Opening Knebworth House to the Public in April 1932
My grandmother Hermione, newly-married and living in Milan, received this newspaper cutting from her mother in April 1932. Her mother’s comment was “There have been about 900 tourists in the week – Keep that up, and we are saved – But alas there are only 4 Bank holidays a year.” So it was during the Great Depression. But how different is it 84 years later? And how different was it 84 years before?
84 years later, in 2016, there were storms over Easter weekend, and every shilling we took at the gate went to pay the jousters, who had to cancel three of their four performances. Alas, there are only 3 Bank holidays left!
84 years earlier, in 1848, the Lytton family had had to spend the winter with the Tennysons (cousins of Alfred) at Bayons Manor in Lincolnshire because it was too expensive to live in Knebworth House except during the summer months.
Last week, in researching 1848, Clare our archivist and I went to visit Bayons Manor – or rather, what used to be the wonderful gothic mansion Bayons Manor, and is now just a mound of brambles on a Lincolnshire hillside. For Bayons Manor did not survive the 20th Century. It too opened to the public, in 1934, but the shillings were not enough and what was left of the crumbling deserted mansion was dynamited in the 1960s by the farmer who’d bought the land.
Persistence, hard work – a little luck – and the support of its local community have so far kept Knebworth House from going the way of Bayons Manor. In another 84 years time, it will be the year 2100. If we can keep up the aforementioned, this wonderful gothic mansion on a Hertfordshire hillside has as good as any chance of surviving into another century as more than a mound of brambles.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com