Winter is a hard time for the stately home viewer; most of the privately owned houses are shut until the spring, leaving only the National Trust to fill the gap and provide me with things to complain about. But for a change we’re here at the Trust’s Dyrham Park not to complain, but to observe with interest.
Plenty of other people will very likely be complaining, starting with the Daily Mail. We have come to visit their nightmare of the woke National Trust manifested as solid brick and stone. This is a place telling some uncomfortable stately home truths.
Not that you would guess any of this as you approach. Just south of the M4 before Bristol, Dyrham Park is a moderately average neoclassical house built out of a quite pleasing stone (hey, it’s near Bath) and for many years hasn’t had a lot to distinguish it from many other of the Trust’s properties.
At least that was the case until the cultural climate shifted. As David Olosuga observes:
The cliché of the stately home visit now is that the parents are looking at the furniture and paintings while the children are googling where the money came from.
In Dyrham Park’s case, what they will uncover is particularly difficult. Because the house - conveniently close to Bristol and its west-facing port - is built on the profits of slavery. Or to be precise from the profits of its administration.
The Wynter family who first owned the house were ship owners who helped finance some of the first slave voyages in the sixteenth century, while William Blathwyt, who married into the family, made his fortune as Auditor-General of Plantations Revenues a century later. It turns out that there’s lots of money to be made from being the accountants and managers who organised and audited the business, not just for the slave owners themselves.
What’s interesting is that the Trust have not shied away from this history. On the website, a whole section is devoted to the colonial history of Dyrham.
While when you come into the house, the presentation isn’t just facing the history, it’s actively running towards it. The stories of William Blathwyt and his work managing the colonies are explicated, as you might expect, in informational panels across the house.
But another, more wide-ranging decision has also been taken. The house is deliberately displayed as it was / might have been / in an interpretation of how it was back in Blathwyt’s time.
This is clearly a very different house to what was originally bequeathed to the Trust. Layer after layer of later additions have been stripped back, and many of the rooms are half-empty; what remains is only what might have been there in the time of maximal colonial profiteering. The displays underline this - e.g. drawers of spices are set out in the kitchen as a reminder of the many trading connections that a house like this would have with its colonies.
In some ways this makes sense* - few grand houses of this period remain, and we all need to know a lot more about our early imperial and colonial heritage. But I’m still amazed that the Daily Mail or other retro organisations have not yet discovered what the Trust is up to here. Maybe they don’t actually visit country houses, just rant about them. (And yes, I rant about country houses and stately homes, but I do also go and see what I am talking about).
Where all of this gets interesting is with the exhibits. There are a few paintings which clearly refer to the colonies without being too offensive. "(“A Cocoa Tree and Roasting Hut’, anyone?)
And then, before you get into the Balcony Room, a warning.
What awaits you is a pair of these.
(I was too busy discussing them with the room guide and forgot to take a picture, so I’ve had to borrow one from the Trust, I hope they don’t mind.)
Grim, clearly. But what do we do with them? Are they perpetuating racism and so should not be on display, or should they be constant and terrible reminders of the dark past of our upper classes and their houses. (There is also a third option, as approved by Restore Trust and the Daily Mail which would be leave things exactly as they are with no captions and just enjoy them, but I don’t think we’ll let that detain us.)
At the moment, the Trust have let these pieces hover in a kind of Schroedingers display in which they are only there if you want them to be. Which is fine - because for me the most important thing is that we acknowledge that there are issues with stately homes and we need to bring all this stuff out into the open. With big interpretative signs.
What I do object to, though, is that slavery and the colonies are by far the worst problem with our stately homes, they’re very much not the only one. These houses are stuffed with many, many other problematic objects which are either being removed or are still proudly on display (like these pictures at Highclere Castle for example). No one is pointing out that they are a problem.
So we’ll take a look at a few of these next time.
*In many ways it doesn’t, but this brings us back to all the big questions of what are we here to see and what are country houses like this for anyway and there just isn’t time to boil our brains with that today.