Wentworth Woodhouse
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Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed country house near the village of Wentworth, in the vicinity of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. Its 606 ft. (185 m) long East Front is the longest façade in Europe.[1] The house includes 240 rooms and covers an area of over 2.5 acres (10,000 m²). It is surrounded by a 150 acre (0.6 km²) estate. It was the family seat of the Earls Fitzwilliam
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[edit] Architecture
The Baroque style, brick-built western part of the house was begun in 1725, replacing an older structure that was once the home of Thomas Wentworth. In c. 1734, before this West Front was finished, Wentworth's grandson Thomas Watson-Wentworth commissioned Henry Flitcroft to build the East Front extension.
The huge length of the East Front is believed to have been the result of a longstanding feud with the Stainborough branch of the Wentworth family, who lived at the nearby Wentworth Castle. The castle was itself undergoing an extension at the time.
The house was later the home of Watson-Wentworth's grandson Charles Watson-Wentworth, the 11th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It subsequently passed to his sister's family, the Fitzwilliams, who in c.1782 added an extra storey to parts of the East Front.
[edit] The grounds
The grounds (and surrounding area), which are largely open to the public, contain a number of follies including:
- Hoober stand. A tapering pyramid with a hexagonal lantern. It is 30 m high and was built in 1747–48 to commemorate the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion. It was designed by Henry Flitcroft. The tower is open to the public on Sunday afternoons throughout the summer.
- Keppels Column. A 115 ft. (35 m) tower built in the late 18th century to commemorate the acquittal of the court-martialled Admiral Keppel. It visibly bulges due to an entasis correction, which was rendered inappropriate when funding problems reduced the height. It was designed by John Carr.
- The Rockingham Mausoleum. A 90 ft. (27 m) high, three-story building situated in woodland. Consequently, only the top level is visible over the treetops. It was commissioned in 1783 as a memorial to Charles Wentworth and was designed by John Carr. The ground floor is an enclosed hall containing a statue of the former prime minister by Joseph Nollekens, plus busts of his eight closest friends. The first floor is an open colonnade with Corinthian columns surrounding the (empty) sarcophagus. The top storey is a Roman-style cupola. Like Hoober Stand, the Mausoleum is open on summer Sunday afternoons.
- The Needle's Eye. A 45 ft. (14 m) high, sandstone block pyramid with an ornamental urn on the top and a tall Gothic ogee arch through the middle, which straddles a disused roadway. It was built in the mid-18th century allegedly to win a bet after Charles Wentworth claimed he could drive a coach and horses through the eye of a needle.
- Bear Pit. Accessible if patronising the nearby Garden centre. Built on two levels with a spiral stair. Outer doorway is part of the architecture of the original house (about 1630). at the end of the garden is a grotto guarded by two life-sized statues of Roman soldiers.
[edit] Destruction of the estate
In April 1946, on the orders of Manny Shinwell (the then Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power) a "column of lorries and heavy plant machinery" arrived at Wentworth. The objective was the mining of a large part of the estate close to the house for coal. This was an area where the prolific Barnsley seam was within 100 feet of the surface and would become the largest open cast mining site in Britain at that time. Ostensibly the coal was desperately needed in Britain's austere post-war economy to fuel the railways; it was, however, useful cover for an act of class-war spite against the coal-owning aristocracy. A survey by Sheffield University, commissioned by Peter, the 8th Earl, found the quality of the coal as "very poor stuff" and "not worth the getting"; this contrasted to Shinwell's assertion that it was "exceptionally good-quality." [2]
Shinwell, intent on the destruction of the Fitzwilliams and "the privileged rich", decreed that the mining would continue to the back door of Wentworth. What followed saw the mining of the renowned formal gardens and 99 acres of lawns. Ancient trees were uprooted and the debris of earth and rubble was piled 50ft. high in front of the family's living quarters.[3]
Local opinion supported the Earl. Joe Hall, Yorkshire branch President of the National Union of Mineworkers said that the "miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth Woodhouse destroyed. To many mining communities it is sacred ground" - the Fitzwilliams were respected employers known for treating their employees well. The Yorkshire branch later threatened a strike over the Government's plans for Wentworth and Joe Hall wrote personally to Clement Atlee in a futile attempt to stop the mining.[4] This spontaneous local activism, founded on the genuine popularity of the FitzWilliam family amongst locals, was dismissed in Whitehall as "intrigue" sponsored by the Earl. [5].
The mined area took a long many years to return to a natural state; the woodland and formal gardens were not replaced.
[edit] The Lady Mabel College
The Ministry of Health attempted to transform the house into "housing for homeless industrial families". To prevent this, the Earl attempted to donate the house to the National Trust, but political pressure from Whitehall was brought to bear on the Trust not to accept the house: once again the government's actions were motivated by anti-Aristocrat spite bordering on the irrational. In the end, Lady Mabel Fitzwilliam, sister of the 7th Earl and local Alderman, brokered a deal whereby the West Riding County Council leased the majority of house from the estate to be an educational establishment, leaving a small portion of forty rooms as a family apartment.[6] Thus from 1949 to 1979, the house was home to the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education, which trained female PE teachers. This college later merged with Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), which eventually gave up the lease in 1988 due to the prohibitive cost of maintenance.[7]
[edit] Private residence
By 1989 the house was in a poor state of repair. With the Polytechnic no longer a tenant, and with the family no longer requiring the house after the extinction of the Earldom in 1979, the family trustees were faced with no choice but to sell the house and 30 acres of the estate. It was bought by locally-born businessman Wensley Haydon-Bailey, who started a programme of restoration, however a business failure caused it to be repossessed by a Swiss bank and put back on the market in 1998.[8] The present owner is Clifford Newbold, an architect from Highgate, who bought it for something over £1.5m.[9]
The house is a Grade I listed building. Its size makes it very expensive to maintain, which is perhaps the main reason why the building has never been bought by a charity or the local council as a tourist attraction.
[edit] References
- ^ The Sunday Times Magazine, 11 February 2007, p19
- ^ ibid., p23
- ^ ibid.
- ^ ibid.
- ^ Bailey, C (2007). Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, p393. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-670-91542-2
- ^ ibid., pp397-402
- ^ ibid., p449
- ^ ibid., p451
- ^ http://www.britannia.com/history/wwwood.html
