Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  Because of coal-rationing (an irony in a house built on top of coal), only wood was available for heating, and when this became rationed too, the sole warmth in winter – apart from one or two bedrooms which had scanty log fires for part of the night – was in the tiny ante-dining-room. ‘We sit in it too, now,’ grumbled Osbert in a letter to David Horner. ‘It’s squalid and middle class and I hate it, but it’s better than being cold.’4 Yet he gave a new overcoat to a gamekeeper who was fire-watching. As in peacetime, the drawing rooms were lit by Aladdin paraffin-lamps and bedrooms by candles in white enamel candle-sticks.

  Although no bombs fell on Renishaw, from autumn 1940 onwards they heard German planes passing overhead at night to bomb Sheffield, eight miles away; then distant explosions, with flames lighting the sky. By November, refugees were being rehoused at Eckington. The following month Sheffield suffered two particularly severe air raids that killed over 600 people – seventy died when a hotel received a direct hit. There were more raids during the weeks that followed. Going into Sheffield shortly after a raid, Edith was moved by the shop assistants’ courage. In April 1941 she learned that in London a land-mine had obliterated Pembridge Mansions, killing everyone who lived there.

  ‘How simple-minded of the Germans to imagine that we British could be cowed by the destruction of our ancient monuments!’ Osbert joked. He was referring to the Baedeker Blitz that had begun with the obliteration of Coventry. ‘As though any havoc of the German bombs could possibly equal the things we have done ourselves!’5

  Newly discovered letters reveal that Osbert wrote regularly to members of the Renishaw staff serving with the Forces, letters in which he showed much kindness and understanding. (After all, he knew what war meant.) Among them were Cooper the chauffeur and Shafto the gardener. He also sent letters of sympathy to villagers whose sons had been killed. As has been seen, another kind letter went to Vanessa Bell after her sister Virginia Woolf drowned herself.

  Writers continued to stay at Renishaw. Besides Bryher and Powell they included Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Waley, Lord Berners, John and Rosamond Lehmann, and also L. P. Hartley, who became his close friend and trustee. (A copy of Eustace and Hilda in the library is inscribed ‘For my dear ward, Osbert, with love from a faithful & vigilant trustee, Leslie.’) A member of the family always remained puzzled by the friendship since, with the best will in the world, she had found Hartley ‘a fat and boring little man’. His homosexuality may perhaps explain why Osbert liked him, not to mention his unremitting flattery.

  As a lover of Brighton, Osbert had been delighted by the publication of John Piper’s Brighton Aquatints in 1939. He commented in The Listener that they made ‘a charming book, beautifully produced, and Mr Piper has called the tune to exactly the right note . . . He shows a rare aptitude for the rendering of architectural surfaces and manages to convey atmosphere with the strictest economy of means.’ Deciding that Piper was the ideal man to illustrate his autobiography, Osbert then wrote to him, inviting him to paint Renishaw.

  ‘I am delighted with the idea of painting Renishaw Hall and of staying there with you,’ Piper replied in April 1940. ‘Its beauties look very great from the postcards you send, and I look forward with enthusiasm to seeing it and you.’6 It was two years before the project finally got under way, but in May 1942 they agreed on a price suggested by the artist – ‘£1 per inch measured the longest way.’

  Piper’s first visit was in June. He was given David Horner’s bedroom, which he occupied on all subsequent visits – much to Blossom’s resentment – and he enjoyed Edith’s company when she came down in the evenings and put Debussy records on the gramophone, though he was alarmed by her consumption of neat gin. He left in an ecstasy. ‘I got home, with my head full of black-trunked trees, scythed grass, the tumbled beauty of Renishaw Park, Bolsover in the mist, and Sutton Scarsdale in drizzle and Barlborough in fitful sun’, he told Osbert in a thank-you letter.7

  Osbert’s commission of Piper echoed Sir George’s choice of Sargent. In 1945 Osbert claimed, with justice, in a preface to an exhibition of his work at the Leicester Galleries that in Renishaw,

  Mr Piper has found a territory peculiarly suited to his sombre and fiery genius . . . His landscapes are imbued with the very spirit of a countryside that knows no rest from work, and that throbs with a strange dual life; for, under the age-old surface processes of farming, forestry and the like, runs the cramped subterranean existence of mines. Here in this hilly land of slagheaps and chimneys is a vividness not to be found in tamer districts of the South.8

  Renishaw possesses over seventy paintings and drawings by John Piper, the largest collection of works by any leading British artist of the twentieth century in private hands. When you step into the hall you see an oil of Venetian scenes over the fireplace, while on the side walls are Derbyshire Domains, with views of Renishaw and the ruins of Bolsover Castle. The ‘smoke’ room next door contains further Pipers. There are others throughout the house – even a tiny stained-glass window.

  Piper fell totally under Renishaw’s spell, like so many before and after him. Proposing himself for another stay in June 1943, he wrote, ‘it feels like arranging to come home again’.9 He grew devoted to Osbert, as can be seen from over thirty letters to his host. In 1951, asking him to be his son’s godfather, he ended ‘I long to see you’, while during the 1960s he referred to him as ‘the most generous person I’ve ever known’.10 It has to be said that John Piper gave a great deal in return.

  In February 1941 the Trio were once more in the headlines, with a libel action at a time when it still looked as if Britain was going to lose the war. (Germany had not yet turned on the Soviet Union, nor had Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.) Reviewing Edith Sitwell’s Anthology, the Reynolds News described the three as ‘literary curiosities of the 1920s’, sneering that their prominence in those days had been due to self-advertisement, but ‘now oblivion has claimed them’. They sued the paper, pointing out that they had published many books in recent years, and won £350 each in damages as well as costs.

  They deserved to win. A year later Edith published a collection of her latest verse, Street Songs, which received enthusiastic reviews and became a triumphant success. Here at last was the breakthrough for which she had always hoped. The book contained one of her finest poems, ‘Still Falls the Rain’, a meditation on the bombing of London during the Blitz that she compared to the crucifixion of Christ. There could have been no better proof that the Sitwells were far from out of date.

  In April 1943, in a further demonstration that the Sitwells were still relevant, Edith and Osbert organised a poetry reading in the Aeolian Hall. The poets they chose included T. S. Eliot, Edmund Blunden, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare and Lady Gerald ‘Dotty’ Wellesley (soon to be Duchess of Wellington), among others.

  The reading, attended by the Queen with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose (who sat in the front row) went off well. Edith declaimed her ‘Anne Boleyn’s Song’. The only shadow was cast by Dotty Wellesley, who, very drunk, attacked Harold Nicolson with her umbrella under the impression that he was Osbert, using frightful language about the Queen and Edith. Reresby Sitwell, fifteen at the time, remembered the fracas as one of the funniest things he had ever seen, saying that it sent the young princesses into fits of laughter.11

  Despite the war, Sir George stayed on in Italy until 1942 when, says his grandson, ‘lack of his favourite food, roast chicken’12 drove him to take refuge in Switzerland, in a hotel at Locarno where he grew a beard like that of an Old Testament Prophet. His children learned with horror of his plan to marry a German nurse and settle £500 a year on her. Then he fell into the hands of a Swiss man named Woog whose English wife came from a family George knew in Derbyshire, and after engineering the German nurse’s expulsion from Switzerland, the couple plundered his bank account. When he died in July 1943, Osbert believed the Woogs had murdered him. The war made it impossible to investigate, but with hindsight, it looks as if he died a natural deat
h.

  Although he was a strange, badly damaged man, George Sitwell had been infinitely kinder and more human than any of his offspring, as well as far more intelligent. As will be seen, his elder son’s revenge would turn him into a genuinely tragic figure.

  During recent months Osbert and Edith had resembled Aesop’s fox waiting for the crow to drop the piece of cheese, so they were horrified by their father’s will, which left them less than they expected and made Reresby the ultimate beneficiary. Osbert got nothing, as he had already been given Renishaw and Montegufoni, while Edith received a mere £1,000. They were otherwise unmoved by his passing. Only Sachie mourned him. Even so, there was a decorous memorial service at Eckington.

  Among Osbert’s guests at Renishaw during the war was the actor Alec Guinness, who came for a weekend in 1941, bringing his wife and baby. During dinner, Robins announced that ‘Young Master Guinness’ was yelling his head off upstairs. ‘I expect the baboon has just looked in and frightened him,’ said Edith playfully. ‘And suddenly in that extraordinary house with its oil lamps and creaking stairs and miles of corridors and haunted rooms, one really could imagine that there might be a baboon or two roaming around,’ commented Guinness.13

  A pre-war guest who might have been expected to come and stay regularly was Rex Whistler, but he was serving with the Welsh Guards. Osbert was deeply upset by news of his death in action in France, shortly after D-Day. Besides providing dust jackets for the entire Trio, Whistler had designed Osbert’s bookplate (showing the author, quill in hand, on a Baroque staircase) and also a letter heading, an exquisite little drawing of Renishaw Hall that remains in use today.

  The most appreciative guest during these beleaguered years was undoubtedly Evelyn Waugh, who saw the house as a last bastion of patrician civilisation. Yet even at Renishaw, the ‘war effort’ lurked menacingly in the background. A dedication to Osbert, scrawled in a first edition of Put Out More Flags which is still in the library, reads, ‘Don’t go down the mine, Daddy’. This was a cruel reference by Waugh to Osbert’s nagging fear that the local authorities at Sheffield might arrange for him to be conscripted as a ‘Bevin Boy’ – a coal miner.

  Posted to the War Intelligence Centre at Matlock in Derbyshire in June 1942, Waugh took the opportunity to visit Osbert and Edith. In his thank-you letter [c. 22 June 1942], he rejoiced at not finding Nissen huts in the garden or evacuees on the stairs, and said that Lord Woolton would disapprove of life at Renishaw. (Minister of Food, Woolton had introduced ration books, dried eggs, Snoek fish and the ghastly Woolton Pie.)14 Waugh told his wife, ‘Renishaw is just as you saw it. Shabbier outside with the lawns long & the hedges ragged so that you might think the house deserted till you come inside . . . Banks of potted plants & bowls of roses: piles of new & old books & delicious cooking.’15

  Waugh visited Renishaw again that summer, and wrote again [c. 14 July 1942] from Smedley’s Hydro (famous for health-giving mineral water) to thank Osbert for his stay, during which the pair had indulged their taste for Baroque art and good wine. ‘Vincenzo Re and Léoville-Poyferré’ Waugh recalled happily. (Vincenzo Re had been an eighteenth-century designer of stage scenery for the Teatro di San Carlo, and Osbert possessed handsome engravings of some of his sets; Léoville-Poyferré is a prized second-growth claret.) ‘What could have been more delightful or more different from Smedley’s Hydro?’16

  He kept in touch with Osbert for the rest of the war. In 1943 he wrote to condole on Sir George’s death, commenting that he liked the way the obituary in The Times referred to his attempts to recreate a view of Derbyshire life in the thirteenth century.

  In August 1944, writing from Croatia to thank Osbert for a letter that congratulated him on surviving a near-fatal air crash, Waugh says he has heard that Montegufoni has survived in reasonably good condition. He adds that he has given instructions for an advance copy of Brideshead Revisited to be sent to Renishaw.

  From White’s, in April 1945, Waugh thanked Osbert for the first volume of the English edition of Left Hand, Right Hand! ‘It is stimulating to find a writer nowadays with the power and hope to plan a work on a large scale and the grace and detachment to carry it through.’ However, he did not like the illustrations which he called, ‘Mr Piper’s sketches’. He thought that perhaps they had suffered in reproduction.17

  Brideshead Revisited was published to acclaim in May 1945. Osbert would have been superhuman not to feel a twinge of envy; but it was more than a twinge. ‘Jealous, doesn’t like talking about it,’ was how Waugh’s loyal friend Nancy Mitford described his reaction.18 Osbert told Horner that, ‘with all my great admiration and warm friendship for Evelyn, I think it is a bad book. It reveals unpleasant snobbishness in the author.’19 Yet he never openly criticised Brideshead or any other novels by Waugh.

  For his part, showing rare self-control, Waugh never expressed reservations about the autobiography’s later volumes, even pretending to qualify his dislike of Piper’s illustrations. Nevertheless, despite all the compliments he paid Osbert, privately he did not think much of his literary gifts. ‘Well, he was as bad at painting as Osbert is at writing,’ he told Nancy Mitford in 1945 when discussing Benvenuto Cellini. ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t repeat that comparison to anyone.’20 But he was sincere in praising Osbert’s patronage of letters.

  Because it was valued by both men, their friendship survived the war, which was a remarkable achievement for two such difficult personalities. What held them together was Renishaw.

  On her final wartime visit, Bryher found it sad that ‘I should never see Renishaw again in quite the same way. It was already drawing back into some private enchantment of its own.’ She thought it unfair that Osbert and Edith should receive so little credit for all they had done. ‘A few intimate friends apart, nobody thanked them when the war was over.’21 However, in 1947 Cyril Connolly wrote in Horizon that they had not only produced their best work during these years, but found time to be of immense help to other writers.22

  Chapter 22

  THE SITWELL RENAISSANCE

  abitual pessimists, Osbert and Edith feared some sort of Bolshevik upheaval would engulf Britain when hostilities ended, with a police state run by very unsympathetic people indeed. They thought there was going to be no place for Sitwells. However, the Attlee Terror proved comparatively mild, and within a few years it was followed by an attempt to bring back the pre-war world. There would, after all, be plenty of room for Sitwells – and Renishaw.

  Admittedly, the new Socialist Britain was miserable for the upper classes. London had become a slum where malarial mosquitoes bred in bomb-site pools; a city of wrecked buildings, with stucco peeling off the façades of Belgravia. Exhortations to eat in the ‘British Restaurants’ (corrugated iron huts kept on from wartime) heightened the gloom, as did the prospect of the ‘Festival of Britain’. Taxation was punitive, food and clothing still rationed, and there were financial restrictions on travel abroad. The future seemed bleak for houses such as Renishaw.

  Like Evelyn Waugh, Osbert developed a loathing for the ‘Common Man’. His version of Hooper, Waugh’s philistine subaltern in Brideshead Revisited, was Demos, who personified the drab new age. In a ‘secular oratorio’ called Demos the Emperor, in which Demos fights Autork, a figure who is either Hitler or Stalin, for world domination, Demos declares, ‘I am the Mass Mind of Red Bungalows . . .’.1

  ‘It’s icy here, and I’m getting elderly,’ Osbert moaned to his friend Christabel Aberconway on Boxing Day 1945.

  What we all need is what we want – and how to get it. I want, this house, electric light and heating instituted, works of art, champagne, caviare (I’ll let the foie gras go), mangoes, peaches, Southern climate, and masses of money as well as fame. Not much to ask. And, of course, no gout.2

  He feared the Labour government might take Renishaw away from him, as they had Wentworth Woodhouse from the Fitzwilliam family.

  Yet despite intimations of ruin, he remained as generous as ever, helping such needy writers
as Edith’s boozy young protégé Dylan Thomas, whom even she admitted looked like a youthful Silenus painted by Rubens. In August 1946 the bard wrote to thank ‘My dear Osbert’ for cash that enabled him to go to Ireland (and get beastly drunk). ‘Your book I am reading slow as a snail because I do not want that journey or that world to end; and the money you sent me from the kindness of your heart made me proud and happy.’

  ‘It was all Christmases and birthdays the morning of getting it,’ Thomas wrote again at the end of November 1946 after receiving another handout.

  It was new shoes and sweaters for the [water] voley river cold, and school bills paid with a flourish, and some Algerian [wine], and books I’ve wanted for months, and a heater for our hutch, and more things and more, and such happiness to think that you were thinking of us and could spare, in this taxed dark, such a very marvellous gift.3

  In the event, apart from electricity and a cure for his ‘gout’, the modest needs Osbert had listed in his Boxing Day letter to Lady Aberconway were to be satisfied. Ironically, the provider was the Labour government, who ended his money worries by nationalising coal mines. On the advice of his shrewd agent Maynard Hollingworth he used the compensation to buy farmland, which then soared in value.

  Even Montegufoni survived relatively unscathed, as Osbert found on a brief visit in summer 1946. It had been used by Mussolini’s government as a repository for the greatest paintings in the Pitti and Uffizi galleries (by Botticelli, Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Giotto, Duccio, Uccello). Castello and pictures survived occupation by first German and then Indian troops. Their salvation was largely due to Guido, an unpleasant but faithful servant from a nearby village. The following year Osbert brought John Piper to paint the castello, with the usual happy results.