Mapperton House highlights and reflections tour with the Earl and Countess of Sandwich

hello hello everybody hello everybody in america in england all over the world i see there are people from vermont manhattan illinois ontario fishborne uh west sussex breadport down the road and a lot of others who i mentioned later welcome and welcome back to many of you as well yeah very very much thank you so much for looking at us yet again how can you bear to do it but this one is going to be a very different tour because it's john and me talking about how we've lived here some of the fun bits some of the some of the odd bits and wandering around the house as a couple who lived here for so many years and we won't agree on everything all the time good lord now we don't agree on much actually it would be grim but we do agree we're in the front courtyard here it's very warm so we won't belong and i only want to tell you two little stories about the front courtyard and i think john's going to talk about the roof one of the little stories relates to a time you see we lived here and my father-in-law was here my parents came and we used to run a show with very little help and a lot of work and i remember one christmas when it was very very cold and it was just before christmas all the people who helped us on the estate had gone home and they were having christmas when i walked out into the courtyard here and looked over there and there was a manhole which was kind of coming up and full of neat sewage oh no yeah yeah yeah however i know it's very bad to start with the first story of being sewage um however it was all frozen and we walked in and out over christmas we went to parties we invited people in nobody noticed exactly i think we must change the subject because what we're really talking about is the changes that we've made and i think we want to show you one up on this roof of the north wing of the house which is the oldest wing of the house we've replaced all those roof tiles at a quite a cost and uh doubtless there will be more to do quite soon so we're always aware of the things that can happen to these old buildings you can see the difference between the windows already some have been restored that one's had a magnolia on the left uh protecting it but you know the the tiles are interesting because they're tiny tiles at the top and big tiles at the bottom they're all new and came from a quarry we had the most wonderful surveyor called tracy and unfortunately she emigrated to new zealand it was a real loss to it to us and to anybody who managed to have her helping them really she's really great what else have we done in this we should be going in oh we've put in plants all over here these plants are ours and then there's a really important another manhole here not the same story different story and as luke goes past it he'll show you that there is no uh grass growing there and that is the manhole that always tells us when there's a drought as soon as that goes dry we know we're in for a drought and we'll now go straight in and into the dining room as we go and admire some of the detail of the 17th century house owned by richard rodrick they were all one family from the middle ages up until 1919 and richard has signed himself in the stonework all ham hill and it says rb 1666 and he was also represented um here over the doorway those were the griffins that were his emblem so we'll go into the house let's we'll should we go in into this little into the little hole and then go into the dining into the dining room should we go in first no this is a dining room which i maintained has had a very smart smart 17th century ceiling ah now this is one of the great moments mind the step here thank you this is one of the great moments when john and i were doing tours one after another and he he came in saying very fine 17th century ceiling up here and i came in after him saying no it's not it's now you said very fine 17th century ceiling and i said no it's not it's 20th century and it's mrs la boucher who bought the house in 1919 and the reason i know oh i thought i knew was that we'd had a leak you know in these houses you always have leaks the radiators leak and the ceilings come down and so on and i'd have to the only way of getting the water out from the ceiling without it coming down is to drive a skewer in right in the knife him and i'd done this in one of the soft 16th century ceilings but when i had to do it in this room it was as hard as concrete this particular plaster work so i reckon it was a mrs labusha and i felt rather like that character in a play called lettuce and lovage if any of you ever saw it you know when you throw your hands to the cnc and this is the perfect whatever it is ceiling yeah and we look at it clearly more clearly closely and we saw a parliamentary port colors absolutely so that revealed that it could have been mrs labosha's liberal member of parliament relation oh so do you want to tell the story about the tapestry well the tapestry wasn't very sad well the tapestry was a tapestry that came from the family house hinchingbrook in huntingdon and the only um piece of wall space that was big enough for it was here and a very kind iranian friend of mine mended it it was mended perfectly by him some probably 30 years ago now of course with the sun coming in and age it's got little hells all over it julie would like no doubt to mend it um but uh it's a big job it also no longer has a border this side yes on the left on the left hand side because just before our house tour the housekeeper then walked in and saw that our labrador dog had been chewing it well i don't think we ought to tell that story but it's a bit late and so she took it off all the way down so they're all sorts of stories of how you live in these places and how you negotiate difficulties all the time but it does need restoration doesn't it well i mean it actually of course i mean massive restoration if it's going to be anything at all these pictures of course also their frames need restoring because i think they've got live worm in them but again that's another thing and there's live worm in these oh yes look lovely live worm there look look beautiful live worm all the way up and down and it's um you try to do one bit and another bit turns up but now i can see who's online hello to baltimore oh i'm going to start at the top it's terribly exciting heavens i can't do all these manhattan houston illinois i've said palm bridge dorchester that's around the corner southern california new jersey uh someone picking black currents don't understand that aylesbury buckinghamshire california again seattle fish born in west sussex mississippi new york again hinsdale illinois i guess new jersey ohio i mean sometimes i can't pronounce these american airs minnesota oklahoma new orleans alabama singapore florida texas reading berkshire again atlanta uh arkansas i think we'll be here all day oh all right welcome everybody it's absolutely wonderful that you're all there and i hope we're giving you a pleasurable half hour but this is a lovely dining room we've had christmas here we've had dinner parties here we've had birthday parties uh this was one good addition by my father an indian carpet made in agra originally yep um and we but we never have a father because that chimney is always full of jackdaws and you can't do it let's go next door then right through into the great hall now we've got a rather sad story to tell you in a minute um but basically this is an original hall 17th century hall which extended through to the dining room where we where we were just now and the paneling is civil war and the story of the family um i'll tell you in a moment is from that period the time of oliver cromwell but i think we'll have to tell you a very sad thing that occurred um it was the time of my father-in-law's funeral so we're talking about 1997. um we had the bbc making a film of tom jones the famous novel um and so we decided to move all the important paintings to a warehouse which we knew was a trusted warehouse in bridport and unfortunately they went up in flames all but one of them uh i mean how we were to know that an arsonist had decided to visit his mother in bridport just at the time we had our pictures in store and we lost a lot because it was a terrible tragedy because we we knew and we loved some of those paintings dearly and the good side of it i'll leave you to tell them well the good side is that of course we bought um other paintings and we bought uh if we're in this room we bought the portrait of catherine of braganza there and we bought a picture of the first earl of sandwich's mother uh sister eliza over there yeah and then we bought and we had a version of this version of lord and we bought um uh jemima the first count as his brother there so um we are very lucky in the sense we got good insurance and we were able to cover the holes on the wall so i'll take you slowly back to the first the first deal of sandwich but this time he was simply edward montague and if you read books about samuel peeps who was his cousin you'll hear that they had a very quiet happy family life 10 children all survived which is quite unusual and he went went to war as a young man with grom on cromwell's side because he lived in well he lived in the former cromwell house at hinchingbrook huntington and so we could tell you all that story but i think just you know we've done some of that before i'm going to tell you some other things we haven't talked about well just in a word he became the earl of sandwich so maybe some people who don't know that and we'll talk about him later on and jemima's his wife over there jemima who was a friend of the darius samuel peeps but here do you see this bit of sculpture up here you know every sort of country house had to have its bit of classical sculpture and this is um a reproduction of a bit of a freeze from a greek temple in south greece and it's a pic it represents greek men killing trancing and killing um uh um hip-hop what are they called amazon women and then that is one the amazon queen is down on the ground there and what is so shocking about it is that it's an allegory for greek men representing civilization doing away with amazon women representing barbarism and i've said this to a number of tours and sometimes the men in the tours cheer to my chagra no i don't you don't yeah oh and this this piece of furniture here comes from my family and we always call we always call it the bug cabinet in fact it's one of these cabinets of curiosity that you had in the 19th century and it has a lot of specimens in it nobody normally sees this really quite secretly and there is one one of the drawers of butterflies and beetles and locusts and heaven knows what um it's it was a very well-known thing in the 19th century to have this kind of cabinet it came from a family called back house who were quakers and bankers in york in the north uh and relations of mine it's fun it's full of shells and some of the some of the exhibits are pre darwin's publication of the origin of species do you want to mention her too [Applause] i'm sorry i was just going to mention somebody who's always left out who is the daughter of the earl of rochester she was she was called elizabeth and she became the third countess of sandwich and the story went that she kept her husband on bread and water and he wasn't actually up to much but i'm mentioning her because she was a famous beauty and well known to the likes of uh all that all the cultures of of that time this is this is now just mentioned sorry um this is this is uh jemima the first countess of sandwich painted by lily and this painting went through the fire and so she was restored most painstakingly in a in a studio in bristol and we were very grateful for that but it is an example of how famous painting can come back to life i used to do you remember johnny when you're in london working and i was down here either looking after the estate or doing things i um used to sit in this room in the evening my father-in-law used to sit in the library and i used to sit in here and i got very very spooked by it because at 10 to 9 every evening the windows rattled and i thought why should mappington have a ghost that just has got such a good sense of time and i mentioned this to some other dorset folk and they said don't you know that's when the concord the supersonic airliner breaks the sound barrier over bristol and after that i understood and i wasn't scared sitting in the sofa over there if it wasn't my father thundering about it in the bathroom overhead even though that bathroom used to leak so we are we moving on now yep sure which way so we're going to the staircase hall i think mom might want to see if there are any questions yes of course i will no this is worth the display this is part of the the decoration of the house when we have visitors so it's all ready for you today a magnificent plant which is called well that's a begonia that talks and i have no idea what this is and if any of you know please just sort of put it online for me i've never known it's flawed for six months maybe somebody might know exactly have you got any question oh um oh dear i don't see any questions at the moment except one luke from your um son nestor who wants to know what the rarest butterfly is in the bug cabinet well that's up to him to find out it's not my job right right um i'm sorry you lost paintings in that bread portfolio my friends lost their house contents which is much worse than losing paintings much much worse um uh somebody was asking about the tapestry in the dining room do we normally keep the sun off the tapestry well not enough yes we do and we draw the curtains but they good now we're in the staircase hall with all the pictures a lot of john's till i finish off on the first step you're going to finish off i'm just going to finish this we're going to polish the first hair off polish them off because some of you will have seen them but i think some of you won't have seen them the first elves sandwich was made the ambassador in madrid and so i always think of him uh sorting out the civil war with portugal and spain um for two years he was over there and it was then that he got rather addicted to chocolate and he started writing recipes from local physicians for chocolate ice cream one of them i think he sold to king charles ii so that's the story i usually tell i'm sorry if you've had it before and then finally his death in 1672 this is the battle of seoul bay and i'm now going to advertise naval paintings uh in a future tour because we'll be telling the story of that sea battle when the first l drowned with hundreds of men in that ship you'll see on the right hand side going down all because the duke of york couldn't get off the sand which other pictures johnny are you going to talk about here or two we could just mention captain cook here because it's such an important part of the story we've done we've done a a captain cook um tour already but it was um one of the achievements of the fourth the second voyage and the third voyage of captain cook so i'll say no more about that and on that i will accept that we would like the endeavor oh well yes we were talking about did you talk about that previously yes raising the the ship the endeavor from the mud in rhode island i think we have newport rhode island and i suppose i would want to talk about only just about these two pictures here that is of authors mancini the niece of the duke of she was supposed to be charles the second last mistress but knowing charles ii well not knowing him but knowing about charles ii i suspect she wasn't i mean her dress is quite suggestive but there we go i mean that was the sort of look away if you don't like it and then her friend was and that's a picture we just cleaned ninon de lonclo who was a kind of parisian intellectual of the same period we cleaned um that picture it cost four thousand pounds to clean and we then discovered who it was by because la guilier's signature was on the back and the next picture we have to clean is this larger picture of anne boyle who was the um niece of the great boyle boyle's law which i'm sure you can all recite about pressure temperature and pressure um with her uncle i think uncle yeah and and you can see where the restoration is needed in the background there particularly and i know that i'm meant to and would like to say any contributions will go directly to restoration and restoration and conservation and i think one of the first things that needs doing at the moment is cleaning and restoring and boil and she will stop looking so yellow and she'll go pink like nina under longclaw so while we're on the theme of conservation i don't know whether we can look at that portrait of the emperor charles v above and boyle and you'll see that one is he's in shining armor but the armor is only shining because the courthold institute helped us to both identify and to restore the painting and so it's a famous titian copy and the original edition doesn't exist the copy was made in the school of rubens 100 years later so it is the time of henry v but not in in reality it's 100 years later now i've got one or two questions i'm sorry johnny are you going on i've got one or two questions i have to put my glasses on and look really fierce to be able to read the text here do fine art paintings require professional maintenance such as dusting or cleaning well we used sort of um if you do maintain if you do any maintenance it's got to be done by professionals that's why we dust the frames we don't dust the dust the surface of the picture as much how often do we clean the paintings well we as i said we don't really clean the painting as they are but if we have one cleaned quote some quotes it has to be done by a very serious professional firm usually taken to london and done properly and cost thousands four figures yes always but it's a good thing to do them properly if you're going to do them you've got to do them properly and she's she's a candidate at the moment so looking up to the ceiling reminds me of a terrible day when we had leaks in the roof and uh this was normal winter conditions we're going back to the first time we were here we did really didn't know what to do at that time except put little pots under the drips and some of the drips came from this wonderful cocoa ceiling so i'm afraid you're getting the sad and bad side of the story as well but it was extraordinary that was the big freeze when um articulated um when trunks we look at this motorway simply couldn't move because they're diesel froze that everything grows in this house not least because do hunters to her father the evening before had looked at his weather chart and thought it was reasonably mild and so he turned the central heating down it all froze it froze john was here i was in london thank goodness looking after children at that point john put buckets and and there was a constant sound of drip drip drip and one of those saturn's one of those people um on the corners of these portrait of these ceiling there he had a permanent drip on the end of his nose for about a month or two and if you want to hear read more about this i do strongly recommend you john's diary oh thank you which is called mapperton moments and is available um on amazon it's a it says available on mappington.com oh sorry yes isabella bafferton.com which is better for us than amazon sorry i got it wrong again but i always get things wrong that's the way i think amazon's got pregnant um it's about living here and living with his father it's also a poignant story of his father getting uh more absent-minded and rarely getting dementia and how john dealt with it i recommend it to i really do another advertisement for a future tour god is martha ray we thought we'd do something about the fourth earth private life because she was the one who was the young singer who came along when his wife was demented and certified and really couldn't live with him anymore in fact it it was it was a hindrance to his son's wedding that his wife was or her his mother was demented which terrible reflection on the time anyway along came martha and that's the whole story which we'll tell you later um the only other um picture i'm going to point out is i'm not going to point out because i'm going running late so i'm going to go into the room do what i'm told not that i like doing what i'm told we do need lights on in here you know we do we really do turn them all on johnny honestly it's dim we're now when i'm in the drawing room um which is a room on which we have done so much restoration and repairs i mean it looks as if it's always looked like this it most certainly hasn't uh virtually every piece of furniture well not quite all but almost two-thirds of the furniture in here has been restored by us in one way or another these sofas this sofa here and that's over there were in the old days when we first came here covered in the most hideous dark gree olive dark green velvet and we sat on them after dinner in evening dress i hated to say um and then we had them all redone and covered in light material um the um the that big seascape there by samuel scott we had they had the frame had so much live worm in it that we had to have the whole frame taken picture taken out of the frame and the frame taken to london and restored um do you want to show the country life picture of the room as it was yeah if you like it's at the very end and we also moved the family portraits we've moved family portraits into here to give it some stature and make it look good so here mom do you want to just describe what we're looking at um yeah well where where are we there's the um um not that different well it's sort of a bit dull isn't it and it doesn't seem to have got no sofas well if we look at the room now and it's cozy now well you can see it it's not that cosy but it's fairly cozy and the pictures are all the pictures are fine and then of course there's obersong carpet that was in rags we've had that restored some wonderful ladies came volume yes volunteers and now it really needs it again where does it need it oh you can yes look there or down here or down there wherever you are or all over there and that of course is where house tours go yeah yeah yeah yeah and then there's this wonderful story of the statue here in the corner oops of the six counties louisa lowry curry that statue is by the famous neoclassical sculptor torvalds and danish sculpt torvaldson my father-in-law used to keep it in the orangery down in the garden and then finally i got a letter from our insurers saying dear lady sandwich i know would have been lady hinchinbrook i'm afraid we can no longer ensure a torvaldson in in a in the orangery with no security at all and so we brought it up here and she's been here ever since she was chosen to be on loan to the tate gallery oh yes that's right she then went on loan to the tape gallery for an exhibition and she was clean no it was actually beautifully cleaned well it made her very very white as she is now it made the rest of the room look really rather grubby and shabby i mean i was always looking for shabby chic but this was straight shabby and then the curtains used to be the most wonderful silk damask in complete holes all over the place until i was shocked to hear some garden visitors outside saying oh they must be a bit down on their luck look at their curtains and so we renewed them so should we get back to the library and then we'll think we'll have to end soon how are we doing on time no idea we'll have help possible already don't worry dad it's there okay watch out for the cable okay oops i think there's a question yes you go on johnny well maybe you have a look yes i'm just look out for the thing well i'm just getting into this really it's probably likely to go on for much longer now let's have a look what oh yes there's a question saying um did the children was it difficult to teach the children to respect um these historic the historic star historic pieces no not really on the whole the children when there was more live more at the other end of the house not so much at this end yeah but they're also very observant as to what one is doing and also i mean they haven't talked actually and that's not very good look well i know look at this oh it's absolutely shocking let's just have a look honestly peeling paint peeling paint peeling paint that was only painted say four years ago now this is the library so this is where i'm going over here well john is going to show you books that we've restored well there are quite a lot of examples here you don't have to go very close to see the condition but this is what we have been doing this kind of thing a really proper job a new spine which is in keeping with the vellum of the original and this is part of the first cell journal so it's terribly important to keep these in the styles of which they're custom do you want to show an example then there's one here which is terribly afraid it's rather an important book which belonged to the fourth house what's that what's it about johnny well that's the that's the record of his um journey around the mediterranean you know he was he was quite a traveler himself the fourther so a lot of these things were collected by him and in the drawing room which we didn't have time to show you yeah it works but this also is where my father-in-law used to sit and watch television um oh yes in that chat and he was sitting in that chair and we were very worried about that because it's said to be the dutch burger masters chair in which king charles ii sat when he was being restored to his throne um the only problem is that it is actually 18th century indonesia identified this 20 years later and it is never mind it's still looking very very nice and we used to sit in here um it's a wonderful cozy winter room with a big wood burning stove and all the taps were used to clean the chimneys you used to say oh you shouldn't really have that stove you know that's a very big chimney you know you're going to get a lot of tar up there and i used to say yes yes thank you very much i'm sure you're right but we continued to do it this tour has gone so fast i hadn't realized it's we've come to an end now i'll be really yeah well wait a minute there's one more question that i would like to the question is um uh what is oh hang on a lot what is your favorite room in the house you just like to sit in and relax yours over the library yes yes room uh wait a minute do you keep a journal now john well yeah very short very few words um thank you any hidden room behind those books no way those books go back to the back of the bookcase no uh do you keep a journal now what is that i've done that is your son filming and talking in the background yes he is it's wonderful keeping him in the keeping him in the background like that yeah you do yourself turn around and do yourself um can i do it for you no i can't ask better better safe enough um yeah there's something else oh yes um would you consider a similar program with a reading from mappiton moments and then a live q and a sort of book club golly well that's a very kind compliment a very good suggestion we might do that um and the other question is what's the kitchen like well the answer is and i think it would be quite fun to do a tour of the kitchen the cellars the pantry and that's quite a different that is a very different scene although of course they used to be there for lots of servants and when we first came the kitchen was diabolical um with pipes all right don't give ending away if you're saving it for a long time mark i think this is the moment when you thank everybody oh right and you can you say if you've enjoyed the talk oh hang on i can do that you can do all of that i understand that we've got to finish and finish up julie listening to you never mind um we can't do it as well um thank you very very much for coming in and listening to us doing our rambly tour through the bottom of the house there's a different one there and actually we didn't disagree much which is remarkable um and thank you all very much indeed and the more you contribute the better we'll look after her hesitate and as i've said before you know any small amount of loose coins contributes to the cleaning of the pictures and the mending of the carpets and all the other things we have to the books thank you very much and the donation page is mappington.com live it's funny how one's children that kind of know these things better right thank you

Channel: Mapperton Live: Backstage at Britains Finest Manor

Views: 47,142

Rating: 4.966361 out of 5

Keywords: Mapperton house, Dorset, Earl of Sandwich, montagu, sandwich, history, british history, grand historic tours, stately home, stately home tour, countess of sandwich

Id: AeHaCsriG4A

Length: 36min 0sec (2160 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020