Henry Lytton Cobbold

September sees the final completion of our extension to the Barns – made possible by consecutive Sonispheres – which connects the Garden Terrace Tea Room with the Park Toilet block that was built a couple of years ago.  The extension includes a Park Gift Shop (no more portacabin – hooray!), which we were able to open at the beginning of May, a lecture/conference room, a new function room with a capacity of 250 (larger than our main Barns), a catering support kitchen and ancillary toilet facilities.  There will be a small garden to one side of the new function room, which will connect to the gazebo in the main Knebworth House Garden, and thus become a perfect garden wedding venue.

The extension continues the style of the original Barns, which some will remember were 16^th Century tithe barns moved from Manor Farm and Lodge Farm in the village.  The Manor Barn was literally lifted up, intact, onto giant wheels and pulled by traction engines the mile or so from Park Lane.  At the time – the early 1970s – it was the largest building in this country ever to be moved on wheels.  The extension matches these older barns by being oak-framed and timber clad, and creates an attractive and welcoming three-sided courtyard for our visitors, leading to the arched entrance into the formal gardens.  The new courtyard is the perfect size for the marquee that hosts the Hertfordshire Business Awards this November, which this year will be hosted by broadcaster Paul Ross.

Did anybody watch “The Hour” over the summer?  If you did, you may have thought Juliet Stevenson’s home looked familiar.  I haven’t seen the programme yet, but apparently one of the characters comes to an unfortunate end in a hotel room, which is actually one of our bedrooms – not to worry, apparently we have Agatha Christie coming this month.  I’m sure she’ll sort it out!    

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

For the last three years we have had an exhibition of Zimbabwean stone sculptures in the Gardens at this time of year – this year we move closer to home with an exhibition of Stevenage wood sculptures.  Those who know the Gardens will be familiar with Dennis Heath’s work – whenever a tree dies we ask Dennis to transform its trunk into a permanent sculpture that somehow represents a Lytton family, or garden, story.  Last year he transformed an upright cedar bough into a jousting knight, to represent my father’s illustrious history on the Bank Holiday field of combat.  

This month, some 100 of Dennis’ – and his colleague Dave Flemons’ – sculptures will be on display throughout Knebworth House’s 28 acres of formal Gardens.  The pieces represent a wide range of figurative and abstract subjects, with woodland and wild animals a specialty.  Many of the pieces will be for sale, including Dennis’ popular carved seating and benches – perfect love seats for your summer garden.

The artists work with a range of different sized chainsaws to create the work – including unusual “mini” chainsaws to fine-tune the subtleties of the carving.  Demonstrations will take place at various times throughout the exhibition – full details will be on our website www.knebworthhouse.com.  I am hoping that Dennis will have time to work on a new upright bough we have next to the tennis court.  I envisage it becoming my grandmother, Hermione, pausing on her afternoon walk to watch her great-grandchildren playing happily on the same sunny court she and her brothers used to play on a century ago.   

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

I was told recently that the Knebworth House website needs a “blog” – good for “SEO” apparently, if that makes you any the wiser!  A daunting prospect, until I realised that this column is essentially a “blog” – and that therefore I have been “blogging” quite happily for the past six years without realising it!  So I’ve been back through my records and posted all six years of these columns for the Parish News – that’s 65 “blogs”!  You (and importantly the search engines) will find them if you go to https://www.knebworthhouse.com/blog.  They go back to December 2005 – I can’t tell if I did any before that… and I’m missing one, June 2006, if anyone has that edition, the completist in me would be grateful for a chance to copy it out again.

Meanwhile in Knebworth Park, we are very pleased that Sonisphere is back for its third year.  The festival is a few weeks earlier than it has been for the last two years – Friday 8^th July to Sunday 10^th July – and we hope that doesn’t catch you too early for the summer holiday spirit.  There is a lot of excitement about the event and you can be assured that 50,000 music fans will be associating Knebworth with happy times and lifelong memories, like the million-and-a-half Knebworth concert-goers who have been before them.  We trust the event will run as smoothly as it has done for the last two years – however if you have any questions please do contact the Estate Office (812661) or, over the weekend itself, the live hotline number 0203 328 9830.  So you know what a “blog” is – but here’s the real test, do you know what a “Biffy Clyro” is?!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

I was interviewed last week by BBC Radio for a programme on first lines of novels – the programme was interested in the notoriety of Edward’s Bulwer Lytton’s famous opening line to his novel Paul Clifford:  “It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets… etc. (it goes on for 58 words)”  The line is notorious because it has led to an annual competition for silly opening lines to be named the “Bulwer Lytton Contest”.  I was able to defend my great-great-great-grandfather to the interviewer by pointing out that the line was intended as a joke.  There is a character in the novel – the heroine’s father – who speaks in absurd sentences like this, and clearly Bulwer Lytton intended it for comic effect.

The reality is, however, that Bulwer Lytton is rarely read nowadays because of the florid style of much of his writing.  So when asked which of his works I would recommend to a new reader, I usually say his play Money, where you will find his great wit and brilliance in a form most palatable to a modern audience.  Thus I am very pleased to tell you about a BBC Radio production of Money that will be broadcast on 19^th June on Radio 3.  It is the radio directorial debut of the well-known actor Samuel West and stars Celia Imrie, Roger Allam and Ian McDiarmid – and was recorded at Knebworth House.  You’ll be surprised how many of the jokes are still funny 170 years on, especially when delivered by these wonderful actors in the spirit of fun in which they were intended.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

May 9^th sees the release of “The King’s Speech” on DVD.  Now anointed with an Oscar as “Best Film” of 2010, the DVD is expected to a reach a huge audience worldwide.  To coincide with the release, Channel 5 will be broadcasting “The King’s Speech: Revealed” – on, I believe, May 3rd – much of which has been filmed at Knebworth House.  The screenwriter, David Seidler, also an Oscar winner for the film, visited the House with Mark Logue, the grandson of the speech therapist Lionel Logue, whose friendship with George VI – for the benefit of those who haven’t yet seen it (there can’t be many of you!) – is the film’s subject.  They discussed the history and making of the film in our Picture Gallery, which features in the movie as the room in which Queen Mary (Claire Bloom) listens to the climactic speech.  The documentary crew also filmed in the Banqueting Hall, which – along with the Armoury Staircase and the Cellar – also features in the film during the Balmoral sequence.  We are very proud to be associated with this excellent film, and very pleased by the positive exposure it has given – and will continue to give in DVD collections around the world – to Knebworth House.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

In the week I write this, Roger Allam has just won “Best Actor” at the Olivier Awards for his Falstaff in the Globe’s production of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”.  In the year 2000 Roger won the “Best Supporting Actor “ Olivier for playing Henry Graves in the National Theatre’s production of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s 1840 play “Money” – and I am thrilled to hear that next week he will be coming to Knebworth House to reprise his role in a BBC Radio production of the same play.  It is very enterprising of the BBC to seek to summon up the spirit of the author by recording in Bulwer Lytton’s home rather than in a recording studio – I very much look forward to the broadcast later in the year.

Meanwhile, there is much going on in the House in April.  We are adding an extra open day on the Public Holiday of Friday 29^th April – and to celebrate the Royal Wedding, Stevenage Floral Arts Society will be filling the House with flowers.  It is also the weekend of our Hertfordshire Garden Show, so the evidence should be all around us that Spring has indubitably Sprung!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

“Wow – that was quick!”  These are the words that greet me every time I log onto the website (www.vopres.co.uk) of the little company my brother and I have been running for a couple of years.  Vopres makes little videos for websites, like the one of me on the Knebworth House “Welcome” page that appears “instantly” to greet visitors.  These words are constantly in my head – I dream them, they have become the coda to everything that happens during the day, I can even see them on my tombstone!  I am trying to replace them in my head with the more positive “fill the unforgiving minute” from Kipling’s poem “If” – in fact I am tempted to translate that phrase into Latin and write it on the wall as the new family motto.

But here I go again…  “Wow – that was quick!”  Our 2011 Summer Season is upon us.  It seems only yesterday that we were “closing” for the winter.  Although we never technically “close” – it has been a full winter of weddings, Christmas events, film companies, repairs & maintenance, and, of course, contract meetings for all of next summer’s events.  A big project this winter has been trying to get our new Gift Shop built – despite our best intentions, this won’t be ready for our opening on Saturday 26^th, but there will be an impressive new building frame to look at, along with the daffodils, if you accept our invitation to this year’s Parish Open Day.  To celebrate the start of our 2011 Summer Season, Knebworth House, Gardens and Park will be free to residents of Knebworth Parish on Sunday 27^th March.  Please enter via the white gate by St Mary’s, and please bring something that indicates you live in Knebworth (i.e. a copy of this magazine).  Put it in your diary – it’ll be here before you know it!

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

When, in 1811, Elizabeth Lytton Bulwer encapsulated her hipped-roofed Tudor mansion with tall gothic battlements, she not only created one of the most unusual looking houses in the south east of England, she also created the equivalent of a porous bathtub over her head.  One of my earliest memories of moving into Knebworth House in the early 1970s is of water pouring through the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall.  I remember it splashing into tin buckets spread across the stone flagstones.  Later, as a teenager, I was woken in the darkness of my bedroom by a gushing waterfall on the pillow next to me – as I remember it, I rolled over and went back to sleep (I was a teenager).

The weight of snow and ice this December caused water to break through again – this time into the northwest corner of the House, damaging one of the beautiful 18^th Century beaded tapestries in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s study and the ceiling of the Library (but thankfully not its books).  It reminds why we do a twice daily security walk of both the inside and the outside of the House – once we found a broken pipe spraying water around the Library like a sprinkler!  Thus, the strange prayer group, just before Christmas, on their knees in State Drawing Room, armed with hairdryers and fan heaters – and the good New Year news that the beaded tapestry has survived, and is back on the study wall… hiding the water stains.

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

Daniel Radcliff – aka Harry Potter – gave “Knebworth Hall” a nice mention on BBC Radio Two, whilst promoting the final two-part film in that series.  He remembered promoting the very first film here, when he was only 11-years old.  Warner Brothers filled the House with all-things-Potter and flew in journalists from all around the world to interview the stars.  The three children, exploring during a break, opened our kitchen door to be confronted by our large Great Dane – and reacted in very much the same they do in the film to the large three-headed dog monster!  It is pleasing that Daniel remembers his time here – his co-star Rupert Grint has more reason to.  Rupert is from Watton-at-Stone and, during his childhood, was often seen enjoying visits to the Park and Adventure Playground with his family.

Colin Firth, meanwhile – whose new film “The King’s Speech” opens on 7th January (look out for interiors of Balmoral looking strangely like Knebworth House!) – has a more clandestine childhood memory of Knebworth Park.  He confesses that the last time he was here, was to climb over the fence into the 1979 Led Zeppelin concert!  There were no Great Danes at that time to chase out actors.

Very best wishes for 2011,

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com

There has been a lively debate in the media recently about the best way to “preserve” our built heritage.  There are those – notably Sir Simon Jenkins, Chairman of the National Trust – who believe our buildings and historic environment should be alive and lived in (fires in the grate, prams in the doorway), and interpreted for all generations.  And there are those – notably Stephen Bayley, journalist and design critic – who believe that the experience of great architecture does not need to be “enhanced by dirty tricks from a theme park”, and berate this as “Disneyfication”.

My loyalties are divided.  Simon Jenkins’ book “England’s Thousand Best Houses” places Knebworth House in the top 50 “best” houses in the country and one of only two four-star houses in Herts (the other being Hatfield House, and there being no five-stars houses in this county).   On the other hand, I literally owe my place at university, back in 1980, to Stephen Bayley, who felt that despite inadequate grades I was a suitable inductee into his pioneering History of Art department at Kent!

In this current debate, however, I am clear whose side I am on.  “Preserving” Knebworth House is not pickling it; not putting it in aspic and putting it in a jar.  “Preserving” is for monuments, mausoleums…   The story of Knebworth House is a living story.  The nineteen generations of social history we interpret for thousands of visitors and schoolchildren every year is still being written.  As an active part of our community, we adapt to our times and do our best to evolve in step with modern life.  In our education programmes, leisure facilities and house & park events – even the way we live in, and present, the house – we are looking to interact with as many different age groups and   different interests as possible.  This keeps our story relevant.  This is our best chance of survival.  This is sustaining – a much better word than “preserving” – the heritage of Knebworth House.

Martha joins with me in wishing all our neighbours a very happy Christmas,

Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com