Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  This happy time was not to last. In the late 1920s farming started to slip into a catastrophic depression. Every year the milk had been sold locally, delivered by van, the potatoes were sold, sheep and cattle came and went to Ashford and occasionally Biddenden markets, the apples were packed and shipped to London, the hops picked and dried and sent to London in their giant pockets, first by wagon on the road to Cranbrook station, and from there to the brewers in London. Every year the produce going out was a guarantee of the year to come.

  Mary Stearns can still remember the late autumn moment in her teens, at some time in the late twenties, when one day at Bettenham they all heard and then saw a train of wagons coming back rumbling down the lane towards the farm. On them was the whole of the Bettenham hop harvest returning from London unsold. The market had failed them. There was a glut of hops. Supply far outstripped demand. All the work and investment in the hop gardens that year, all the setting up and stringing of the poles, the manuring, weeding, spraying, picking, carting, drying, packing and dispatch: all had gone to waste. The hops were worth nothing. The wagons were unloaded, the pockets taken out on to the land, slit open and the precious contents spread as a mulch on the fields.

  1935: Captain Beale and the sheep on the Low Weald pastures at Bettenham

  The Beales only just got through the depression and emerged from it financially damaged. In 1936, after Vita’s mother had died and left her a fortune, she bought Bettenham from them, the debts were paid off with the purchase price and Captain Beale took on the whole of Bettenham and Sissinghurst Castle Farm, now as Vita’s tenant. With some reluctance among his womenfolk, he moved the family up to the Victorian farmhouse at Sissinghurst (at Vita’s suggestion) and left Bettenham behind. Their capital had largely disappeared but in Ossie’s hands the whole joint farm nevertheless became glowingly beautiful, perhaps never more beautiful in its history: the Guernseys down at Bettenham, the dairy shorthorns up at Sissinghurst; hops; apples, pears and cherries; blackcurrants and potatoes; a large flock of sheep; peas and beans, wheat, barley and oats for milling and cattle feed; kale, turnips, rape and mangolds; fifty acres of meadow; men and women at work, working horses and the first tractors arriving, a kind of bright, rich, ancient modernity. Vita had added Brissenden Farm (in 1940) and Little Bettenham (a year later) to the estate. And Captain Beale was riding high, presiding over the county, becoming chairman of Ashford cattle market, a Justice of the Peace (with Vita) and a governor of Wye Agricultural College, from where one or two students always came to live and work here.

  During the war Mary had married Stanley Stearns, a Canadian pilot with Coastal Command, who after the war and a spell training pilots in Canada came to work here in partnership with her father. The Stearnses lived at Bettenham and the Beales lived in Sissinghurst Castle Farm. Vita and Harold were in the Castle itself, Jack Copper and the cook, Mrs Hayter, lived in parts of the front range and a cowman and the head gardener were in new cottages built beyond the oast houses. There were other cottages in the village, where other gardeners lived, and still more attached to Bettenham.

  Ossie Beale, called The Captain by the farm staff and students, presided over this beautiful and multifarious kingdom until his death in 1957. In 1952 the Sissinghurst shorthorns were sold and the Bettenham Guernseys moved up here, but apart from that there was no shrinking of the enterprise. New orchards were planted, new machinery bought and, after Stanley Stearns took over, much the same was true. He too was a go-ahead farmer, bought a new efficient hop-stripping machine, which made most of the hop-pickers unnecessary and became chairman of the Kent NFU.

  So when, I asked James, had it all begun to unravel? First, he said, when Nigel, my father, was forced to sell Bettenham in 1963 to pay his mother’s death duties. The Stearnses had to surrender the tenancy there (for which my father paid them £6,000) and the size of their farmed area shrank by almost half. That was a body blow. The Stearnses should have bought it themselves, James said, but the capital wasn’t there. The Bettenham house and land were sold separately and for the first time since the Dark Ages that unity was broken. Then, in 1967, James’s father died suddenly and young – ‘he was a smoker, sixty cigs a day.’ James in partnership with his uncle John Beale took the farm over. John was a distinguished virologist, scientific director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories in London, and at the weekends he did the book work for the farm. James was the hands-on farmer. The business was laden ‘with quite a bit of debt and no assets’. I asked James why he had taken it on? ‘Because I loved it,’ he said. ‘I always loved farming. And I loved it here.’ There were seven men working on the farm, looking after a flock of sheep, the Guernseys, ten acres of hops, two orchards and the big arable fields on the eastern end of the farm. A capital injection from Pat’s father, who was a big vegetable grower at Offham near West Malling, paid off the overdraft, but it was not long before the first disaster struck. In 1967, the hops in Frogmead became infected with verticillian wilt, an ineradicable fungal disease, and the hops, always the most treacherous of crops, expensive to grow and threatening low prices in a high-yielding year, lost the Stearnses more than they could afford. James pulled them out in the following spring.

  The Guernsey herd also seemed wrong. James and his father had started a move towards more productive Friesians in the early sixties but the Milk Marketing Board had insisted that each farm stuck with a single breed. So James kept the Guernseys, even though he never felt particularly drawn to the life of a dairy farmer, until they too stopped making financial sense and finally left the farm in 1980. His father-in-law was an expert in vegetable growing and under his encouragement James started with Brussels sprouts and lettuces in 1968, labour-intensive crops that involved management of the gangs of pickers, but nothing on the farm was singing.

  ‘Lack of capital was beginning to strangle us,’ James said. There was no financial cushion, nor assets to borrow against, nor any sense that they could easily weather a crisis. The debts were looming larger. From 1968 onwards, the family was running the tea room for the visitors in the now redundant oast house. Mary was making her famous apple cake, and the wonderful unpasteurised cream straight from the Guernsey herd lay at the heart of the teas. In 1971 Pat started up a farm shop, supplied from the wholesale vegetable market at Covent Garden in London, and they began doing lunches. All of these were buoyancy aids: without them, the small farm, with no ability to make large capital improvements, and with a debt burden on its shoulders, could not possibly have kept afloat.

  Then the hammer fell: in 1982, the National Trust, itself looking for income to maintain an increasingly expensive property, told the Stearnses they wanted to run the tea room themselves. Two years later the transfer was made. Now James and Pat were faced with the hard fact: the farm had become unviable. 1984 had been an extraordinary bumper year for grain but still it was no good. They were ‘getting deeper into real debt’ and James was living night after night with racking anxiety, the feeling that everything he loved was dissolving around him. He hung on until Christmas 1989. ‘“We’re bust,” I said to Pat. “I don’t know what to do.”’ By then only the bed & breakfast business that Pat was now running in the farmhouse was going well. They struggled on with the farm for another decade. All the work on it was now done under contract by outsiders. No one was employed here. Finally, in 1999, it came to an end. James surrendered the farm and the Trust gave the family a fourteen-year tenancy on the farmhouse. No other farmer came in. Sissinghurst was divided up and let to four separate farm businesses, whose main focus was elsewhere. It was the saddest possible end to the three generations and eighty-eight years that the Beales and Stearnses had been at Sissinghurst.

  James’s life had coincided with the worst years that the farm had seen for centuries. No one had suffered the decline of Sissinghurst as much as he had. He had experienced the deepest change in the ways of farming, not as a business phenomenon, a technological or market shift, but as something of a personal and private crucifixion. On
ce, before James died, Pat Stearns heard me giving a talk at a charity lunch in Tenterden, when I had spoken about what I wanted to see happen on the farm here. She came up to me afterwards and said gently and kindly, ‘That was interesting, Adam, but I don’t think you know just how difficult it was.’ I could only say to her then, as I do now, that I hope I was at least trying to understand.

  The question remained whether this story could be reversed. Could the farm ever return to the rich, mixed condition it had enjoyed until the 1960s?

  On 16 March 2007, James’s funeral was held in Cranbrook church. The pews can fit five hundred but the crowds for James were so large that lines of people stood at the back to hear his friends pay their tributes. One described him as a ‘yeoman’, a word, with its roots in the Sissinghurst earth, which brought tears to my eyes, for its irony, for its taunting understanding that James had been a yeoman at a time when yeomen were not wanted or their qualities understood. I stared at the small stone pediment fixed up on the wall in front of me, brought here in the 1830s from the remains of Elizabethan Sissinghurst. Others talked of his kindness, his warmth and jokiness, his generosity, the way in which he was loved by everyone who knew him, his love of Kent and Sissinghurst. We sang ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’. His mother, wife, sister and daughter were there to mourn him like four queens. I thought of him as an oak in the wood, which had fallen and left a gap, a big present absence where the crown had been, something rooted now down and gone.

  In April 2007, the Soil Association delivered their final report. We had met and talked through it often throughout the winter and spring and we had come up with something that looked quite like Sissinghurst in its glory days under Captain Beale. There was to be a suckler herd of Sussex beef cattle, and a flock of Romney ewes. Most of the farm would be grass and there’d be 50 acres of crops. Cow Field was to have its vegetable patch of 2½ acres. Twenty-five acres of mixed fruit orchard would have grazing under the trees. There would be chickens in mobile houses. All of this needed a capital investment of just over £300,000. After five years, there would be a small working profit.

  We imagined that, this second time around, our proposals would look as if we were on the money. We weren’t. In May, the plan was rejected for a second time. Unaffordable. Yet another report, by yet more consultants, delivered in July 2007, concluded that the whole idea was impracticable unless it were part of a bigger enterprise. We had spent yet another year trying to get this right and it was still as dead as it had been the previous summer.

  Pat Stearns had in the end decided, after talking to her children and her friends, that she could no longer live in the great battleship of the Castle farmhouse. It is a Victorian brute of a thing, expensive to heat and laborious to clean. She and James had run a successful B&B business there for more than twenty-five years. People came back year after year, every time booking their next season’s visit before they left. At the height of the summer you could never get in. It was a sad day but Pat could no longer think of running the six-bedroom business on her own. What this meant for Sissinghurst, though, was that a house for the farmer and more significantly a bed & breakfast business for the farmer’s wife or partner had suddenly become available. The farm business no longer had to stand on its own. Tied to a bed & breakfast, it was surely a viable proposition. It is the greatest irony that this opportunity should have occurred because James Stearns died. I hope it is not too sentimental to think that if the farm at Sissinghurst does work in the future it is because his death allowed it to.

  These elements seemed at last to be pointing in the right direction. A candle flame flickered, if only just. Jonathan Light asked me to come to the meeting of the NT Regional Committee at Sissinghurst on 9 August to talk about my ‘vision’ – a word that by now had acquired something of an ironic tinge.

  I stood at one end of their table and talked to them. The farm scheme was fighting for its life. We could, I said, reduce the ambition, set up a partnership with local growers and end up at Sissinghurst with a superficial gesture towards the original idea. It would be highly compromised. The heart would have been taken out of it, because the essence of the idea was ‘an intimately close connection between food, people and landscape’.

  Do you know those moments in meetings when you are more fired up than everyone else around you? When you notice a sudden balloon of your own passion come wobbling out over the table and hang there as a form of radiant embarrassment? While people shuffle in their chairs and look at their papers? This was one of those moments.

  But I was going on. The other option was to increase takings in the restaurant. Sell more of what we grow and/or charge more for what we make. Don’t be idealistic about it: be entrepreneurial about it. The sums were pretty straightforward. The restaurant turned over £600,000 a year. About half of that was on prepared food. A 10 per cent rise in that half of the revenue would deliver an extra £30,000 a year. The projected shortfall was in the region of £75,000 a year. Half the solution to the problem lay in the market. And there was another figure: the Chatsworth combined farm shop and restaurant turns over £5 million a year and makes a £1-million-a-year contribution to the Chatsworth estate. I had been to talk to them about it and the key word was processing: not leeks but leek pie, not apples but apple cake. If you add the value, you get the profit.

  I have no idea if these Regional Committee meetings usually have speeches of this kind made to them. Maybe not, but after so long and after so much hope denied, I was in a state of high frustration.

  Don’t abandon the ideal, I said to them, because the ideal is the only thing worth having, but go slowly and build a ramp towards it. But don’t kick it back again. There were only a certain number of times you could fell a scheme like this and expect it to come bouncing back as before. If they inserted another year into this process, the air would come leaking slowly out of the balloon, a long slow wheeze, and nothing would change. Or at least other places would change and Sissinghurst would only have to catch up later.

  I would like to have seen me, to see just how Billy Grahamish this was. As so often in this process, I looked for the nods around the table, for the scepticism to ease. I didn’t dare look at Jonathan Light, who was sitting next to me. I can’t think this is what he expected me to say.

  Why was only the whole idea worth doing? If we go for a dilute version of this scheme, reliant on other local growers, Sissinghurst-lite, there would be nothing to shout about. We buy our raspberries from within a ten-mile radius.’ ‘Our lamb comes from the south-east of England.’ ‘Our salmon is not from Nagasaki.’ That is not a message for which anyone nowadays is prepared to pay more. The word ‘local’ is well on its way to overused exhaustion.

  But if we can say, ‘Here, for a small premium, is lunch for 50,000 people a year from 250 acres of farmland at Sissinghurst,’ that is a story to tell.

  The battle lines were clear. You either thought that there was nothing to be done against the large-scale, globalising forces of international commodity agriculture; or you stood out against it, found other ways of establishing a relationship with the land, which were not ‘romantic’, but attentive to a modern appetite for real food from enriched places. By establishing something here that was full of hope and optimism, it could generate its own market. The farm at Sissinghurst could, like the garden itself, become something to which people would want to come, and from which they would want to buy. If you think you can’t do anything except the homogenised, the cost-cutting and the mediocre, it’s true: you can’t. You can only if you think you can.

  Jonathan Light’s response to the new situation was to gather everyone together and make us find a solution. The original timetable was now shot. We could not start hiring people to run a project that had not been given the go-ahead. If the orchards and new hedges were ever to exist, they would have to wait a year. Everything would slip, but a slipped something was better than a nothing, so we all went along with it. The old tenants were each given an ext
ra year on the ground. But there had been a curious shift in atmosphere. We still had a hundred and one things to agree on. There were some horrible gaps in the budget and yet somehow, now, without anyone quite saying so, it was understood that this idea would not be allowed to fail again. A Scottish fisherman I knew used to claim that he could tell whether the tide was rising or falling by the different sounds that waves made during the ebb or the flood. There was something of that here in the autumn of 2007: I felt, without being able to put my finger on it, that, for all the negative signals, our boats were somehow just lifting up off the sand.

  On 4 December 2007, Sally, Jonathan and Sue Saville all went to the National Trust HQ in Swindon to present the final proposals and that afternoon Sally rang me from her mobile. ‘It’s a yes,’ she said. We had the go-ahead. We had five years to get it right.

  I went out in to the Cow Field and stared into the dark of the evening, up along the line of the old drove to Canterbury, across Sissinghurst’s wet and lovely fields, and wondered what would become of them. Would this scene in 2020 or 2030 be a model of delicious productiveness, of the land as its hundreds of owners would have recognised it? I thought and hoped so. I could people this place now with layer on layer of different ghosts. I could bring to mind that long flickering film of its bogs and woods, meadows and orchards, streams and lakes, its herds, flocks and draught animals and the ten thousand years of birdsong which had been sung in these hedges and skies. The phrase ‘an unfinished history’ ran on in my mind. That was surely the point: nothing was over. The land at Sissinghurst was no longer staring at a sterile and redundant fate. It would be more than just an adjunct and backdrop to a famous garden. Sissinghurst would be a place that fed off its own richness again. None of it would be easy. But now, here, in the cold and dark, looking to the north, with my coat wrapped around my chin, I thought I saw coming towards me the future of which I had long dreamed.