How I Married Into the British Aristocracy - Julie's Diary Episode 1

hi everybody and welcome to our very very first episode here at mapperton live pippa has decided to join us as well and and i it's kind it's quite wonderful that we have pippa here because pippa wasn't here a year ago um no when things at all is only one that's right when things all changed for us so we are a year on from lockdown from when we first started lockdown and when things really started to change here as far as what are we going to do now that visitors can't come um now that everything's been shut and last this time a year ago we had this crazy idea that because we couldn't have physical visitors we'd start to try and do virtual visitors so we went on live yes online online and crossed our fingers some of you came and some of you came and watched these programs mostly with julie i was behind the camera because um we didn't have any help at that point no we weren't allowed and we had my mum and you and my dad and there were episodes like romping through the bedrooms and touring the church and all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff so you might have seen those and some of you might not have but you're going to see a lot more of those type of episodes and really kind of as we like to call backstage at britain's finest manor house so we want to just tell you a little bit about kind of the in the beginning when we first well when i first saw this place as the american and kind of how i've been able to really take it on the you know i think i've take it off yeah it's quite a lot to take on and projects that we're looking forward to doing in the future yeah so this as julie says this is the very first episode of of maps and live um and we're welcoming you all here today the truth is it's quite cold so i thought we might want to go into the kitchen yeah where it's a bit warmer and have a cup of tea yep by the yeah by the aga which i didn't know anything about agas by the way no not until i moved here now i love agas now i'm like oh my gosh how can you live without an agar in this house or in this country oh a lot warmer since we put the um the biomass heating system into the place yeah he'll say a lot warmer so so here come on you can yeah he'll say a lot warmer but the american in me is still a little bit cold just still a little bit cold so let's get by the aga right so we're into the back of the house coming through here um this is one that we still haven't painted it's a really kind of garish yellow yeah it is but can we just focus on that since we are going through the back of the house i love this so this is the old um bell system is that what you would call it yeah and it still works so somebody rings a bell from number one bedroom or the travel room really it still goes there's unfortunately no butler bringing your tea up anymore you could bring it up for me he could bring me up the tea there you go we're calling people for supper you see yes it's true that works really well that gets the kids down i think that was pre the bell system so first it was the gong then the bell system and now it's just shouting right which is true this is definitely warm okay this this is why i love i i mean i live in here because i love this aga well the art the alga is is about 50 years old i think and the amazing thing about argos is they haven't changed at all so if you buy an argo today there's almost nothing that is different about it right and what i didn't know also about well the agon and it being on 24 7. is if you can look up above me we've got some bed sheets hanging there because which i at first was like this is strange why am i walking into the kitchen and there's like a laundry line above me but it makes sense this house didn't have a tumble dryer until about four years ago everything was dried above every time you have a new generation taking over is a historic house they're going to come up with their own plans um and those plans are going to be based on things that they want to do and i suppose critically things that tie in with their expertise and experience yeah so i'd had another career working as an entrepreneur running a film school a production company etc you'd been helping me with with that as well um but coming down here i think we realized that there were really three things initially that we needed to do yeah right when we took it over the first was we wanted to get more visitors so more people to come and see the house and gardens the second was we wanted more weddings because weddings have been an incredibly helpful way to build income to support all the costs that we have here and the third linked to you this is where i finally come in which was which was to get the place set up so that we could host yoga retreat retreats exactly so so i think for me coming in you know as the american and really not knowing any of this history marrying into this family and then not knowing any of this history and then taking on this big historic house britain's finest manor house i really had to start to get my head around it but i also felt like i wanted to to make sure that something of me was involved in something of sort of here the montague sandwich family and that's where the yoga retreats came in so we really did think about this like how can we have people come and stay here and we thought yoga retreats because it's not like when we come and have yoga retreats there's huge parties here so they would be very responsible looking after the house the same time um having a lovely time enjoying the house and gardens but we had to we had to take many of the bedrooms and upgrade them to the 21st century but it but it was more than that wasn't it i mean there were there were all the bedrooms that we needed to make comfortable for people to come to stay many of the veterans didn't have bathrooms and i think when people come to stay for a yoga retreat they quite understand we need bathrooms so we we put in a lot of bathrooms we put in a complete new hot and cold water system which involved pulling up all the pipe work which was an extraordinary amount of work um and really quite scary because of all the leaks that we had in the process we're going to talk more about leaks because that's a bit of a recurring theme yeah there seems to be no end to those things but um but along with that we had to have a space where you can actually teach yoga and it so happened that we've got this wonderful big stable block called the south stable block which used to be quite a small tea room but it's been a perfect much bigger event space in which we can have weddings yoga events events everything but going back to the to the things that we did so um so we converted the south state block we put in new bedrooms and bathrooms here but the other point was you know this is a home this is somewhere where we need to live and we need to be able to have our children here we need to have friends it needs to be comfortable and warm and i think we also took a decision not to live full-time in the front of the house because often that was going to be open to the public and so we needed to make the back of the house uh comfy and um and a fun place to be and we kicked off the kitchen so the kitchen is completely different really i think to how it was before we put in um completely new cabinets the argo is exactly the same because that lasts forever um we did a bit of repainting yeah and people will ask just so i know because i know i bet some of you are going to ask so can you explain though luke the aga here this is really where the old hearth obviously the fire this is where before sort of electricity or oil or anything like that this is where the this is was the kitchen but this would have been the tudor kitchen i mean one of the amazing things that my parents did um was to restore the floor here as well this was all lino and they pulled it up and it was covered in glue black glue holding this lino and every little bit had to be painstakingly taken out and they've restored it so that you've got this wonderful flagstone floor and this is the big would have been the big tudor fireplace in fact when this when my parents initially renovated this um the poor chap i think was the builder who was supposed to be finding out what was going on he um he touched one of the boards up in there and the whole thing collapsed with centuries of birds nests and bird poo and all the nasty stuff that fell down the chimney is completely covered um luckily that didn't happen to us in fact there are lots of things that my parents did which thank heavens we we haven't had to do because of that one thing of course that they continue to do is look after the gardens yeah um and um and we're really grateful to my mum for doing that because that's yeah and she's been able both uh my in-laws the earl encounters a sandwich have been really taken me under their wing if you like and have definitely helped me as far as up my knowledge in the montague family but one of the things i think for me is finding out about the historical figures of the montague family there's so many of them and yes there's the famous one the fourth earl of sandwich everybody knows he's the one that the sandwich was named after but for me personally alberta sturgis who was the ninth countess of sandwich was an american so she came over as an american heiress during the gilded age and so during that period of 1870 in 1910 there was that gilded age and she came over married your great-grandfather uh george and um you know and she also came from chicago so i've been a little bit obsessed about alberta because she also saved every letter that she wrote to her family back in the states um every letter that she received she saved and she's and so we're still trying to get through all of that but alberta is somebody that i definitely want to continue because i've only just barely touched on her she's left so much of her mark here i want to continue to to embrace that and create something more of a memory around alberta yeah i think she's she's become even though you've never met her and i never met her i don't think i think she died by the time i was born um you know there are certain similarities i mean you both come from chicago you're both marrying into this rather odd eccentric family um it's not all straightforward is it i mean i mean it's you know a lot of it is wonderful but um and some of the people are wonderful and all of the people are wonderful but there are there are things that are different yeah so i think for me being able to really embrace the history here and i just want to show something that because you know that i try to really embrace it and get my head around it and make sure that when i'm telling people the stories of the painting of the first early sandwich that i don't mix it up with the painting of the fourth earl of sandwich church and it's very easily done and who's who and making sure that i say the right name like it's basil montague and not basil montague things like that okay i'll get i'll get things like that wrong but you know that i do love it and so and i and i think for an american especially seeing like the coat of arms and the crest everywhere is really i you know i get into it you grew up with it so it's not that big of a deal for you but for me i'm always like look at this coat of arms look at this look at this crest this is amazing so luke for my birthday this year found this um and with the help of our cameraman behind the camera found this and it did i opened it up uh a month ago and he and can you just explain and i had tears in my eyes because i couldn't believe it this is well explained well it's the code well it's a it's an 18th century print of our coat of arms so back then there would have been lots of prints made of different families coats of arms this is actually the very finest one we've seen because i don't know if you can see from the camera but the colors are so vivid and if you think of the the 18th century printing process i mean they might even have in some cases they used to actually paint over the top that's possibly what's happened here but it has in it um the coat of the montague family coat of arms um and you've got the lozenges the three lozenges which are the the uh the montague crest and you've got the coronet on the top which is the symbol well you know this now yeah i know this now which so there's five um balls which is a symbol of an earl so i know that um and then interestingly you've got our code uh not our current ones our motto our family motto which i've always thought is particularly apt um can you say it in latin first he's really good at that post tot now frogia portum which translated means after so many shipwrecks port and of course that's particularly poignant for the very first earl of sandwich who died in a terrible shipwreck when his boat was set fire in the anglo-dutch wars the battle of seoul bay in 1672 um because of course he didn't reach port after his shipwreck um and then later members of the family particularly the fourth earl have all had associations with the navy and the sea and exploration and captain cook um and we all love the city as well well you do well that's true you get rather seasick yeah and and and in fact we've got our youngest son oh good grief what were we doing we um we bought him a an 18-foot yacht no no we did not buy it for him he bought it himself he saved up his money saved all his money and it's it's a it's a boat that needs a lot of work and we really hope that there are no now frogia there are no shipwrecks with nestor so i think i'm going to be trailing him in my boat whenever he sets out because i'm not machine making a gurgle so um so yeah so so but i would quickly want to ask you a question yeah which is um when you first came here i remember you coming down the drive and i hadn't really prepared you for mapperton um and that was quite a shock but you also met my parents for the first time in in quite extraordinary circumstances i did so i did so i so a couple of things about that evening was number one or that day luke telling me that just so you know the house is kind of big and i was like that's okay i come from america the land of supersize so no problem there right but what he didn't prepare me for was not only was it rather large but it was old so i think there's a big difference in america when we think of big it's usually super size and brand new this was like super sized and 500 years old so i had to really take all that in and remember when i first arrived we didn't have all the plumbing that was done so only one place in the other kitchen small kitchen it was always a bit of a risk whether the lavatory was going to work when you pulled the chain the water was i going to you know end up being sick from it and it was that's true you couldn't drink the water at that stage right i couldn't drink the water at the stage and it was super cold so because we didn't have the biomass spoiler that's why i love it here why did you marry me i mean it's astonishing i'm not getting no comment no comment i'm not going to answer that you put me on the spot i'm just kidding um because you're lovely um so then we met his parents i met his parents your parents um some boar around here had escaped and so we were helping to track them because they can be very dangerous once they've escaped for other livestock so i met your parents having found the boar boars and met your parents and we sort of bonded over over wild boar over wild boar as one does in the west country of uh yeah that's when i didn't meet them here i met them out there in the woods in the woods over a ball over a boar yeah yeah you must have thought we were completely mad i did i did and i thought okay you have a choice you can either run away now and never come back here's one of those why's in your life you're hitting a junction in which way right exactly yeah so i stayed the course and here we are yes yes so so have we but i mean coming back to the motto because i do find that interesting as a sort of backdrop to our our lives um you know we've got quite a lot of challenges here we're we're trying to do things um in a way that will ensure that this place is able to be passed on to the next generation it's there's no denying that running a place like this is immensely challenging in terms of the costs because we've got lots of properties that need endless repair we've got lots of chapels so pictures and furniture and tapestries that all need restoration and work we've got roofs that leak we've got animals that escape we've got all sorts of things that happen here and so we i think what we've tried to do is to come up with things that we think are going to be part of the future here both in terms of things that interest us but also things that will generate income so yoga retreats is is one of those but these other ones we're wanting to cover in these mapping live episodes so so coming up we're going to be talking about things such as the cafe opening up so remember we've just come well we're just not technically we're still in lockdown but we're just easing out of lockdown now so there's several key dates and one of the big key dates is april 12th which we've opened the gardens up to the public now we are allowed to do that a couple of weeks ago but we weren't allowed to open up our cafe which is in the coach house and april 12th is like the big day our people going to come we're allowed people are allowed to sit outside so they can get a takeaway from the cafe and actually sit outside and i think that's going to be the big question is are people going to come and we basically have been closed for well closed and then open and then closed and then open for over a year now and you just and and the staff haven't been here so so the cafe chef hasn't been cooking for a year i hope he remembers yeah i do too well i hope he remembers how to make my my my julie's live well salad salad and things so so that's one of the big challenges reopening um but then we've also got other things that we've got going on so we've got new opportunities with a project that i've just started around rewilding and we're going to talk about this in a future episode but rewilding is this uh movement really towards restoring the balance of nature and allowing ecosystems to replenish and it really means thinking about the land in a slightly different way not just for intensive agriculture but also for wildlife and coupled with that we've got this venture to do some glamping so we've just been invent investing in bell tents which are six meters wide we're debating whether they can fit a double bed or a king site what do you think double bed king size double bedroom doubles enough yeah a bit snug i know but there's a lot of americans probably watching this they're probably the king king go for the king so we're maybe we should do okay so we've got to sort that out we've been working out the um the lavatory systems for them compost lose talking about compost yeah but it for me it goes back to the multi-q logo of after so many shipwrecks the harbor i kind of want to keep the shipwrecks at bay so i kind of want to be like no more shipwrecks let's save them before they become wrecked let's bring them into the harbor safely right right we'd all rather be sitting happily in a harbor anchored having a cup of tea than out in the kind of choppy waters of the mid-atlantic but i think some of that is a little bit inevitable because there are just things that are unpredictable for example with our glamping operation you know we've got to get the council to approve we've got to get the regulatory bodies to approve we've got to go to our neighbours we i mean they're there all i know is that it has to be approved there are so many in america you don't have that you can just basically do it yeah unfortunately it's build it it's not here there's a lot of improvement processes and also it's a historic house and you're on so for that there has to be a lot of approval and the land and yeah so that's where it just gets exhausted but then we have got some help from other members of the family so we've got my parents um the encounters of sandwich are going to be doing some tours as part of maps and live so they're going to be doing much more in-depth tours really looking at individual pictures and items in the different rooms things that they feel really um passionate about but nestor as well so our 14 year old son nesta is going to be doing a series on maps and live called mapperton safari where he's going to introduce you to all of the furry beasts that we have and the creepy crawly ones and the creepy crawlies so starting off looking at ones around mappington and then going out onto the estate to find slightly more exotic animals and i've even heard that there are white-tailed eagles flying over the estate now so maybe maybe he can spot yeah so we'll be doing lots of like live events and experiences i'll be doing experiences yoga meditation in the garden where you can join me live i also want to do somehow figure it out to do something with my you know my good old cold water swims so there's such a range of things that we're hoping to do hopefully it's not too much and we'd love to hear from people as to as to the things that you are most interested in um but obviously we'll be having weekly content coming out one of the other things that we're going to do is to go and visit some of our neighbors in in other local historic houses uh and see how they are running things because every everybody's got their own particular way anyway so we're this was our first episode here from rapperton live just to give you an update on all that we will be offering to every single one of you here and we just want to say thank you so much for your support for your generosity and of course um for joining us on this what we really feel is an incredible um journey and it wouldn't be near as much fun without having you all with us and hopefully not too many shipwrecks and lots of port no we're gonna no those shipwrecks are gonna be right coming into coming into the harbor safe and sound okay okay bye everybody [Music] i can't see a single car no i can't either where on earth is everybody well let's hope that they come out when the cafe opens up you

Channel: Julie Montagu: Yoga, Tea & the British Aristocracy

Views: 137,727

Rating: 4.9258704 out of 5

Keywords: lockdown, lockdown life, Mapperton house, mapperton, Mapperton estate, country house, manor house, aristocracy, aristocrat, an American aristocrat, coach house cafe, julie montagu, earl of sandwich, montagu, countess of sandwich, lord sandwich, lady sandwich, renovate, renovate a manor house, renovation, chateau diaries

Id: dspZZSeGbps

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021