Volunteers at Shaftesbury’s Gold Hill Museum have been mastering new technology and creating new displays in preparation for the return of visitors on Monday 31 May, and every day thereafter until Sunday 31 October, government regulations permitting. Mr Toad’s Abandoned Caravan, one of the entries for the on-line Amazing Spaces Challenge run during Lockdown, will be on show, courtesy of creator Elizabeth Hazelwood, together with magnificent Doll’s Houses built by the late Tryphena Orchard. They form part of a new temporary exhibition on the theme of Childhood.

Two residents, Peter and Kitty de Barnes, are seen here relaxing in the lounge of No 2 of the houses, while their ginger cat shows a keen interest in balls of wool or possibly fish paste sandwiches on a low table. (Tryphena invented convincing back stories for all her creations, and her own biography is no less interesting.) Held over from last year is a display of memorabilia from the advertising agency responsible for the classic Hovis ad, which will be running on one of several brand-new digital screens acquired with the assistance of a Dorset Museums Association small grant. The DMA has also helped to fund improved storage and conservation of the Museum’s archives which will be made more accessible to the community as a result of months of cataloguing during Lockdown by an expanded team of volunteers.

There is no charge for entry to Gold Hill Museum, which is open from 10.30a.m. to 4.30p.m. A one-way system helps to maintain a socially-distanced flow of visitors, and last admissions are at 4.10p.m. for similar reasons.

On 21 May 1471 the last of the Lancastrian kings, Henry VI, was murdered in the Tower of London. If Henry were not the worst, he must have been the unluckiest of English kings. On his watch England lost the Hundred Years’ War with France and was convulsed in the Wars of the Roses. Henry lost two crowns, one of them twice.

He was the only son of Henry V, victor at Agincourt in 1415. The charismatic father embodied the virtues of the medieval warrior-king. The insipid son was the only king of medieval England who did not lead an army in war against a foreign enemy, and showed no interest in martial pursuits. This cut no ice with the English nobility, who ran private armies and practised for war when they were not actually waging it.

Henry was born at Windsor 600 years ago, on 06 December 1421. He was only nine months old when his father died of dysentery campaigning in France. The quarrelsome nobles of the Royal Council sank their differences and governed on the boy’s behalf, maintaining stability in England, where he was crowned king in 1429, and retaining most of the English territory in France, where he was crowned king in 1431. The problems started in 1436 when Henry began to exercise power in his own right.

Medieval kings were besieged by petitioners. With ‘benevolent vagueness’ (Helen Castor) Henry never seems to have refused a request. This led to the wholesale granting of titles, lands, offices, rents, and pardons which completely undermined the royal finances. While some of this was cronyism, Henry seems to have been naïve, impractical and excessively generous. As James Ross writes: ‘Carelessness, lack of attention to detail and sheer incompetence were the hallmarks of the king’s involvement in government’. He would perhaps have been better suited to the religious life, as medieval apologists suggested.

Some of his achievements in education were not recognised at the time, and are not generally associated with his name now. In 1440 he set up Eton College as a charity school for 70 poor boys who would then go on to King’s College, Cambridge, founded in 1441. Henry intended the nave of Eton College Chapel to be the longest in Europe, with 17 or 18 bays; even at today’s eight, it is impressive. He laid the foundation stone of King’s College Chapel in 1446, though the building was not completed for another century. In 1442 Henry lobbied the Pope unsuccessfully to have King Alfred, whom he admired as an educational reformer, canonised as a saint, and in 1445 he provided 30 oak trees from the royal forests for a new library at Salisbury Cathedral. The building stone came courtesy of the Abbess of Shaftesbury from quarries at Chilmark.

While these worthy foundations were viewed by many contemporaries as expensive vanity projects, Henry’s failure to defend English territory in France attracted far more venom. In 1445 Maine was ceded to Rene of Anjou, Henry’s new father-in-law, without consultation or compensation of English stake-holders. This contributed massively to the loss of Normandy in 1450 and Jack Cade’s Rebellion in Kent; in 1453 Gascony, which had been English for four centuries, was re-taken by the French.

News of the disastrous English defeat at Castillon in the summer of 1453 probably helped to trigger Henry’s sudden and total mental collapse while at Clarendon, a royal hunting lodge near Salisbury. Henry was in a catatonic state, unable to respond or even move, until Christmas 1454. Even after his apparent recovery – for which Henry ordered thanks be given to St Edward (probably “the Confessor”, though Henry would have been familiar with Shaftesbury Abbey’s St Edward “the Martyr”) – the king was now little more than a puppet. His French queen Margaret of Anjou did her best to defend the interests of her husband and their son, born during Henry’s mental paralysis, (and also called Edward). Misogyny and francophobia meant that she would never be acceptable as a regent, and the struggle for power between Margaret’s Lancastrian supporters and their Yorkist rivals was finally resolved in favour of the Yorkist Edward IV after one of the bloodiest battles on English soil at Towton, fought in a snowstorm in March 1461. Henry evaded capture until 1465 while his wife and son made their way to France.

In 1470 a split in the Yorkist ranks saw Henry released from the Tower and restored as king. “A stuffed woolsack lifted by his ears, a shadow on the wall, bandied about as in a game of blind-man’s buff, submissive and mute … like a crowned calf” according to a Burgundian chronicler. Margaret returned from France via Weymouth with Prince Edward, only to be captured on 04 May 1471 at the Battle of Tewkesbury where her son was killed. There was now no incentive for Edward IV to keep Henry alive. Previously his murder would have created a martyr, with a much more capable heir to replace him.

In death Henry became the subject of a cult. Pilgrimages were made to his Windsor burial place and 368 miracles were claimed on his behalf. Putting on his red velvet hat, kept by his tomb, was a sure-fire cure for migraines. The Tudor kings Henry VII and Henry VIII had a vested interest in playing up the saintliness of their otherwise feckless kinsman. The consolation of canonisation was, however, denied Henry VI by the break with Rome in the 1530s, when Thomas Cromwell would have confiscated the hat.

Or so the postmark said on today’s letters. “(Sir) Robert Walpole enters office as first UK Prime Minister 300 years ago 4 April 1721.” Walpole himself would have denied it. He did so explicitly in 1741, when he had held office continuously for 20 years. “I unequivocally deny that I am sole and prime minister.” The term was then an insult, aimed at politicians whose ambition exceeded their ability.

In 1721 Walpole, a Whig, was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of Commons. He had occupied some of these roles before, and had also been Secretary at War and Treasurer of the Navy. He was educated at Eton and from 1735 he lived at 10 Downing Street, so he did have some recognisably modern Prime Ministerial attributes. In other respects he broke the mould. He was one of 19 children of a Norfolk country squire, weighed twenty stones as an adult and possessed a blunt, rustic and politically incorrect turn of phrase. In cultivating Queen Caroline, the influential wife of King George II, he claimed to have “seized the right sow by the ear.”

But he was industrious, thinking nothing of starting on his correspondence at 6.00a.m., and financially adept – “the best master of figures of any man of his time”, according to a contemporary. This competence enabled him to ride out the crisis created by the South Sea Bubble of 1720. It’s not clear whether he personally made big profits or losses when the price of shares in the South Sea Company, dealing mainly in slaves and sugar, soared to stratospheric heights and then crashed. Many of his political rivals were implicated in corrupt share transactions, and ruined both financially and reputationally. Walpole earned the gratitude of King George I by damping down the scandal which could have engulfed the Hanoverian Royal Family. Cynics called him “the Screen Master General.”

The Whigs were the party of the Protestant Hanoverian Succession, dating from 1714. Many of the Tories were suspected of having secret sympathies for the exiled Catholic Stuarts, who failed to seize back the British throne in the Jacobite Rising of 1715. One of the founders of the Whig Party was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, (1621-83) who built St Giles House at Wimborne St Giles. Ashley-Cooper died in exile after campaigning to exclude the Catholic James Duke of York from the line of inheritance. James duly succeeded his brother in 1685 but was deposed in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. The last of the Protestant Stuarts, Queen Anne, died in 1714.

Walpole’s longevity as a governing politician owed much to his policies of peace and low taxes. His motto was Quieta Non Movere, or “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie.” He was a persuasive orator, but preferred to know in advance that he could rely on the votes of the “Robinocracy”. “All those men have their price”, he is reported to have said. About a third of the Members of the House of Commons, or 185 MPs, were “Placemen” in receipt of largesse from the government, in the form of publicly-known appointments, honours or pensions. Many more sweeteners may have been paid from secret service funds, the records of which have not survived. Walpole would have regarded all this as sensible man-management, but literary opponents such as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding satirised what they saw as industrial-scale corruption.

Walpole’s two decades in government were well-compensated. Houghton Hall cost in excess of £200,000 (values of Walpole’s day) and its walls were lined with Old Masters, sold by a later generation to Catherine the Great of Russia, where they are now on display in the Hermitage Museum.

In 1739 Walpole was dragged into the War of Jenkins’s Ear. Captain Jenkins had been trading (probably slaves) in the Spanish American colonies, as Britain was permitted to do by Treaty, when in 1731 he claimed a Spanish coastguard had cut off his ear. There was uproar when he appeared before the House of Commons in March 1738 with his ear pickled in a bottle. “It is your war,” Walpole said to the Duke of Newcastle, a fellow Whig, “and I wish you well of it.” By 1742 the war had spread into Europe and Walpole had clearly lost control of the Commons. He resigned in February 1742, was made Earl of Orford by a grateful George II, and died in 1745, the same year as another abortive Jacobite coup.

Dorset Council has recently bought the former St Mary’s School for £10.05 million. Though described as Jacobean in style, Coombe House is not regarded as an historic building. It was built in 1886 (architect E.T. White) about a mile to the east of Shaftesbury, just inside Wiltshire, for Mark Hanbury Beaufoy (1854-1922), a wealthy vinegar manufacturer whose factory and main residence were in South Lambeth, London. The Beaufoy company had been founded in the 18th century by his great-grandfather, another Mark, on a site later occupied by Waterloo Bridge. Until the advent of refrigeration, vinegar was much in demand for food preservation, and in 1881 the Beaufoy works employed 125, producing 790,096 gallons of vinegar in 1898.

M. H. Beaufoy was regarded as an enlightened employer, who supported the campaign for an 8 hour working day and introduced a 45 hour week. In 1881 he chaired a meeting which founded The Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays, later to evolve into The Children’s Society. He sat as Liberal MP for Kennington in Lambeth from 1889 to 1895, and Hansard records that in July 1889 he asked the Home Secretary whether he was aware that “a man was charged at Leman Street Police Station with having assaulted a woman by dragging her to the ground by her hair and stabbing or attempting to stab her with a knife, but was subsequently discharged without any effort having been made to find the woman.” Clearly he was concerned that an opportunity had been missed in the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

The youthful Mark was a talented footballer. This was the heyday of amateur sportsmen of independent means. He played mainly as an outside right for Eton College, Cambridge University, and Surrey, and was the member of an FA Cup Final winning team in 1879, when Old Etonians beat Clapham Rovers 1-0.

Another of Mark’s favourite pastimes was game shooting. This was the attraction of Coombe House, surrounded by 1500 acres of land ideal for pheasant shooting, with a further 500 acres being rented in the vicinity of Ashmore. Some serious safety advice was addressed to his fifteen-year-old eldest son, Henry Mark Beaufoy:

If a sportsman true you’d be

Listen carefully to me

Never, never let your gun

Pointed be at anyone.

That it may unloaded be

Matters not the least to me.

Sixteen indoor servants were employed at Coombe House, and presumably at least as many on the estate. The Beaufoy Family’s private library, which included a Shakespeare First Folio bought in 1851 and Dr Samuel Johnson’s armchair acquired in 1859, was moved to Coombe House in 1909, though the First Folio was sold in 1912. The south wing was enlarged to create a ballroom to celebrate the marriage of daughter Margaret Hilda at much the same time.

Mark Hanbury Beaufoy was chairman of The Kennel Club from 1920 until his death in 1922. The estate was sold in 1930, with Coombe House turned into a luxury hotel, owned in 1935 by a Mr and Mrs Whitaker, and in 1939 by S. Wormald. In 1943 it became a USAAF Rest Home for American bomber crews based in the UK. The last of the Beaufoys involved in the vinegar business, George Maurice, was killed when a Luftwaffe bomb fell on the Lambeth works in 1941. The Beaufoy brand was phased out after 1961, while the factory was converted into upmarket housing. Its white cupola can still be seen from trains approaching Vauxhall Station from the south-west.

Most recently Coombe House has been part of the complex of St Mary’s independent school, which closed in 2020. The sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary bought the house in 1945 and opened a school for boarding and day girls, gradually adding to the facilities. Dorset Council has acquired the site with a view to making better provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, who might otherwise have to be accommodated much further afield. The views of Dorset residents and other interest groups were being sought until 18 March 2021 at dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/st-marys-survey

The photographs of Coombe House are from Gold Hill Museum’s Tyler Collection.

On 27 January 1921 Sir Merton Russell-Cotes died. In the course of a long and colourful life he had risen from humble beginnings to possess a fortune (most of which was given away to charitable causes), a flagship Bournemouth hotel, a significant art collection which filled a purpose-built clifftop villa, a knighthood, and a double-barrelled surname. In 1896 he had secured a lease on the elevated site for a new house, East Cliff Hall. In appearance this was an eccentric fusion, in his own words, of “Renaissance, Italian and old Scottish baronial styles.” Only the top storey was visible from the road and entrance level, while three storeys nestled into the cliff and commanded superb sea views. Visitors descended into the double-height Main Hall, which was overlooked on all four sides by a balcony. Statuary and a mosaic fountain caught the eye in the Hall, while the balcony walls were covered with paintings. Rooms off the balcony were dedicated to Japanese artworks – 100 packing cases of artefacts had been brought back from Japan in 1885 – and to memorabilia associated with the famous actor Sir Henry Irving. In 1907, at a civic lunch held to celebrate the opening of the undercliff promenade for which Merton had campaigned for 30 years, the sensational announcement was made that East Cliff Hall and its art collection would be gifted to the town of Bournemouth. Henceforth it would be known as The Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, though Merton and his wife Annie would continue to reside there during their lifetimes. By the time Annie died in April 1920, she and her husband had funded three additional galleries and the salary of a curator.

Merton bought the lease of the Bath Hotel in 1876. He was the third son (born 1835) of a Wolverhampton wholesale ironmonger, Samuel Coates. Merton’s middle name was probably a tribute to Lord John Russell, something of a local Midlands hero for his championing of the 1832 Reform Act, and was never hyphenated during most of his lifetime. He seems to have been a commercial traveller in cotton goods, though one also interested in buying and selling contemporary British art. He acquired experience of the hotel trade in Glasgow, in partnership with his sister Clara, and renamed the Royal Hanover Hotel, off George Square, on the strength of a visit by a great-grandson of Charles X of France. In fact Merton’s great talents lay in marketing, networking, and self-promotion. The Bath became the Royal Bath Hotel because the Prince of Wales, aged 14, stayed for one night in 1856, and was virtually rebuilt in Loire Valley chateau style in 1877. Merton knew the power of celebrity and ensured that the Royal Bath could provide the luxury expected by an upmarket clientele. In the early 1890’s this included Prince Albert of Belgium, conductor Sir Charles Halle, Oscar Wilde before his fall from grace, and Henry Irving, whom Merton claimed as a special friend.

In 1894 Merton served as one of the early Mayors of the newly incorporated Borough of Bournemouth. He was not an elected Councillor and may have regretted accepting the honour after the Council reversed his attempt to block a right of way passing between the Royal Bath and three adjoining houses to which he held the leases. By 1908 this furore was long-forgotten when the Russell Cotes received the Freedom of the Borough, and few begrudged a knighthood for Merton in 1909. It may have been references in the press to “Sir Russell Cotes” which led to the adoption of the hyphen.

Merton Russell-Cotes was to have been the subject of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society’s January 2021 lecture by David Beardsley. This has been postponed until Tuesday 04 January 2022.

This blog was inspired by a reading of ‘The Art of a Salesman: The Life of Sir Merton Russell-Cotes’ published by Paul Whittaker in 2019. Paul maintains a blog about Merton Russell-Cotes at Sketches of a Salesman.