What am I looking at here? And the whole thing might be so confusing that you might not come to an answer for a very long time.
What am I on about? To rewind, I went to Tyntesfield, the National Trust house just south of Bristol over two months ago. But in truth, I’m still not entirely sure what I saw. So all I can do is express my confusion.
The backstory to Tyntesfield is not displeasing. It was a relatively late purchase by the Trust - bought in 2002 with masses of money from the National Heritage Lottery Fund and public donations. And support from Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen, but then Tyntesfield, a piece of high Victorian Gothic full of 150 years of family possessions and old-fashioned clutter, is very much his kind of place.
It was bought in part because it was a great example of the Victorian country house genre - most of these have been knocked down or turned into asylums or schools - and because so much of the original furnishings and possessions remained.
To me this is a brilliant idea because it’s not just Victorian architecture which has been ignored, but Victorian style - the piling of stuff onto clutter onto fabric onto furniture - is rarely ever acknowledged. How great to see that in situfor once.
Except it has all gone. I took this picture of the hall stand because even a few years ago, this was still full of walking sticks and umbrellas and odds and ends.
Not any more. While they have all been meticulously catalogued by the National Trust, they’re no longer on show.
The clutter has been tidied out of the interior design too. Here is Tyntesfield’s drawing room in 1878.
And this is what it looks like as dressed / conserved / curated by the National Trust a few years ago.
Somewhat more like a conventional country house. So what’s the point of that? Why am I here? What am I looking at?
But the questions get even more pressing, because what I actually got to see was this.
It’s an artwork which “features one dress that has been embroidered on to by people around the world over the course of 13 years, many of whom are vulnerable and live in poverty.”
Which is kind of interesting, but if I am not in Tyntesfield to see the furniture and the art and the whole Victorian ensemble of stuff, what am I here for? In short, what is the point of coming to see a country house? How did I get here?
The National Trust, as far as I can tell, has answers, at least to some of this. In the next room is an exhibition called Threads of Tyntesfield, with a short blurb about how women did a lot of embroidery.
There is quite a lot which I could say about women and embroidery as a form of class display and enforced irrelevance but that’s a diversion for now.
What I am interested in is why we are being made to examine a dress about poverty and exploitation instead of looking at the furniture? The answer is that there is an elephant in the room which no one is mentioning and, as ever, it’s the question of where the money came from.
Tyntesfield is built on shit, or to be more precise the proceeds from bird guano. As the stained glass reveals.
The Gibbs family who gave the house its Victorian splendour earned the money to do so by mining bird guano on islands of the southern hemisphere. Classic Empire entrepreneurship, and quite funny. Except it is not.
The guano was dug out under hellish conditions by men who were effectively kidnapped from their homes, predominantly in China, and not allowed to leave.
I observed Coolies shoveling and wheeling as if for dear life and yet their backs were covered with great welts...It is easy to distinguish Coolies who have been at the islands a short time from the new comers. They soon become emaciated and their faces have a wild desparing expression. That they are worked to death is as apparent as that the hack horses in our cities are used up in the same manner.
Effectively this was slavery. But try and find a single reference to this anywhere in the displays or captions. Trust me, I went round twice and could not find it. So I talked to one of the guides. Apparently they are told to say that it was not slavery but indentured labour.
Hmmm.
So what the red dress is doing, I think, is trying to expiate some of the house’s guilt about exploitation and slavery. Except because no one is talking about the exploitation and slavery and how it built the house, the whole experience becomes intensely bewildering.
And the big questions just get bigger. I thought we came to stately homes to admire the furniture and the art, but from the way that the National Trust displays Tyntesfield that’s clearly not the case. (There is more to say about this another day).
On some levels we’re starting to acknowledge that there are big issues with the way that these houses both came to be and are run - in short that they exploit, dehumanise and diminish almost everyone except the very tiny minority of men who actually own them. Who tend to be, therefore, massive arseholes who are not to be admired. Only we are not allowed to refer to these ideas anywhere in the house.
With the result that I find myself standing in front of an embroidered red dress wondering what on earth I am doing in this place and what I am meant to be looking at? What, in the end, is the point of the stately home and its visit? And I still don’t have any answers.
Nor, it seemed did many of the other visitors to the house either. The vast majority were in the gardens and the grounds and shopping for plants and ice creams. The house only gave a name to the visit, not a reason. Which is a strange place to be.