Foreword
1. Evelyn Waugh, Sunday Times, 7 December 1952.
2. H. Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London, Methuen, 1948), p. 208.
3. Osbert Sitwell, Noble Essences or Courteous Revelations (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 41.
Chapter 1: The Cavalier
1. Unless otherwise stated, material quoted in this chapter comes from Sir George Sitwell, Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells, 2 vols (Scarborough: for George Sitwell, 1900–1), vol. I.
2. Osbert Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand! (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 13.
3. The two grants of arms hang in the library at Renishaw.
Chapter 2: ‘Mr Justice Sitwell’
1. Sir Reresby Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells (Derby: Derbyshire Countryside Ltd, 2001).
2. Unless otherwise stated, material quoted in this chapter comes from Sitwell, Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells, vol. II.
Chapter 3: A Mathematician
1. Unless otherwise stated, material quoted in this chapter comes from Sitwell, Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells, vol. II, and Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells.
Chapter 4: The Merchant Squire
1. Unless otherwise stated, material quoted in this chapter comes from Sitwell, Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells, vol. II, and Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells.
Chapter 5: Passing on the Torch
1. Unless otherwise stated, material quoted in this chapter comes from Sitwell, Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells, vols I and II, and Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells.
2. Sir George Sitwell, The Hurts of Haldworth and Their Descendants at Savile Hall, The Ickles and Hesley Hall (Oxford: University Press, 1930), p. 225.
Chapter 6: A Regency Buck
1. Renishaw Archives (hereafter R.A.), Sir George Sitwell’s Red Notebook C, p. 58 (Print Room).
2. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 17.
3. Joseph Friedman, ‘New Light on the Renishaw Commode’, Furniture History Society Journal 1997, pp. 136–42.
4. E. A. Smith, ‘The Yorkshire elections of 1806 and 1807: a study in electoral management’, Northern History 2 (1967), pp. 62–90.
5. Osbert Sitwell (ed.), Two Generations (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 40.
6. R.A., Box 139, Bundle 2.
7. R.A., Box 139, Bundle 1.
Chapter 7: Ruin?
1. R.A., Box 139, Bundle 1.
2. Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells, p. 8.
3. Sitwell, Two Generations, p. 62.
4. Ibid., p. 61.
5. Ibid., p. 74.
6. Ibid., pp. 23–4.
7. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
8. Ibid., pp. 130–1.
9. Ibid., pp. 18–20.
10. Ibid., p. 120.
11. R.A., letter (1881) from Georgiana Sitwell to Sir G. Sitwell.
12. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 18.
13. Sitwell, Two Generations, p. 139.
14. Ibid., pp. 145–6.
Chapter 8: Camping in the Wreckage
1. Unless otherwise stated, material quoted in this chapter comes from the diaries of Louisa, Lady Sitwell (R.A., Box X3).
Chapter 9: An Unsung Heroine
1. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 40.
2. R.A., Box ex 28.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 29.
6. Ibid.
7. R.A., Farrer & Co. Box.
8. Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 59.
9. Letter from Ethel Smyth, quoted in Appendix D of Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, pp. 261–4.
10. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 156.
11. R.A., Box 24 c1869/70.
12. Sitwell, Two Generations.
13. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 67.
14. R.A., OS (oversized) Drawer 2.
Chapter 10: The Golden Years Return?
1. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 50.
2. Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning (London: Macmillan, 1948), p. 50.
3. R.A., Bundle 2.
4. R.A., Box 147.
Chapter 11: A Miserable Marriage
1. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 20.
2. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 223.
3. R.A., Box 147, Bundle 9.
4. Ibid.
5. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, pp. 20–1.
6. Osbert Sitwell, The Scarlet Tree (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 20.
7. R.A., Box 565, Bundle 1.
8. Sitwell, Scarlet Tree, p. 43.
Chapter 12: Sir George’s Italian Cure
1. Sitwell, Letters of the Sitwells and Sacheverells, vol. I, p. ii.
2. Reresby Sitwell (ed.), Hortus Sitwellianus (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1984), p. 3.
3. Ibid., pp. 36–8.
4. Ibid., p. 109.
5. R.A., Box X13, Green Note Book 1907–10, p. 100.
6. Ibid., p. 13.
7. Ibid., p. 58.
8. Sitwell, Hortus Sitwellianus, p. 33.
9. R.A., Box X13, Green Note Book 1907–10, p. 110.
10. R.A., Box X13, Bundle 1, card No. 64.
11. R.A., Box X13, Green Note Book 1907–10, p. 125.
12. Ibid., p. 75.
13. In the Val di Pesa, in the Chianti.
14. R.A., Box 532/1; also in Sitwell, Great Morning, p. 51.
15. R.A., Box 470, Bundle 4.
Chapter 13: A New Renishaw
1. Sitwell, Hortus Sitwellianus, p. 15.
2. Ibid.
3. R.A., Sir G. Sitwell, The Story of an Old Garden, Box 100 (ex X48).
4. David Kesteven, Renishaw Hall Gardens (Derby: Abbey, 2010), p. 10.
5. R.A., Box X13, Green Note Book 1907–10, p. 106.
6. Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley (eds), The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife, Lady Emily, (London: HarperCollins, 1985), p. 157.
7. Renamed Madonna with Two Saints Adoring the Child, today this is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
8. R.A., Box 13. opp. p. 104.
9. Sitwell, Hortus Sitwellianus, p. 20.
Chapter 14: Renishaw Children
1. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 104
2. Ibid., p. 111.
3. Osbert Sitwell, ‘A Door that Shuts’, in Selected Poems, Old and New (London: Duckworth, 1943), p. 66.
4. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 32.
5. Sacheverell Sitwell, All Summer in a Day (London: Duckworth, 1926), p. 79.
6. Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), p. 39.
7. Sacheverell Sitwell, For Want of the Golden City (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), p. 417.
8. Sacheverell Sitwell, Splendours and Miseries (London: Faber, 1943), p. 242.
9. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 41.
10. Percy and Ridley, Letters of Edwin Lutyens, p. 157.
11. R.A., Box 408/6.
12. Sitwell, Scarlet Tree, p. 305.
13. Sitwell, Great Morning, p. 96.
14. Elizabeth Salter, The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London: Bodley Head, 1967), p. 91.
15. Richard Greene, Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius (London: Virago, 2011), pp. 105–6.
Chapter 15: Leaving the Nest
1. Sitwell, Great Morning, p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 141.
3. Ibid., p. 228.
4. Ibid., p. 13.
5. J. Pearson, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 72.
6. Richard Greene (ed.), Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell (London: Virago, 2007), No. 18.
Chapter 16: The Great War, and Lady Ida’s Ordeal
1. Philip Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 54.
2. Osbert Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 78.
3. R.A., Box 565, Bundle 1.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Greene, Selected Letters, No. 21.
7. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 20.
8. Sitwell, Splendours and Miseries, p. 242.
9. Sitwell, For Want of the Golden City, p. 292.
10. Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room, pp. 79–85.
11. Ibid., p. 105.
12. Sitwell, Selected Poems, Old and New, p. 157.
13. Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room, p. 113.
14. Derek Parker (ed.), Sacheverell Sitwell: A Symposium (London: B. Rota, 1975), p.76.
15. Grover Smith (ed.), Letters of Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 141.
16. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 4.
Chapter 17: ‘Sitwellianism’
1. Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, p. 129.
2. Barry Day (ed.), The Complete Verse of Noël Coward (London: Methuen, 2011), p. 53.
3. Cecil Beaton, The Wandering Years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), p. 163.
4. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1975–80), vol. III, p. 428.
5. Gabriele Finaldi and Michael Kitson, Discovering the Italian Baroque: The Denis Mahon Collection (London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 12.
6. Parker, Sacheverell Sitwell: A Symposium, p. 16.
7. Ibid., p. 62.
8. Rebecca West, ‘Two Kinds of Memory’, in The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928).
9. Allan Wade (ed.), The Letters of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 776.
10. Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 38.
11. Penelope Middleboe (ed.), Edith Olivier From Her Journals 1924–48 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 98.
12. Nicolson and Trautmann, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III.
13. Ibid.
14. R. L. Mégroz, The Three Sitwells: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Grant Richards Press, 1927).
15. Powell, Messengers of Day, p. 35.
16. Cyril Connolly, The Evening Colonnade (London: David Bruce and Watson, 1973), p. 300.
Chapter 18: Rivalry with Bloomsbsury
1. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 1.
2. Parker, Sacheverell Sitwell: A Symposium, p. 16.
3. Ibid., p. 4.
4. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 101.
5. Nicolson and Trautmann, Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, p. 466.
6. Sitwell, Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 19.
7. R.A., Bundle 510.
8. R.A., Bundle 9.
9. Salter, Last Years of a Rebel, p. 58.
10. Glendinning, Edith Sitwell, pp. 194–5.
11. Sitwell, For Want of the Golden City, p. 277.
12. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930), p. 322.
13. Glendinning, Edith Sitwell, p. 85.
Chapter 19: Renishaw as Patronage
1. Parker, Sacheverell Sitwell: A Symposium, p. 12.
2. R.A., Box 501, Bundle 3.
3. Ibid.
4. Greene, Selected Letters, No. 65.
5. Sarah Bradford, Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), p. 128.
6. Salter, Last Years of a Rebel, p. 60.
7. Peter Quennell, The Marble Foot (London: Collins, 1976), p. 131–2.
8. Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries 1920–22 (London: Faber, 1981), pp. 75–8.
9. Middleboe, Edith Olivier, pp. 79–80.
10. Beverley Nichols, The Sweet and Twenties (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1958).
11. Powell, Messengers of Day, p. 164.
12. Christabel Aberconway, A Wiser Woman? A Book of Memories (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 8.
13. Percy and Ridley, Letters of Edwin Lutyens, p. 411.
14. Sir Peter Quennell, personal communication from a stay at Renishaw in 1978.
15. Salter, Last Years of a Rebel, p. 186.
16. Michael Davie (ed.), The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), pp. 329–30.
17. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 160.
18. Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room, p. 313.
Chapter 20: Marking Time in the Thirties
1. Middleboe, Edith Olivier, pp. 79–80.
2. Sir George Sitwell, Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse: Being Eight Short Lyrics with a Preface and Postscript (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1938), p. vi.
3. Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985), p. 166.
4. Letter from Sir George Sitwell to Reresby Sitwell, 28 November 1936, courtesy of Penelope, Lady Sitwell.
5. R.A., Box 537/ Bundle 13.
6. Letter from Sir George Sitwell to Reresby Sitwell, 19 July 1937, courtesy of Penelope, Lady Sitwell.
7. Pearson, Façades, p. 323.
8. Sitwell, Idle Fancies, pp. 71–2.
9. R.A., Box 501/ Bundle 3.
10. Letter from Sir George Sitwell to Reresby Sitwell, 26 November 1939, courtesy of Penelope, Lady Sitwell.
11. H.M. to author at a luncheon given by Sir Steven Runciman at the Athenaeum, June 1998.
Chapter 21: Renishaw and the Second World War
1. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 240.
2. Bryher, The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940–1946 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 22.
3. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 151.
4. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 253.
5. Quoted by George Orwell in Tribune, 31 December 1943.
6. R.A., Box 502.
7. R.A., Box 511.
8. R.A., Box 65.
9. Ibid.
10. Sunday Times, 22 March 1964.
11. Reresby Sitwell, personal communication.
12. Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells, p. 11.
13. Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), p. 148.
14. R.A., Box 511/5.
15. Mark Amory (ed.), The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson , 1980), p. 163.
16. R.A., Box 511/5.
17. R.A., Box 528/5.
18. Charlotte Mosley (ed.), The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (London: Hodder, 1996), p. 16.
19. Diary, May 1933, quoted in Vickers, Cecil Beaton, p. 166.
20. Mosley, Letters, p. 13.
21. Bryher, Days of Mars, pp. 174–5.
22. Cyril Connolly in Horizon XVI (No. 90), July 1947.
Chapter 22: The Sitwell Renaissance
1. Osbert Sitwell, Demos the Emperor (London: Macmillan, 1949).
2. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 320.
3. R.A., Box 532/6.
4. Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, p. 308.
5. R.A., Box 567/1.
6. Sitwell, For Want of the Golden City, p. 417.
7. Sitwell, Hortus Sitwellianus, p. 13; Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells, p. 11.
8. John Lehmann, A Nest of Tigers (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 243.
9. Mosley, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyen Waugh, pp. 113–17.
10. Pearson, Façades, p. 401.
11. Sitwell, Taken Care Of, p. 183.
12. Glendinning, Edith Sitwell, p. 200.
13. Salter, Last Years of a Rebel, p. 155.
14. Osbert Sitwell, On the Continent: A Book of Iniquities (London: Macmillan, 1958). Dedicated to the Kirsteins.
15. Amory, Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 204.
16. R.A., Box 571/4.
17. Amory, Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 380.
18. New York Times Magazine, 30 November 1952.
Chapter 23: Decay
1. R.A., Box 571/10.
2. Amory, Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 493.
3. R.A., Box 571/12.
4. Mark Amory (ed.), The Letters of Ann Fleming (London: The Harvill Press, 1985), p. 264.
5. Thekla Clark, Wystan and Chester (London: Faber, 1995), pp. 27–8.
6. Sir Steven Runciman, personal communication.
7. S. Sitwell, Serenade to a Sister, Brackley, Northamptonshire, 1974.
8. Personal observation (the author was a member of the St James’).
9. R.A., Box 158, Bundle 6.
10. Mosley, Letters, p. 484.
11. R.A., Box 572/2.
12. Ibid.
13. Bradford, Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries.
14. Greene, Edith Sitwell.
15. Pearson, Façades, p. 190.
Chapter 24: Renishaw Reborn
1. R.A., letter (8 October 1966) from Osbert Sitwell to Derek Morley, courtesy of Penelope, Lady Sitwell.
2. Penelope, Lady Sitwell, personal communication.
3. Sitwell, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells, p. 2.
4. R.A., letter from Reresby Sitwell to Osbert Sitwell, courtesy of Penelope, Lady Sitwell.
5. Ibid.
6. R.A., New Acquisitions Shelf 1.
7. Simon Jenkins, England’s Thousand Best Houses (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
8. James Lees-Milne, Ancient as the Hills: Diaries, 1973–1974 (London: John Murray, 1997).
9. Ibid.
10. Reresby Sitwell, ‘Robin Hood’s Bow’, lecture (Renishaw, 1996).
11. Sitwell, Hortus Sitwellianus, p. 123.
12. The Times, 1 April 2009.