So I was interested to see a write-up about the place in the heritage part of last Saturday's DT - where I learn that the £7.5m chipped in by you and me, that is to say the government, is pretty small beer when set against the total cost of restoration estimated to be of the order of £200m. And I had thought that the £7.5m was a bit strong. Will our friends from Saudi Arabia be helping out?
One of the wheezes the restoration trust is exploring is B&B. For so many pounds a night - say £250 for two for bed and breakfast - you get to pretend to be a noble lord - or at the very least a successful iron master or mill owner - for a night. Which prompts one to think about just how far the fake is going to be taken.
For £250 a night, do you get butlers in penguin suits, footmen in striped waistcoats (Simenon seems to think that this is a mark of true class) and maids in white caps & aprons? Porridge, kedgeree, kippers and devilled kidneys served from whacking great silver serving dishes. Silver plate at a pinch. Fancy cutlery. Noble lords and ladies at table with you - with conversation with them being a chargeable extra.
Would guests be expected to dress up too? It only seems right, in which case one might to have fit out one of the outbuildings as the dressing up department. Seamstresses, hairdressers, beauticians, massage parlour, the works. Maybe a MacDonald's for the children - can't expect them to like the stuff just mentioned.
And afterwards, horses to ride, woods and gardens to stroll in. Ponds and rivers to fish in. Fly, naturally. Home farm with deferential farmer's wife ready and waiting to show you her dairy.
Or perhaps for the same sort of sum, you can dress up and pretend to be a footman or a maid during the day and whoop it up in a grand, old-style beano in the servants' hall at night. Accordion. Dancing. Barrel of the finest beer sent down from upstairs. Probably more fun than fine dining.
Or perhaps for corporate hugging sessions, you can do a block booking and go in for full-on dinner in the state dining room. Dinner on the finest Spode. Brandy, cigars, whist and billiards after. Flirting in the conservatory. You might need to tweak things up a bit, maybe hire the odd resting actor (probably cheaper than real noble lords), so that dinner can count as a performance and so be exempt from the rules about smoking.
So perhaps the organisers at Wentworth Woodhouse need to go out to North America where this whole business of re-enactments is well established. There is, for example, a working village re-enacting life in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Ontario, on the north bank of the St. Lawence River, described at reference 5. As Sir Simon Jenkins once pointed out, during his days as Chief Heritage Officer at the National Trust, we should not be sniffy about what they get up to over the pond. Or at Disneyland for that matter.
In the olden days we were not always so sentimental and possessive as we are now about grand houses which were no longer needed. Nonsuch Palace, just up the road from us here at Epsom, one of the grandest houses of its day, was sold on for architectural salvage and building materials less than a hundred years after it was built. Not much more left now than the park which bears its name. And the £40,000 worth of model of reference 4.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/heritage.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/facades.html.
Reference 3: http://periodpiecesandportraiture.blogspot.com/2013/04/wentworth-woodhouse.html. The source of the image, said to be from the mini-series 'Wives and Daughters', which somehow passed us by. With this scene apparently set in Wentworth Woodhouse.
Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=nonsuch+house+mark+madonna. Where I wasn't even sure it was worth spending out on a model, never mind on the house itself!
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Canada_Village.
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