History of Waddesdon Manor

maude Stern is a phenomenon in lots of ways I mean who would expect to find a French chateau in the middle of the English countryside and it's very much the vision of one man baron ferdinand de rothschild who acquired the estate in 1874 and set about creating a place in the country where he could bring friends and family to entertain them at weekends and so what's done really sprung from that but he chose Buckinghamshire because he knew the county very well other members of his family had already started to build the most extraordinary houses in the vicinity in fact Buckinghamshire was often referred to as Rothschild show in the 19th century because so many members of the family lived here it was a sort of phenomenon because the Rothschild family having made a lot of money in the 19th century and having come from the ghetto Frankfurt with nothing decided to build on a huge scale throughout Europe most of those houses have now gone Wasden remains as the one with his collections intact and they're growing one of the really astonishing things about this house is that Ferdinand began from scratch there was nothing on this bare hill when he started out and the house was assembled and the grounds all around it in an astonishingly short space of time Ferdinand held his first house party in May 1880 six years after he'd bought the estate from the do come over what Dunn was renowned for the quality of the hospitality and the entertainment that was given further guests came from all walks of life but the real pinnacle was his royal visitors Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales who visited on numerous occasions Ferdinand continued to entertain for the next eighteen years but it's clear from some of his own writing that he worried about Waterston's future thankfully Ferdinand did need to worry so much because his sister miss Alice who inherited from him very much saw herself as the custodian of Berlin's legacy at watch stem we have in the archives a wonderful photo of Miss Alice from about 1910 when she is towards the end of her life and she still managed to look like this wonderful kind of bustling bundle of energy she had an incredible eye for detail in every aspect of life at wood stone but the area's she's particularly remembered for is the gardens and we have wonderful very early color photographs of the garden from that time on stereoscopic glass slides that you looked at through a viewer and you got an almost 3d idea of what the gardens would have looked like when Alice died in 1922 she left wood stone and her other properties quite unexpectedly to James de rothschild of the Paris Rothschilds and his English wife Dorothy James and Dorothy remained childless but during the war during World War 2 in fact there were a hundred children who were evacuated from London because of the bombing and who took over Watson everything was cleared out for them after the war James began to worry about what would happen to watched in the future the same way that Ferdinand had and he decided the best thing to do would be to bequeath the manor and its collections to the National Trust with a large endowment and the management committee chaired by a member of the family in this case Dorothy so it was up to Dorothy to open the house in 1959 two years after james died and she continued to run the house in her position as chair of the committee until her death in 1988 at which point she herself bequeathed that interest to Lord Rothschild Wendell Rothschild took over Maude stone embarked a different trajectory in lots of ways through the rostral foundation of which he is the chair and it's the foundation which underpins all of Watson's activities on behalf of the National Trust because of his passion for contemporary art for example that means that we can now explore contemporary art in all sorts of different forms whether it's through new acquisitions or through buildings like this extraordinary room that we're sitting in now which houses both the archive but is also the home of the Rothschild foundation so in recent years Watson has seen a renaissance really when the collections are being preserved but are also being added to the gardens have all been restored and I think it's a real reflection of the interest of the family in the committee family to this property which they care about so much and which will take it into the future you

Channel: Waddesdon Manor

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Keywords: waddesdon manor, national trust, aylesbury, Visit Britain, english heritage, victorian, architecture, art, rothschild, Destailleur, Rothschild Collections

Id: GIh8TB4aQMM

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2016