Henry Lytton Cobbold

I write listening to the beautiful voice of Oliver Darley (his album “Mindin’ My Business” on Spotify) and am excited for his return to the Banqueting Hall in Knebworth House on Sunday 20^th December with “Simply at Christmas – favourites from The Great American Songbook”.  If you were able to catch Oliver last Christmas, when he and accompanist Chad Lelong performed “Simply Sinatra”, you will know what a treat we have in store.  Do join us if you are free that afternoon or evening – tickets sold out last year early, so do head to our website.

Oliver’s voice is the perfect soothing antidote to today’s task – reading Hertfordshire’s Local Transport Plan draft consultation, which asks for comment before Monday 9^th November.  LTP5, as it is called, is a crucial document for Knebworth Village, as it dictates how County Highways will respond to our congestion issues and our road infrastructure deficit over the next couple of decades.  The news is not good, I’m afraid, as – reflecting its current position and current policy, LTP4 – roads will continue to be seen as the devil’s work.  The new plan is full of fine aspirations for improving the safety of cycling and walking, and other healthy initiatives we can all support – but contains absolutely nothing to improve the lot of those of us in this rural community whose responsibilities and busy lives rely on the freedom to use a car.

There is zero in Hertfordshire’s Transport Policy for the next two decades for improving, replacing or, heaven forbid, creating roads.  Highways solution to congestion is ‘intervention’, making it harder to use cars, reducing vehicular access and parking, until Knebworth becomes its vision of a single-crossroads, cycling & walking utopia.  If, like me, you feel that this does not adequately reflect the real-world needs of most residents in this rural Parish, please do Google “online consultation LTP Hertfordshire” and tell them so before 9^th November.  To make it easy there is a response document called “Easy-read version of Local Transport Plan and survey” which, after a few very easy questions (do you want cheaper buses?) gives you a box to answer “What is the most important thing that would make transport better for you?”… Whatever your answer, do mention Knebworth.  I shall be putting on some soothing Oliver Darley before I fill out that box.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

We need to talk about housebuilding.  Lots of things I would rather talk about, but October brings it up on the agenda.  Firstly, four years after the 2011-2031 Local Development Framework (LDF) was adopted by our District Council re-zoning our agricultural fields between the western edge of New Knebworth and the motorway for residential development, we are finally able to start putting forward planning applications.  Delays begot delays.  In the same month the LDF was finally adopted our longtime housebuilding partners were subsumed by a much larger company, much less appropriate for Knebworth.  It has taken us until this summer to extract ourselves from that arrangement and to enter into a much more suitable new partnership with a housebuilder (HarperCrewe) that is in tune with our aspirations and the work that has gone on over the last 30 years on these plans.  Better still, we are now working with nationally-renowned architects and designers Adam Architecture, who have a complete understanding of, and appreciation for, the original designer of New Knebworth, Edwin Lutyens.

Also this October, consultations begin on potential new sites for residential re-zoning for the next Local Development Framework, not yet titled, but likely looking at the years 2031-2051.  We have put forward sites for this consultation and we understand that a natural thought will be that all we want to do is cover our agricultural fields with lucrative housing at the expense of what is best for the village.  I assure you that is not the case.  It is not the case for many reasons.  In the space here, I’ll focus on the predominant one.  Regular readers have heard me bang on for many years about replacing New Knebworth’s medieval lanes with fit-for-purpose local routes.  Lutyens designed for that in 1909.  The current LDF (and Local Transport Policy) make that impossible to achieve as part of the current development allocations.  The new potential allocations we’ve put forward for consideration are specifically to offer an opportunity to create alternative local access routes to take traffic off – in the north west, Deards End Lane and its conservation area; in the south west, Gipsy Lane / Stockens Green, and its conservation area; and in the north east, Watton Road, for when the planned Secondary School is built.  In the south east (Swangley’s Lane) we are not the landowners.

The traffic issues we face today are the direct result of New Knebworth not evolving in the way it was originally designed.  Maybe we think New Knebworth was a bad idea in the first place.  Maybe we think Lutyens was wrong, and New Knebworth never needed to replace these medieval lanes.  Maybe we would rather not have a railway station and the pressure it brings to accommodate new homes.  Maybe we are content with Highways’ vision that we will soon all be on bicycles, and therefore kettling any remaining local cars, vans, buses, lorries, down to the one crossroads in the High Street will not clog it up…  If I thought any of these maybes were the case, we would not have put these new sites forward to be considered.  To be sustainable, our farm needs agricultural fields.  And we, like you, live here, and treasure open countryside.  But if evolution and solving generational problems means development, we will support it, and accept the time it takes to do it well; to do it in the best interests of the majority; and to do it in a way that reflects the original vision for New Knebworth – or as Lutyens called it, Knebworth Garden Village.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

This £1 WH Smith book token has been shuffling around at the back of my desk drawer since my grandmother gifted it to me when I was a child, back in the days when you could buy a book for £1.  Sadly, I think I have missed my chance to trade it in, as WH Smith, in this century, has downsized to the travel bookshop it began as when it opened a news-stand at Euston station in 1848, and even a cheap paperback for the train is not going to be mine for £1.

1848 was the year that publisher George Routledge & Co. inaugurated its ‘Railway Library’ – heralding the birth of the ‘paperback’ – and with this, WH Smith was responsible for raising the standards of the sort of thing you could buy at a Railway station.  Routledge – and WH Smith – believed the public would buy a travel copy of a previously published popular work.  Routledge took a gamble, and offered to pay previously best-selling author, Edward Bulwer Lytton (now being outsold by a precocious young journalist called Charles Dickens) £100 a year for the ‘paperback’ rights to 20 of his novels for ten years.  It was a good call.  Just Bulwer Lytton’s novel ‘Pelham’ sold 46,000 copies in the first five years of the 18 pence Railway Edition, which equates to £3,450 pounds of 1850s money.  The 2 shilling Railway Edition of 1859 sold another 35,750.  Bulwer Lytton played an important role in building up WH Smith’s business.

I suspect you have not read ‘Pelham’.  Should you?  Well, that very question will be answered on Thursday 17th September, when I give a talk on Bulwer Lytton’s novels in the author’s home, Knebworth House, in support of Knebworth Twinning Association.  Tickets are available via the KTA website – WH Smith book tokens and shillings not accepted, but all pounds and pennies going to a good cause.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

In his Country Life article on Knebworth Garden Village (February 28, 2024), Clive Aslet marvels that apart from Central Square at Hampstead Garden Suburb, Knebworth Garden Village was architect Edwin Lutyens’s only town planning venture before New Delhi in India.  Quite a stepping stone!  Consequently it was an enthusiastic group of members of The Lutyens Trust that I guided around Knebworth on June 19^th to admire Lutyens’s work.

It was a beautifully sunny day and the Knebworth Garden Village Conservation Areas of Deards End Lane & Stockens Green were looking their best; the party stopped off in Oakfields Road to see the airy effect of its ‘recessed build line’, bringing ‘the country into the town’; and of course we toured the St. Martins neighbourhood, including his magnificent church.  We also had time to visit his beautiful memorial designs in St. Mary’s, to lunch at his splendid Golf Club, and enjoy the special treat of visiting three of the lovely houses he designed, Hillcroft, Wych Elms and Homewood (pictured).  Thank you so much to the owners who welcomed us so warmly.

It was his magnificent church St. Martins that provided the climax of the great day, with a lovely tea laid on by the Church and Al from Coasters, followed by stunning performances of his daughter Elisabeth Lutyens’s String Trio (1939) Opus 5 by the Knebworth Chamber Players, led by the brilliant Gaby Lester, and Variations for Flute Opus 38 by superb flautist Anna Noakes.

Knebworth Garden Village stepped up for a wonderful Lutyens Day!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

Last time Iron Maiden played Knebworth Park, 14 years ago, the lead singer Bruce Dickinson arrived flying his Fokker Dr.1 Triplane (as used by the infamous German flying ace Manfred von Ricthofen, aka The Red Baron) in a recreation aerial dogfight over the Knebworth Woods.  This July 11^th the band returns to Knebworth Park with Dickinson achieving a much greater feat – retaining all the power of his three-octave voice after beating back throat cancer.  It will be an emotional day for the 50,000 Iron Maiden fans that are expected.

Thank you for your patience for any local inconvenience caused by the concert – there is always some disruption and inconvenience on the roads – but we strongly believe it is worth it for the pleasure and joy Knebworth Park concerts bring to so many people, and for the business they bring to our area on their very occasional summer weekends.

If you are not an Iron Maiden fan and plan to give Knebworth Park a wide berth on 11^th July, do consider visiting at some other point during the summer holidays.  We are joining the Government’s new Great British Summer Savings scheme which means until 1st September, VAT on admission tickets will be temporarily reduced, helping families enjoy more affordable days out.  As part of the scheme, a Single Gardens & Park ticket will be £13.60 instead of £15.50, or a family ticket £50.75, reduced from £58.  If you plan to arrive in a Triplane, call in advance.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

What a great motto Stevenage has, “The heart of a town lies in its people”.  It is what comes to mind when I consider how blessed we have been with all the stalwart, dedicated, hard-working – and crucially, good-humoured – staff we’ve been so fortunate to work with at Knebworth House and Country Park.  There have been so many great characters who’ve joined us for the ride since I came to live in Knebworth House two generations ago in 1970.  Joining us that year was Derek Spencer, born and bred in Hitchin, a very fine carpenter and maintenance man who, at his interview, worried there would be enough work for him here.

“Enough work for me?!  I’ve never had a quiet day since.  Within minutes of arriving I was moving the gamekeeper and then rebuilding the old forge down in the village.  Then I had to move on to the riding stables, and I just wondered what on earth I had done.  You see Lord Cobbold wanted to make the estate viable and he really was in a hurry to do so.  He wanted to get people in, to show the public what a wonderful place Knebworth is.  Knebworth really has changed since I arrived: now it never closes, it’s always on the go.” [quote from Tales from the Country Estates, John Bailey 1999]

In 2020 we marked 50 years of Derek’s work at Knebworth House, but even that milestone was not going to stop him.  For another six years, well into his late 80s, Derek has continued to come to work one-day-a-week to share his wisdom and encyclopaedic knowledge of the estate and to mentor new members of the Maintenance Team.  All good things must come to an end, and Derek finally retired this Spring, but in every room in the House and every corner of the Park & Estate there is the evidence of over half a century of his beautiful work.  All hail you, Derek.  How on earth, now, are we going to know where anything is?!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

One the great pleasures of the Knebworth House Archive is visiting academics and authors informing us of stories and facts we did not know about the history of Knebworth House and the Lytton family.  A good example of this is the recent visit of author Hiroto Tanaka, who is researching the Lytton Commission, a United Nations visit to Manchuria in the 1930s to check on Japanese aggression, chaired by my great-grandfather Victor Lytton.

Mr Tanaka praised the Commission for the real time and space it gave for negotiations on the Japanese side.  He felt there were “genuine efforts to find a dignified way forward, one that did not require either party to lose face”.  It is good to hear this praise of my great-grandfather, but what I was not expecting was to hear that he has since become a popular meme in Japan!

This at-the-time famous image of members of the Lytton Commission examining the China Railway track at the site of the explosion which the Japanese used as justification for occupying Manchuria is so familiar in Japanese history books, that people have been recreating it.  That’s my great-grandfather, second from the left… and here are some of the recreations of him and his United Nations team that are apparently flooding the internet in Japan!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

For most of last month, just as we seemed, as a nation, to move a little further away from the United States, we were actually an hour closer.  American clocks went forward on 8^th March and ours not until on 29^th March.  This meant that the Oscars in Hollywood on 15^th March started an hour earlier than usual in the UK, at 11pm.  For the first time since I was very much younger I was tempted to stay up and watch them into the early hours of Monday morning.  They say it was a good year for films, but I’m not convinced.  Lots of violence and horror and grief was thrown into perspective for me when Barbara Streisand paid tribute Robert Redford by singing a chorus of “The Way We Were”, from their 1973 film – the kind of Romantic film that is nowhere to be seen in the 2020s.  I hope someday soon we can pull ourselves out of this Romance recession.

However just as violence and horror and grief were being handed awards in Hollywood, here in Hertfordshire, awards were being handed out for happier, more wholesome reasons.  The Hertfordshire Association of Museums gave their 2026 Award for Object of the Year to my Grandfather’s teddy bear.  This much-loved childhood companion of Cameron ‘Kim’ Cobbold (1904-1987) was brilliantly rescued by Alan & Jackie Primett when my Grandmother was downsizing towards the end of her life, and now resides on display as a gem amongst generations of much-loved Lytton family toys in the Hampden Room of Knebworth House.

But no time for speeches, as hot on its heels was another Award for one of our own.  Clare Fleck, Knebworth House’s Archivist for 30 years – before she retired to one day’s volunteering a week – was honoured with the Hertfordshire Association of Museums’ 2026 Heritage Hero Award.  Long a hero of ours, for her transformative work in the Knebworth House Archive, it was a great pleasure to see the so-deserving Clare celebrated in this way.

So, Clare, for sorting all the scattered pictures, and Bear, for all the smiles you left behind, we stand in ovation and celebration of you in 2026 for The Way You Are!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

Although my great-great-great-grandfather, the 19^th Century author Edward Bulwer Lytton is not much read nowadays, his influence is still to be found in popular culture.  A great example of this is the spectacular immersive exhibition that has been at the Excel Centre in London this winter (until 15^th March).  The exhibition is named after his 1834 novel, “The Last Days of Pompeii”, and pays tribute to him in its displays.  Travelling back on the Tube towards Finsbury Park, I was chuffed when my train stopped in a station where the exhibition’s giant poster – with the big headline “The Last Days of Pompeii” – was directly opposite me on the station wall in 2026.

Extraordinary then, that when my train stopped at the next Tube station, the poster directly opposite me was a giant colour photograph of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s home.  The house he transformed into a High Gothic fantasy castle is the background to the poster for the new fantasy movie “100 Nights of Hero”, which filmed here last year…  Then things started getting spooky.  At the very next station – again, right in front of me, out the Tube window – was another image of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s home!  This time in a giant poster for the Iron Maiden concert in Knebworth Park on July 11^th.  Edward Bulwer Lytton may be a dead, forgotten author, but he’s all over London this season!

So do the fashionable thing, and come see Edward Bulwer Lytton’s home for yourself this Parish Open Day, Sunday 22nd March.  Your invite is a copy of this magazine – bring it to the gate at St Mary’s.  Celebrate with us as we kick off Knebworth House’s 2026 Open Season, still making our mark after all these centuries!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold

If you didn’t catch it, I recommend a web search for the excellent episode of BBC Radio 4’s ‘History’s Toughest Heroes’ on my great-great-aunt the suffragette Constance Lytton.  That broadcast not a surprise, because I’m in it – but what was a lovely surprise was the BBC 2’s ‘Celebrity Mastermind’ over Christmas that featured Constance as the specialist subject of broadcaster Ashley James.  These were the questions Clive Myrie posed:

• “What alias did Lytton use to ensure that she’d received the same treatment as less privileged working-class suffragettes after her arrest in Liverpool in January 1910?”
• “What was the title of the book written by Lytton and first published in March 1914 that describes her experiences after being jailed for her part in suffragette protests?”
• “In protest at her arrest and detention in Holloway Prison after a demonstration in February 1909, Lytton carved which letter of the alphabet into her chest?”
• “Which of her fellow suffragettes, traumatized by her experiences of being force-fed in 1913, did little Lytton later support by paying her private asylum fees?”
• “’The Pageant of Great Women’, staged in Bristol in support of the suffragette movement in November 1910, Lytton portrayed which renowned nurse and social reformer?”
• “At what house in Hertfordshire, designed by Edwin Lutyens and built in 1901, did Lytton live for much of her later life?”
• “Lytton helped working class girls to participate in what traditional activity with the help of members of the Esperance Club?”
• “In 1896, Lytton helped her aunt, Mrs. Earle, write a bestselling book with the title ‘Pot-Pourri from a –‘ what?

I am relieved to say that I did as well as Ashley, only not knowing the answer to question 4.  How have you done?  As Knebworth residents, I hope you got question 6.  The answers are:  1) Jane Wharton.  2) ‘Prisons and Prisoners’.  3) V.  4) Rachel Peace.  5) Florence Nightingale.  6) Homewood.  7) Morris dancing.  8) Surrey Garden.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold