hen Osbert left England in 1965, he gave Renishaw to Reresby Sitwell – who, as Sachie’s elder son, was ultimate heir to the baronetcy. What made this a little less painful was Osbert’s fondness for his nephew. He told friends, ‘Renishaw is made for Reresby and Reresby for Renishaw,’ and that he liked to ‘think of them as belonging to each other’.1 In the event, Osbert had far more grounds for saying this than he can ever have guessed.
Born in 1927, Reresby was tall, heavily built and high-coloured. He had the same thick hair as his uncle, to whom physically he bore a certain resemblance, if his voice was not so deep. He had tremendous presence and zest for life, a keen sense of fun, and his laughter filled the room; his arrival at a boring party had the impact of a mass blood transfusion. He was fond of wine, cigars and good conversation, and was an enthusiastic traveller. Because of his appearance, some observers thought him a throwback to the Sitwell squires of the Regency; but he neither hunted nor shot, from dislike of inflicting pain.
Although he could write – as he showed in a book on Mount Athos co-written with John Julius Norwich, the preface to a new edition of Hortus Sitwellianus and a fine booklet on Renishaw – he lacked any sense of vocation as a writer, no doubt intimidated by the family’s output. On the other hand, he would always show impeccable taste in pictures, furniture and gardens, together with a strong feeling for family history.
Like Osbert, he loathed Eton, which he remembered as cold and dirty because of the war. In contrast, he enjoyed National Service with the Grenadier Guards, during which he was commissioned and spent nearly three years in occupied Germany. (His company commander Miles Fitzalan-Howard, later Duke of Norfolk, recalled that he was a natural soldier – ‘very good with the men’.) After going down from Cambridge and various unsatisfying jobs, he became a wine merchant in a firm whose senior partner was Bruce Shand, father of the future Duchess of Cornwall.
In 1952 Reresby married a beautiful Anglo-Irish girl, Penelope Forbes, who came from a background even more patrician than Lady Ida’s. (The Forbes have been noble since 1442 while her uncle, the eighth Earl of Granard, was Master of the Horse to Edward VII and George VI.) Despite her childhood being overshadowed by the death of her father in a motor accident, Penelope became a formidable, resourceful personality, no less colourful than her husband. She was a tall, slim, striking brunette whose intelligence was on a par with her looks – during the war she had worked as a code-breaker.
Unshakably loyal, Penelope gave Reresby rock-like support throughout their long marriage and proved to be the ideal partner for the renewal of Renishaw Hall. She was well equipped to deal with an impossible mother-in-law, brushing aside repeated attempts at interference. (The archives are full of abusive letters from Georgia.) Nor did she take any notice of Sachie’s outrage when, asking his granddaughter the name of her dachshund, he was told ‘Heinz Sacheverell Sitwell Prickles’.
Penelope never forgot her first visit by herself to Renishaw during the mid-1950s, having recently married Reresby. Osbert gave her a pleasant welcome, as he liked and admired her, while she found him amusing. Yet the atmosphere at lunch was not exactly easy. The new butler, who was in love with his employer, resented beautiful ladies. Nor did the agent seem to like women. After walking by the lakes, she had to clean soot off her shoes and stockings.
The evening was even more daunting. Save in one room, lighting was still provided by oil lamps or candles. After dinner, Edith, her alarmingly Gothic new aunt, announced, ‘Dear child, it is time you went to bed,’ picking up two huge silver candlesticks, one of which she handed to her. Having led Penelope up stairs and along a pitch-black, seemingly endless corridor to a cavernous bedroom, she left her cowering in the darkness with the single candle.2
Despite this unpromising start, the couple fell hopelessly in love with Renishaw, and became devoted to every stone and blade of grass. Years later, Reresby captured its spell perfectly when he wrote of a
strange compelling atmosphere which seems always to have held a mysterious grip upon all who live or work here, an enchantment that will not appeal to everyone – and may well be tempered by the vagaries of climate – but has led one visitor, the artist Rex Whistler, to declare that Renishaw ‘was the most exciting place he knew’.3
It was also the most exciting place known by Reresby and his wife. ‘Renishaw looks more beautiful in this lovely spring each time we go there,’ he wrote to Osbert in March 1966. ‘No wonder you found handing it over such a terrible wrench . . . I wonder what you will think of some of our minor alterations and re-groupings of furniture? On the whole I think many of the things we have done are what you would have got round to if you were more mobile.’4 Yet despite many invitations, Osbert never returned to the place he had loved above all. ‘Although I should very much like to see Renishaw again, I cannot see myself travelling to Sheffield under any circumstances,’ he explained to Penelope in a letter of January 1968. ‘But if I ever made up my mind to come to Renishaw, you and Reresby must be there too.’5
For a few years, however, Renishaw had a rival in Reresby’s affections – Montegufoni. In August 1968 he wrote to Osbert after learning that he, and not Sachie, would inherit the great Tuscan castello.
I have to thank you for so many things . . . above all, of course, for Renishaw and all its treasures – so many of them surprises I never expected, the family estates, the farms and the woods I have got to know so well these last few years, all these things and now the promise of more.
Your letter in fact reached me yesterday morning. I should, of course, have written to you at once but, although I never doubted your word, once you had made your decision and told me, yet somehow I felt stunned and unable to marshal my thoughts on paper. All I can say is that, poor Christian as I am, my fervent prayers are that your present comparative improvement in health will long continue and that you will be spared a good many years more to enjoy Montegufoni.6
The embittered Blossom still managed to be a nuisance. Suspecting that he was no longer going to inherit Montegufoni as Osbert had once promised, despite having plenty of money he demanded some of Renishaw’s more valuable pictures, which he insisted had been given to him. Osbert told his nephew to take no notice.
For some years after Osbert’s death Reresby spent a few weeks each summer at Montegufoni, and his enjoyment of the castello’s Chianti led him to plant a vineyard in Derbyshire. Finally, however, realising he must choose between Renishaw and Montegufoni, he chose Renishaw. It was a brave choice with a Labour government in power and Denis Healey threatening to ‘squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked’. It was also a lucky one. Had he stayed in Tuscany, the flamboyant ‘Barone Inglese’ up at the castello could well have become a target for kidnappers when the Brigate Rosse – the Italian revolutionary movement – emerged at the end of the decade. Montegufoni was sold in 1976.
To a large extent what Reresby and Penelope did at Renishaw, inside and out, was to turn Sir George’s plans into reality. To begin with, however, even to live in the house was a daunting experience. Upon taking over in autumn 1965, they and their young daughter Alexandra had to live with electric light in only a few rooms and no heating. It was so cold that during that first winter they sometimes preferred to read the newspapers in the warmth of the car. It all needed vast expenditure to put right. When heat and light finally came, separate electric circuits were installed to reduce costs.
After modernising the kitchen in the former Preserves Room (the old kitchen, with its copper pots and pans, being kept as a museum) – and after providing seventeen bedrooms with baths – there still remained the problem of staff, the upstairs–downstairs world having vanished with the war. During the 1960s, many owners of great houses who had not yet learned to live without servants abandoned the struggle, selling their homes.
At Renishaw, the problem was solved by staff from the village, finally culminating with the charming Pat and Sheila – renowned for their beautiful frilled aprons and splendid hairstyles – who came in daily to cook as well as clean. They produced (and at the time of writing still produce) meals reminiscent of a good French restaurant.
Until 1979 the butler (unpaid) was Leedham, who did not notice the passage of time, and much to Alexandra Sitwell’s embarrassment laid a child’s small knife and fork for her on her twenty-first birthday. On retiring, he was replaced by a weekend butler, Philip – otherwise an electrician – who was fascinated by life at the hall. (‘There’s diamonds as big as pigeons’ eggs in there,’ he remarked during dinner for a ball at Chatsworth.)
The immediate task, Penelope recalled, was just tidying up. Then she and her husband embarked on a methodical restoration, the first room reclaimed being the ballroom from use as a junk room. It was repainted as a temporary measure by the then cleaners’ husbands, and given curtains that Penelope made herself. Sir George’s Brustolon chairs were moved into it from the Great Drawing Room, as was Belisarius in Disgrace. Most rooms were repapered fairly quickly, but as late as 1975 discoloured paper still flapped on the walls of the Duke’s Wing.
Gradually Renishaw became a masterpiece of decoration. The Great Drawing Room was repainted in subtle colours. Instead of being carpeted its wooden floor was stencilled and then varnished by Paul and Janet Czainski with designs inspired by the floor of Empress Maria Feodorovna’s state bedroom, which Reresby and Penelope had seen at the Pavlovsk Palace in St Petersburg. An immense Regency colza-oil chandelier from Sir Sitwell’s time was converted to electricity, lighting the room as it had never been lit before.
The dining room regained some of its original furnishings. Five of its Chippendale dining chairs were returned from Weston, then joined by three more found at an antique shop in Sheffield, the set being completed by a skilled cabinetmaker.
Another drawing room became ‘the Print Room’, with eighteenth-century engravings pasted on its walls in place of wallpaper, inspired by one seen in a great Irish house. The walls of the Stone Hall (the old stairwell) were covered with a hundred blue and white plates brought back from China by Osbert. The ghost wing was given electric light, which at last got rid of its uncanny atmosphere.
Penelope went to a London workshop to learn gilding so that she could put life back into faded furniture and picture frames, while the cabinets and commodes were cleaned and renewed. The collection continued to grow, one acquisition being a big Derbyshire Blue John urn of about 1810 that was joined by two Blue John topped tables.
Some of the bedrooms, such as Osbert’s, ‘Lady Margaret’s’ or ‘the Duke’s’ needed little refurnishing, but others had been sadly neglected. Mouldering ostrich plumes were removed from the four-poster beds while country house sales were regularly attended to find better tables and chairs. All received new curtains and carpets.
Osbert’s study was left untouched. Reresby would sometimes invite one or two guests into it, then read them his uncle’s story of the only recorded English vampire, imitating Osbert’s deep voice, which made for an unsettling performance. When there alone, he himself thought it had an eerie feeling. One afternoon, leaning out of the study window in a reverie, he suddenly felt a cold hand pressing down on the back of his neck. For a few long seconds he remained petrified, unable to move – only to find that a creeper growing on the wall outside had become detached and fallen on him. As his uncle had written in ‘Night’, the poem which conjured up the haunting of Renishaw Hall, ‘A shudder from the ivy that entwines/The horror that is felt within its grip . . .’ ‘Night’ was much admired by Reresby, who read it again and again, feeling it reflected his own sense of hearing faint echoes of what had happened there long ago.
Renishaw is a benevolent and cheerful dwelling, a welcoming place of happy memories. Yet, as in most old houses, there have been ghosts. A blue-haired American lady who had heard the story of the Boy in Pink complained of not being woken by him – nobody cared to tell her that she wasn’t young or pretty enough. Even so, the middle-aged pianist Moura Lympany, scarcely a raving beauty, was convinced she had been kissed by him and seen his beautiful face drifting away.
The Boy was not Renishaw’s only phantom, but Philip Ziegler went too far in claiming that it was infested with ghosts in the way another house might be by rats. More recently, Simon Jenkins gave a lurid summary in his England’s Thousand Best Houses.7 Even when Jenkins wrote, however, he was out of date, since they had all gone.
While Reresby did not object to the Boy in Pink, he took drastic measures to get rid of the others, having the house exorcised first by an archdeacon, then by a rabbi and finally by Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, the former Catholic chaplain at Cambridge. He reinforced their ministrations with fresh paint, redecorating every room. Since then, there have been no more hauntings.
A silver plate on the ballroom wall commemorates a ball given by Reresby and Penelope in 1977 for 700 guests, to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and also Alexandra’s coming out. It was an epic party on the scale of Sir Sitwell Sitwell’s routs. The hall was filled with flowers, the gardens and statues were floodlit, and the gas flambeaux by the main porch had their mantles removed, roaring flames into the night. The hosts stood at the door to greet guests, Penelope and their daughter Alexandra in ballgowns made by the famous Rahvis sisters.
‘The best music I have heard for a long time,’ wrote one guest. ‘If it had gone on any longer, I should have been dead on my feet. The breakfast and champagne were a great sustenance in the middle of the dancing.’ Another thought the party more impressive than the Shah’s coronation. It was all paid for by some broken sixteenth-century Maiolica plates, hoarded by Osbert, that Penelope found in a cupboard.
Almost every weekend the couple entertained with house parties in more or less pre-war style, but only changing for dinner on Saturdays. As many as sixteen guests would arrive on Friday in time for dinner. There was always a cheerful welcome from the hosts, who sat on or by the fender in front of the fireplace in the old hall that still served as a drawing room.
Although the guests were no longer predominantly writers and artists as in Osbert’s time – even if they often included John Piper and Moura Lympany – they were no less interesting. Among the grander were the aged Duke of Portland, who had a platonic crush on Penelope and drove a car much too small for a duke, and Baron Élie de Rothschild (the colourful owner of Château Lafite) and his wife Liliane, whom Reresby thought ‘the most intelligent woman I ever met’. But at meals you might just as well find yourself sitting next to a gardener or a cabinetmaker in black ties.
The diarist James Lees-Milne, who came with his wife Alvilde in 1974, recaptures one such weekend in Ancient as the Hills. For years he had longed to see Renishaw, and wished he had done so during Osbert’s time, for ‘then it must have been more Gothic and gloom-filled than it is now. Reresby and Penelope have brightened it up.’ He thought the Chippendale commode ‘about the most beautiful piece of furniture in all England’. There were ten other guests, delicious food and ‘an old family butler who obliges for house parties but will accept no recompense, no gratuity’.8
As for their host and hostess, he thought Penelope beautiful and stately while Reresby was ‘a very sweet fellow’ who reminded him of Sachie. Even so, Lees-Milne took exception to his ‘coarse streak’. When showing them their bedroom, Reresby said to Alvilde Lees-Milne, ‘If Jim gets too randy, you can always put the bolster in the middle.’9 (They realised he knew they were both bisexual.) When Lees-Milne left he presented Penelope with his novel about incest, Heretics in Love, carefully writing in his dedication on the fly-leaf that ‘this insalubrious tale was written by, and not about me’.
During these weekends, on the first morning Reresby would take his guests on a tour of the house with a talk that became an increasingly polished performance. (He enjoyed being a travel lecturer, his subjects ranging from ancient Egypt to Robin Hood.) High points of the Renishaw lecture were attributing the other commode in the Great Drawing Room to Chippendale – ‘unsigned but the work of the Master at his very best’ – or how Sargent in his portrait had given Edith a straight nose and Sir George a crooked one, when the reverse was true. All this was spoken in a voice deepened to add solemnity.
The talk included details of family heraldry, such as his forebears the Morleys of Hopewell having borne rabbits on their coat, ‘a fine example of canting arms’. There was advice on restoring furniture, and how it is cheaper to use the very best craftsmen just as ‘sometimes it is cheaper to eat at Claridges’. Other topics were Robin Hood, about whom he knew a great deal (having written a pamphlet on the subject),10 and a local crusader and namesake, St Reresby – ‘the canonisation is purely local’. There were also some extremely amusing stories in Derbyshire dialect.
Tours of the Renishaw gardens could be equally memorable. After the Second World War these had become almost a jungle, as Osbert lacked the energy to restore them. Their comprehensive re-creation after 1965, with innovations that included planting a hundred species of rose and creating a ‘White Garden’, was a saga to which the host did full justice.
There were afternoon excursions, sometimes to tour a ducal house – Haddon, Hardwick or Chatsworth – but also to see the Christmas lights at a mining village, or to visit a gigantic black pig who lived contentedly in a small cottage kitchen. Alternatively there might be a picnic near the ruins of Bolsover Castle (of which the guests would already have seen an evocative Piper painting in the hall at Renishaw) or beside the forlorn shell of Sutton Scarsdale, once a glorious Georgian mansion.
At Sutton Scarsdale, during an al fresco lunch, the host would explain that in 1946 his uncle Osbert had bought what was left of the place to save it from demolition, and that he himself had sold it to the Ministry of Works for £200 – which was why the house eventually went to English Heritage. After this Reresby would recount, with gusto and vivid anatomical detail, his theory of how the (presumably) castrated Mr Arkwright and his wife had served as models for D. H. Lawrence when he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
In 1984 Reresby published Hortus Sitwellianus. This was an elegant new edition of Sir George’s On the Making of Gardens, with a short foreword by Sacheverell, an introduction consisting of an excerpt from Osbert’s memoirs and an essay by Reresby, ‘The Gardens at Renishaw’.
Reresby’s essay gives us some idea of the sheer magnitude of their restoration, which was very much in the spirit of his grandfather. To begin with, he and Penelope trod carefully: ‘When the new owners took over Renishaw in 1965, at first they had to be cautious not to offend their uncle by too dramatic alterations,’ writes Reresby. He goes on:
The destruction of the sunken gardens had to be glossed over but, gradually gaining confidence, they put in hand other minor improvements. So the Water Garden was completed, by paving the unfinished side with coping stones taken from the walls of a derelict orchard. At the same time, a wrought-iron footbridge that had connected the bottom of the wilderness with the South Park and become redundant, was placed to join the ‘island’ with the ‘mainland’, so that one can walk from the end of the grass ‘causeway’ over the tops of the water-lilies on the far side.
He adds, showing his own passionate love for the gardens, ‘one of the great minor pleasures of Renishaw is to gaze at the many-coloured water-lilies, opening and closing their flowers according to the time of day, and feed the swarms of coruscating goldfish’.11
Sir George might not have liked some innovations, such as the ‘Yuccary’ in the Orangery (restored in 1999), which houses the National Collection of Yuccas – thirty species of unlovely plants from the deserts of the western United States, some very rare. Nor might he have cared for the dachshund cemetery in Sir Sitwell Sitwell’s Gothic temple. Yet he would have been charmed by Reresby’s ‘Auricula theatres’ – tiny display cabinets whose shelves hold pot after pot of these exquisite little flowers.
In 1983 Reresby served as High Sheriff for Derbyshire. Wearing Osbert’s court sword and velvet court dress, he swore an oath of loyalty to the Queen before the Lord Lieutenant at Derby Cathedral while trumpeters in the uniform of the old Derbyshire Yeomanry played Haydn’s Derbyshire Marches. Again in court dress, he acted as returning officer for the general election that year. What pleased him was the sense of continuity from his forebears.
These were the ‘golden years’ of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, but far from happy ones for many in Derbyshire. The miners who had brought down Mr Heath met their match, and when their strike failed the mines’ closure meant widespread misery. On the other hand, lower taxation made it easier to maintain Renishaw, while soot-blackened grass and the red gleam of pit-head lights at night became things of the past.
In 1997 Reresby told the Sheffield Telegraph, in an interview for a Piper exhibition, ‘I tend to regard Renishaw as the mistress of my old age, beautiful, charming, moody and unpredictable.’ By now he had ensured that Renishaw Hall was playing a role in the life of the local countryside, and of Derbyshire as a whole.
Guided tours of the house had started, as well as concerts and plays in the gardens, while a museum with art galleries was created in the stables, with display cases designed by Alec Cobb. The galleries included a Museum of Sitwell Memorabilia and an exhibition of John Piper’s works. This contribution to local culture was recognised in 2004 when Sheffield University gave Reresby an honorary doctorate – which delighted him, as the Trio had all received doctorates from Sheffield.
Meanwhile, in Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’, the lord of the manors of Eckington and Barlborough in Derbyshire, of Whiston and Brampton-en-le-Morthen in Yorkshire, remained a Victorian squire who was accepted as such for miles around because of his affability and good nature. He kept up rent dinners, inviting farmers to dine at the hall twice a year so that they could drink Her Majesty’s health and pay the rent. An improving landlord, he took a practical interest in his estate’s thirty or so farms, regularly inspecting farm buildings. On one occasion during the demolition of a ruined cottage, the arms of Richard III, with their white boar supporters, were found painted on a wattle-and-daub wall – but they crumbled into dust before his eyes.
In old age, Reresby grew to look even more like his uncle. In 1999 the Queen Mother lent four Pipers from her own collection for an exhibition at Renishaw, and soon afterwards lunched at the Sitwells’ London house. She was so struck by the resemblance between Reresby and Osbert that – aged ninety-nine – she announced as she left, ‘I feel rejuvenated!’
Having suffered a stroke that increasingly slowed him down, Reresby died at the end of March 2009, a fortnight before his eighty-second birthday. Until the end, he remained devoted to Renishaw – I remember him leaving it for London when a shadow of his former self, murmuring as we drove away down the drive, ‘Goodbye, dear old house.’ A few months before his death, he had left instructions for a great diamond-shaped funeral hatchment with his coat-of-arms to be hung over the north porch when he died – a gesture that would have delighted his grandfather. During the funeral service in Eckington parish church, at Alexandra’s request, Osbert’s poem ‘Night’ was read.
Nobody who knew Reresby could disagree with the obituary in The Times: ‘Fun-loving, flirtatious and gently feudal, he won the love and affection of a wide and diverse circle of friends and tenants.’12 His monument is a reborn Renishaw Hall – more enduring than any of the Trio’s writings.
In the end, Sir George triumphed, because Reresby and Penelope ensured that his plans were realised while adding much that was their own invention. Together the pair developed every aspect of Renishaw’s power to please. Today, even the most casual visitor can sense the spell that it has cast on the generations of Sitwells who have lived there.