Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  Renishaw is a benevolent and cheerful dwelling, a welcoming place of happy memories. Yet, as in most old houses, there have been ghosts. A blue-haired American lady who had heard the story of the Boy in Pink complained of not being woken by him – nobody cared to tell her that she wasn’t young or pretty enough. Even so, the middle-aged pianist Moura Lympany, scarcely a raving beauty, was convinced she had been kissed by him and seen his beautiful face drifting away.

  The Boy was not Renishaw’s only phantom, but Philip Ziegler went too far in claiming that it was infested with ghosts in the way another house might be by rats. More recently, Simon Jenkins gave a lurid summary in his England’s Thousand Best Houses.7 Even when Jenkins wrote, however, he was out of date, since they had all gone.

  While Reresby did not object to the Boy in Pink, he took drastic measures to get rid of the others, having the house exorcised first by an archdeacon, then by a rabbi and finally by Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, the former Catholic chaplain at Cambridge. He reinforced their ministrations with fresh paint, redecorating every room. Since then, there have been no more hauntings.

  A silver plate on the ballroom wall commemorates a ball given by Reresby and Penelope in 1977 for 700 guests, to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and also Alexandra’s coming out. It was an epic party on the scale of Sir Sitwell Sitwell’s routs. The hall was filled with flowers, the gardens and statues were floodlit, and the gas flambeaux by the main porch had their mantles removed, roaring flames into the night. The hosts stood at the door to greet guests, Penelope and their daughter Alexandra in ballgowns made by the famous Rahvis sisters.

  ‘The best music I have heard for a long time,’ wrote one guest. ‘If it had gone on any longer, I should have been dead on my feet. The breakfast and champagne were a great sustenance in the middle of the dancing.’ Another thought the party more impressive than the Shah’s coronation. It was all paid for by some broken sixteenth-century Maiolica plates, hoarded by Osbert, that Penelope found in a cupboard.

  Almost every weekend the couple entertained with house parties in more or less pre-war style, but only changing for dinner on Saturdays. As many as sixteen guests would arrive on Friday in time for dinner. There was always a cheerful welcome from the hosts, who sat on or by the fender in front of the fireplace in the old hall that still served as a drawing room.

  Although the guests were no longer predominantly writers and artists as in Osbert’s time – even if they often included John Piper and Moura Lympany – they were no less interesting. Among the grander were the aged Duke of Portland, who had a platonic crush on Penelope and drove a car much too small for a duke, and Baron Élie de Rothschild (the colourful owner of Château Lafite) and his wife Liliane, whom Reresby thought ‘the most intelligent woman I ever met’. But at meals you might just as well find yourself sitting next to a gardener or a cabinetmaker in black ties.

  The diarist James Lees-Milne, who came with his wife Alvilde in 1974, recaptures one such weekend in Ancient as the Hills. For years he had longed to see Renishaw, and wished he had done so during Osbert’s time, for ‘then it must have been more Gothic and gloom-filled than it is now. Reresby and Penelope have brightened it up.’ He thought the Chippendale commode ‘about the most beautiful piece of furniture in all England’. There were ten other guests, delicious food and ‘an old family butler who obliges for house parties but will accept no recompense, no gratuity’.8

  As for their host and hostess, he thought Penelope beautiful and stately while Reresby was ‘a very sweet fellow’ who reminded him of Sachie. Even so, Lees-Milne took exception to his ‘coarse streak’. When showing them their bedroom, Reresby said to Alvilde Lees-Milne, ‘If Jim gets too randy, you can always put the bolster in the middle.’9 (They realised he knew they were both bisexual.) When Lees-Milne left he presented Penelope with his novel about incest, Heretics in Love, carefully writing in his dedication on the fly-leaf that ‘this insalubrious tale was written by, and not about me’.

  During these weekends, on the first morning Reresby would take his guests on a tour of the house with a talk that became an increasingly polished performance. (He enjoyed being a travel lecturer, his subjects ranging from ancient Egypt to Robin Hood.) High points of the Renishaw lecture were attributing the other commode in the Great Drawing Room to Chippendale – ‘unsigned but the work of the Master at his very best’ – or how Sargent in his portrait had given Edith a straight nose and Sir George a crooked one, when the reverse was true. All this was spoken in a voice deepened to add solemnity.

  The talk included details of family heraldry, such as his forebears the Morleys of Hopewell having borne rabbits on their coat, ‘a fine example of canting arms’. There was advice on restoring furniture, and how it is cheaper to use the very best craftsmen just as ‘sometimes it is cheaper to eat at Claridges’. Other topics were Robin Hood, about whom he knew a great deal (having written a pamphlet on the subject),10 and a local crusader and namesake, St Reresby – ‘the canonisation is purely local’. There were also some extremely amusing stories in Derbyshire dialect.

  Tours of the Renishaw gardens could be equally memorable. After the Second World War these had become almost a jungle, as Osbert lacked the energy to restore them. Their comprehensive re-creation after 1965, with innovations that included planting a hundred species of rose and creating a ‘White Garden’, was a saga to which the host did full justice.

  There were afternoon excursions, sometimes to tour a ducal house – Haddon, Hardwick or Chatsworth – but also to see the Christmas lights at a mining village, or to visit a gigantic black pig who lived contentedly in a small cottage kitchen. Alternatively there might be a picnic near the ruins of Bolsover Castle (of which the guests would already have seen an evocative Piper painting in the hall at Renishaw) or beside the forlorn shell of Sutton Scarsdale, once a glorious Georgian mansion.

  At Sutton Scarsdale, during an al fresco lunch, the host would explain that in 1946 his uncle Osbert had bought what was left of the place to save it from demolition, and that he himself had sold it to the Ministry of Works for £200 – which was why the house eventually went to English Heritage. After this Reresby would recount, with gusto and vivid anatomical detail, his theory of how the (presumably) castrated Mr Arkwright and his wife had served as models for D. H. Lawrence when he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  In 1984 Reresby published Hortus Sitwellianus. This was an elegant new edition of Sir George’s On the Making of Gardens, with a short foreword by Sacheverell, an introduction consisting of an excerpt from Osbert’s memoirs and an essay by Reresby, ‘The Gardens at Renishaw’.

  Reresby’s essay gives us some idea of the sheer magnitude of their restoration, which was very much in the spirit of his grandfather. To begin with, he and Penelope trod carefully: ‘When the new owners took over Renishaw in 1965, at first they had to be cautious not to offend their uncle by too dramatic alterations,’ writes Reresby. He goes on:

  The destruction of the sunken gardens had to be glossed over but, gradually gaining confidence, they put in hand other minor improvements. So the Water Garden was completed, by paving the unfinished side with coping stones taken from the walls of a derelict orchard. At the same time, a wrought-iron footbridge that had connected the bottom of the wilderness with the South Park and become redundant, was placed to join the ‘island’ with the ‘mainland’, so that one can walk from the end of the grass ‘causeway’ over the tops of the water-lilies on the far side.

  He adds, showing his own passionate love for the gardens, ‘one of the great minor pleasures of Renishaw is to gaze at the many-coloured water-lilies, opening and closing their flowers according to the time of day, and feed the swarms of coruscating goldfish’.11

  Sir George might not have liked some innovations, such as the ‘Yuccary’ in the Orangery (restored in 1999), which houses the National Collection of Yuccas – thirty species of unlovely plants from the deserts of the western United States, some very rare. Nor might
he have cared for the dachshund cemetery in Sir Sitwell Sitwell’s Gothic temple. Yet he would have been charmed by Reresby’s ‘Auricula theatres’ – tiny display cabinets whose shelves hold pot after pot of these exquisite little flowers.

  In 1983 Reresby served as High Sheriff for Derbyshire. Wearing Osbert’s court sword and velvet court dress, he swore an oath of loyalty to the Queen before the Lord Lieutenant at Derby Cathedral while trumpeters in the uniform of the old Derbyshire Yeomanry played Haydn’s Derbyshire Marches. Again in court dress, he acted as returning officer for the general election that year. What pleased him was the sense of continuity from his forebears.

  These were the ‘golden years’ of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, but far from happy ones for many in Derbyshire. The miners who had brought down Mr Heath met their match, and when their strike failed the mines’ closure meant widespread misery. On the other hand, lower taxation made it easier to maintain Renishaw, while soot-blackened grass and the red gleam of pit-head lights at night became things of the past.

  In 1997 Reresby told the Sheffield Telegraph, in an interview for a Piper exhibition, ‘I tend to regard Renishaw as the mistress of my old age, beautiful, charming, moody and unpredictable.’ By now he had ensured that Renishaw Hall was playing a role in the life of the local countryside, and of Derbyshire as a whole.

  Guided tours of the house had started, as well as concerts and plays in the gardens, while a museum with art galleries was created in the stables, with display cases designed by Alec Cobb. The galleries included a Museum of Sitwell Memorabilia and an exhibition of John Piper’s works. This contribution to local culture was recognised in 2004 when Sheffield University gave Reresby an honorary doctorate – which delighted him, as the Trio had all received doctorates from Sheffield.

  Meanwhile, in Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’, the lord of the manors of Eckington and Barlborough in Derbyshire, of Whiston and Brampton-en-le-Morthen in Yorkshire, remained a Victorian squire who was accepted as such for miles around because of his affability and good nature. He kept up rent dinners, inviting farmers to dine at the hall twice a year so that they could drink Her Majesty’s health and pay the rent. An improving landlord, he took a practical interest in his estate’s thirty or so farms, regularly inspecting farm buildings. On one occasion during the demolition of a ruined cottage, the arms of Richard III, with their white boar supporters, were found painted on a wattle-and-daub wall – but they crumbled into dust before his eyes.

  In old age, Reresby grew to look even more like his uncle. In 1999 the Queen Mother lent four Pipers from her own collection for an exhibition at Renishaw, and soon afterwards lunched at the Sitwells’ London house. She was so struck by the resemblance between Reresby and Osbert that – aged ninety-nine – she announced as she left, ‘I feel rejuvenated!’

  Having suffered a stroke that increasingly slowed him down, Reresby died at the end of March 2009, a fortnight before his eighty-second birthday. Until the end, he remained devoted to Renishaw – I remember him leaving it for London when a shadow of his former self, murmuring as we drove away down the drive, ‘Goodbye, dear old house.’ A few months before his death, he had left instructions for a great diamond-shaped funeral hatchment with his coat-of-arms to be hung over the north porch when he died – a gesture that would have delighted his grandfather. During the funeral service in Eckington parish church, at Alexandra’s request, Osbert’s poem ‘Night’ was read.

  Nobody who knew Reresby could disagree with the obituary in The Times: ‘Fun-loving, flirtatious and gently feudal, he won the love and affection of a wide and diverse circle of friends and tenants.’12 His monument is a reborn Renishaw Hall – more enduring than any of the Trio’s writings.

  In the end, Sir George triumphed, because Reresby and Penelope ensured that his plans were realised while adding much that was their own invention. Together the pair developed every aspect of Renishaw’s power to please. Today, even the most casual visitor can sense the spell that it has cast on the generations of Sitwells who have lived there.

  Chapter 25

  TODAY

  n 2009, Reresby’s daughter Alexandra Sitwell became the first woman to be squire of Renishaw Hall. A small girl when her parents took possession in 1965, she had at once succumbed to the spell of the landscape as well as that of the house, spending so much time in the Renishaw woods – even sleeping in them at night – that for the first few weeks they did not see her for days on end. From the very beginning, however, she took an enthusiastic part in the house’s restoration.

  Intent on preserving their achievement inside and out, she is no less determined than they were that Renishaw should survive as a family home (she and her husband Rick Hayward have a son and daughter) and as a monument to the Sitwells. She is also keen to carry on its traditions, provided these are viable in the modern world. One example is presiding over the biennial rent dinners that her father enjoyed so much.

  Her carefully considered innovations reflect this determination. Among the first was engaging a new, highly professional archivist, in a programme designed to increase our understanding of the Sitwell family’s history and the evolution of Renishaw Hall. One consequence has been the rediscovery of hundreds of letters to Osbert which had been carelessly stuffed into drawers or cupboards. They show that he was in contact with far more writers, artists, musicians and actors than any Bloomsbury can have been, not excepting Virginia Woolf. All of the books in the house – some 25,000 – have been catalogued, which meant taking every single volume off the shelves in the library and in other rooms, listing and reshelving them.

  Alexandra has also redecorated the library and the front hall, and many bedrooms, reconfiguring the furniture. Nearly all the paintings on the first and second floors (apart from those in the Duke’s Wing) have been rehung. Osbert’s collection of twentieth-century art – not just the Pipers and Nevinsons, but the Tchelitchews, Gaudier-Brzeskas and Rex Whistlers – has been framed and are on display. More family portraits have been placed in the dining room, to maximum effect.

  At the same time, following in her parents’ footsteps and in those of her great-grandfather, the gardens have gone from strength to strength. The present gardener, David Kesteven, has been an enormous help in carrying on the tradition. Alexandra has encouraged him to rediscover and recreate the architecture of the gardens as first laid out by Sir George, reducing climbers on the house and garden walls and opening up vistas into the west park. In addition, with her mother and David, she has redesigned the Fountain Garden and the Ballroom Garden.

  Today, thanks to all the work put in over the years by Sir George, by Reresby and Penelope, and more recently by Alexandra, the result is generally acknowledged to be one of the most impressive horticultural ensembles in England, as well as a real plantsman’s joy.

  In April 2015 it was announced that Renishaw had won the coveted HHA/Christie’s Garden of the Year Award, which is annually given by the auction house to a Historic Houses Association member garden after it has been voted a favourite throughout the previous year by the HHA’s Friends. (Past winners include Blenheim Palace, Bowood House, Castle Howard and Hever Castle.) The award reflects the amount of enjoyment gained by the garden’s many visitors, and the extent of the owner’s personal involvement in its maintenance and development.

  Each year more and more visitors come to see Renishaw Hall and its gardens. Often they have been drawn by Renishaw’s regular appearance on such TV programmes as Countryfile or Lynda Bellingham’s Country House Sunday. The exhibitions in the stable block flourish, and attract an increasing number of visitors.

  Just as it was for Rex Whistler, for more than a few people Renishaw is still the most exciting place in England, and continues to cast its extraordinary spell.

  George Sitwell of Renishaw (1657–1723) by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Called ‘Mr Justice Sitwell’ by his family, he was a Whig who welcomed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.

  Francis Sitwell of Renishaw (1682–1753
) by Charles Philips, 1742. A confirmed bachelor whose hobby was mathematics, like his father he hated and feared Jacobites.

  The Boy in Pink, the last Sacheverell, by Verelst, 1726. He drowned in the River Rother when very young and his ghost was supposed to haunt Renishaw – waking pretty girls with a kiss.

  The Entrance Hall of 1625, where once the entire household ate together. It still has some of the original furniture – supplemented by John Piper’s painting.

  The Great Parlour of 1625, today the Library.

  The Small Parlour of 1625, today the Ante-Dining Room.

  The Cherry Barrow by Henry Walton, purchased from him by his friend Francis Hurt Sitwell in 1779.

  Francis Hurt Sitwell at right and his brother-in-law Colonel Warneford at left. The boy with the dog is Sitwell Sitwell and the little girl on her mother’s lap is Mary Sitwell, later Lady Wake. By the silhouettist Francis Torond, c. 1776.

  A Young Lady and her Brothers by John Singleton Copley, 1787: Mary Sitwell; Sitwell Sitwell (with whip), later of Renishaw; Frank Sitwell, later of Barmoor Castle, Northumberland; and Hurt Sitwell, later of Ferney Hall, Shropshire.

  Sir Sitwell Sitwell (1769–1811), 1st Bt, who hunted down an escaped tiger with his hounds. He transformed Renishaw, adding the great rooms. By Francis Chantrey from a death mask, 1811.

  ‘The Arch on the Ravine’, John Piper’s original name for his painting of the folly erected in the park at Renishaw by Sir Sitwell Sitwell in 1805.