You are self-employed, best-known for writing fairly serious biographies that
give you an annual income of, at best, about £30,000. So how do you feel
when you inherit a 15-bed rose-brick Jacobean manor house in
Nottingham-shire, tucked away beyond a picture-perfect lane of 18th-century
houses and cottages, surrounded by undulating parkland and overlooking a
tranquil lake?
Ecstatic? Terrified? Or a mixture of the two?
I didn’t really understand what I was in for when, in 1994, I inherited
Thrumpton Hall from my father. I knew — we all did — that this was a house
that could inspire obsessive love. I also knew, all too well, that the house
could master me, as it had him.
I didn’t want that. If the house proved too difficult to maintain, too
expensive to keep in the state to which it had grown accustomed, I promised
myself that I would let it go. One glance at my mother, however, with whom
my husband and I still share the house, made it clear that this was not ever
going to be an option. Her life has been bound up in this place for 50
years; she knows it better than I, and loves it like an extension of
herself. When I asked where she would like her ashes buried, her answer was
predictable: in the garden of Thrumpton, close to the house she has helped
to save from ruin.
“Next to my father?” I asked, and weighed the pause before she said, smiling:
“No, darling. But adjacent.”
In 1950, my parents were in their mid-twenties when they borrowed £50,000 to
buy Thrumpton — estate duties had forced a sale, instead of my father being
granted the lifetime tenancy he had been led to believe he would receive on
the death of his uncle, Lord Byron, a descendant of the poet.
To fund the rescue of a derelict, chilly, underlit old home, and most of its
contents, my father had to sell off prime farm-land. The estate of 1,000
acres, a big house, and ownership of half a village shrank to less than 300
acres and a clutch of 13 houses and cottages, most of them semi-derelict.
The objective was achieved: the house he had adored since childhood was safe
from ruin, or from the grasp of a developer.
Owning an ancestral pile is, as Elizabeth Bowen, the Irish writer, wryly
noted, something between a raison d’êtreand a
predicament. It grants you a role, as its custodian. It confers — it would
be silly not to admit this — a proud sense of being somebody special, a
person of privilege.
It gives you land to roam at any time of day or night that strikes your fancy,
landscapes to embellish (or even create), rooms in which to indulge a taste
for solitary splendour or to entertain your friends — at Thrumpton, for
instance, we often have 20 people to stay for the summer cricket match, in
which chums of my brother and my son play the village team, to whom they
regularly and reluctantly lose. It’s fun to sit down to a candlelit dinner
in the dining-room, to play silly games in the garden, to dance on the
terrace, to show off to new visitors the house’s glories.
Thirteen years on, and conscious of all the pleasure that owning a ravishing
country house has brought into my life, I can better understand the passion
my father felt. I don’t share his need to identify with the place (“I have
therefore I am” runs another Bowenism he might have relished), nor to love
it with the proud intensity of a fond parent — or, even, of an author for
her book.
On the other hand, I’ve learned that running a stately home is neither so
simple nor so manageable as I had blithely supposed when I first took it on.
This kind of a paradise comes at a price. Fuel bills have rocketed; so has
the cost of maintenance, insurance, security. The complexities of handing on
the house — without ruining my 32-year-old son, Merlin, and his wife in the
process — are dismaying. Laws are tightened year by year, closing the
loopholes and raising the potential tax bill to far above the £2m mark. That
kind of sum can only come from further sales, diminishments — and massive
loans.
So, yes, there have been bleak moments, times when I have contemplated flight.
It’s the home I adore, but there is relief in driving back to a two-bed flat
in London, away from the weight of Thrumpton’s constant need for attention,
care, and cash. Money is what this glorious old place needs; selling it
would bring in a tidy sum — more than £6m in today’s market. But losing it
is a prospect I’m not willing to face. Of course, a new owner might protect
it just as fiercely as our family has done — but why, unless circumstances
make it impossible to carry on, forfeit the beauty that my father gave most
of his life and all of his love to preserve? For money? Could money fill the
hole in my heart such a loss would create?
The problems of staying heart-whole are considerable. My father, always shrewd
where his home was concerned , enjoyed the benefits of a system known as
“one-estate election”, a benign arrangement that enabled the costs of
running and repairing a stately home to be set against the whole estate as
losses. Seven years ago, the “one-estate” ruling was abolished. The Historic
Houses Association announced last year that approximately £130m of repairs
would be needed to maintain the 1,500 privately owned houses that it
represents (about 600 of these are open to the public). Without the
existence of the “one-estate” system, or some similar form of tax relief, it
isn’t clear how such enormous bills will be met — or how these treasured
houses will survive.
My parents were always on the side of public access. Thrumpton, less than 20
miles from Nottingham, was open to all, every weekend, from the time that I
was a tot. Later, since visitor numbers became increasingly hard to predict,
the house was shown to parties only by appointment. We still do the tours
ourselves, for groups of between 20 and 50 people. As a source of income, it
is irregular and unrewarding. The six state rooms have to be opened, aired
and heated, and specially cleaned. Coffee and biscuits, let alone a catered
lunch, aren’t easily provided to the touring groups in the absence of a
resident staff. A good day can bring in a couple of hundred pounds. We get
about a dozen tours a year.
This, plainly, is not the way forward. Neither, with an annual expenditure of
nearly £90,000 on wages, repairs, insurance — the electricity and oil bills
are each at least £6,000 a year — is reliance on the old-fashioned rental
system. Agricultural rent for a small grazing estate is modest (about £4,000
income in 2006) and shrinking by the year: the 13 cottages and houses, when
fully occupied, brought in £42,000 last year, of which £19,000 went into
basic maintenance and repairs. These are old buildings, and we’re paying
today for the fact that my father favoured the upkeep of his own house above
those of his tenants.
The cottages could, of course, be sold, but that, as any land agent will tell
you, is like selling off, piecemeal, the family silver. Besides which, a
house that’s sold, despite strict planning controls, can soon change its
looks; in a village as tiny as ours, with its single old-fashioned lane,
appearances need to be protected.
And so, nervously, I have embarked on the well-trodden route of using the
house as a venue for weddings, celebrations, conferences: anything, in
short, that might help assuage its ravenous need of capital for upkeep.
Untrained as a business-woman, I needed first to gain some mastery of figures.
Business Link, a government body that provides practical advice for
business, produced Bob Wilmot, a shrewd and patient man who was willing —
the service is free to new businesses — to sit down for half a day, once a
fortnight, and tutor a novice on marketing plans, location analysis, and
manageable targets. I had found myself a good teacher. Soon, directed by
Wilmot, I had assembled the small team that now manages our events. Key to
our burgeoning success was that we all liked each other and we all loved the
house.
We have just completed our first year of running Thrumpton Hall as a venue.
I’m not sure what my father would think, but I’m elated and hopeful.
In just 12 months, the annual revenue has increased by 90%. The house is
full of life again, as it was always meant to be. Healthy forward bookings
suggest a well-designed website, plus good word-of-mouth, have been key to
Thrumpton Hall’s newfound success, combined with attentive supervision,
constant flexibility and the decision, taken early on, to keep events to a
manageable size, while ensuring each client sole use for each occasion.
Quite soon, we’re hoping that Thrumpton will be able to pay for itself.
Bowen’s predicament has turned out to be our raison d’être.
The hall has found a way to survive.
www.thrumptonhall.com
- In My Father’s House, by Miranda Seymour, is published by Simon and
Schuster (£14.99) and is available through Sunday Times Books First for
£13.49 including free UK postage and packing, 0870 165 8585, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
A very interesting article, but I am sorry that you have not mentioned anything about, who I believe were the original
occupants of the hall. My ancestors "the Peutrells", who were at Thrumpton from the 12th century until 1605, being involved
in the Gunpowder Plot". History that not mentioned.
Dennis Powdrill, Loughborough, England