The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Stylish watering inside the house

Ursula Hayward had a particular passion for growing and arranging cut flowers for her home.  She even had a Flower Room for the purpose designed into the house.  It has a sink, shelves for storing the vases and other equipment  and then a special shelf flap, disguised as an oak panel, that lets down into the Hall so the arrangements can be moved into the house by the servants.

 Once the flower arrangements were in position they would have to have their water topped up, and for this task there are two brass watering cans.

They are no longer used but are displayed in the Flower room and the job is now done with a less stylish but practical yellow plastic watering cans.  However; fresh flowers remain a central part of the life of the house and each week one of four teams of volunteers arrives on a Tuesday to clean out the old flowers and change over the arrangements.  They continue the tradition of cutting fresh flowers and foliage from the gardens and then selecting suitable containers from the Flower Room to make arrangements in six rooms.  Ursula Hayward was a great fan of Constance Spry and her innovative approach to arranging flowers.  There are a dozen or more books by her in the collection on the art of flower arranging (see recent biography ‘The Surprising Life of ConstanceSpry’ by Sue Shephard).  This British woman almost single-handedly changed the approach to arranging flowers, breaking it free from highly architectural arrangements and the dominance of white blooms of 1920s  and 1930s. Her use of unusual vessels for arrangements and informality in their assemblage brought a refreshing visual richness to interiors breaking away from rigid symmetry.
Ursula Hayward acquired three antique cradles and had the copper trays made to line their bottoms so that arrangements and pots of colour such as orchids could be brought into the house.

The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Bill Hayward's eleven cricket bats

Bill Hayward attended St Peter’s College in Adelaide following his older brother Ian to Adelaide’s English style school.  He did not have any outstanding academic achievements but excelled at several sports.  He was a rowing and tennis blue as well as playing for the first XI cricket team.  Sadly we do not have any of his race winning bathers or tennis rackets in the collection but there is every cricket bat that he owned.  In an ABC radio interview in 1979 he explained his last match for Saints was a disaster as he was out for a duck in both innings thus making a pair of spectacles of him!

Cricket historian Bernard Whimpress has been asked to examine the bats to tell us if any are of particular note in terms of their manufacture or brand.

The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Buckets of fun but also for safety

Amongst the quirkiest items to be found in the house are four leather buckets.  What on earth were they originally used for?  The Haywards used them as waste paper baskets and two of them are designed for this as they bear a modern leatherworker’s manufacturing label; so probably made for the purpose but modelled on an original. 

The two originals may well date from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and were probably from an English country house where such receptacles were used as fire buckets.  They would be hung in rows in servants corridors filled with sand ready to dump on carpets or floorboards when the open fires spat sparks or candles tipped over causing small conflagrations.  Water would have caused too much damage although leather buckets and other receptacles made from this material were commonly used for carrying liquids in households long after the Middle Ages. After the industrial revolution metal buckets were more cheaply produced and became common. 

Carrick Hill has an interesting metal bucket, which is coated with black paint and bears a coat of arms on the outside. Quite whose they are we have not yet deciphered to date and it looks like the bucket was used for fuel for the fires. 

The whole of Carrick Hill house was heated with open fires mostly with wood grates.  The threat of fire was always great in any country house in Britain and the Haywards did not take any chances either. However; rather than rely on their bucket collection they had a beautiful copper fire extinguisher ready to do the job which is now a collection item reflecting the working side of the house’s history.

The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Faience dinner service

These are French made, slip cast tin glazed plates with lively hand painted designs of fruit and vegetables.  It is a charming service with a Mediterranean feel and probably used for informal lunches at the Haywards Port Willunga beach house

The Haywards Port Willunga beach house

Carrick Hill’s Hayward Bequest is what is called a closed collection and is not normally the subject of acquisition except under exceptional circumstances, as in this case.  The were three plates from the set in the ‘vault’ (the underground room where all the silver, china and ornaments surplus to use are stored) so imagine our delight when a call from Small &Whitfields Auctions informed us of 47 pieces were being sold from the private collection of one of Adelaide’s leading antique dealers who had recently died. 
The Friends of Carrick Hill agreed to finance the purchase of the missing ceramics and I successfully bid for the lot to bring home this wonderfully rustic dinner service.  Research is still being carried out into exactly who the French manufacturer is - their mark is clearly on the reverse of every piece.

Makers mark on the reverse of the recovered Faience dinner service.

The Keeper's Random Ramblings - What's in a name and a photo?

A couple of weeks ago I visited Brisbane to see our son and he suggested an excursion to Mount Tambourine.  It was a wonderful trip to a charming township with delicious rewards from the micro-brewery(Mt Tambourine) and local cheese company (Witches Chase) based there.  Sadly there was not time to travel on to visit the interestingly named town Beaudesert but as you can see from the photo – I got close to going there!

You may ask why I wanted to visit this French sounding place in the Queensland Hinterland beyond the ranges. The answer is that the 400 year old interior at Carrick Hill was purchased by Bill and Ursula Hayward from the demolition sale of BeaudesertHall in Staffordshire.  They were motoring the shires of England on their honeymoon in 1935 when they came across the this country seat of the Marquess of Angelesy that he could no longer afford to run ( he had a second house on the Isle of Angelsey ‘Neu Plas’ now owned by the National Trust).  The full story of what they acquired (it included a staircase, windows, doors, fireplaces and oak panelling) can be read in the recently published book: Carrick Hill: a portrait.

Whilst on the Royal Collections Studies course last September  held at Windsor Castle, I learnt from Jonathan Marsden, the Director of the Queens Collections, that the Paget family who owned Beau Desert did not pronounce it with a French styling but as two words sounding like: bow desert (the dry sandy variety not a pudding).  This was quite upsetting to some of our guides when I told them as they had been told by visiting locals from Litchfield and Cannock Chase near Beau Desert that it was given a French sounding pronunciation.

I was also told by Jonathan that Tudor bricks from Beaudesert were used to repair WWII bombing damage to St James Palace in London.  So fancy Carrick Hill sharing a source of materials with a palace – a brush with a royal building?

The photo shown here is in the Carrick Hill collection but it's subject has long been a mystery.  That is until I was doing some research into the Beaudesert garden to see if Ursula had borrowed any ideas for her Adelaide garden as well as collecting an interior!  It was a vast house with extensive garden and grounds (99 employees to work the estate and run the house).  I discovered that the photo is taken from an unusual position which the great article in Country life book (also in the collection) did not use.  From the stamp on the reverse of the print we know the photograph was taken by The Times but what for? Was it to report the demolition of the great house and its forthcoming architectural salvage sale on 18 & 19 July, 1935?

The image presents a wild fore ground which enables us to imagine the forests that the Bishop of Lichfield hunted in when Beaudesert was their hunting lodge in the fifteenth century.  This was before the Paget’s had risen to prominence as Elizabethan lawyers and been given the property for services to ER I.  Then we see the back of the house in the distance with the oldest window range and formal gardens with banks and terraces.