MEETING AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT IN ENGLAND: Find out where the sandwich was invented (Part 1)

good afternoon hello we are on our way to dorset yes we're gonna visit mapperton yeah mapperton estate we will have an amazing collaboration with julie montague yeah and we'll share more of the details later on so we're on our way to dorset but we thought we would split the the journey in half yes so we're gonna make a stopover in bristol yeah we booked a hotel room and to be honest with you we are quite hungry and we stopped here at the service station called gloucester yes in cluster yeah let's go inside let's go i'm hungry so this is called red dragon pie and it's gluten free and yogurt's got chips and some lasagna enjoy yeah yeah really hungry now aren't you [Music] so this is our place for tonight and the name is taldworth court so that's the room it looks quite simple but the good thing is it's not tiny so that's really good compared to london where rooms are usually really small and outrageously expensive still so as we said earlier yoga and i are going to mappington in dorset tomorrow morning and we can't wait yes because it says it's one of the finest country houses in britain yeah it looks really really stunning and actually just one historic houses garden of the year 2020 award i think they had that online ceremony two days ago yes and i've seen some pictures of a garden and drum footage of the garden in its momminess oh god the topiary yeah looks so romantic and the house mapperton house is home to the earl and duchess of sandwich yes but it's run by their son yeah and luke luke and his wife julie montague yeah and yeah we hope we can hear more about the history and how they run the estate because i think that's really interesting and i think that's quite challenging oh yeah yeah and we will film more for you that of course we hope and they also have julie has a youtube channel and there's another youtube channel mapperton house so nice to check out the videos and i believe if you like our channel you will love this channel oh absolutely so make sure to subscribe because it's really worth it good morning breakfast time we don't have much time left like five minutes and then we have to go to mappington yeah [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so we are in mappington now this is mappiton house and gardens it looks amazing and now let's meet julie come on [Applause] [Music] there we go let's how are you fine you made it you found it yes we found it great and the house is amazing well you haven't even seen the inside yet so to be seen it's so nice to have you okay so um um this is so nice that you're here yes and could you please introduce yourself hi everybody this is so nice um so my name is julie montague but sometimes i'm also known as vicantus hinchingbrook which is well i'm going to explain why i have that title but it's really comes from the earl of sandwich so that ancestor of ours that made that uh sandwich famous that we all know the sandwich comes from the family that i married into so one day i actually will be the countess of sandwich which would be quite funny considering i do really like sandwiches yeah um there you go so what i thought i would do is i would just give everybody um a tour so all right okay so i'm gonna just pin points just um so everybody's aware what during the pandemic we obviously had to close the house off and we still don't have visitors yet back in so apart from you guys um private visitors so this is the kind of the part of the house that we start to give tours and when that happens but you're all going to get a virtual tool right now and i'm really just going to pinpoint sort of three interesting things which in in each room to make it yeah more fun yeah and um yeah i'm going to give you the tour but i'm also going to give you all the tour and then any questions you have yeah just like ask away i might not be able to answer all of them because i'm married into the family so and i'm american as you can uh here um so i think first and foremost we're in what's called the hall and what's interesting about the hall is a couple of things is the ceiling up above it's an arts and crafts ceiling so it used to be much higher but during the arts and crafts period they lowered the ceiling and then you can see they put this beautiful plaster work here so this is the arts and crafts ceiling here so that's late victorian yes yeah when it was like super fashionable um so really beautiful and then the ceiling was lowered in order to create this arts and crafts ceiling then i think the other thing that people always ask about is this of course this mantle uh the fireplace we do use this um but you can see very very much up there york if you can see it's 1604 and that's i'm really going to start to talk about the period of the house that we're in so it's a real mixture this mapperton is tudor it's jacobean and it's also georgian and we're going to go into the tudor part of the house as well i think probably the most important painting in this room is going to be this chap with the gorgeous collar here but the slightly weird hands and i'll explain why so this is this is lord montague of balton and he's considered really the founding father of the montague family so this was painted in early 1500s i don't know the exact date but um interestingly enough about the hands is it was more expensive like your paintings would cost more if you would have your hands like painted it in real life and he didn't so the painter just would then put the hands on themselves and so that's why they're a bit creepy so we put a plant here to hide them seriously that's why so we put the plant there although it needs to be watered um to kind of hide it to hide those sort of scary looking hands like you said i'll just a couple more things is this is catherine braganza she was married to she was the queen she was married to king charles ii and she was a queen of portugal and to either side here i have the first earl of sandwich but he was very very young there this was before he became earl and so he was edward montague and then his wife so they get to look at each other across the room and purposely set it up so that they can see each other for the rest of their hanging lives um and that's his wife jemima who became the first countess of sandwich and i'll explain why the title came to be so here they're just edward and jemima montague but he was a great naval officer and the title came a little bit later she's related to that title in a second okay so again this is the historic part of the house and i'm gonna walk into this room right now so this is the tudor room and roughly around 15 40s 1550s is when this part of the house was built so just a couple of things in here that are worth noting is this furniture right here comes from the uh the fourth earl of sandwich so it's like it was like his ship furniture so this was the furniture that was on one of his ships and uh speaking of the fourth earl of sandwich there he is himself yes so the fourth url of sandwich uh he is the one that the famous snack sandwich is actually named after the rumor is is that he was playing gambling cards all that stuff gambling gambling that's the rumor and that he didn't want to get his cards greasy so he asked his butler to put the roast beef in between two pieces of bread yeah to not get them greasy yeah and but that's the rumor so we believe that the real life story is that he was a fantastic politician naval officer worked so much that he was always working at his desk and therefore he didn't want to get his papers greasy and so he asked so you heard it here first oh yeah the other thing to mention is the rug that i'm standing on right now which is the obasan rug and what i learned um when i married into this family was that obasan is a town a village really in france and um in i think it's around 18th century 1700s the obasan was known for making these rugs for for royalty so that's these and so this rug we've had again for 300 years and we just had it repaired i mean you can see it's been but all this right here used to have as of last month used to have huge holes in it so we had uh doris come in and really really repair um all of this it took her i think five weeks this is the tudor part of the house this is the part this is the house that part of the house that was built first and what's interesting is the original tutor door is behind this paneling so i'm gonna open it up okay be super careful um open this up and [Music] there is with some very vintage christmas ornaments in there as well exactly it's now become storage but you can see can you see the outline yeah you can see it all the tutor door so and then of course you know they came and they because this part of the house is the georgian part when you go around and you look at the architecture you'll be able to tell because the windows are different and it's a georgian facade and they obviously hold all the you know uh stoned all this up and then created the door over there yeah so that's i mean fascinating right now we're in the staircase hall so in the staircase hall is where we obviously have a lot of paintings but i'm going to go through two of the main paintings well one main painting and one of my favorite paintings first and foremost you've got the first earl of sandwich so we saw him before he became of the early sandwich in the other room when he was just lovely edward montague and the reason the edward montague became the first early sandwiches because he was head of the um of the royal navy so um what is it so it was the first sea lord yeah exactly exactly so he when charles the first king charles the first was executed and there was that period that there wasn't a monarch then the restoration period came through so he in one sense edward montague well he did he went on a secret mission to holland to um to bring back king charles the first son charles ii from exile brought him back and that was the period of restoration so king charles ii became king and uh he was given then a title for doing that great brave uh task if you like and he was given the title earl yeah but he because he was a great naval officer he chose a port right he wanted to choose a port and he originally wanted to choose portsmouth so we could all be eating portsmouth's right now okay right but but he that was taken so that was taken so right so he ended up going with sandwich so sandwiches in kent and it used to be a very famous uh naval port so yeah so that's where that's where it came from so we're all eating sandwiches named after a city really in um a town in in england ah okay that's something exactly so then i'm gonna take you up here and we're gonna head up here because this is the best spot to get my the best spot to get alberta so for me personally this is my favorite painting this is a painting of alberta sturgis she's an american and she came over during the gilded age like if you have downton abbey fans who are listening to this just like lady grantham the american who the countess who came over um during the gilded age and she married lord grantham and the gilded age is really that period between 1870 and 1910 that women came over to marry into the aristocracy the new money americans were not allowed to socialize and go to the high society parties of old money like the asters in particular and so what the during this gilded age mothers would bring over their american daughters to europe and in one sense you know try to see if they could marry them off and during that period in particular taxes started coming in these old historic houses did need money so they exchanged their money for their titles just like so alberta is just like downton abbey so she came over married george montague in 1905 and she became then the ninth countess of sandwich and and lived over here so i have this real love and slight obsession of alberta and that painting would have been done in about the 1920s it's beautiful isn't it just beautiful okay so this is kind of like this is the room that everybody wants to see when they come and visit mapperton and take a tour i can't blame them right so this is again we're still in the tudor part of the house so again this is 1540s 1550s this room is called the great chamber and it's um noticeable obviously and and and known i should say for its pendant ceiling and this exact same pendant ceiling is in hampton court palace we're one of the very few homes that actually has a pendant ceiling because obviously it's the tudor period so yes almost 500 years old um but what the great chamber what's interesting about the name the great chamber is the great chamber in in old houses like ours in historic houses like ours it was named the great chamber because that's where the lord of the house would come to retire if you like so not retire and go to sleep but sort of get away from everybody so it wasn't his library it was just his place to relax and put his feet up um and so this was the great chamber when this was originally built this is where the lord of the house would just go to to rest and relax but we've now created into a bedroom so this is a bedroom and uh we've got quite a few four poster beds around the house um i can't remember what that dates to a house like this is beautiful right and it's but it's also really old so everywhere we go we just are like oh and there's another leak and that needs to be restored prepared that's broken yeah and you know we just said like last night we said so many people us included tend to romanticize a house like this and how it would be to live there yeah whereas in reality it's so challenging it's so it it's so challenging that it can it's a lot it's so much work and both i have another full-time job my husband has a full-time it's like so much work so it's just like it's never ending so our weekends as much as we would love to enjoy a place like this i'm afraid our weekends are pretty much at work and i don't want to have your heating bill the heating bill well the nice thing about the heating euro gets a really good question is when my husband and i took over the running of the estates in about four years ago you're right the heating bill was a big deal so we built beyond um the cafe that you'll see the shed you might have seen when you came in that's our biomass boiler okay so our biomass spoiler has really helped shave that bill right down so yeah so everything's heated now by wood chips oh good and eventually those wood chips will be coming from the estate right now we're we haven't been able to harvest our own wood but we're looking to do that in the future so this room this is the last one i'm going to show you because it's i call it it's beautiful but i for me it's like it has one of the biggest projects in here that i want to to do but it's there's a lot i mean the cost of restoring what i want to restore is in the thousands of pounds so it's way down on the list but still it's a it's something that i'm obsessed with so this is this is called the west room i have this reminds me of emma the film emma the 2020 version oh right because this chemistry looks the same and i was so obsessed with it in the film did you know that the gwyneth paltrow emma was filmed here by the way they did a lot of filming here so we had emma guerra pacho and then far from the madding crowd carrie mulligan and then recently netflix's rebecca with lily james yes yes all wonderful films yeah i know i know of all of you we will link them for you in case you haven't watched them because you need to watch them yeah and you'll reckon then you'll start to recognize different spots so yeah rebecca was the gardens yeah carrie mulligan you'll see the whole of the uh far from the manning crowd you'll see the whole of the house and the emma the gwyneth paltrow's version i'm pretty sure the gardens as well that's right but the tapestry is like from the 2020 version have you seen my gosh no i need to see it so interestingly enough these tapestries are again they are 18th century tapestries um and i am desperate to get them repaired restore everything so they have not been cleaned in 300 years yep and you what happened was when when during the victorian period what victorians did is they would cut the tapestries in order to hang in the part of the house where yeah it would fit in order to heat the house yeah because tapestries of course were made beautifully but they were in one sense to heat the house to keep right that's why they i mean of course they're a work of art but they're a work of art that heated the house if you like yeah but you can see firstly how dirty it is it hasn't been cleaned because the cost of that is thousands of pounds but also you can see how we've had to piece them back together because the during the the victorians cut through and so again they would have cut this one um at on some level that bird right yeah just to notice all these beautiful creatures and on the tapestries you have to get so close because it hasn't been cleaned because again taking this is a place i went to visited in in belgium called uh mecklen and it's the place to have your tapestries restored and cleaned but it's thousands of pounds yeah so that's not gonna be happening for a long time so bizarrely this is my favorite room of the house it's called the thunderbox lou basically blue our toilet okay so this it probably doesn't look dark york or is it okay it's good is it good okay so this is the thunderbox lou and as an american i had never seen one of these before but it's where you glue to the loo and we just had it restored the whole thing was just restored and i'm trying to see there is a date on there uh somewhere i can't see it i don't want to stick my head in there but um there we go but we just had the bowl restored but it used to be that the chamber pots would go here so the chamber pots would go here but now i'm going to do it for you yeah now we've got plumbing [Music] and we've got a good plush so there you go that is the thunderbox how interesting that's funny [Music] so i'm going to give you all just a little kind of exterior tour if you like yeah um we're standing obviously in sort of what is now the front of the house and um again the house is i always the house is your is tudor jacobean and georgian so we're gonna i'm gonna take you around um to really the georgian facade part of the house so there was a georgian facade put up over the tudor room area and you'll see the difference so you can see all the lead windows here yeah feel the led windows and the lovely thing is the clematis that's creeping around you're getting unless luckily you came right in time to see it before it disappears until next year and there's like lovely doorways throughout for really good for instagram shopping yes yeah exactly so here is the croquet lawn but this used to be the garden before the sunken gardens were built which i'm going to leave you to explore once i show you this was actually the the garden itself the party garden and um but we're going to see here georgian facade because it was very fashionable yeah to have that look yeah you can see the sash windows yes [Music] guard these sunken gardens were built in between 1920 and 1927 so it was a seven year project and i'm quoting my mother-in-law here as well it's quite an extraordinary thing to see formal gardens like this uh in you know connected to a manor house you would you normally see these formal gardens in a much grander house right so it's it's um it's wonderful for us we're very so further down here this is the uh well this is my favorite part of the gardens is the pool which you're gonna go explore but this is where i go for uh a dunk most days when i'm here at mapperton um two minutes it's freezing cold it's like a pond we just cleaned it recently and it really invigorates me and re-energizes me and that's why i do it because it's really it's supposed to be fantastic for energy so so i want you to go explore that we will maybe uh yeah we'll go in there yeah you can feel free to go swimming if you want to yeah i'm going to leave them now to go swimming

Channel: Kirsten & Joerg: 2 Germans in Britain

Views: 82,241

Keywords: kirsten & joerg, meeting an american aristocrat in england: find out where the sandwich was invented, the chateau diaries, cool aristocrats in england, uk travel, the most beautiful manor houses in england, the most romantic english gardens, Mapperton house and gardens in dorset, the modern downton abbey, the earl of sandwich invented the sandwich, nicolas fairford, julie montagu mapperton house, julie montagu american aristocrat, ladies of london, julie montagu, mapperton house

Id: JRkmw9bI7cM

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021