lived in the South Cottage and eight other farm families lived in the old buildings, a bailiff in the Priest’s House, others in the front range and in the Tower, where both the archways were bricked in to make a room. A gamekeeper lived in Horse Race House, which had kennels and outbuildings. Fruit trees were trained on the south wall of the great Elizabethan courtyard and a greenhouse built near the Tower.
Neve had the 278 acres of Bettenham (where the farmhouse was divided into three cottages) as well as the 478 of Castle Farm. The brick kilns were ‘in full working order with plenty of excellent brick earth close at hand’, and next to them was the highly productive timber yard with four cottages for sawyers. The farm produced ‘heavy crops of hops, grass and cereals’. It
was even said that the finest hops in Kent were grown here. A large flock of sheep and many head of cattle were fattened on it, and there were ‘extensive piggeries’. There were six acres of allotments on the southern side of the wood, let out to people from the village.
Payments made by the Cornwallises’ agent to men at work on the Sissinghurst estate describe a world of unbridled energy and productivity. All fencing and gates were made from the wood grown here. Ladders, stepladders and brick moulds were all made in the timber yard next to the Frittenden brickworks. The brick ‘lodges’ in which the clay for the bricks was dried before being fired were made from oak cut in the neighbouring woods, roofed in the tiles dug from the neighbouring brick earth and held on the riven oak laths with pegs cleft from the same oak. Hundreds of payments are made for ‘hewing and sawing’, including for up to five hours at a time to one ‘Elizabeth Eldridge’. Hired-in labour worked in the woods, ‘setting and planting’, weeding around the new chestnut plants, picking up nuts at a shilling an hour, ditching, digging, carrying manure, ‘letting off water’ from the rides in the woods, brushing the roads, cleaning the carts after they had come out of the thick clay, making bridges over the streams. In all this multifarious work, there was one constant: the men and women who did it were paid a pittance.
It was, amazingly, a farm still worked largely by oxen, creatures that would remain in harness here until the First World War. To feed them, 110 acres of the farm were given over to grass, including the Park. Arable covered 108 acres, hops were grown on 59 acres and then carted in their giant sacking pockets to Cranbrook railway station and from there to London. There were 13 acres of orchard and 265 of wood. When the Neves had some time off, they fished for trout in the Hammer Stream and hunted deer with the Mid-Kent Stag Hounds, which met here every winter. There is not even the faintest suggestion that Sissinghurst, as it arrived in the twentieth century, was an abandoned or declining place. It was a living monument to farming excellence, to Victorian enterprise and to all the sustained and sustaining virtues of ‘imbarning, stacking and foddering out’. The ruins of the Elizabethan house stood there not as the focus for nostalgia but as a kind of memory, full of half-mythical stories. The Neves’ children used to dig in their garden for the secret passage Bloody Baker was meant to have built from here to Cranbrook. Frederick William Neve, one of George’s sons, listened agog as he heard ‘a tradition handed down among the peasantry that when Queen Mary came to the castle, she alighted from her horse and the footprints which she made are still there. Even when ploughed over they would return. However, as flagstones cover the ground, there is no way of testing the truth’. The first postcards of Sissinghurst were made. One or two tourists used to come and for a few pence would be shown the top of the Tower, its room full of carved Tudor heads and, intriguingly, its museum. A note written by Vita survives among my father’s papers:
A curious old couple came to Sissinghurst in the spring of 1942, to visit the garden. The woman told me she had been a midwife in Cranbrook many years earlier & had often been up the towers. She asked me what had become of the things from the ‘museum’ that used to be at the top of the tower, and mentioned that there was a ceinture de chasteté there. I must have looked surprised, for she explained ‘What the gentleman locks the lady into when he goes away.’ She said her daughter was one of Epstein’s favourite models.
When the Sissinghurst Castle Estate was sold by the Cornwallises at auction on 25 June 1903 in Maidstone, in twenty-one lots, it was advertised as ‘an unusually fine sporting property in this lovely part of Kent’, on which ‘the estate has been well farmed & looked after for a long period’. The 1,083 acres of Sissinghurst, including a great deal of arable land, meadow, pasture and wood that no longer belongs to it, went for £16,500 to the Cheeseman brothers, one of whom, Barton, came to live here in the farmhouse. In 1925, he left and the castle and farm were sold to a sixty-eight-year-old coal and feed merchant, William Wilmshurst, a rich man, who was already dying of cancer. Against the wishes of his son and heir, he wanted to spend his last years doing something worthwhile and had decided, after driving round Kent and Sussex, to pour his money into the ruins of Sissinghurst Castle. His nephew, John Wilmshurst, lived in the South Cottage and ran the farm, while his niece, Dorothy, was living only a mile away, married to the farmer who had bought Bettenham four years earlier, Captain Ossie Beale.
Wilmshurst died in 1927 before he could do anything for the Castle ruins, and his son, also called William, who had thought his father’s plans absurd and romantic, decided to sell the whole place. Ossie Beale started to rent the Sissinghurst fields on the Bettenham side, but England was just tipping into an agricultural depression and Sissinghurst sat on the market unsold for more than two years, increasingly glum. The farm started to slide away from its Victorian condition. Then one day in April 1930, Ossie’s brother Donald, who was a land agent, brought two women over from Sevenoaks to look at the place, a pair of aristocratic women poets: Vita Sackville-West and Dottie Wellesley, her lover, to whom four years earlier she had dedicated her long pastoral poem The Land. My thirteen-year old father came with them, appalled at the mess. Vita fell ‘flat in love with it’. By 6 May, she had bought Sissinghurst, its lands, woods and buildings, less for the overbrimming excellence of its farm than for what the agent’s particulars described as ‘picturesque ruins in grounds’.
TEN
Acceptance
Quite unexpectedly, James Stearns, the last man to have been the resident farmer at Sissinghurst, died at the end of February 2007. He was on the way back from South Africa with his wife Pat. Their children had given them three weeks of holiday as a fortieth wedding anniversary present. He was sixty-five.
I went to see Pat on the morning she returned from the airport. A packed cluster of cars in the driveway of the farmhouse and frost in the puddles. Her family was all there in the sitting room and the hall. The whole of George Neve’s Victorian house was busy with them, and a feeling of sweetness and gentleness filled it. We had coffee and biscuits, in a strange and heightened party, sitting on the sofas, everyone bright in the bruised air, people coming and going, the friends and neighbours, all of us suddenly allowed an intimacy we had never had. Pat was pale and brave, sitting expectant in the centre. James’s mother, Mary Stearns, was there, her cheeks flushed, and his sister Linda and his daughter Catherine: these four strong, capable women who had surrounded James and sustained him in his lifetime. I hugged Pat and kissed her and we talked about his death. They had been side by side in the aeroplane on the runway when he died. Pat had just told him to put his seat belt on, she looked away, heard him cough a little, looked back and he had gone. They had been so happy on the holiday. There had been no build-up to this death. It was just a sudden removal, a hole cut in their lives. It felt as if the family had been stabbed, or attacked in the street, and had gathered here now to dress the wounds. Mary Stearns held my hand as she spoke to me. Hurt and affection were so close to the surface that morning, they were like a scent hanging in the rooms.
I thought as I went back home of the long talk I’d had with James two years before about the farm and its history. He had told me how everything in his life had been bound to this place. His grandfather, Ossie Beale, stood at the foundations. As a young man, Oswald had his own farm in Sussex at Hadlow Down, and at the beginning of the First World War he had enlisted as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. But his own father, Louis, a great, waistcoated, bearded patriarch, who was running the Beales’ construction and property business in Tunbridge Wells, had taken him out to dinner, told him to go to Sandhurst and get himself a commission. So it was that Ossie fought the war as a commissioned officer in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, The Beds and Herts, at the Somme, at Passchendaele, in Italy and then on General Ironside’s staff during the Murmansk expedition, returning as Captain Beale in 1919, a veteran, with the MC and the Croix de Guerre and a shrapnel wound on his forehead. His admiring father gave him £17,000 to buy the fa
rm at Bettenham in 1921 and the family had moved in: a lovely but draughty and earth-floored medieval house, surrounded by a moat – disgusting because the drains ran into it; two hundred acres of good valley land; hop gardens; some stables and huge, marquee-sized barns; a herd of beautiful, milky Guernseys. Every one of the Beales loved it there.
James told me this over his dining-room table in the Sissinghurst Castle farmhouse, in his deep, reverberating voice, while his hangdog, rather lugubrious eyes looked into mine now and then to confirm that I was getting the picture. This was the other Sissinghurst. To begin with, the farming went well. Captain Beale rented the eastern half of Sissinghurst Castle Farm, up to the Sissinghurst moat, planting an expensive new hop garden in Lodge Field, managing it with expertise and tailor-like precision. Everything was orderly and the whole place breathed well-being. Vita immediately took to him, charmed by his gentlemanly, buccaneering manner and charming him in return. Both, from their different sides, liked the antiquity, the half-formal almost-courtship of their neighbour–landlord relations. She loved his knowledge and he loved her romance and perhaps her aristocratic allure, that inexplicable seductiveness she could summon at will. He was a self-consciously wonderful man, a showman and a commanding figure. As his party trick for his grandchildren he would blow cigar smoke out through a hole – a childhood defect – just below the bridge of his nose, like a smiling dragon in a tweed jacket. His daughter Mary called him her ‘BM’ – the Blooming Marvel – and between him and Vita the relationship was one of long-sustained, mutual flattery and delight.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 22