Percy, like all his family, was delighted with their new house. Clouds was the embodiment of their exceptionalism. And though the Wyndhams’ friend Godfrey Webb thought, privately, the house ‘the largest and ugliest in England’, for the most part the Wyndhams were flooded in praise. ‘Influential people (or donkeys as you would call them) are putting it about that this is the house of the age. I believe they are right,’ Percy wrote to his architect, as he surveyed his new domain.23
The villagers of East Knoyle and Milton greeted the rising up of a great house in their midst with feudal-like enthusiasm. They twice turned out to cheer the family’s arrival, East Knoyle’s church bells pealing in celebration, when Percy, Guy, Mananai, Pamela and Fräulein arrived on the afternoon of 23 September 1885, and when George and Madeline, delayed by George’s regimental inspection, followed the next day.24 The handsome, eccentric family was a source of fascination: village children whispered that drawling, impeccably dressed Percy had his valet wash the coins jingling in his pocket, so bleached clean did he seem (in fact, such a practice was quite common and the rumour probably accurate). By contrast Madeline ‘never seemed like an ordinary rich person … she … was the easiest and most sympathetic person to talk to that I have ever met,’ remembered Violet Milford, one of the daughters of the Canon of East Knoyle church.25
The house and the village existed in symbiosis. The Wyndhams had brought some staff with them from Wilbury – Tommy the valet, Eassy and tall, tranquil Bertha Devon, a housemaid who joined the family in Cumberland and spent her entire service life in their employ. Others were recruited from the locality. When a bad spate of influenza struck East Knoyle, Madeline Wyndham took Mananai and Pamela with her to visit the sick ‘nearly everyday’,26 and shortly afterwards employed a London-trained nurse permanently to attend the parish’s sick. Each day lunch’s leftovers were delivered by the little girls and Fräulein to the cottages of the poor – piled up, as was customary, in one pungent mess. The village’s children remembered Punch & Judy shows in the hall at Christmas; charity bazaars where the female Wyndhams manned the stalls; vast feasts held to celebrate the marriages of each of the Wyndham children where all the toys in the nurseries were turned out on to the lawns – a very heaven.27
Clouds was to become famous as a ‘palace of weekending’, in the phrase of William Lethaby, the architectural historian and propagandist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and for the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose writings disseminated the works of his friends Philip Webb and William Morris to the next generation.28 The press would focus on the fact that, from the late 1880s, Clouds was where Arthur Balfour spent each Easter, passing his days playing golf on the private links built by Percy, and engaging in brilliant ‘general conversation’ at dinner, of which he was always the star. Mary recalled those Easters in later years: when she met the golfers for lunch in a ‘small furze hut’ on the links, and as the party drank Château-Yquem provided by Percy, discussions between Balfour, Percy, the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge and George Wyndham, among others, ranged across politics, philosophy, literature and science, while ‘the gorse shed its fragrance and the larks sang’.29
Clouds, a place where politicians of all complexions, primarily Souls, convened, was a house of esoteric delights, overseen by a consummate hostess. Madeline Wyndham was impervious to obstacles when the opportunity of delighting people arose. On a September day in 1883, Mananai and Pamela’s lessons had been interrupted by the sight, from the schoolroom window, of an elephant trundling a yellow cart down the drive. Madeline Wyndham, taking a morning constitutional on the Downs, had encountered a travelling menagerie and persuaded it to divert its course so as to amuse her daughters. ‘We fed the “oily phant” with buns and bread and he … drank some beer, his ears were enormous just like umbrellas,’ Mananai reported excitedly to Mary.30 At Clouds, Madeline Wyndham’s munificence was given full force.Regular guests arrived to find hand-bound copies of their favourite books at their bedside (a favourite family anecdote concerned a tiny bound copy of the Lord’s Prayer, which contained a slip bearing ‘the Author’s Compliments’).31 In the evenings, Madeline plied them with blankets while listening to recitals in the hall. Masseuses were on hand to give ‘Swedish rubbing’; in front of a blackboard, Lodge (later President of Birmingham University), who played a key role in the development of wireless telegraphy, gave lectures on ‘electrons’ and ‘cyclones’; gymnastics classes were conducted in the garden; and invariably in a darkened room somewhere in the house a spiritualist was conducting a bout of table-turning for the Wyndhams’ guests.32 Madeline had been a convert to spiritualism since inviting her first medium to Wilbury in 1884,33 and at Clouds the Wyndhams hosted the most prominent theorists of the day – Edward Maitland, Gerald Massey, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Lord and Lady Mount Temple.34 Walburga, Lady Paget, an eccentric vegetarian, thought Clouds perfection in all its entertainments, except for the adders that slithered through the Downs preventing her from walking barefoot through the morning dew.35
In microcosm, Clouds reflected ‘the oncoming of a great new tide of human life over the Western World’, in the words of the sage Edward Carpenter – a post-Darwinian, post-Industrial Revolution experimentalism, seeking to find meaning in and improve the new age.36 The spiritualist craze exemplifies the way, in this age, optimism and anxiety combined. Balfour, Ruskin, Tennyson, Watts, Leighton, Oliver Lodge, Sigmund Freud, Gladstone and William James, psychologist brother of Henry, were all members of the Society for Psychical Research (the SPR), founded by a group of Cambridge scientists in 1882 ‘for the purpose of inquiring into a mass of obscure phenomena which lie at present on the outskirts of our organized knowledge’.37 Their number included two of Balfour’s brothers-in-law: John, Lord Rayleigh, husband of Evelyn Balfour; and Henry Sidgwick, husband of Eleanor Balfour. In an age of extraordinary exploration, it seemed quite possible that science might be able to communicate with a world beyond the earthly plane. One of the SPR’s founders, Frederic Myers, was a reluctant atheist and spoke for many when admitting that his spiritualism was driven by the desire to ‘re-enter … by the scullery … the heavenly mansion out of which I had been kicked through the front door’.38
Madeline Wyndham, who designed beautiful prie-dieus for her children, and illustrated biblical tracts to hang above their beds, had no difficulty in reconciling her powerful religious faith with a belief in a ‘sproits and spiris [sic]’.39 Pamela, who adopted her mother’s creed more enthusiastically than her siblings, in later life explained her teachings: ‘I learned that death is an incident in life … that communication with those we call the dead, under certain conditions is possible … never was I led for a moment to think that [spiritualism] should stand in the place of religion … Spiritualism supports rather than conflicts with [the] narratives of the life of Christ.’40
Percy was more sceptical. But he was certainly a little superstitious. In the spring of 1885, as builders were putting the finishing touches to Clouds, a tall woman dressed in black appeared, asking to see the house. She was shown inside – such requests were not uncommon. She stood in the dusty hall, the walls rearing up around her. ‘This house will be burnt down and in less than three years,’ she announced, before disappearing as mysteriously as she had arrived.41 When later that year Percy arranged with Webb for the insurance of the house and its outbuildings, he expressed particular concern about the provision for loss by fire.
Clouds’ magical luxury depended on a silent army of staff. Its occupants woke to fires crackling in the grate, laid soundlessly by a housemaid who had risen long before dawn and had then scurried downstairs to clear away the previous evening’s detritus: wine-stained glasses, full ashtrays in the smoking room; pieces of paper from a game, torn up and carelessly thrown aside. While the family and guests breakfasted, staff flung open windows to air bedrooms, whipped off still-warm sheets to remake beds perfectly and emptied chamberpots. Then they dusted, swept, polished and mended linen before preparing the bedrooms again for their occupants to dress for dinner (men attended by their valets, women by their ladies’ maids); and again while the house dined, they were drawing curtains, lighting candles, turning down beds. Rarely did they throw their exhausted bodies on to their own mattresses before eleven or twelve at night.