Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power. Claudia Renton

house was enormous. Built of green sandstone with a red-brick top floor, it looked like a storybook house that, like Alice, had found a cake saying ‘eat me’ and mushroomed to a hundred times its normal size. ‘I … keep discovering new rooms inside and windows outside,’ marvelled Georgie Burne-Jones on her first visit in November.³ Half a century later, an estate agent’s particulars listed five principal reception rooms, a billiard room, thirteen principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, a nursery suite of two bedrooms, twelve other bedrooms, a separate wing of domestic offices including thirteen staff bedrooms, stabling for twenty-three horses, garaging for four cars (presumably carved out of the stabling facilities) and a model laundry.⁴

      The nerve centre of the house was a spacious sky-lit central hall, two storeys high. Opening off it at ground-floor level were Percy’s suite of rooms – bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, study – and the reception rooms – billiard room, waiting room, smoking room, dining room, adjacent dining service room, and the long south-facing drawing room and music room, connected by double doors, where floor-to-ceiling French windows revealed a wide grass terrace melding gently into the misty Downs beyond. Magnolia trees clustered up against those walls, with a border of roses, myrtles and rosemary beneath. Spiralling stone staircases in the hall’s corners led up to a vaulted, cloistered gallery overlooking the hall, off which were the family’s bedrooms; and up again to the nurseries and housemaids’ rooms on the top floor. The lower ground floor was the masculine domestic sphere. There the under-butler slept, guarding the gun room, wine cellars and butler’s pantry where the family silver and other valuables were locked in the plate closet.⁵ There too were the butler’s sitting room, odd-man’s room, lamp room, gun room and brushing room, dedicated entirely to brushing dirt off woollen clothes.

      The servants’ offices, where the majority of Clouds’ thirty-odd indoor staff slept, were connected to the main house on the ground floor through the dining service room and on the lower ground floor by a web of subterranean passages. The offices were a long, low wing designed by Philip Webb to look like a series of cottages, with un-cottage-like proportions. The beamed servants’ hall was nearly 40 feet long; the housekeeper Mrs Vine’s bedroom and sitting room two-thirds as large. The housekeeper’s ground-floor rooms led directly to the china closet, the table linen room, the still room, store rooms, larder, game larder and bakehouse: all her responsibility and domain. Forbes the butler slept on the first floor, next to the footmen’s rooms, where he could keep an eye on them. Footmen, chosen specifically for their height, good looks and turn of calf, were apt to be troublesome. Further rooms for visiting valets were beyond. At the far end of the offices was the gardener’s cottage of Harry Brown, who had come with the Wyndhams from Wilbury; beyond that stood the stables with their controversial bricks.

      The vast kitchen was modelled on a medieval abbot’s kitchen at Glastonbury. Huge joints of meat roasted on a spit over the fire kept turning by a hot-air engine. The dripping, caught in a vat beneath, was sold to East Knoyle’s villagers for a penny per portion. Next door the scullery maids scrubbed stacks of dishes and dirty pans. In a separate laundry building containing washing house, ironing room and drying room, four local girls washed and rinsed muslins, linens, cottons and woollens three days a week, mangling, starching and ironing for another two. A house like Clouds might go through on average 1,000 napkins a week; soap and soda were delivered annually by the ton and half-ton.⁶

      The imaginative gardens, designed for tête-à-têtes, were a collaboration between Madeline Wyndham and Harry Brown. Madeline’s bedroom on the main house’s east side overlooked a series of gardens, walled on one side by the offices (which were covered in vines and fig trees). The gardens were ‘a succession of lovely surprises’, said Harry Brown, with rose gardens, yew hedges clipped to resemble peacocks’ tails, a chalk-walled spring garden blooming annually with tulips, narcissus and cyclamens, and a pergola garden. The garden to the house’s north-west, with its winding ‘river walk’ (so-called by the family), was wilder. Cedar trees towered in the distance. The walk itself was planted with bluebells, primroses, Japanese iris, azaleas, bamboos, magnolias and rhododendrons.⁷

      When the Wyndhams moved in, the house was not quite complete. The hall’s chandeliers had yet to arrive; the drawing room’s intricate plasterwork was not finished until 1886. The plumbing was so full of glitches that Percy complained it required the assistance of the house carpenter and an engineer for ‘a common warm bath’.⁸ The house had to be unpacked, and decorated. ‘Lately the floors have been strewn with scraps of carpet and we have stood with our heads on one side …,’ said a perplexed Mananai.⁹

      When finished, the house had a distinctive scent of cedar wood, beeswax and magnolias¹⁰ and was decorated with near-monastic simplicity. Percy’s bedroom was papered in Morris print. Otherwise all the ground-floor rooms were painted white, their woodwork unpolished oak. Against the hall’s stone walls hung two large tapestries: ‘Greenery’ commissioned from Morris & Co., and a Flemish hunting scene. Over the vast fireplace was a large painting, believed to be by the Italian Renaissance painter Alesso Baldovinetti, of The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with the Infant St John the Baptist and Angels in a Forest, bought by Percy at auction.¹¹ A Morris carpet, pale pink, green, blue and white, covered the floor. The hall had little furniture: a Broadwood piano, four black-lacquer cabinets, and chairs upholstered in Morris’s ‘Honeysuckle’ design.

      The light-flooded drawing room, filled with comfortable sofas and chairs, was piled high with periodicals and books rebound by Madeline Wyndham in her favoured vellum. There was no library, books were everywhere in the house, with a trolley for trundling them about.¹² At the drawing room’s far end stood Madeline’s ‘scrattle table’ – at which she sketched, and wrote, hands constantly moving even as ‘her mind was free, moving among her guests’.¹³ The furniture was eighteenth-century Hepplewhite or Chippendale. On the walls – finally displayed to perfection – was the Wyndhams’ collection of many years: works by the Pre-Raphaelites; the Etruscan School; and Old Italian Masters. Over the main staircase hung Burne-Jones’s cartoon of the Ascension, depicting in glowing raw umber and gilt ‘the figure of Christ blessing those on Earth from above surrounded by the Arch-Angels’.¹⁴ This might well have been the house depicted by Henry James in The Spoils of Poynton: ‘the record of a life … written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists … all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out of old windows – it was England that was the wide embrace.’

      In every room cushioned baskets awaited Madeline’s pampered fleet of fox terriers; more than thirty peacocks and peahens strutted through the gardens. The South Terrace beyond the drawing room rang to the ‘wild satanic laughter’ of a pair of African jackasses;¹⁵ fifty to sixty doves, which were fed in the Walnut Tree Court, flew freely about the rooms.¹⁶ Three times a day, Madeline scattered birdfeed outside to attract wild birds. A packing box used originally for Mananai’s possessions was turned into a squirrel house, still bearing the faded legend ‘Miss Wyndham’s bedroom’.¹⁷ The house teemed with life.

      The Wyndhams’ arrival at Clouds coincided with George’s return from the Sudan with tales of some ‘hot’ engagements and a souvenir in the form of a 3-foot-long Crusader sword liberated from a Sudanese prisoner of war.¹⁸ Madeline was ‘simply brimming over with thankfulness’ at entering the house with her family safe and well.¹⁹ From the very first Christmas the family showed themselves diligent and generous squires. Madeline provided each of East Knoyle’s 190 or so schoolchildren with a new, warm jumper.²⁰ Semley station’s employees were invited to toast and ale on Boxing Day. On New Year’s Eve the family threw a staff ball with dancing from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.; an orchestra was bussed in from Salisbury, chairs laid out along the passages for sitting out and rooms provisioned with card tables for those who preferred gin rummy to waltzing. A music show was held in which footmen and kitchen maids displayed their talents.²¹ George reinforced his hero status by rescuing a village child who had fallen through the bathing pond’s ice – although, due to ongoing plumbing problems, he could not have a hot bath afterwards. ‘There is something refreshing in the idea of patrician and plebean [sic] after their common danger