The Finest Stately Home in the Cotswolds? | Stanway House | Cotswold Stately Homes

[Music] hello there and welcome to the Cosworld Explorer i'm Rowan Shakbra and since 2016 Ross Aerosmith and I have been traveling the Cossworld Hills in England describing and filming as best we can the incredible villages architecture and scenery which make this region one of the most famous tourist destinations in the world but we've been aware from the beginning that one of the most extraordinary things about this region is the number of great country houses there are ranging in use these days between curated buildings run by the National Trust through grand hotels communes huge commercial enterprises and of course private homes the one thing they have in common is fascinating histories [Music] it's always been in the back of our minds that we should try to include these amazing houses in our travels and attempt to show you how they came to be built how they've survived the centuries and what they do now to keep going in a time when their original purpose seems so archaic i am delighted to say that with the help of the National Trust a couple of other building trusts and in particular some of the braver owners of these iconic Cotswwell houses we are bringing you a series of documentary length films on what are amongst the most spectacular buildings in the United Kingdom welcome to Codswald stately homes [Music] you find us today in Stanway House in the village of Stanway it's quite definitely one of the most beautiful houses in the whole area we're first of all going to go and meet the 13th Earl of Williams and March who owns this house and has kindly agreed to talk to us about it and tell us about its history and then we're going to show you around come with me from as early as 715 AD this estate belonged to Tukesbury Abbey the story of how it came to be in the possession of the Tracy family whose descendants still live here guarding this wonderful place from the nastier elements of the modern world is one of intrigue luck resilience and determination the Abbotts of Tukesbury built a house here probably more than just an administrative outpost and there are certainly some remnants of that original building in what you see now but the alterations and extensions that make up the complicated and extraordinarily homely house you see today was started by Sir Richard Tracy in around 1590 after the dissolution of the monasteries and the year his family acquired the freehold of the property from the crown rafe son of the count of Ammo and nephew of Edward the Confessor arrived in England in 1041 he was part of Edward's aunt and soon became extremely powerful he became Earl of Heraford and acquired many estates including Toddington just a mile or so from here and Sudley Castle in Wincham within 25 years however the situation in England became extremely tricky not to say dangerous so how did Rafe's family unlike almost all the landowning people in England survive with their possessions intact the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066 well mainly because Wraith himself had died in 1057 lord Williams himself takes up the story they they were unusual um they were called disudi at that point in that um they survived the Norman conquest um having having acquired Toddington which is about a mile away in 1054 um they survived the the uh earthquake of 1066 because the head of the family was only aged 8 at the time of the battle of Hastings and he therefore didn't fight against William the Conqueror at Hastings and that was a big black mark on your zapiska if you fought on the wrong side and you you were deprived of everything um and apart from that his great um grandmother was Emma of Normandy who um married um into the English royal family and was William the Conqueror's great great art and so William the Conqueror was a sort of third cousin or something like that and that probably helped so they kept Toddington um through the conquest and the Toddington there's a big house at Toddington still and was was that built by them no built by descendants it was descendants of that family in 1136 the Toddington branch of the Dudley family took the name of Tracy from their mother Grace de Tracy and became one of the extremely few pre-invasion families to keep their estates the Tracy family were also descended from Sir William De Tracy one of the four knights who in 1170 crossed from Normandy to kill Thomas Abeckett the Archbishop of Canterbury you remember that King Henry II is supposed to have posed the apparently rhetorical question who shall rid me of this troublesome priest whereupon quite probably to the regret of the king his loyal knights did just that as punishment the Pope sent William on a 14-year crusade and condemned him to a lifetime of prayer and fasting but his family were proud of his moral courage and adopted the scolop shell the symbol of pilgrims as their crest the next hurdle in these turbulent times was the wars of the roses in 1461 the Dudley family at Sudley Castle ran into problems your connection in Sudli is is now no longer I take it is and the the family who at the time of the Norman conquest were called Dudley they owned Toddington and they owned Sudley Castle in Wincham right um and then at some point they split off dodington went one way and Sudley Castle went another way and the branch that kept um Sudley Castle got done in in the Wars of the Roses they got um expropriated in 1461 I think yes I see so once again the Tracy family seemed to have avoided the political pitfalls of a tumultuous time however this run of good fortune was to have a serious hiccup in the early 1500s when Sir William Tracy met with William Tinddale and was convinced by the teachings of Tinddale Luther and Latimer he was well before his time particularly amongst the ruling class and it put him at serious odds with the church when his will came to be proved before the bishop of London's court in 1530 he was declared a heretic and his body ordered to be exumed and moved from consecrated ground this inspired one Dr parker Chancellor of the Dasis of Worcester to go well beyond his instructions and to burn William's bones at the stake this extraordinary act backfired seriously on the church and became something of a cause celeb amongst the reformers and a great boost to their party william's son Richard MP for Wooden Basset campaigned for the restoration of his father's reputation and in doing so came to the attention of Thomas Cromwell who became his close ally on the 12th of February 1533 Cromwell wrote to the abbott of Tukesbury desiring him to lease the manor of Stanway to his friend Richard Tracy it took just 4 days for the instruction to be agreed upon the monasteries were understandably nervous for their future at the time and Stanway was led to the Tracy family for a hundred years at a reasonable rent thus began the Tracy occupation of this beautiful piece of land and the original house built for the monks of Dukesbury richard lived on pretty dangerously for the next 36 years giving offense to monarch after monarch but despite a spell inside the Tower of London he managed with a combination of luck and we assume charm to survive perhaps the most turbulent time this country has experienced cromwell himself was discarded and executed by the psychopathic Henry VIII despite brilliantly managing the king's affairs for many years a story told in the television series Wolf Hall they came to film part of the series at Stamway surprisingly perhaps I'm told the film company and crew had absolutely no idea of the close connection this house has to their hero when Tukesbury Abbey was dissolved in 1539 the crown of course became Richard's landlord and it seems that his son Paul managed to negotiate a deal to buy the Freehold of Stamway probably in the last decade of this dangerous century the crown sold off most of the enormous estate they took from the monasteries and a great many of the purchases were funded by mortgage so the great boom in the building of country houses was delayed in most cases by a decade or so in Paul's case a good marriage to Anne Shackley from Aho near Bista allowed him to start building pretty quickly he and Anne rebuilt the gabled west range of Stamway House with its incredible west window and this staggering window is is the gl how much of the glass is old and well it's all old but we don't know how old i mean um if you look up there we think some of those are the oldest bits right bits that you can hardly see through those I exactly translucent um yeah and um as clear as they can make but who knows maybe maybe it's 16th century i'm not sure i mean it is just extraordinary there's a lot of them those pains i mean I've counted how many there are in the past over a thousand panes and it was a revolution in the 1590s suddenly having windows like that it's like sort of modern glass and steel office blocks skyscrapers i don't know it was a completely unheard of thing to do to have such huge windows and was it as divisive do you think did Did some people love it and some people hate it well who knows i should I think they all everybody must might as well have loved it so impressed by change and then there was a Minstral's gallery up there which right they played but it was still there in I think it's still there in the 1820s they filled it up and made it into a bedroom i see and it has an an a staircase in it um you've got it up the main staircase through the back and then they just left that little window there that you can open and look out from the bedroom into a hall yeah which is a fantastic room i can just imagine with a roaring fire in a just absolutely It's a good idea to have a roaring fire um and and you see this paneling here is uh Yeah 1850s right and it used to go all the way around they took it off in 1950 right which made the room a lot less gloomy here's a lighter because it didn't it has a very dark and then these tapestries were brought down from Scotland they fit it very well in 1626 his son Richard inherited the house and built the absolutely beautiful South Range he was high sheriff of the county and as expected of him he built the south range of Stamway as a royal apartment on the off chance that he would receive a visit from the monarch sadly he never did but in the meantime he kept the rooms pristine unused and full of his finest furniture he also built the walled garden and quite breathtaking gate house with its internal courtyard and arches well we think it was built in 1620s it's one of the last gate houses to be built sort of quite so near the house that it's the gate house for um after that gate houses were a thing you had at the edge of the park mhm rather than just near the house and um the probably the reason it's there is because this was a public road went through here yes nice um and or semi-public road and so they wanted a gate on that and they they opened it to let people through yes I see did they I see and um and they wanted to have a courtyard we think originally there was a courtyard on the west side of the house and they uh wanted to have a they wanted to they moved the windows from the west side of this room to the east side of this room right um and then that was in the 1590s and then they'd thought "No it's not very nice looking out like that let's look into another courtyard." So they built this courtyard including the the gate house yes I see so they could still look into a courtyard and it's a very beautiful courtyard it's not rectangular so that that building's at an angle to this one and then the church is at an angle to it and then this wing is at an angle to the main block of avoid at all costs right angles symmetry yeah symmetry absolutely well it is it is a beautiful building do you you use it still or is it um do we use it we use it um when there are parties sort of overflow accommodation the hugely disruptive civil war in the 17th century must surely have given this family some problems 17th century civil war we were um on the on the royalist side um and um we the the head of a family fought at um the siege of Gloucester right and the siege of Sirencester in 1643 44 um and they they didn't uh they wouldn't fight outside Glasters no they were very happy to fight for the king in Glostia many got over the border into Warshire that was none of their business i think a lot of families fought like that um and so they were they were on the wrong side the house was not defensible unlike Sudley which was a sort of thoughtful fortified exercise and was knocked down largely by the Crom Williams um Stanway was just sort of open and no doubt it was looted and things like that um but the family had to um pay a fine uh to sequestrators to not lose it and they had to pay 1,600 which was a colossal money knew something i don't know how they'd find it they must have sold land elsewhere or something like that yes I see after the war Humphrey kept his head down and died without further catastrophe in 1657 his successors over the next 20 years were his two younger brothers on whose demise the male line of this Tracy family came to an end and the estate was left to a remote third cousin Ferdinando the youngest son of the Traces of Toddington it was in 179 that John and Anne Tracy came to live at Stamway and began the planning and eventually the layout and building of the outstanding [Music] gardens lord Williams takes up the tale of how the Williams family came on the scene and how the gardens were built in 1771 right um we married somebody called um Susan Tracy who was one of the two um girls who were going to inherit Stanwayne right um but she was the younger sister um she had an elder sister called um Charlotte um Tracy and um we we chose to marry the younger sister in 1771 the older sister got married a bit later and had no children she married somebody called Lord Herford and had no children so by as it happened in 1817 when she died we inherited Stanways but it was um very um prudent move to marry the younger sister who was not in the nature of things the Aith and they must have sized her up very carefully and sized the elder sister up very carefully the the reason I think they particularly uh went for this um these girls was that um the landscape here had been redesigned um on Masonic principles in 1750 this marriage was in 1771 and the pyramid at the top of the um garden had been built in 1750 very much on sort of Masonic um Pythagorean lines yeah by somebody called Thomas Wright of Durham for Robert Tracy and the ancestor who married off his son to Miss Tracy um was very much into that sort of thing he's grandmaster mason of Scotland at one point and he built a moraleum in the 1790s which included all the same ideas as are in the pyramid here so it was a sort of marriage of of masonic minds how interesting because I I there's a there's a way in which the trees are planted up there isn't there that turns That's right they're clumps and most of them are hexagons with one tree in the middle and six around the outside which gives you a lot of um equilateral triangles and they point at the other clumps and then there's another lot of clumps which are triangular um with um trees in the middle of each side which are tetractices which is another um favored masonic symbol right i see okay so that that that's that is the connection and why the Scottish and English families joined and also Miss uh Tracy's mother was a um a Douglas Hamilton all right which was Scottish and so we would have known so there was a con family through the Hamiltons yes i see yeah okay i'm I'm the gardens we we start talking about them you they were designed as they are now by Charles Bridgeman charles Bridgeman do you think now it's interesting this because I know that I've seen comparisons between this garden and Rasham which which is interesting we've been to talk to cultural dorma about his and he talks about his garden being designed by Kent and I'm presuming that Kent must have been a protetéé is that right um I mean Bridgeman was the most famous garden designer of his time era and so I'm sure Kent would have been happy to be his protetéé and Bridgeman did work at um Rousam yes he he built a cascade there and um which not very big but it nonetheless a cascade and then Kent took over the work and did a lot more and then and built appeal to the house and all that kind of stuff he was a slightly less good architect I suspect arrive so so Bridgemond we think um the family here went to um stay at Great Tu which belonged to um um cousins or uncles or aunts and things like that and then they went over to Rasham to visit it and admired the cascade uh built by Bridgemond and then they came back here and built a much much bigger cascade i think the biggest in the country probably um which think it almost certainly is long hugely long this has created for you an an interesting thing are you planning on in ever trying to restore if somebody gives me a million pound it's a million pound be delighted that's sort of we ought to be able to find it for you well I I hope it would be wonderful wouldn't it in Lord Weebs's words in his admirable guide book to Stanway a copy of which I highly recommend you buy if you come here which of course you must Stanway slumbered peacefully for a century after 1750 being rudely awakened in 1853 by Francis ninth of Williams francis was one of the great masters of foxhounds in the era when fox hunting was becoming the topmost English sport if we're honest Francis was mainly and almost to the exclusion of everything else interested in his sporting activity his wife however Louisa Bingham daughter of the second Earl Lucan a family name familiar to those of you who are students of the 1970s social scandals was very interested indeed in building she replaced the windows in the beautiful South Front she put a huge and by all accounts hideous fireplace in the great hall subsequently removed and installed in the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas and she built a substantial new servant's wing blocking up the windows in the drawing room so as not to be overlooked by said servants stanway was under threat from the Philistines perhaps most destructively of all they completely destroyed the magnificent water garden filling in the ponds and lakes and removing the complex water systems more of this bit of the story later but meanwhile here's Lord Williams again i mean there was uh a period in the 1850s when there were a lot of bits added onto the house yeah not very nice uh done by William Burn um and those were mainly domestic wings um as a result of the um um particularly the agitation over the great reform bill of the 1830 to32 um people in houses like this were a bit nervous about the loyalty of their servants right and so they tended to um try and give the the upper servants really posh accommodation that would make them loyal and so they built in the 1850s um a wing which included very nice places for the butler and the housekeeper and it sort of a rational domestic wing um not particularly nice but very useful and then that was expanded um in 18 in 1913 to 14 um uh under the architecture of Demar Blow right um so it just got a lot bigger and um then after 1945 um there weren't so many domestic servants so you didn't need so much of that and there wasn't that much nearly as much entertaining going on as had gone on before 1914 and also um the architecture wasn't very nice inside so my father decided to pull it down it was your father who did that yes and it was the best thing he ever did um and he did it in 1948 uh the listed buildings came in i think the act was 1948 it took about a year to compile the list and he you know if he hadn't done it then you wouldn't be allowed to do it now and it's been a huge improvement yes so there the house in its present state was taking shape lord Williams takes us first to what was probably the royal bedroom reminding us that this south range of the house was built as a royal apartment a sort of procession through the reception room called the presence chamber the bed chamber itself and what was called a cabinet a kind of study this is lovely it's a sort of uh it's probably the library but it isn't your library is it a budoir it's meant to be birk sulking room your sulking room yes absolutely um and uh very drafty room with all these windows and so you do you use it yourself or do you um it's theoretically for the wife right to use as her office but she got a much bigger and better office in Oxfordshire so she doesn't use it very much is valid but I mean these wonderful windows this sort of wall of window is one of the features of this house isn't it a lot of glass yes um after glass became sort of cheaper in the late I was going to ask because it's 16th century when it was first built this it must have been an extremely difficult would have glass in that scale i mean in the 1540s you didn't have windows like this it happened in the in Elizabeth ren suddenly you could built enormous windows cuz glass was cheaper and glass can cheap and and presumably the the technology because the strength that you have to maintain that comes out of these things yeah that was very clever as the way they did it yeah is an extraordinary thing and a beautiful view up your hill towards your banqueting that grass work um is is quite extraordinarily beautiful we think designed by Bridgeman it was his one of his signatures and particularly that in the morning light when you get shadows on it in the rising sun it's very um lovely way to use the landscape yeah it's beautiful this what this is is the western escarment of the children's children's very exactly amusing and well we'll talk a little bit about your fountain in a minute but then that's a bit up there as well isn't it we then moved to the main drawing room where some of the houses many treasures are to be found wow what a wonderful ceiling it it's a funny ceiling it's sort of 1850s me it doesn't quite fit but it goes terribly well with these day beds and also you know you've got to have a ceiling and it it's it's interesting to compare it with a sort of Robert Adam ceilings and things like that it's it's much more uh exciting yeah yeah and the nice little gold leaf bobbles on the end of the Yeah um flirty I suppose yes i suppose they are yeah but it's but it sort of looks if it was brought in from somewhere else and it's sort of strange the way it doesn't sort of because it doesn't actually fit the the the cornice which the cornice is uh uh Francis sniffer warrick right uh 1724 to 25 we know that from a diary entry and the pilasters are sniff of war and and these four windows are snifforik Um he's a a a relatively little known architect but everything he did he usually did alterations to other houses that he hadn't built for but he everything he did was sort of magically well done and beautiful and and these windows are absolutely extraordinary they had a wonderful light touch and that that in Norway they are beautiful and they were put in again in 2004 we got listed building consent to put them back they they'd been blocked up in the 1850s um because there was a domestic wing out there which um you didn't want to look over they didn't want to be overlooked by people in the domestic wing in the 1850s um and anyway so the room wasn't at all nice after the blocking up um and thank goodness we were allowed to open them up again and it's completely transformed the room into a sort of goldfish bowl isn't it and it showed you how narrow the this wing of a house is yes it's one room wide and um it's full of light and Well it's restored the it restored the proportions of this extraordinary room done yes absolutely and somebody said they thought it was the most beautiful drawing room in England which I I can almost believe yeah absolutely where did these wonderful things come well the Chinese Chippendale Chinese style Chippendale made in the 1750s we think really for a house in Scotland yeah I see which had a Chinese room in it uh which got demolished in 1923 uh Amesfield near Hadington right um and they're unique i mean nobody else ordered beds like these they're very special they are amazing they're absolutely wonderful they're a fantastic one and these I better ask these lovely portraits are um um they're mainly ancestors yeah um except for these girls over here as far as I'm aware they're not ancestors um but um they're they're very special they're by somebody called Jean Louie France Lagrun right who um most people have never heard of but he was very famous in his day he was uh second court painter to Louie Caz in Versailles and he was I think court painter to um the empress of Russia and um he was head of the um French Academy in Rome and uh he amazingly beautiful pallet um and um they were they were painted for somebody called the Maki de Ver in 1777 um and then following the French Revolution they came onto the English art market and were bought by an ancestor yes um and and they're very good they are stunning they are absolutely beautiful um but as I say they're not not your relation granny or anything no that would would be exciting but um the rest of the people are I mean that's Miss Tracy Susan Tracy who right who we married in 1771 with two of her children painting children was as a new idea in the 1770s um because children died like flies in the early 18th century so you didn't bother to paint them it would only um remind you remind you of what you'd lost lost um but but by the 1780s they were beginning to paint children they didn't do it very well they looked much too sort of sentimental and sort of silly um this is this is also 1780 more of the same family slightly better but still rather sacarine slightly sentimental looks on the faces done by George Runy right um and then that's um the the Williams ancestor who married Susan Tracy in 171 okay looking rather like um George Washington yes he may have been deliberately looking like thinking George Washington he um Yeah well it's it's very reminiscent he um he was an MP and he he got slung out for um for being the eldest son of a Scottish pier which is a funny funny little rule they had which really they only applied four times um but the reason they were keen to slay him out was he'd taken the wrong line on the American Revolution i think that he was slightly against the government's policy of trying to suppress the Americans yes I see so that might be why he looks like George Washington well he was an enlightened individual well that's the right word isn't it turns out and then this is uh that that boy up there number 36 he's um called Dig Digbeard Lord Gerard and um he he um died um in a drinking match outside the Rose Tavern Covent Garden the Rose Tavern Coven Garden was the most exciting pub in London you know and he he got involved in some match i decided he could drink more beer or champagne than the other guy and he died on the paper oh goodness me um and then this girl here on 37 who you can only just see when this bird is um his mom Yeah who was called um Jane Diddby um and she has a blue bottle on her left breast right which is unique may maybe also be painted with a fly on for skin one or two paintings the fly sitting on your crowford make and things on the skin of uni and she came from place called Gerard from um in Staffordshire I think and she had an uncle was called sir sir everard deeply he was one of the gunpowder the plotter forgive her yes right familiar name he wasn't a very he wasn't one of the sort of big five who started it he just sort of helped Yes no you can sort of borrow some of my horses or use my house as a sort of plotting in and things like that and um so he was convicted of treason and um and he he'd been a courtier and so it was arranged that after they'd drawn him that's to say put him on a hurdle and dragged him through the streets of London to Tyburn to be um hangrawn and quarted um it was agreed that he could have a chat with his friends from court so he got off the hurdle and they sort of chatted about what was going on in the court for 10 minutes and then um the executioner said um well sore you know we said 10 minutes and it's been 15 so I think we better get on with the business sort of thing and then they um they uh started drawing him they hang that's right they hang hanged him for 10 minutes or something like that and then disemballed him and burnt his entrails in front of him all that sort of thing the whole and and then they cut out his heart and held it up to the crowd and said "Behold the heart of a traitor." And so Everard said "Thou liest." To the executioner before

he died which is quite courageous brave to say to make remarks like that after your heart has been cut out oh goodness me so he was considered the bravest of the gunpowder plotters when it came to his execution my goodness what a story what a brutal lot we were well times were interesting extraordinary story this is wonderful this is a a harpsicle is it and jolly nearly it's a um uh piano piano it's a broadwood piano can I open it up a bit so it's hammers rather than plucking uh that's right and um it's got a wooden frame see as opposed to a iron or was it steel frame invented by right Mr steinway and it's not in tune and even if it were in tune with me playing it it wouldn't make a terribly nice noise but um it's um Broadwood was the greatest piano maker in Europe right um and funnily enough he came from Berikshire I think from somewhere very near um Coben's path in Bericure and went on to world fame and he he gave one of these to Beth Hovind um and um Beth Hovind was very deaf and the only way he could hear his piano was by putting a bit of wood on the sounding board and hitting the keys very hard just hear what's going on so Bate Hovven's Broadwood all the strings were broken because of all this banging awful mess but they all have a number and I'm not quite sure how near to Bethovven's in number this is it was made in 1810 right um and and it was you had to tune them once a day for a year in the factory before you sew them because of the the wooden because it all moves so much and then they go into houses where the temperatures are not quite as static as they are in this house and they start bending all over again right well luckily we don't really have much central heating it's good for pianos much better than the one another similar broadwood square piano over there i don't know if you can see which is 1821 and um we we used to have the children had two pet rats called Hazel and Whiskers who escaped into the square piano and we couldn't get them out and we we had to starve them out and after a week they sort of came out and surrendered with their hands up in that week they'd been chewing up keys and bits and pieces time massacing a ball machine well I'm I'm fascinated by instruments of this kind my father was a clever cord maker and a harpscore maker while he retired really and um he he his instruments are all over Oxford he he didn't do it he he tended to donate them to people and uh lovely thing to do it's it was fantastic and he and we I have a cab which the beautiful painting thing like a screwdriver exactly little flat thing which hits the hits the key little metal metal thing and he made all everything the key he was he was a frustrated cabinet maker he became a diplomat and then uh and but and when he retired which they do rather early in the foreign service 16 yes exactly he he started he did an uh a an apprenticeship with Tom Goff who was the at that stage the leading clerical maker in the country right right uh do do a lot of people play clavicords they're very few but anybody who wants to in a house that um it's really best not you know you disturb everybody with a piano you with a clavic cord you right so my mother for example had one in her bedroom which she played and and and and that's the one I now have in you play i I wouldn't even grow myself with that i tried I I used to when I was a child but I don't anymore right i mean we up in Scotland um bought by the same person who bought this I suppose um we've got a clavio or ganum come across no I haven't no it's got a harpsy cord on top and then the sides have been filled in and there's an organ underneath it which can be played either separately or in combination with the harpsy cord or the heartsy cord separately orchestra we're just having it restored at the moment which is very exciting because it's um it has had to have a lot of work done to it and you're used to pump it quite difficult playing a organ and pumping it but now we're getting a sort of blower to pump it which would be very make a much better noise I think continuing down the south reach of the house we come to the great hall which was during the current Lord Williams's childhood the center of family life in his grandparents and then his parents house i asked him how much part of his childhood this place really was um came and visited my grandmother and stepgrandfather so three or four times on your best behavior you know so to speak not not taking running she was a sort of she liked things in order you know everybody was for sitting sitting up straight and didn't laugh yes and uh and one loved her for it yes yes of course um and and she had a a lot of staff didn't you she had a cook and a chauffeur and a butler things like that the whole So it was sort of very nice place to come and stay yeah I'll bet we've already heard about the extraordinary window and now we hear of other treasures and family traditions um that's the shuffle board yeah which we think is 1620s um and it's nearly 23 ft long right and um this bit of wood is is um heartwood of an oak tree and you know heartwood is the middle where it hasn't gone where it isn't pale and um there can't be many oak trees knocking around that you can get this bit of heartwood out of quite extraordinary it is amazing and I'd say if you look closely and see there's a scoring line and you you take these bits Yeah up to the far end and um and you shovel them down the table like that you get as close as possible to that line get over that line and then one point if you get over that line you get two points all right if you get in there you get no points and um this this line here it's scorled on the underside of this bit of wood as well yeah really so after playing for a thousand years or something you wear out the top flip it over and you can play for another thousand years on the bottom that sort of um Absolutely thinking forward thinking did you play on this as a child yep um quite a lot it was the main activity yeah uh in this room which was the sitting room and a nice quiet um thing to keep the children amused without being even even the grown-ups yes um and if you did very well you got your your name on the role of honor oh um if you got more than 10 points you got on the role of honor and um the most anybody ever got was 15 points and that's right here oh wow and um he's thinking of a fadeed 15 i think it says 15 there in red ink let guy Lety guy and then Roger Wake those are the only people who got 15 between 1951 and 1967 very very difficult getting 15 you could in theory get 20 if they were all in this yes if you were born there but you get 15 there that is an extraordinary skill and this all in the same handwriting sir yes I think that's Guy Benson's handwriting and um I I managed to get 12 at one point um Jamie 12 it says somewhere um there I think is that Jamie yep there we are that's the best I ever did but it it was a game that requires practice you know you just play all weekend or all week or whatever it is in the school holiday it's a sort of Yes it's I that skill of being able to get things it's like curling isn't it you get much better at it if you've done done it all day of course um and it a very nice noise in the background for people talking this funny funny noise they That's a sort of beautiful noise isn't that nice and then the chinking noise very nice but you're meant you're meant to do it from the other end yeah no I see yeah um and so this room this wonderful room with this huge ceiling was used as your drawing room it was the drawing yeah and uh quite drafty yeah um but in in those days that's to say between 1950 and 75 there was central heating coming through those grills there all right yeah um and that stopped dead in 1975 when I came here right and the price of oil you remember the oil crisis of 1974 as well yes and I can't remember the price of oil quadrupled it's the end of central heating in this room this in this room oh yeah well I I mean I'm not surprised if I would be because George has disappears but it's it's a lovely room in summer yeah yeah the games didn't stop there just one other thing while you're in this room is the stamps on the ceiling if you can avoid looking at the very new fangled fire it's an unfortunate thing as a modern world trying to persuade the fire alarm people to do it a slightly less unpleasant color than white but we haven't got there yet um they say that they can't do them in any other color they don't do them in any other color that's and that if you paint them they won't work so yeah we're working our way through that problem but you see the stance of which there are four and five that was a game they used to play in the 20s when James Barry came here um you would lick a a stamp on both sides and then you put the king's head on a penny and then you flick it up to the ceiling and hope it going to hit it so as to stick and very occasionally it does there used to be more i think he used to be what some 20 and most of them fell off just I see five five left but um James buried neighbors where he came from in Angus there's a a house there which has 200 on the ceiling which is a lot lower than this I may say oh wonderful in the best tradition of great halls there are many things hanging on the walls and some ancient traditions fulfilled and then The hatchments were brought in in the 1890s there was a vicar who didn't like hatchments oh really um which is fair enough and so we put them here and they're much better here amazing and and they if you're into heraldry they amazingly intricate amount of information lot of um encapsulated in all those hatchments in the hatchments i we we do a lot of filming at inside of churches and they appear all the time and I've never given nearly enough attention to them really m I mean there's a a mile away Dbrook church that has two hatchments which were in very bad condition and we had them restored um and we wrote up about them and the husbands of somebody called Mary Richardson who married a Holford from uh Western and he she married somebody else a Pratt that's right a Pratt from Costco yeah and um because of those hatchments we now know a vast amount about Mary Richardson um if she hadn't bought to have a hatch nobody would ever have heard the name if you if you want to be remembered my advice is get get yourself a single hat you have to it in a bit of a hurry you know you I presume you have to have it done after you're dead or Yeah beginning to be dead um and before your whatever memorial service you have um your service and they used to hang them outside the front door right while you were in mourning could tell people were in mourning because the were hanging outside and there were people in 1919 in Edinburgh who had hatchments outside their front door having died of Spanish influenza yeah james Barry the author of Peter Pan and made a baronet by George V in June 1913 played an important role in Stamway as we will hear but also in the surrounding villages you can hear the stories of his cricket matches in our film of Broadway one of our Cotswwell stars he was important for this village wasn't he because he was a cricket enthusiast he um my great aunt Cynthia Chartreuse who became Cynthia Asquis um was into literature yeah and um Barry had a very um disorganized sort of administration and she became his secretary in about 1917 and got his papers in order and his correspondence in order and then he was going to go off somewhere on holiday in 1923 and it fell through and so he came here instead and he rented the house off my great-grandparents for I think £200 um and came here for 10 years and was incredibly popular gave very big tips to everybody started the cricket a lot more cricket here than because he had his own cricket team the alleoon a he built cricket pavilion um he he had uh a literary week he came here a fortnight had a literary week and a cricketing week um and I don't know whether you remember Lord David Ceell yes who was taught English at New College Oxford he was chief of staff to Barry for the literary week sort of invited all the other authors and poets and such like to come and stay and one of his jobs was to amuse Barry who was an insomniac after everybody else had gone to bed and um so he had to sit and tell Barry sort of witty anecdotes and um for an hour or two each night and if Barry didn't find the anecdote witty enough he would sort of groan sort of the terrible sort of groaning noises and David Ceel said trying to tell a sort of funny story to somebody who's sort of groaning like that was very very challenging impossible and then when he finally went to bed He he went to bed in the demar blow wing which was on a corner so that and he had a terrible cough which went on all night so the coughing from Barry could be heard by many people as possible down each corridor from what else will but he was a he was a godsend he really kept the show on the road yeah yeah um for 10 years that was a what a great relationship to have a pleasure and then he organized plays in here they had a stage here and everybody acted Barry plays one of the many extraordinary things about this house is the way it sits as if part of the landscape tucked under the wonderful discarment of the northern Cotswwells there are very few great buildings that seem to exist quite so comfortably in their surroundings the beautiful barns welcoming arches leading to courtyards where it's impossible not to hear imaginary clattering of horses hooves and where you expect any moment someone to appear in Elizabethan clothes calling for the [Music] groom it's well worth knowing that one of these beautiful barns has been kitted out as a stunning canvas on which to build a wedding or any great celebration my own sister tells me of a wedding she came to here at Stanway some years ago which she insists was one of the most full of wonder of Eddie she's [Music] attended after the destruction of the water garden as well as the lakes and mills by Lord Wind's 19th century ancestors it has been his ambition to bring as much as possible of that incredible landscape back to life the soft undulations of the lawn rising up the first few hundred feet of the escarment were still intact and I think are the most stunning pieces of grass landscape I've ever seen but now it is clear where the huge cascade used to run the mill whose praises I can't sing loudly enough if you're a bridge freak like me is fully working and open on one day a week to buy flour check out their website the header pond and the canal have been restored and a fountain the tallest gravitypowered fountain in the entire world creates fantastic shapes and rainbows in the sky and against the breathtaking green slopes of the lawns and hillside lord Williams is understandably proud of his achievements bringing this part of the estate back to life it was very lovely and and sort of known to be so when I came here 48 years ago I think it was um and actually I'm amazed at how much better it's got in the last 48 years if you look around the things that are good to look at which weren't there are quite frightening how many of them there are like the canal which we put back in 1998 it's a huge transformation of the whole landscape uncovering the cascade which doesn't quite work but it's visible um putting back the pond behind the pyramid also in 1998 adding the fine tin and then adding a lot of trees in the right places and and another pond down by the Tai bar enormous number of ways in which it's got more beautiful you you put that pond in yourself did you put it back with the wonderful swallows to been taken away in 1860 or something like that yes I see um so amazing how you can get a nice place and make it even nicer to work at yeah I bet you can i noticed a wonderful and obviously extremely ancient Wellington I think isn't there well 1853 I think right yeah um there's a photograph of it sort of 2 ft high surrounded by rabbit netting um in the late 19th century they they were discovered in 1852 all right in western Canada or Oregon or something like that the year the Duke of Wellington died so they were called Wellington and then they came onto the market in 1853 and a lot of people planted them we planted these 10 I think yeah they have that lovely soft bark and do you lovely tree creepers when they put little birds with the birds bark you can punch yes exactly yeah that's it's great great tree we couldn't have hoped for a better house to launch our new series on great homes in the Cotswwells we will follow the stories of many homes in the region examining all the different ways in which they've been preserved and maintained i really hope you've enjoyed our little trip around Stanway House it is the most extraordinarily beautiful place and of course it's a real privilege to be given an insider view of it don't forget to subscribe to the channel you can find on also on all the normal platforms and we will see you again very soon somewhere else in the Gospels [Music]

2025-04-11 11:56

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