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.