When the time actually came to move into Biddulph Old Hall, the compulsive hold it had established on our imaginations and the uncanny way it had come into our ownership were once again making us distinctly uneasy. We felt an urgent need to reestablish a stable plateau of objective rationality, so that our decisions could be driven by shrewd calculation rather than sentimental voodoo if we were to avoid another collision with mundane, everyday life. To this end we made a solemn vow not to indulge our fascination with the house’s aura, or divert scarce resources from the restoration of Bletchley Manor, until that project was completed and sold. This would avert the potential catastrophe of owning two deconstructed, valueless, listed buildings at the same time.
We decided we would live in Biddulph exactly as it was, and await the proper moment to begin investigating its fabric and its story. The one concession we allowed ourselves was to agree a programme of investigative work with our local Conservation Officer. This would enable us to prepare a carefully drawn-up application to obtain Listed Building consent from the council and English Heritage.
Three months after we had set out upon this virtuous path we received a phone call from someone we did not know called Amy. She had been part of the production team on the Channel 4 television programme Grand Designs, and remembered seeing the plans of two restoration projects that we had done for clients, which had been considered for inclusion in the programme. She had moved on, having secured funding from BBC2 for a new prime-time series, specifically focused on the restoration of historic houses. She wondered if we had anything interesting in the pipeline.
She went into eulogies over the quality of our drawings and the ‘truly amazing’ nature of our projects. She also appealed to our vanity by inferring that she was specifically searching for serious contributors with longstanding professional experience in period buildings whose work would be endorsed and explained to ‘the punters’ by a panel of experts from the heritage industry.
As she spoke the possibility occurred to me that public exposure might attract interest, or even funding, for one of the two huge projects we had so impulsively become entangled in. Surely, if nothing else, television had the power to sell Bletchley Manor quickly when it was finished, so that we could regroup and pursue our obsession with Biddulph. Sadly, despite my shameless hard sell, Amy could not be persuaded to take any interest in Bletchley, since the restoration was already under way and the essential ‘before’ shots would be missing.
Undaunted, I found myself luridly describing another project that, ‘as luck would have it,’ was on the very point of starting work. I described it as a disintegrating ruin standing in a waterlogged moon crater, with a six-storey stone tower damaged in the English Civil War. She was agog. Before the phone call was over she had proposed sending two researchers to carry out a ‘recce’ and get some footage for her to look at. The researchers would be able to explain the exciting format of the series to us without, of course, putting any pressure on us to do anything we were not comfortable with.
Naturally, I agreed – completely failing to recognise the critical moment when all our carefully laid plans were abandoned and we linked our fate to the fortunes of a plausible stranger and her untried television series. Within a month we had given a firm commitment to Amy and initiated a crash programme of work at Bletchley to establish sufficient protection and security to allow us to divert the team of men working there to Biddulph. It was arranged that the production team would film the work intermittently over the next year, focusing on the restoration of the Great Hall, the Staircase Hall and the creation of a small parterre garden by the front door.
At a stroke we were liberated from the stern discipline of our pledge not to investigate either the historic fabric or the documentary evidence of Biddulph’s past until Bletchley Manor was sold. In fact, we convinced ourselves that it was our duty to put in hand a meticulous drive to discover the lost story of the building at once, to enable us to carry out an informed restoration.
All we knew at the outset was that a family by the name of Biddulph was recorded as being the feudal lords of the surrounding area back into the mists of history. From a privately published booklet on the Civil War skirmish in which the house had been attacked, we knew that they had been Royalists and that after the Restoration Charles II had described their defence of their home as a ‘great service’ to the monarchy.
The owner of Biddulph Hall at that time was a young man of twenty-two called Francis Biddulph, who was captured and imprisoned in Stafford. His mother, young wife and one-year-old baby were forced to flee the building when the local population completed the work of the fearsome cannon, Roaring Meg, by looting and setting fire to the Hall. Reduced almost to starvation, the women were recorded as petitioning the Parliamentary Committee at Stafford for permission to return to the charred remnants of their former home. The Committee acceded to their request only under a series of stringent conditions, which condemned them to continued poverty. They were described as dangerous, and ‘a nest of Papists’. As our research progressed, we came to realise that this phrase held a vital clue to understanding the whole story of the house and its inhabitants.
We managed to reclaim a file of papers relating to Biddulph from a firm of solicitors where they had been languishing unseen for decades. These recorded that, despite the continuous occupation of the house from the earliest era of archaic documentation, there was no evidence of its ever having been sold until 1861. In that year it was sold by a Lord Camoys to James Bateman, Esq. We knew that James Bateman was a wealthy Victorian who had created a famous garden round his property Biddulph Grange, which adjoined Biddulph Old Hall and was now restored and maintained by the National Trust. But who was Lord Camoys? How had he come to own the house? What link, if any, was there between him, Francis Biddulph and the destitute women of the Cromwellian era?
It transpired that there was a living Lord Camoys, whose surname was Stonor. He lived in some style at Stonor Park, a country house near Henley-on-Thames. Once we began to investigate these disparate people from different ages, the connection between them began to emerge. At the core of that link lay the Roman Catholic faith. Francis Biddulph had been a prominent Catholic. His Roman Catholicism had caused his house to become a natural target for the predominantly Puritan Parliamentary forces in the Civil War. When Henry VIII split from Rome, the Biddulphs became Recusants – they refused to recognise Henry, or any subsequent sovereign, as the Supreme Head of the Church in England. Despite their equally fervent Royalism, this led them to be held in deep distrust by succeeding monarchs and made them liable to punitive taxes and restrictions. The Stonors were equally overt Recusants who maintained a private Roman Catholic chapel by their mansion.
When we traced Francis Biddulph’s descendants it became clear why Biddulph Old Hall had never been rebuilt or demolished. Despite the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, it was not long before the Biddulph family were again the focus of deep suspicion by the Court and political establishment. Several members of the family were implicated in King James II’s attempt to reinstate the old faith, and fled into exile with him when he was deposed in favour of William III. The punitive taxes they were subjected to, especially at the time of the 1715 and 1745 rebellions, meant that they remained impoverished until Francis Biddulph’s son, Richard Biddulph, made a highly advantageous marriage to the sole heiress of another Recusant family, the Gorings of Burton Park in Sussex. Not only did Richard Biddulph acquire a magnificent new estate and mansion in the south of England, but the marriage made him eligible for another advantage, retained by the family of his new wife.
The Gorings were holders of the Camoys title, which had the extremely rare distinction in English law of being able to pass through the senior female line of the family if the male descent became extinct. Thus, as an only daughter and the sole heir, Anne Goring was able to pass the title to her husband Richard Biddulph and on down to their children. However, the laws against Recusancy debarred Richard or his children from using this title or being legally recognised as peers. This situation persisted until 1820, when the male line of the Biddulph family died out with the death of Charles Biddulph, a bachelor nearly a hundred years old. His estates were divided between his two sisters and their families. Burton Park went to the younger sister and the Biddulph estate to the elder, Mary, who was married to Thomas Stonor.
Shortly after this, in 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed, removing penalties and restrictions on Roman Catholics. Among the Biddulph papers we found an elaborate family tree drawn up in 1839 to demonstrate the descent of the Stonor children from Mary Biddulph. This enabled them to place a successful claim before the House of Lords for the Camoys title to be brought out of abeyance.
Brian and I visited Stonor Park, a deceptively symmetrical Carolean house which encases a much earlier medieval structure. Our formidable guide majored on the evolved architectural history of the house, deviating only occasionally to point out pictures or objects that emphasised the historic pre-emimence of the Stonors, particularly in relation to the royal family. After Catholic Emancipation the newly enobled Lord Camoys had been appointed Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, and begun a family tradition of discreet but devoted service to the British monarchy that has continued ever since. Judging by the plethora of silver-framed photographs, the present Lord Camoys and his forebears had been intimate with most of the people who occupied key public positions across the globe during the previous 150 years. The pictures ranged from Queen Mary, through the Queen Mother, to the Queen, Prince Philip and innumerable lesser luminaries of the House of Windsor. They were supplemented by an assortment of French and American presidents, leaders of the UN, popes, dalai lamas, Japanese emperors and boiler-suited Chinese Party chairmen.
In view of the imperial grandeur and global reach of this network of connections, it seemed faintly implausible when our guide paused in the dining room beside a portrait of a frail, homely lady in a lace cap and announced that she was ‘Mary Biddulph, the wife of Thomas Stonor and mother of fourteen children, who brought the title Lord Camoys into the family’.
Brian and I stared transfixed at the quaint little figure gazing out at us. It was the first face from the story of Biddulph that we had ever seen. Could she really have come from our strange, fragmented, hobgoblin of a house on the gale-swept Staffordshire moorlands to this noble pile? Could she have relentlessly given birth to fourteen children and bestowed nobility on them in perpetuity, once conditions allowed it? Although the ancient prominence of the Stonor family was evident all around us, we wondered what part her unique bequest of elevation to the peerage had played in their ability to project themselves into the heart of the British establishment.
We sought out Lord Camoys and told him our story. He and his wife were intrigued, as they did not know that any remnant of a house had survived at Biddulph. They freely acknowledged that it was to emphasise their descent from Mary Biddulph and reinforce their claim to the Camoys title that the Stonors had held on to the estate. In the early nineteenth century the family had intended to rebuild the house for a younger son, but he had died young. After that, with no use for it and with the Camoys title secured, the Stonors gradually lost interest in their remote acreage in Staffordshire and sold it, for the first time in its long history, to James Bateman in 1861.
Gradually, we were beginning to discern the succession of human tragedies and cruel twists of fate that had created the fragmented ruins that we now lived in. Local folklore had always insisted that our house was not the original historic seat of the Biddulph family. This was supposed to be on a steeply rising hillock, two miles away, round which a river, the Biddulph Brook, formed a natural moat. Although it seemed plausible, we had never been able to find any confirmation of this, so it was exciting to discover the report of an archaeological dig that had been carried out on the mound in the 1960s. The results had confirmed the site as a medieval settlement containing artefacts from the twelfth to the end of the fourteenth centuries. The last finds were a cluster of objects, all associated with demolition, dating from around 1400. This suggested a family long settled in the area, on a defensible site, who had progressively abandoned it and built a new house nearby, completing the removal by demolishing the old building completely at about this date.
The date stone of 1580 on the porch of our surviving ruins suggested that in the sixteenth century they began to replace the disorderly medieval buildings, many moved from their original site, by an ambitious, symmetrical, stone mansion. This process had been critically delayed from the 1530s by the penalties for the family’s Recusancy, so it was incomplete at the time of the Civil War attack that brought it to ruin. Accounts of the attack describe the critical moment of surrender occurring when a cannonball struck the bressummer of a timber-framed section of the building, causing a partial collapse. This indicated that not all the house had been rebuilt in stone by that time.
After the attack the Biddulphs had squatted in fearful poverty among the ruins of their former mansion. They regained their land after the Restoration but, as generations succeeded one another, never wavered in their commitment to the Roman Catholic faith. Thus they remained impoverished and unable to rebuild the house until they acquired another estate by marriage. Because the name of Biddulph was the basis of their claim to the Camoys title, their descendents were never prepared to sever their connection with the Old Hall despite being settled elsewhere.
While we were immersed in these investigations, the television crew had come up for a day to get some establishing shots of the house. The first full day’s filming was fast approaching. Before they arrived we needed to look into the other character we had found in the sale documents. Unless we could gain some understanding of what had motivated James Bateman to buy the Old Hall in 1861, we might misread the traces his ownership had left on the fabric of the building and its surroundings.
A visit to his house, Biddulph Grange, seemed the obvious place to start. We had been there before, but now, with our sharper focus of interest, the domineering scale of his huge Victorian mansion and the complexity of its restored garden impressed themselves upon us. The National Trust curator explained that James’s purchase of Biddulph Old Hall had marked the last phase of the continuous elaboration of his garden, after the rock works, stumperies, arboretums, and Chinese and Egyptian gardens were already complete and mature. He had regarded the nearby ruined hall as the ultimate picturesque garden folly. He had bought it to add a last twist of macabre excitement to his landscape creation – the spectral tower abandoned amid the forlorn ruins of its former grandeur. The visual potency of the ruin was heightened by the fact that it was partly habitable – meals were prepared and served within it to Bateman’s wealthy friends.
Intriguingly, James was said to have built a connecting walk from Biddulph Grange to the Old Hall that passed through tunnels and over bridges before rising up the valley beside the Clough stream. However, since he bought the Hall in 1861 and moved permanently to London in 1868, there were almost no surviving records or documents relating to it. Another local tradition had it that James’s third son, an artist called Robert, had lived in the Hall before the family moved to London. In a book on the Grange gardens by Peter Hayden, we discovered a photograph of Robert Bateman in what was claimed to be part of the walk through the Clough (fig. 10). He was a bearded, distinctly artistic-looking character in a soft hat and neckerchief, accompanied by a woman and a bowler-hatted man on a rustic bridge in front of a complex waterfall. This photograph instantly reignited our interest in the Clough stream, as it appeared to confirm our intuition that at some point in the past the valley had been manipulated to intensify its atmosphere.
Feeling that Robert Bateman might form an important component in the story of the house and its surroundings, we spent many fruitless hours over the next weeks searching for this elusive character. There seemed to be little evidence anywhere to support either the tradition of his being an artist or of his sojourn in Biddulph Old Hall. Then, by chance, a man called Bill Ridgway contacted us to discuss his forthcoming book ‘James Bateman and his World’. He knew almost nothing about Robert Bateman but had come across a single letter from him. This indicated that Robert had been some sort of governor of a school at Biddulph Moor when a quarrel had broken out between the rector and the resident schoolmaster. A letter from a school governor did not seem likely to confirm Robert’s life as an artist living in a ruined mansion, but we asked Bill if he would send us a copy so that at least we could put the myth to rest.
Fig. 10. Robert Bateman (right) – a distinctly artistic-looking character.
To our amazement, the letter appeared to support one aspect of the story while creating a mystery around the accepted chronology of another. It was addressed from Biddulph Hall and dated 2 March 1874. This appeared to suggest that Robert was living at Biddulph Hall and acting as a school governor six years after the family were documented as having moved to London.
The letter is about an acrimonious dispute and Robert’s position is a difficult, semi-official one. It is written privately to the schoolmaster, to express sympathy and to try to persuade him to follow a path that will avoid personal humiliation and unhappiness at the hands of the rector. Bateman’s human concern is clearly sincere and beyond the scope of his official duties. It opens:
Enclosed you will find an official letter from me as one of the school managers, the contents of which you will see, but I cannot send it off without this line to say how very sorry I am to find there exists a disagreement between yourself and the Rector. I have tried to find out the truth and justice of the case without taking either side and it seems to me that however blameless you may have been it is strongly in your own interests to abide by the notice which it seems Mr Gordon [the Rector] has given you and go on May 12th quietly.
My reasons for so advising you are simply and solely that supposing you did stop your two years at Biddulph Moor
1st You would be in direct opposition to Mr Gordon – that would have a bad effect in every way on yourself, him, the school and the neighbourhood.
2nd You would only have a miserable pittance from the school, pence which could be legally halved if the management chose.
The third point shows a real will to see beyond the dispute to the longterm wellbeing of the man himself:
3rd You would scarcely be happy up there – and what is life without happiness.
He concludes by emphasising the personal nature of the letter:
Mr Gordon knows nothing of my writing to you, which I hope you will take in good part as it is meant.
The suggestion that Robert Bateman really had lived in our house and the humanity of his concern for the schoolmaster made us eager to know more about him, but the lack of available information and the arrival of the television crew at Biddulph Old Hall swept our curiosity aside.
The crew decided to film us removing the 1950s fireplace in the Great Hall and then knocking out two or three square blocks so that we could establish whether there was a deep void behind it. When eventually the blocks splintered we were almost overwhelmed by the acrid smell of sodden soot. On an impulse I fed a broom handle into the opening and was amazed when it disappeared to the brush head. With mounting excitement we set to work on the surrounding blocks.
By the end of the first day’s filming, one half of the chimney was open, and the true dimensions of the whole structure were beginning to become clear. It was evident that the opening did span virtually the full width of the visible beam. The bottom metre of the fireplace was filled with a black slurry of slimy soot, so wet and heavy that it flowed out the moment the stone wall was removed. We had established beyond question that the scale of the fireplace was too massive and the construction too naive to have been built after 1660. By this date the understanding of flue construction had advanced way beyond this crude cavern, even in the remotest areas of England. Suddenly, Pevsner’s description of the inhabited part of the building as ‘a late seventeenth-century house of no pretension’ was unsustainable.
Fig. 11. The Great Hall before the removal of the 1950s hearth that had been substituted for the original 14-foot opening defined by the beam above it.
We began to explain the significance of this to the film crew, expecting them to perceive it as contributing a compelling new dimension to their programme. However, they were completely impervious to our fascination, and deferred all discussion to the next filming visit when ‘the experts’ would be with them. What did excite them, on the other hand, was our intention to use the fire. They were openly sceptical about this but were equally anxious not to discourage us as they were convinced the huge opening would fill the room with smoke, creating a wonderful moment of television. By the middle of the afternoon they had wished us good luck and set off back to the sanity of contemporary London.
Much of the next day was spent in back-breaking labour, shovelling the sinister, black mucus into wheelbarrows and dumping it in a skip. But despite our exhaustion, the following evening found us standing inside the massive hearth, staring up at its awesome construction. Hand-hewn, blackened boulders were heaped one upon another, and climbed towards the distant sky in coarsely tapered, irregular steps. The right-hand portion had been manipulated into a sophisticated system of brick ovens, with complex barrel-headed compartments. These had only partly survived, leaving gap-toothed apertures and scatterings of fractured, fallen bricks. We knew that this massively constructed vault was important both as a historical survival and for its ability to convey the actuality of an ancient working fire (fig. 11). Over the next years, when we did begin to use it, there was no mistaking the mesmeric attraction it exerted upon visitors. There was something almost primeval about the comfort derived from its robust, living presence, as if it awoke some half-remembered instinct, almost a folk memory of communal security and wellbeing. Our intuition that a fire opening related to the visible beam would totally transform the character of this strange room was amply confirmed. The rough-hewn generosity of this giant focus of warmth destroyed any vestige of the gaunt, puritan cell into which the Great Hall had been transformed by deliberate concealment and assertive modern whitening.
After I had shovelled the last pieces of rubble from the hearth into the wheelbarrow, I slumped back heavily against the wall near the steps up to the parlour. To my shock, the wall seemed to give way behind me, and the next moment a patch of modern gypsum plaster slithered to the floor, revealing a beautifully carpentered section of timber framing, complete with a clearly legible joiner’s numbering mark. The studs were in-filled by rectangles of old lime-washed lime plaster, broken away in places so that the underlying wattle twigs and straw-filled daub were visible. All along the edge of the opening, the brittle pink finish of new plaster had detached itself from the surface of the underlying frame and was hanging loose. I could not resist the temptation of banging it. Another big circle of plaster fell. The new section of visible frame was pockmarked with little charred gauges where tapers or crude candles had scorched the exposed surface of the timbers long ago.
Without a word we put our shovels into the loose edges of the plaster covering, and within ten minutes it was all lying in a disorderly pile at our feet. The more we revealed, the more obvious it became that the timber-framed wall was a later insertion. We realised that the parlour and the Great Hall had originally formed a single unit, heated by the huge hearth which we had just found. This was a pattern of building abandoned by the early sixteenth century, rather than one employed for new houses a century and a half later.
The true age of the Great Hall meant that the relationship between the lived-in house and the ruined mansion must have been much closer than anyone had previously understood. The two buildings must have coexisted over many years. If this was the case, each would be able to shed vital light on the role of the other, and on the forgotten meaning of the complex whole. The house was responding to our interest in it by dropping cryptic hints of a longer, more convoluted tale of mutation and survival than anything suggested to us when we bought it.
Our frustration at the filmmakers’ lack of interest in our first round of discoveries was exacerbated on the second filming day by their introduction of a huge superstructure of television ‘format’. This took the shape of a band of three building conservation specialists known collectively as ‘the experts’, and a likeable, but lightweight, presenter. As individuals they were an interestingly diverse group of people, with a wide experience of conserving important listed buildings. Brian and I had been looking forward to this element of the programme, as a chance to enter into a constructive dialogue about approaches and techniques with a group of knowledgeable, sympathetic enthusiasts.
When they actually appeared, they were fussed over by make-up girls, lighting specialists and sound technicians. Every move they made was subject to elaborate preparation and set-dressing, all designed to project a forbidding group persona of patronising hauteur. The relationship between ‘the experts’ and ‘the contributors’ (us) had been preconceived as an adversarial one. The idea clearly was that the stuffy world of historic house restoration could not be expected to hold viewers’ attention for fifty minutes, so had to be enlivened by being adjudicated, with devastating frankness, in the time-honoured tradition of TV talent contests. To be fair, even they found the continual pressure to be abrasive a trifle ridiculous and would often say, ‘I can’t say that – it isn’t true,’ when surreptitiously handed a note in the middle of an interview instructing them to draw blood for the entertainment of the masses.
Not that the filming wasn’t fun, nor that the film crew treated it with anything but total commitment. The difficulty was that with so elaborate a presentational structure to maintain, involving a presenter and three commentators, all of whom were required to react to every development, the filming days became dominated by them recording pieces to camera. They had no time to explore the detailed discoveries that were revealing the story of the building and informing the restoration work. Naturally they acted as a group, with shared opinions snatched superficially in the first moments of arriving at a new site to enable them to film their contributions shortly afterwards. In these circumstances, ‘the experts’ could not help becoming immersed in the imperative of the programme makers, and progressively losing touch with the subtleties of the archaeological investigation itself.
Gradually, this approach led Brian and me to develop two parallel perceptions of the progress at Biddulph. These were born out of the marked contrast between filming days and the rest of the time when the real work moved steadily forward. The television visits were characterised by the enjoyable, but slightly frenetic, gladiatorial combat with ‘the experts’ over the surface texture of the changes, such as the inclusion of modern features, particularly downlighters. The other times were dominated by an utterly different excitement. This was generated by the experience of interpreting a series of tiny textural and structural discoveries, dating from different periods of the house’s history, which slowly enriched the knowledge gained from our recent research.
This quiet, infinitely private adventure bore no relation to the agitated craving for confrontation that the television crew imposed upon us for a couple of days each month. The quiet progress went unnoticed and unrecorded, except by us, while the tawdry parade of the programme marched on down its predestined route. We followed the band, and enjoyed the fun while it was there, but our hearts were rooted in the other Biddulph, the one that silently re-emerged to enfold us when the last van had tooted and rattled off up the drive – the mystical place in which we had perceived some half-hidden force or presence that we felt compelled to engage with and understand.
After the cameras departed, our men returned to their long days of patient toil, in which they dedicated all their skills to the pursuit of uncompromising perfection in every detail of the regeneration of the Great Hall. Something wonderful was happening, something that we could not allow to pass without a gesture of recognition. We had to find some way of acknowledging not only the peerless achievement of the actual craftsmanship, but the joyful commitment with which it was offered and carried out. Several of the guys had joked about their wives or girlfriends complaining about their obsession with Biddulph, so we hit upon the idea of a Christmas party in the Great Hall, to which everyone could bring their families to admire their work.
When the day of the party arrived, none of us had anticipated the strange alchemy that using the room would work upon its atmosphere. Suddenly, it was more than the sum of its lovingly repaired stones. More than the crackling and flaring of the apple logs in its monumental working hearth. More than the tranquillity of its recessive colour harmonies, or the honeyed glow of its beeswaxed tables and chairs. Nor was it simply the beguiling counterpoint between these caressing comforts and the broken floor of discordant flags and the rude, hacked flanks of the fireplace. These things tingled across the senses, mischievously playing games with scale and texture, but they alone did not fully account for the room’s compulsive resonance.
There was a new radiance, emanating from within the room itself, that existed separately, beyond, and distinct from, the sum of its disparate components. The alteration was hard to define, being assimilated through the consciousness of atmosphere rather than the direct physical senses, but it was none the less real, and too intense to ignore. That evening, scarcely one of the craftsmen or their partners entered the room without remarking on its ‘special feel’, or ‘its wonderful atmosphere’. Several of the men said that something new had happened that they found hard to explain, which carried it beyond the restored room they had been working on (fig. 12).
In the new year we began on the Staircase Hall. This was the one place that had completely baffled us when we first walked into it with Mrs Smith. The whole space had been dark, dank and incomprehensible. The endless piecemeal adaption which had been inflicted on it over the centuries had left it devoid of meaning. Since the jumble of component parts was so incoherent, we felt that the best way of tackling the problem was initially to concentrate our attention on a single element – the low arch with the door behind it – and hope that this would suggest some clues to the rest of the room.
The moment we scraped away the top layer of brilliant white lining paper we discovered several layers of limewash coloured with ‘dolly blue’. This was interesting, as dolly blue was traditionally used in the kitchens of old houses to deter flies and insects. The layers of limewash were very flaky, and fell away to reveal large, regular, sandstone blocks identical in size and colour to the exterior building blocks of the ruined mansion.
Fig. 12. The Great Hall, reborn with a new radiance, too intense to ignore.
So the Staircase Hall had been built directly against the outer wall of the Elizabethan mansion, presumably to form some kind of link between the Great Hall and the newer building. As soon as we began to uncover the stones of the low arch we realised that it defined the front opening of yet another massive fireplace. The confusing doorway had simply been knocked through its brick fireback to allow access to the ruins, after its flue had been blocked off and it was no longer used. On the front face of the arch we found a triangular pattern of wooden dowels and a 400mm groove cut into the face of the stonework. These were clearly the fixings for a spit mechanism. So the Staircase Hall had contained a huge cooking fire, suggesting that at some point it had functioned as a kitchen (fig. 13).
It was almost impossible, however, to reconcile the dimensions of the fireplace with the cramped ceiling height of the room. With only a tiny window in an alcove, it would have been virtually impossible to bear the heat of the fire, let alone cook on it. Something was wrong. The pieces of the jigsaw did not quite lock together to give a cogent picture of the room in use.
As we had experienced before at Biddulph, the clues came when we least expected them. While we were completing the stripping of the wall above the fireplace arch we made another surprising discovery. In the corner of the room, another stone arch sprung along the side wall. The intriguing thing about this high arch, as we stripped it back to the stonework, was that the top of it disappeared above the line of the ceiling, suggesting that at some point the room might have been much higher.
Fig. 13. A treasure trove of concealed clues – the Staircase Hall starts to tell its story.
With this in mind, we carefully inspected the heavy old beam in the middle of the ceiling. To our amazement we found that, despite its obvious weight and age, it rested barely an inch into the wall at one end, and at the other was supported by an early 1930s steel girder, disguised as a whitewashed beam. It had been inserted as a decorative fake. We suddenly realised that if the ceiling was removed, the proportions of the great cooking arch would be completely natural within the stone wall above it, and the heat of the fire would be manageable as the window on the floor above would have lit and ventilated the whole space.
The Staircase Hall proved to be a treasure trove of concealed information, all of which combined to reinforce our thesis that the Great Hall had been an ancient, freestanding block that had subsequently been joined to the new mansion by means of this tall link. The suggestion that it had served as some sort of kitchen for the re-inhabited Great Hall after the Civil War was confirmed by the discovery of an extremely unusual early hatch in the lower part of it. The primitive weight and simplicity of the hatch related it directly to the great stone fire opening and side arches.
In response to the scale of these elements, I designed a sturdy new staircase in English oak, with closed, panelled sides to retain a relationship with the mass of the stonework. On the other side of the space, I allowed the height of the stone arches on the side wall to define the dimensions of the two oak doors I drew to fill them. With the ceiling removed, and the fireback rebuilt to block up the doorway to the ruins, the incomprehensible disposition of the massive structure was suddenly resolved: the elements were brought into cogent relationship with each other and with the soaring dimensions of the overall space (fig. 9, page 30).
Brian and I had become sufficiently seasoned campaigners to enjoy the terror the emergence of this intensely unconventional space generated in the breasts of the presenters and film crew of the television series, by now entitled Restored to Glory. Our contention that it was impossible to begin to interact with Biddulph Old Hall unless one was prepared to empathise to some extent with the deeply held convictions of the people who had created it and made up its story gave everyone around us palpitations.
The over-scaled arches and stone doorways were the residue of the actual story of violent conflict, religious conviction and brutal intolerance that had been played out in and around this place. It had led to the collapse of a proud family into squalid poverty and forced them to eke out an existence among the truncated remnants of their once-great home. The true value of Biddulph as a window into the past was not as a quantified accumulation of moulded timbers, shaped mullions, flue constructions or lead glazing patterns. The elusive ability of the Old Hall to communicate the vibrant aura of long-lost ways of life, and retain the essence of the forgotten people it had sheltered, could not be tabulated and codified in this way. It was part of an intuitive, emotional response to the past embraced by the Victorians, but held in derision by educated people ever since.
Brian and I watched Restored to Glory alone together at Biddulph. We enjoyed watching it, as we might any programme on a subject that interested us, but we had been too immersed in the project itself, and the filming, to be able to assess the impact it would have on the general public. As a result, we were taken completely off guard by the avalanche of highly personal reactions that engulfed us over the next weeks.
It was the strength of feeling that took us aback. The adversarial format produced a passionately partisan reaction in large swathes of the audience, who perceived Brian and me as being bullied by ‘the experts’ while we valiantly dedicated ourselves to preserving a precious piece of the nation’s heritage. Their anxiety seemed to be that we would be discouraged by the nonsense of downlighters and distemper (see fig. 14) from continuing our mission to discover and liberate the essence of Biddulph Old Hall, in which they sensed a magical story. It was strangely moving that people shared our intuition of fabulous, forgotten things, still present in the fabric of the place. It refocused our determination to continue our journey into the history of the house.
Suddenly, the pressure, the deadlines, the tantrums and the momentary fame of the television programme were over. Brian and I found ourselves blinking in the stark light of another cold dawn. The brooding spectre of Bletchley Manor, abandoned and forlorn, reappeared out of the chill oblivion to which we had consigned it by our preoccupation with Biddulph Old Hall and the British Broadcasting Corporation. With the money for it gone, and its condition deteriorated even from the deplorable state in which we had left it, the gentle presence of the Manor acquired a forbidding air of menace.
We furtively consulted an estate agent, but were told it was unmarketable as it stood. We eventually summoned up the courage to return to Bletchley and actually go inside for the first time in over a year. The moment we did so, we knew we could not simply walk away and become the agents of its final destruction. We could not be the people who had fecklessly signed its death warrant by stripping it out then walking away, condemning it to almost certain demolition. Although we knew that it meant setting aside our longing to maintain the momentum at Biddulph, for the first time our instincts told us to save Bletchley Manor no matter what the cost. We had become so concentrated on our new project that at first we scarcely registered the onset of an insidious new process of discovery that was destined to grow in scope and intensity, until it dominated and transformed our lives.
Fig. 14. The adversarial format had produced a passionately partisan reaction in large swathes of the audience.
Fig. 15. On location at home: Nigel with camera in the emerging parterre.
