IN THE AUTUMN OF 2006, we set about salvaging the ideas for the farm. For all the catastrophe of the rejection in the summer, no one was going to let it collapse in a heap of figures. It was a sobering pause and there were many issues to address. A Sissinghurst dairy herd disappeared at this point, as a hop garden had earlier: both needed too much investment, both were subject to wildly fluctuating markets and both were dominated by large-scale producers elsewhere. We could not afford them. A beef herd was also looking marginal. The risks on fruit and vegetable growing were always huge. Raising chickens for the table and the egg market was both technical and tricky, particularly in terms of disease control. Pigs weren’t easy. You could hire in some arable expertise – and the Pipers were keen to be involved – but every one of these enterprises became still more difficult under an organic system. Sheep were relatively easy but disease control was important and sheep were always getting diseases. I sometimes felt it might be better to carpet the whole place in polythene.
It was not as if we were able to reinvent Sissinghurst. We were having to engineer a new system inside the body of the old. The old had to continue to work and the existing visitor flow could not be disturbed. Everything we did had to fit. So we discussed, for example, at some length, the new cow shed. A high-quality building, which would be Sissinghursty, made of the correct materials to the correct design, would, it was thought, cost £200,000. Rob Macklin, the NT’s head of agriculture, called it ‘the gold-plated shed’ phenomenon. ‘Don’t imagine’, Jonathan Light said to me, ‘that we enjoy having to live with these constraints. But they aren’t constraints that can just be wished away.’
He revived an old suggestion: perhaps the Trust should buy the small and slightly run-down neighbouring holding called Whitegate Farm near the village. It had buildings, if not quite enough and not very swish, its land adjoined Sissinghurst, it would relieve pressure on the central cluster at the Castle itself, it could be made to look nicer, the local authority planning system would be working in our favour and the National Trust’s own internal aesthetic bodies could not help but approve. Besides, Whitegate had been identified as a Sissinghurst priority for years. It belonged to Cyril Boulding, a local man who cared a great deal for the village and its surroundings, and who had always intended it should go to the Trust because he didn’t want the land developed for housing. If the Trust bought it, the cost would be outside the farm project budget. Tentative negotiations were opened.
We pushed and stretched the plans and spreadsheets so that they could fit. Nothing should be done that could not be undone. Nothing should be done that could not be done elsewhere. And nothing should be done that would reduce Sissinghurst’s income, although we would be given five years to get the new farm to break even. The glory days of a 15,000-acre estate paying for a luxury bauble were over. This would have to be a self-funding bauble.
Even though we had no clear idea of a way forward, it was decided to invoke the break clauses in the four old tenancies on the farm. If we missed this window, there would not be another chance for five years. As it turned out, one of the four tenants, June Munday, a grazier, was ready to retire; and two others, Ian Strang, the grazier from Lamberhurst, and the Piper brothers from Hawkhurst, who were arable specialists, were interested in taking part in the new scheme, either as tenants or contractors. They were all encouraging, if we could get it to work.
Only Ned Farris, who rented Upper and Lower Tassells for a game crop, was not entirely happy. His son told me they were moving the main focus of their business elsewhere anyway, to a shoot on the outskirts of Ashford, but his father was angry. I had a bad meeting with him one day on the edge of the wood, like something out of a Victorian novel. I had been ferreting that morning with Linda Clifford, and we had managed to catch three rabbits. Mr Farris was coming up the path out of the wood with a young magpie he had caught in a Larsen trap. ‘We were joking about you in Ashford market,’ he said as he walked up and put the bird in an old fertiliser bag in the back of his truck, tying the neck of the bag twice with a piece of baler twine. ‘The big farmers down on the marsh. They think it’s a joke. You’re ten years late with this organic thing. That’s about to run out. Hadn’t you heard that?’ He said he didn’t care what anyone did with this farm. ‘The National Trust won’t allow the farmer to get on with it anyway, will they? They’ll be all over him. I’m just going to leave them to get on with it. I won’t tread on their toes and if they don’t tread on mine, that will be all right. If they do there’ll be trouble.’ What sort of trouble? I asked, but he wasn’t going to say, his eyes bloodshot and angry, his words apparently only saying half of what he felt. None of this was good. I knew there was support in the outside world and high up in the Trust but the neighbours, the local farming community, the Trust’s, professional advisers, the experts serving on their voluntary committees and several of their employees at Sissinghurst itself were all saying the same thing: the ideas I had were wrong.
I went back again to the longer story of Sissinghurst, to what I had always thought of as the long slide of a decline between the days of Elizabethan glory and the moment my grandparents arrived in 1930. Sissinghurst was not Knole. It had fallen from its great height, and that decline and collapse were the part of the story I now turned to. Again I found a surprise: as the great house had imploded, the land around it had thrived.
First, from about 1600 to the 1640s, Sissinghurst had continued as the Bakers’ grand and occasionally visited hunting lodge, an increasingly out-of-date palace in a park. It was a period of profound inactivity. The Bakers were based largely at their house in Lime Street in the City of London and from the late 1630s onwards in a new, expensively rented and richly furnished house in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, part of the earl of Bedford’s development, designed by Inigo Jones, within spitting distance of the palace at Whitehall. Generation by generation, the Bakers trained as lawyers in the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn and hung around the edges of the Stuart court. They were among the first to buy a baronetcy in 1611 – the fee went to pay for the army in Ireland – while Sissinghurst remained occupied largely by their servants and filled with their possessions. Sir Henry Baker died at court in December 1623 from ‘a contagious, spotted, or purple fever, that reigns much’. He left to his ‘loving wife Catherine all the plate and furniture in her chamber at my house of Sissinghurst, her apparrell & my jewells, Rings, Bracelets etc and half the other plate and silver dishes & half the linen in my house’. His son Sir John had the other half but Catherine kept his ‘plate and household stuff and furniture in London’. Loyalty to their servants appears in will after will, as it had done in the sixteenth century. Sir Henry left to ‘the wife of one Lovell who nursed my son Thomas £55 … wch I have laid ready in gold for that purpose in my Cabinett att Sissinghurst’.
There is a hint that the Bakers may have continued as secret Catholics, drawing on the inheritance of the great Sir John, or at least as high Anglicans. In 1639, the chapel at Sissinghurst was, according to Thomas Philipott, the seventeenth-century historian, ‘re-edified’. Sissinghurst was ‘in the wilds of Kent’ and ‘by reason of deep and fowle ways (especially in winter)’ the latest Sir John Baker and his family were ‘not able without much trouble and danger duly to frequent the church’ in Cranbrook. Hence they needed their chapel here. The archbishop’s licence describes it as ‘newly built and decently embellished, apart from the ordinary part of the house’, and so one can’t say whether this seventeenth-century chapel was a refurbished version of the medieval chapel or an entirely new building. The licence says it was ‘below’ (infra) the mansion at Sissinghurst, which suggests it might have been in the orchard below the medieval house. One eighteenth-century drawing does indeed show a semi-detached building there, with a door giving on to the Elizabethan garden.
A further hint comes in the sermon that was preached by Robert Abbott, the vicar of Cranbrook, at the dedication ceremony in September 1639. The chapel was, Robert Abbott said,
built and furnished with cost: profit therefore is engaged to give way to the devout worship of God heere. It is built by a garden of pleasure, a parlour of plenty: pleasure therefore is engaged to give way to the devout worship of God. Iosephs tombe was in a garden, to put thoughts of mortality into his delights, and this chappell is in a garden, to be a monitor (in the midst of refreshments) to the way of immortalitie.
Between garden and parlour, a ‘chapel in a garden’: this was the Sissinghurst version of worshipping God in the beauty of holiness.
Abbott addressed ‘a large crowd’, with some markedly Catholic names (Campion, Mounckton, Henley, Darrell) among them. And the chapel was furnished in a far from Puritan style. It had a communion table, pulpit, reading desks and thirteen pews ‘all of wainscot’, candlesticks and a branched candelabra, a ‘fayre silver bason, a silver pott for wine and a silver chalice with a cover for the communion and a silver plate with a bason for the font, all double guilt’. In 1639, this was the highest of church Laudianism, and you can be sure the whole of Puritan Cranbrook would have been scandalised. It was probably at this stage that the little Elizabethan banqueting house at the northern edge of the garden was extended so that the chaplain could be housed in it, and renamed perhaps by the locals the Priest’s House, a term that in Protestant Cranbrook would have been dripping in contempt.
It was inevitable that this High Church, possibly crypto-Catholic family would side with the king against Parliament in the Civil War. Sir John was already off with the king’s army in 1642, and in August that year his lands, worth £2000 a year, and his ‘rich furniture in Covent garden’ were seized by the parliamentary committees raising money for the war. His family struggled to save what they could, sending in petitions to Parliament, and in March 1644 Sir John petitioned the House of Commons itself.
The humble petition of Sir Jo Baker Barronett
acknowledgeth that hee hath beene at Oxford, in the Kinge’s quarters where hee much disliked their proceedings. He never was in Armes against Parliament, nor ever advanced anie thing either horses plate or money to the King’s forces but ever expressed his good affections to ye Parliament by his ready payment of all duties and assessments of Parliament so long as hee had any disposition of his estate and is ready to ingage life and fortune to the parliaments service. Hee is indebted 10,000 li and hath lost 3,000 pounds by the seizing of his estate to the use of the parliament.
In tender consideration whereof ye petitioner humblie praies he may be accepted into yr favours,
etc, John Baker
But the war had reached an implacable stage, and in May that year the parliamentarian Lord Warwick wrote to Captain Edward Boys, addressing him as ‘my very loving friend’.
Ye are appointed by ye Parliament to bee sequestrator of all ye delinquents Woods within the County of Kent And for the felling thereof for the Service of the State.
The timber thus taken was to be used ‘for the repairing of Castles & Forts & otherwise’. In the complex paperwork of the many overlapping committees by which Parliament administered the goods confiscated from the Royalists, I have been unable to find the inventory made, at some time in the summer of 1644, when Sissinghurst was raided for everything of value. But there are lists for neighbouring gentry houses whose goods fell under the hammer that summer, often sold to the local poor. At the Wottons’ house in Boughton Malherbe, rugs for two shillings, ‘a little round table’, a coverlet, a chair, ‘old pieces of stayres and lumber’, ‘the fruit of the Long Walk and the Privy Garden’, ‘nagges and geldings’, ‘two little turkey carpets motheaten for five shillings’, ‘a little pair of tongs’: all were knocked down to Goodwife Andrewes, Goodman Albert, Mr Cogan (the sequestrator’s assistant), Goodwife Gilbert or their neighbours.
It must have happened here too, and the evidence is in the woods. In the whole of Sissinghurst, there are now only two trees that were certainly growing here before the summer of 1644: the pollard oak in the big wood, in whose branches I once spent the best part of a day; another down by the Hammer Brook, its fat trunk scarred by lightning, its branches hanging out over the stream. Otherwise, they have all gone, and it doesn’t take much to imagine the scene, the great old oaks and beeches which the Bakers had treasured, and even named in their wills, felled unseasonably in midsummer, the huge leafy crowns slowly descending to the parkland grass, the outer limbs cushioning the fall, splintering as they came down, the bodies of the pollards laid out like shot cattle, the timber wagons taking them away to the saw-yards. In other Kentish parks, payments were made by the sequestrator to the men doing the work for Parliament’s cause. And there is one further clue. A description of Sissinghurst Park in 1695 says that ‘The Growth of the Wood in it is most Birch, which is much in use for Birch-Wine’. Birch is the great pioneer species of Wealden woods, colonising any space vacated for it. For Sissinghurst to be covered in them in 1695 could only have meant that the oaks and beeches had been taken away fifty years before.
By July 1644, the Committee for Compounding proposed to fine Baker £5000, ‘it appearing that he has been in service against parliament and has 2,500 l. a year’. Negotiations continued; the fine was reduced to £3000 but he didn’t pay up and still hadn’t by July 1645. His indebtedness rolled on throughout the years of the Commonwealth. As late as 1652, ‘on the morrow of Holy Trinity’, he at last signed a mortgage on almost everything he owned in Kent: houses, barns, stables, 7 watermills, 40 gardens, 40 orchards, 2005 acres of arable land, 700 of meadow, 500 of pasture, 700 of wood and ‘40 acres of land covered with water’ – the huge pond upstream of the furnace at Hammer Mill. Although Baker’s London properties were not mentioned, ‘the manor of Sissinghurst’ was included by name. In return, Baker received £2760 sterling and with it paid the debt he owed the state.
Old Sir John died the following year and his son, yet another Sir John, inherited a heavily encumbered estate. He rearranged the mortgage in 1657, and with the money restored the pale around the whole Park, but Sissinghurst was now fatally burdened with its borrowings and the Bakers would never recover. This last Sir John died in about 1661, having committed the ultimate crime against his family’s fortunes. He left a widow, four daughters and no son. The girls began by living with their mother in the huge house. Any number of others, unnamed, were living in the house with them. There were 38 hearths alight here on Lady Day in 1664, compared with 85 at Knole but only 21 at Penshurst. Inside the Park, at the top of the lane in the fields still known as the Well Fields, there was an ‘old admired well’, set with stones and basins, a ‘curative chalybeate spring’, much in use for those with infections of the urinary tract. Multitudes came. There were walks laid out. ‘The park’, it was said, had ‘very great plenty of Stawberys in and about it … Also near-adjoining … is very good Chery-gardens and great plenty of Fruit: The best Sider is but Six pence the Bottle.’ The district as a whole was ‘much supply’d with Fish, there being much Gentry in the Parish, and many great Ponds of Fresh Fish’.
It didn’t last. Lady Baker ‘hated all the people and had the gates of the park locked to obstruct the same’. The stones and basins were removed as Sissinghurst sank towards its nadir. When the Baker daughters ‘marryed into other counties’, the old lady moved to her London house and Sissinghurst became half destitute and lawless. In 1673, the inhabitants of the mansion house attacked ‘the possessors of a wood adjacent’, the reason not recorded. An arrest warrant was issued, the parish constable came to the front gate ‘with 16 or 20 to assist him’. The Sissinghurst gang refused to come out or give up the man named on the warrant. There was a stand-off but the constable and his men could hear them inside arming with staves. ‘The constable and his assistants fearing mischief went away.’ About fourteen of Sissinghurst’s inhabitants then rushed out of the gate, chased the constable, ‘the constable commanded the peace, yet they fell on and killed one of the assistants of the constable, and wounded others, and then retired into the house to the rest of their company’. The precise individual who had committed the murder couldn’t be identified, but nine of them were arrested, all found equally guilty and all of them hanged, thus establishing the powerful precedent of the Sissinghurst House Case, by which membership of a murderous gang is considered the same as committing murder oneself.
Any question of Sissinghurst being the centre of a perfect world was long gone. It is not quite certain what happened here in the early eighteenth century. A very old pauper, interviewed at Sissinghurst in the 1830s by a visiting American descendant of the Bakers, ‘said he remembered the last of the family coming to Church every Sunday with their guests and visitors in four coaches and four horses, long tails, etc., etc.’. There is no record of them. Sissinghurst and the larger Baker estate had been inherited by the four sisters, in equal shares. Each share followed a tortuous path down the different branches of the family, and although each of those four Baker girls, Anne (d. 1685), Elizabeth (d. 1705), Mary (d. 1714) and Catherine (d. 1733), returned from their husbands’ estates to be buried in Cranbrook church, Sissinghurst was neglected. The buildings rotted. The Park pale collapsed. The unpaid mortgage continued to climb until by the 1750s the sum owing had reached £9000, nearly three-quarters the value of the entire Baker estate in Kent. Sissinghurst had become a lump against which money could be borrowed. The place, in a way that might be shocking to us in the age of preservation, was allowed to fall apart. But the eighteenth-century rich lived in a profligate world. Many families in England were overhoused. Each of the Sissinghurst heirs had their own satisfactory houses elsewhere. What good was a crumbling Elizabethan mansion, only as old for them as a Victorian, concrete shooting box might be for us?
The eighteenth century gave nothing to Sissinghurst. It only took away. I have often wondered what might have happened here if the Bakers’ male line had not died out. Would there have been an exquisite Palladian pavilion placed on this gentle rise, surrounded by the elegances of its improved eighteenth-century park? Would Capability Brown have been brought in to dam the Hammer Brook and make a sky-reflecting lake in the valley? Would one or two Gothic eye-catchers have been built up by the pines in the wood? Maybe. And maybe Sissinghurst would have been coloured not with its air of romantic abandonment but with suede-lined riches, a title, perhaps an earldom for the Bakers, money from an advantageous marriage or two in the City. Perhaps Vita, pursued in 1912 by the earl of Sissinghurst, would have turned down him and his palatial residence as something too smart, too obvious, without poetry?
In 1752, Horace Walpole was touring the sites of Kent, and on 9 August wrote to his friend Richard Bentley:
Yesterday, after twenty mishaps, we got to Sissinghurst to dinner. There is a park in ruins and a house in ten times greater ruins, built by Sir John Baker, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Queen Mary. You go through an arch of the stables to the house, the court of which is perfect and very beautiful … This has a good apartment, and a fine gallery, a hundred and twenty feet by eighteen, which takes up one side: the wainscot is pretty and entire: the ceiling vaulted, and painted in a light genteel grotesque. The whole is built for show; for the back of the house is nothing just lath and plaster.
‘Nothing just lath and plaster’ is a mid-eighteenth-century view of the medieval house behind Sir Richard Baker’s Elizabethan cour d’honneur.
Four years later, Sissinghurst entered the pit of its existence, when even the sad remains that Walpole had seen were effectively destroyed and the break with the sixteenth century was made final. The agents of the dispersed Baker estate found a means of making some money out of the old mansion. About 1400 acres of the surrounding land were let for £445 to a farmer called George Tempest, but the big house was reserved from the lease and let instead to the government. Britain had embarked on a Seven Years’ War with France, and on 21 July 1756 the house at Sissinghurst was leased by the Admiralty’s Sick and Hurt Board as a camp for French naval prisoners.
Up to three thousand Frenchmen were held here at any one time, most of them common seamen. There were rooms reserved for officers in the Tower (where their graffiti have been preserved in the plaster: their names and both brigs and square-rigged ships in full sail), but most officers, having given their word of honour, were allowed to live in Cranbrook, Tenterden, Sevenoaks or Maidstone. If any of them found themselves stuck here they were not slow to make their elegant and elaborate complaint to the Admiralty.
29 Juillet 1757
Monsieur
I take the liberty of writing to you to ask you to listen to me on the subject on which I have the honour to address you. I commanded a Calais privateer called the Duc de Moncis, in which I was taken about a fortnight ago.
I thought on my arrival I would be cautioned on my word of honour just as all others of my rank would be. But far from that. I found myself strictly locked up in a prison where I was mixed up with all qualities of men. Where I am suffering everything one might suffer in such a situation. I am the only captain here even though several others who are of a far lower rank than mine have been given permission to leave. So Monsieur, persuaded as I am that you are filled with Justice, I am writing directly to you, to ask you to help me obtain my freedom. On my word, I assure you, that I will never give you the opportunity to repent of having done me this favour. I await this favour of you, begging you to consider that here I am exposed to all sorts of things, riddled with vermin (please excuse the term) and thus unhappy.
This considered, Monsieur, may it please you from your generosity to grant your consent shortly to
Your very humble and very respectful servant
Captain of the privateer Le Duc de Moncis at Calais
I beg you, if it is your will, to grant me the same favour for my son aged 14 who is a prisoner with me.
The vermin by whom the Maquets were surrounded were guarded by revolving detachments, each of about 220 men, from various county militias: Surrey, to which the artist Francis Grose was attached as a lieutenant; Hampshire, in which the young Edward Gibbon was an officer here; and Leicestershire, which was the most vicious and almost entirely out of control. Officers of the guard lived either in Cranbrook or in buildings that have now disappeared at the top of the Lake Field. Supervising them on behalf of the Admiralty was a Mr Cooke, ‘Agent for Prisoners of War at Sissinghurst’, known to the French as ‘Monsieur Cok’ and suffering a little from the gout. He could speak no French but communicated with the prisoners through an interpreter called François le Rat. Cooke’s relationship with the army officers was usually unsatisfactory and he was generally distrusted by both guards and prisoners alike for his ‘Gouvernement’, which according to one prisoner’s complaint was ‘nothing less than tyrannical and capricious’.
This broken-down and brutalised ‘château’, as they called it – a term then borrowed by the English; this was the moment at which Sissinghurst House became Sissinghurst Castle – was a strange and alien place for the French. Their letters refer to the ‘Chateau de Sissengherst’, ‘Sisinchers’, ‘Chisterner’, ‘Sinsinhars’ and ‘Ste. Sigherts pres Cambrouck’. It was a zoo of abuse and maltreatment, the prison that Frenchmen in other prisons were threatened with if they misbehaved. The stories coming out of Sissinghurst became so bad that in November and December 1761 Dr Maxwell, the Commissioner for the Sick and Hurt Board, came down for a month and held an inquiry in a room in the great Elizabethan courtyard. From the evidence given to that inquiry, transcribed verbatim into a long manuscript now in the National Archives, a powerful picture emerges of the grief and suffering that thousands of men underwent here.
The place was disgusting with ‘great heaps of dirt in all the courts’. The moat was ‘very foul and stinking’, filled with all kinds of ordure and no proper means of cleaning it. The prisoners were packed into every available space on all three floors of all the buildings. They slept in hammocks strung from posts specially inserted into the rooms, converting Sissinghurst into the navy’s equivalent of between-decks accommodation. The numbers of the wards and the number of men to be housed in each of them were painted up over the doors. There was no money to replace broken windows and so the prisoners blocked them up with bricks and clay to keep warm. They had coal fires but no scuttles or bunkers and so the coal lay in heaps on the floor and its dust blackened everything. Large numbers of unwashed men lived in virtually lightless and airless rooms, which Maxwell reported as ‘dirty and very bad smelling’ and ‘very close, by the windows being shut up for want of casements and shutters’. The rooms of Elizabethan elegance became ‘Bowling Alley Ward’, ‘Long Gallery Ward’ and ‘Great Parlour Ward’. Worst of all was a room known simply as ‘Black Dog’, and above it ‘Black Dog Garret’, both of which were ‘very close, wanted air, bad smells in them’.
Every morning the prisoners were turned out of their wards, and on fair days when the ground was dry all the hammocks were taken out to be aired. The prisoners were given two long sheds below the Tower to shelter in during the day. There was a man working in a shed in the Middle Court making stockings. Others had small shops here, selling bread, candles or tobacco. Prisoners could be given licences to go out into the surrounding country, where they worked as cooks, lamplighters, postmen, waiters for officers of the guard or housekeepers for Mr Cooke. Money could be sent from France and was regularly distributed by Mr Cooke. It was said that ‘arithmetic classes’ were held for junior officers in the Tower, unless that is a joke. Some used the chapel to say their daily prayers. They certainly gambled, drank porter and carved their names into the buildings. In the attic of the north wing above the stables, there is still the name of Pierre Mesnard, his letters cut deep into the 1560s oak, and each one carefully painted a smoky French blue.
They were mustered daily in the upper court, but otherwise the bulk of prisoners were forced to hang about in the Middle Courtyard, as they called it, in the medieval court below and in the remains of the Elizabethan garden beside the moat, some of which was still enclosed by a high wall. Where the wall had disappeared, the garden was surrounded by a ‘paled fence with tenter hooks upon it of full 6 feet high’. This was ‘the best garden’, with the chapel to one side and ‘a Necessary House’, a privy, within it, giving on to the moat. One eighteenth-century drawing of Sissinghurst, recently discovered in Canada, shows a basic outline of walks and beds in the garden. There was another kitchen garden, perhaps on the site of the present Rose Garden, and another ‘little court going into the garden’, probably on the site of the present Delos. Throughout these courts and enclosures and beyond the moat stood sentries carrying loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, with sentry boxes and braziers on posts, from which light was thrown at nighttime.
They were, at least nominally, well fed with a standard naval ration: three-quarters of a pound of beef to each prisoner, distributed in the form of 41/21 pounds of meat to each mess, which six men would share. It was cooked in a building just outside the front gate, a delegation of five prisoners inspecting the meat every day before it was cooked. In addition they had I1/2 pounds of bread each (which the French complained was ‘glewy’), a quart of beer and on a weekly ‘maigre day’ they had cabbage in a bowl of soup, some bread and six ounces of cheese. But so bitter was the atmosphere at Sissinghurst that none of this was really as good as it sounds. In Dr Maxwell’s notes there is a draft of what the daily ration of meat should consist of. Weight was not to be made up ‘from the Coarse or boney part’ and the meat was to be, he wrote, ‘without Skirts or Kidneys, Hearts Heads or any other part’. Hearts and heads were considered on reflection a perfectly good part of the ration.
A deeply unhappy and rather chubby twenty-three-year-old Edward Gibbon, who was here for a few days in December 1760, hated every minute of it. Sissinghurst was ‘a strong large old Seat, situated in the middle of a Park’, with about 1750 prisoners housed there. The daily march to and from a ‘miserable’ Cranbrook was disgusting, the ‘dirt most excessive’ and the other officers despicable. He was already ‘sick of so hateful a service, tired of companions who had neither the knowledge of scholars nor the manners of gentlemen’ and was longing to begin again ‘to taste the pleasure of thinking’. Life at Sissinghurst was ‘at best, not a life for a man of letters’. It was ‘both unfit for and unworthy of me’.
There is one curious side-note in young Gibbon’s diary. His detachment was at Sevenoaks on 5 June 1761. ‘We took a Walk to Knowles the D. of Dorset’s seat, a noble pile, very much upon the plan of Sissinghurst.’ The Knole – Sissinghurst connection was alive in the 1560s, when Richard Baker’s sister was married to Thomas Sackville; again in the mind of a particularly alert young man in the 1760s; and again two centuries later in the 1930s, when a disinherited Vita recognised Sissinghurst as the nearest to a ruined Knole she would ever come.
Sissinghurst was a world of gossip and hate, bubbling with violence, threat and mutual loathing. Prisoners would spit in the face of militiamen, who in return would knock them down with their musket stocks. Brutal kicking and beating occurred almost daily. The lingua franca of the prison was foul abuse. Soldiers would habitually break the pipes in prisoners’ mouths or smack them on the head. There were paid informers among the prisoners. At night, in revenge for insults heard or imagined, the militia would destroy the shelving and tables at which the prisoners would conduct their little businesses. Paul Escombre, the prisoner selling bread in the Middle Court, had his basket overturned and the bread tipped into the mud. The Leicestershire militia, as described by one witness to the inquiry in 1761, seems to have been almost anarchic:
One day at the muster, the centinels who were posted as usual to keep good order at the muster maltreated many of the Prisoners as they passed by, by striking of them on their backs with their naked hangers [swords], pushing off their hatts with them, pulling of them by their queues, and sometimes striking in among the whole body of those who had not passed with their Hangers. One of the soldiers with his firelock and bayonet fixed, being on the pavement in the middle court, came running along from the chappel. The prisoners seeing him coming did what they could to make way for him but he being too quick for them struck in among them with his firelock & bayonet and drove them off the pavement into the dirt.
Inevitably, this undertow of loathing and brutality now and then tipped over into murder. One guard, William Bassuck, was killed by a prisoner who dropped a filled pail on his head from the top of the Tower. A soldier who killed two prisoners in the garden said, when asked about it, at least according to one of the prisoners, ‘if he had killed more it would not have given him uneasiness … He sayd he would not have any more pity on us than if we were dogs. He took a stick in his hands. “I’ll take care of these Dogs. They shall not move. If they do, I’ll break their arms.”’ The soldier was said to have ‘publickly boasted that he had long intended it & that he had a desire to kill 10 prisoners before he went off this duty’. The picture recently discovered in Canada shows this incident: the militiaman firing from the far side of the moat; the two men lying dead in the garden; the crowd of outraged prisoners; the ring of sentry boxes and braziers, a Lilliput-version of a human hell.
On 27 October 1759, Mr Cooke’s assistant, Mr Ward, and an officer of the West Kent Militia, Mr Mortimer, were walking in the Long Gallery, on the north side of the Middle Court. It was about eleven o’clock at night, an hour after the regulations stated that all lights should be put out. They were looking across the court to ‘the uppermost ward of the south wing’. Mortimer was convinced that the prisoners still had a light burning. Ward
spoke to Mr M and endeavored to convince him that there were no lights. That it was the Reflection of the Lamps. Upon which we walked up & down the room three times in the Long Gallery where I said I cannot be persuaded that there have been any lights in the room this night.
Philippe Hardie, one of the sixty or seventy prisoners in the upper ward in the south wing, sleeping next to a man called Joffe from Dunkirk, was asked at the inquiry what happened. ‘The soldier called to them to put the candle out and there was no candle alight; as all the people were asleep nobody answered him.’ Mortimer claimed that the prisoners ‘bid him fire and be damned’, but Philippe Hardie’s testimony has the ring of truth:
Everybody in the room was very quiet and I was laid alongside of [Joffe]. The reflection of a lamp shone upon a window in our ward & the centinel thought there was a light in the Room & he fired & the other prisoners say now he called out 2 or 3 times but I heard nothing of that & was asleep. The ball went through his thigh as he lay asleep in his hammock across the window.
The lead ball that hit Joffe in the thigh was found in his hammock. It had gone through one thigh and flattened against the other. But terrible damage had been done in its passage:
A large hands breadth of the thigh bone [was] shattered to pieces the ball having taken an oblique direction. The wound was so near the head of the bone that amputation was impracticable. The man lived in excessive pain till the 31st then died.
Ferdinando Gralez, also of Dunkirk, was killed in 1758 ‘as he was putting his cloaths to dry’ on the barrier on the east side of the garden, killed by a sentry on the far side of the moat. He had been shot in the back and the ball had come out ‘about 3 fingers breadth on the right side of the navel’. Cooke had banned clothes being hung on the barriers but the prisoners were uncertain: ‘some centrys suffered it & some did not’. Four of his friends carried Gralez to the hospital in the Elizabethan barn – a toxic sink of filth and unwashed linen, overseen by the incompetent surgeon, Mr Thompson – and ‘there he languished till 11 o’clock that evening and then expired’. The dead were buried in the ground known as the Plain, the grassy patch in front of the entrance where visitors to Sissinghurst now picnic.
Most pitiable of all, though, are the letters preserved in the Admiralty files in Kew. One after another they describe their hopeless, slave-like circumstances: ‘The sad situation I have been reduced to, having lost a leg in battle, unable to make a living with a large family’; a man who was the last of his crew left at Sissinghurst, all of them having been exchanged with English prisoners and now at home in France; men in need of money; a desperate young man, severely wounded in the face, wanting to be treated by a French surgeon, where ‘he would be much better off than in an English hospital’. Hundreds of them, most of them written in an exquisite clerk’s hand, are piled up in the Admiralty boxes, addressed to ‘Ma Chaire Epouse’, ’ma très Chere mere’, ‘Ma chere fame’. Others are from the prisoners’ wives, still in France.
from le havre 25 August 1757
To monsieur Louis le Brun
D’un navire Le Lizabeht
commandé par le capitaine Pierre Double
de present Prisonnier au chatau de Sissingnurst
My dear husband
This is to tell you of the state of my health which is strong, thank God, and that of our children. I hope that the present finds you in a good condition. I want to tell you that I long for your return at the birth
But she did not have much confidence that he would be there when his latest child was born. She had the good news for him that he would have a place for sure on a boat when he returned to Calais, but when would that be? They must have ‘confidence in the Lord’, but she begged her man to ‘take any joy with moderation’ for fear that things would not turn out as they might have wished. Louis must pray that the Lord will come to their aid.
Je vous prie de me faire response et de me faire scavoir si ce que vous marquerons fait plaisir je fini en vous souhaitans une parfaite santé je suis en attendans le plaisir de vous voir mon cher mary votre fidelle epouse femme Le Brun
I beg you to reply to me and to let me know if what you have learned gives you pleasure. I finish in wishing you perfect health. I await the pleasure of seeing you my dear husband. Your faithful wife, Mrs Le Brun
The most poignant aspect of these letters is that the prisoners never received them. They remain in the Admiralty files where they had originally been scanned for any intelligence they might have yielded on French shipping. And Mme Le Brun would have waited for a reply in vain.
The French prisoners took Sissinghurst apart, tearing up the woodwork, ‘especially in a ward called The Black Dog by destroying the hammock posts and pulling up and making away with the Boards of the floor’, destroying all the fittings in the chapel, parlours and Long Gallery, taking out the inside of the stables, making two barns and four oasts unusable ‘by cutting out the principall beams’, stripping off the panelling wherever it had survived, destroying ‘the Palesade fence to the Kitchen Garden with other fences & gates Destroyed’ and wrecking ‘the best Garden, by the Wall fruite & other trees all destroyed and not even the stump of a Shrub nor Tree left’.
The owner of Sissinghurst was now Edward Mann of Linton, a Baker descendant who in 1762 had bought its 1402 acres from the other claimants for £12,982, plus £300 for the mansion house. When the war came to an end in 1763, Mann wrote to the Admiralty assessors, telling them that he was ‘filled with a perfect Desire of bringing our affairs together to an Eclairissement’. He asked initially for £361 ‘in compensation for the great Destruction in every Particular which such a number of Prisoners have occasioned in every part of the Buildings & Mansion House & Gardens’, but soon accepted fifty pounds plus the Admiralty’s ‘sheds and erections’, which had remained here when the prisoners left.
Sissinghurst had been utterly degraded, and this is the first moment when its history just leaks into the margins of living memory. In the 1930s, Vita met a ‘very old’ gentleman who had lived in the Castle in his boyhood. He had been a ten-year-old in the 1860s, when he met a ninety-year-old labourer, who had been about thirty in 1800, when his father-in-law (then about sixty) told him that he ‘had been employed not only to pull down the walls, but also to pick the foundations in 1763’.
Most of the old house disappeared, probably as hard core for tracks and hard standing. Electronic resistivity surveys of the site have revealed next to nothing, and when drainage ditches have been cut through the lines of the old ranges, all that is revealed in their walls is dark scars of eighteenth-century earth filling the Elizabethan and medieval foundation trenches. All the fields around Sissinghurst are full of shards of tile and crumbled brick from the dismantled buildings. The value remained only in the land. The Park now disappeared. The pale was never recreated and a regular, eighteenth-century field pattern was laid over the open grounds. A survey was made of the trees here in June 1763 in Sissinghurst Park, Hammer Wood by Hammer Mill, Fludgate Wood next to it, Graylins Wood near Whitsunden and Legge Wood and Eleven Acre Wood, both near Wadd. In them, the indefatigable surveyors counted:
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 £5302, 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. Among the thousands of documents in the files of the Kent County Archives in Maidstone, there are two giant vellum pages, stitched together along the bottom edge with vellum strips and carrying the seals and signatures of eleven different individuals. Each page is over two feet wide and eighteen inches high, and both are covered from top to bottom in the tiny, exact but very clear handwriting of the clerk who drew them up.
The document looks as if it might be medieval, or perhaps the translation of something medieval, written on a burnished sheepskin, with the vast Gothic headline ‘This Indenture Tripartite’ painted across the top. It is in fact less than two hundred years old, an agreement made in May 1811 between Sir Horatio Mann, Edward Mann’s nephew, from whom he had inherited Sissinghurst, and a set of eight individuals, described as ‘Yeomen of Cranbrook’, who were renewing their lease on the farm here. It is both an ancient thing, dripping in its medieval inheritance, looking like a treaty drawn up after Agincourt, and a modern one, an arrangement for the welfare officers in Cranbrook, which is what these men were, to rent the farm on which the poor of the parish could live, work and support themselves: a job creation scheme of a modern and enlightened kind.
When I first read this lease, crawling my way across the curly, ant-like script, something else came bowling towards me. This, in its archaic language, its beautiful attention to the details of the land and the habits by which it was managed, was both a voice from the old world and a summons to do things like it again. It was not only a depiction of the world we had lost but a model of the frame of mind that Sissinghurst needed, a level of care and understanding of the place that the late twentieth century had entirely abandoned.
The indenture, with its wavy upper edge, was a lease for twenty-one years, renewing another which the Cranbrook yeomen had made a few years earlier. They were now to pay £318 a year as rent, in four equal quarters, in January, April, July and October. The land they were renting at Sissinghurst, called simply Sissinghurst Farm, was ‘by estimation 342 acres and a half’, in thirty-seven different parcels of arable, meadow and pastureland. The grass in the meadow was allowed to grow for hay; the pasture was to be grazed all year. There were eight acres of hops and extensive woodland.
In hunting for his game and in arriving to secure his timber, Sir Horatio and his agents agreed that they would do ‘no wilful hurt spoil or damage to the Hay Grass or Corn’. There was some mutuality here; not for many centuries had landlords in England been allowed to damage with impunity the property that others had leased from them. But the burdens on the tenants were real and extensive. All hedges had to be preserved ‘from the bite and spoil of cattle’. If any fruit trees died or were blown down, ‘other good and young fruit trees of the same or better sort’ had to be set in their place. Hedges had to be laid (every nine years) and good ditches made alongside them. If they cut any of the underwood, they had to give thirty days’ notice to Sir Horatio’s steward, ‘so that the steward can mark and number the trees and tillers there growing’. They had to keep the buildings in good repair and pay for the window glass, leadwork, straw for any thatching and the carriage of materials. Mann’s steward agreed to provide out of the rent enough rough timber, brick, tiles, lime and iron for the work to be done.
This has a modern ring to it, a negotiated sharing out of tasks and costs. But in relationship to the land there was something much deeper, to do with a vision of cyclicality and self-sufficiency that seemed both extraordinarily and deeply primitive, laying down rules for this place which embodied almost total self-sustenance, and a form of clarion call for us.
First of all, the tenants were not to pollute the land with any form of crop whose seeds tend to spread themselves at will and remain everlasting weeds, now to be seen on every motorway verge in England: ‘The tenants shall not nor will at any time during the said term sow any hemp, flax or mustard seeds or any other prejudicial seeds on any part of the said demised premises.’ If they did, they had to pay the Mann estate every time the punitive sum of ten pounds per acre in liquidated damages.
Nor, more importantly, and as a crucial part of this vision of completeness, were they allowed to carry away from the farm any of the farm’s own produce. Any hay, straw, fodder, unthreshed corn, compost, manure or dung ‘which now is or shall at any time during the said term grow arise or be made upon or from or by means of the said demised premises’ had to stay there. Sissinghurst’s fertility had to be kept at Sissinghurst because its long-term viability as a farm relied on those nutrients remaining to be recycled into the ground. The tenants ‘shall and will there imbarn stack and fodder out all such hay Straw and Fodder’. They were to see that the compost, manure or dung ‘shall and will in a good husbandlike manner [be] laid spread and bestowed in and upon those parts of the land which seem most to need it’. This is something the lease repeats insistently. ‘They shall and will constantly during the said term use plough sow manure mend farm and occupy the said demised lands and premises in a good tenantlike manner and according to the custom of the country in which the same are situate. And so as to ameliorate and to improve and not impoverish the same.’ I thought, when I read those words, that they should be set up on a carved board at the entrance to the barn. I realised that they encapsulated, two centuries ago, exactly what I hoped for from my modern farm-and-restaurant scheme, which was having such difficulties finding its way to reality. This sense of self-enrichment was exactly what I had been stumbling after.
Here at last was a template for what we could do, for another way of looking at this place, which ran deep into its roots. It was essentially a cyclical vision. It did not imagine that next year would be very different from this, nor was it an exercise in progress. It felt for the health of the land in a way that understood it as a body, with all the implications of that organic analogy. It was not a fantasy of wholeness, but a working system, tied to earnings, rents, money and returns. It understood about the need for money on both sides, and the careful regulation of costs and responsibilities, but it did not single out money over all other aspects. It understood that money was one outcome, not the only one. And it understood that the land could only give what was put in. It was a picture of constancy and interrelatedness, not in any Wordsworthian ecstasy of revelation or understanding, but in a lease, a formal document made between the baronet and the yeomen of Cranbrook, drawn up by the lawyers. There, preserved in the county archives, was an invitation to the future. It was a world based on cud. A love of cud – that slow, delicious, juicy recycling of the nutritious thing – was what Sissinghurst needed. This was its unfinished history, its folding of the past into the future in the way that a cook stirs sugar into a cake.
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 farmworkers 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 £1000 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, £2500 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 £1500, 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 £3622 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 1083 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 Sisssinghurst, its lands, woods and buildings, less for the overbrimming excellence of its farm than for what the agents’ particulars described as ‘picturesque ruins in grounds’.