From tin shack to stately home
Stretching into the distance and lined by groups of ancient holm oaks, the avenue leading from the twin lodges of the South Gate towards Holkham Hall in Norfolk goes on forever.
‘It’s rather like Castle Howard,’ I say to my hostess, the Countess of Leicester, at the steering wheel, referring to the fact that this drive is very straight and very long.
‘No! It’s better,’ she replies. And we carry on for a full two miles until there it is, in the middle of a 3,000- acre park – a vast Palladian palace, one of the most majestic stately homes in England, largely untouched since it was completed in 1765.
1 The Marble Hal is constructed of Derbyshire alabaster. The room doubles as a concert hall 2 Deer roam freely in Holkham Park 3 Sarah Forde, later to become Countess of Leicester, in a pony and trap with her mother (1972) 4 One of the magnificent columns from the expansive colonnade in the Marble Hall, which was copied from the Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome. The Pantheon in Rome also inspired the 50ft-high ceiling
It is a stupendous sight, and I am here to talk to Lady Leicester about her role in restoring the house over a 22-year period, about the practical realities of running such a place, and about her present life as High Sheriff and local grandee.
Not that there is anything faintly grand about her manner, nor any hint of airs and graces. Yes, the 66-year-old Countess, petite, fair-haired and olive- skinned, is turned out immaculately, but you would never guess that she has lived for much of her life in such a palace. Indeed, Lady Leicester’s childhood was not merely ordinary; it was positively deprived.
5 Holkham Hall 6 The Earl and Countess of Leicester live in a farmhouse on the Holkham Hall estate 7 The Long Library, designed by William Kent, is now used for entertaining 8 Dating from 1757, meals were prepared in the refurbished Old Kitchen until the Second World WarNever, as a girl, could she have dreamed that she would become the mistress of what the head of the National Trust has described as one of England’s 10 greatest houses… a house, furthermore, that has been occupied for hundreds of years by the family that inspired the central plot of Downton Abbey.
‘It’s a rags-to-riches story,’ she says, as we settle in the drawing room of the comfortable farmhouse on the Holkham estate to which she and her husband, the 7th Earl of Leicester, retired in 2007. To escape from England during the Depression of the 1930s, her father joined the colonial police force, first in Palestine and later in Nigeria. Consequently, from the age of seven the young Sarah Forde, as the Countess of Leicester was then called, was farmed out with her twin brother to a nanny back home.
‘My father kept her short of money,’ says Lady Leicester. ‘First we lived in a council house with her niece, and later in what was essentially a tin shack in a remote village in Kent.’
Her brother was sent off to prep school, but the schooling of a girl not being considered important, Sarah stayed with her nanny.
‘I was hugely lonely,’ she says. ‘We had no car, and my best friend was an old man who lived in an old Pullman railway carriage down the road.’ For four years she and her brother didn’t see their parents once. ‘It was a lousy childhood,’ she comments, without bitterness.
After her parents returned to England in 1957, she went to live with them, finishing her education in a girls’ school in Norfolk. It was the 11th school she had attended.
9 The architecture of Holkham Hall draws upon Palladian villa design and was the vision of the 1st Earl of Leicester 10 Lady Leicester herself models plaster copies of Roman statuary for Holkham Sculpture Reproductions Room 11 Sheep graze in the public areas 12 Crimson and gold dominates in the North Dining Room
Having worked first in fashion making wedding dresses, and then as a secretary for a theatrical agent, in 1972 Sarah Forde married the photographer Colin de Chair, by whom she had two children. Ten years later they divorced; and in 1986 she married the Viscount Coke (pronounced ‘cook’), as the present Earl of Leicester was known, and moved into Holkham, where her son and daughter joined the Earl’s three children from his own previous marriage.
Built by Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, as a showcase for the huge collection of works of art that he had amassed during a six-year Grand Tour, Holkham Hall is a treasure trove, which has survived the vicissitudes of history almost entirely intact. Until the Second World War it was a fully functioning stately home operating along the old lines with an inside staff of 40. Then circumstances changed.
‘After the War the nation was utterly exhausted,’ explains Lady Leicester’s husband, joining the conversation. [He was President of the Historic Houses Association between 1998 and 2003.] There was no money to do anything, taxation was punitive, and the future for all big country houses looked bleak.’
The 5th Earl was therefore tempted to give up and hand over to the National Trust. Furthermore, he had three daughters but no son, so that on his death the title and estate, which is entailed, were due to pass to a cousin of unconventional character who lived on a farm in Rhodesia. This, of course, is pure Downton; and as Lady Leicester confirms, it was this exact situation that provided the inspiration for the TV series created by Julian Fellowes, who knows the Leicesters. But before the 5th Earl could hand over to the National Trust, he had to obtain the consent of his heir in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe, as it is now); and despite the fact that the latter had no interest in Holkham, nor any desire to live there, he said no.
So the house stayed in the family, and when the 5th Earl died in 1976, his successor in Africa, the 6th Earl, immediately handed everything over to his son, who had in any case been helping to run the estate for several years, and who is today the 7th Earl of Leicester, following his father’s death in 1994.
‘We have a lot to thank him for,’ comments Lady Leicester, referring to the absentee 6th Earl.
Back in 1976, however, the responsibilities that the current Earl faced were not enviable. ‘I was paying tax at the top rate of 98 per cent,’ he explains, ‘and I also had death duties to pay.’ This was achieved mainly by selling the Codex Leicester, a Leonardo da Vinci sketchbook, which fetched £2.5m at auction. Painfully for the Coke family, the new owner sold it on 10 years later for $19m. But it had saved the estate.
What, then, was the house like when Lady Leicester (at that time the Viscountess Coke) arrived in 1986?
‘It needed a lot of TLC,’ she says; and to mark the start of a new chapter in their lives, she and her new husband did up and moved into a wing of the house that had not been touched for 40 years. In need of a role of her own, she also arranged concerts in the Marble Hall and managed the pottery shops and tea rooms (the house attracted 45,000 visitors last year). Then there was the ongoing job of general restoration. ‘Very carefully we restored the State Rooms. It was a very slow process, very expensive.’
And there were very few staff. ‘When I first got there I had practically no help in this monster of a house,’ says Lady Leicester. ‘I had to entertain guests in the Library while at the same time cooking veg in the kitchen downstairs. I nearly died of work in those days. I feel that my tough childhood made it easier for me to cope,’ she reflects.
To bring home the reality of all this, Lady Leicester now drives me over to the big house, austere under a gloomy January sky, and we walk round this vast palace. Indeed, apart from the Codex Leicester, the family has never sold anything since the house was built.
Who, I thought, would not feel proud to live in such a place, whatever the difficulties? So I ask how she had felt about handing over the house and its 25,000 acres to her stepson Viscount Coke. The Countess does not hesitate. ‘It was a huge relief,’ she says. ‘I was exhausted.’
Even in what might be called retirement, though, Lady Leicester is not exactly slacking off. Every morning she swims 30 lengths of the indoor swimming pool in the farmhouse that she and Lord Leicester now occupy. After which, there are countless local interests to keep her busy.
Most notable of these is her position as High Sheriff of Norfolk, which she occupies until April of this year. ‘The law fascinates me,’ she says. ‘I enjoy the courts so much that I want to do witness support in the future.’
And then comes a last surprise. The Countess takes me into a workshop, which is full of reproductions of statues from Holkham, all made by herself, all pretty much indistinguishable from the originals, and all for sale at surprisingly reasonable prices. It’s a proper small business, called Holkham Sculpture Reproductions… and it provides yet a further reminder that perhaps the main requirement for anyone running a stately home nowadays is energy. Lots of it.
Holkham Hall: 01328-710227, www.holkham.co.uk
‘It’s rather like Castle Howard,’ I say to my hostess, the Countess of Leicester, at the steering wheel, referring to the fact that this drive is very straight and very long.
‘No! It’s better,’ she replies. And we carry on for a full two miles until there it is, in the middle of a 3,000- acre park – a vast Palladian palace, one of the most majestic stately homes in England, largely untouched since it was completed in 1765.
1 The Marble Hal is constructed of Derbyshire alabaster. The room doubles as a concert hall 2 Deer roam freely in Holkham Park 3 Sarah Forde, later to become Countess of Leicester, in a pony and trap with her mother (1972) 4 One of the magnificent columns from the expansive colonnade in the Marble Hall, which was copied from the Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome. The Pantheon in Rome also inspired the 50ft-high ceilingIt is a stupendous sight, and I am here to talk to Lady Leicester about her role in restoring the house over a 22-year period, about the practical realities of running such a place, and about her present life as High Sheriff and local grandee.
Not that there is anything faintly grand about her manner, nor any hint of airs and graces. Yes, the 66-year-old Countess, petite, fair-haired and olive- skinned, is turned out immaculately, but you would never guess that she has lived for much of her life in such a palace. Indeed, Lady Leicester’s childhood was not merely ordinary; it was positively deprived.
5 Holkham Hall 6 The Earl and Countess of Leicester live in a farmhouse on the Holkham Hall estate 7 The Long Library, designed by William Kent, is now used for entertaining 8 Dating from 1757, meals were prepared in the refurbished Old Kitchen until the Second World WarNever, as a girl, could she have dreamed that she would become the mistress of what the head of the National Trust has described as one of England’s 10 greatest houses… a house, furthermore, that has been occupied for hundreds of years by the family that inspired the central plot of Downton Abbey. ‘It’s a rags-to-riches story,’ she says, as we settle in the drawing room of the comfortable farmhouse on the Holkham estate to which she and her husband, the 7th Earl of Leicester, retired in 2007. To escape from England during the Depression of the 1930s, her father joined the colonial police force, first in Palestine and later in Nigeria. Consequently, from the age of seven the young Sarah Forde, as the Countess of Leicester was then called, was farmed out with her twin brother to a nanny back home.
‘My father kept her short of money,’ says Lady Leicester. ‘First we lived in a council house with her niece, and later in what was essentially a tin shack in a remote village in Kent.’
Her brother was sent off to prep school, but the schooling of a girl not being considered important, Sarah stayed with her nanny.
‘I was hugely lonely,’ she says. ‘We had no car, and my best friend was an old man who lived in an old Pullman railway carriage down the road.’ For four years she and her brother didn’t see their parents once. ‘It was a lousy childhood,’ she comments, without bitterness.
After her parents returned to England in 1957, she went to live with them, finishing her education in a girls’ school in Norfolk. It was the 11th school she had attended.
9 The architecture of Holkham Hall draws upon Palladian villa design and was the vision of the 1st Earl of Leicester 10 Lady Leicester herself models plaster copies of Roman statuary for Holkham Sculpture Reproductions Room 11 Sheep graze in the public areas 12 Crimson and gold dominates in the North Dining RoomHaving worked first in fashion making wedding dresses, and then as a secretary for a theatrical agent, in 1972 Sarah Forde married the photographer Colin de Chair, by whom she had two children. Ten years later they divorced; and in 1986 she married the Viscount Coke (pronounced ‘cook’), as the present Earl of Leicester was known, and moved into Holkham, where her son and daughter joined the Earl’s three children from his own previous marriage.
Built by Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, as a showcase for the huge collection of works of art that he had amassed during a six-year Grand Tour, Holkham Hall is a treasure trove, which has survived the vicissitudes of history almost entirely intact. Until the Second World War it was a fully functioning stately home operating along the old lines with an inside staff of 40. Then circumstances changed.
‘After the War the nation was utterly exhausted,’ explains Lady Leicester’s husband, joining the conversation. [He was President of the Historic Houses Association between 1998 and 2003.] There was no money to do anything, taxation was punitive, and the future for all big country houses looked bleak.’
The 5th Earl was therefore tempted to give up and hand over to the National Trust. Furthermore, he had three daughters but no son, so that on his death the title and estate, which is entailed, were due to pass to a cousin of unconventional character who lived on a farm in Rhodesia. This, of course, is pure Downton; and as Lady Leicester confirms, it was this exact situation that provided the inspiration for the TV series created by Julian Fellowes, who knows the Leicesters. But before the 5th Earl could hand over to the National Trust, he had to obtain the consent of his heir in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe, as it is now); and despite the fact that the latter had no interest in Holkham, nor any desire to live there, he said no.
So the house stayed in the family, and when the 5th Earl died in 1976, his successor in Africa, the 6th Earl, immediately handed everything over to his son, who had in any case been helping to run the estate for several years, and who is today the 7th Earl of Leicester, following his father’s death in 1994.
‘We have a lot to thank him for,’ comments Lady Leicester, referring to the absentee 6th Earl.
Back in 1976, however, the responsibilities that the current Earl faced were not enviable. ‘I was paying tax at the top rate of 98 per cent,’ he explains, ‘and I also had death duties to pay.’ This was achieved mainly by selling the Codex Leicester, a Leonardo da Vinci sketchbook, which fetched £2.5m at auction. Painfully for the Coke family, the new owner sold it on 10 years later for $19m. But it had saved the estate.
What, then, was the house like when Lady Leicester (at that time the Viscountess Coke) arrived in 1986?
‘It needed a lot of TLC,’ she says; and to mark the start of a new chapter in their lives, she and her new husband did up and moved into a wing of the house that had not been touched for 40 years. In need of a role of her own, she also arranged concerts in the Marble Hall and managed the pottery shops and tea rooms (the house attracted 45,000 visitors last year). Then there was the ongoing job of general restoration. ‘Very carefully we restored the State Rooms. It was a very slow process, very expensive.’
And there were very few staff. ‘When I first got there I had practically no help in this monster of a house,’ says Lady Leicester. ‘I had to entertain guests in the Library while at the same time cooking veg in the kitchen downstairs. I nearly died of work in those days. I feel that my tough childhood made it easier for me to cope,’ she reflects.
To bring home the reality of all this, Lady Leicester now drives me over to the big house, austere under a gloomy January sky, and we walk round this vast palace. Indeed, apart from the Codex Leicester, the family has never sold anything since the house was built.
Who, I thought, would not feel proud to live in such a place, whatever the difficulties? So I ask how she had felt about handing over the house and its 25,000 acres to her stepson Viscount Coke. The Countess does not hesitate. ‘It was a huge relief,’ she says. ‘I was exhausted.’
Even in what might be called retirement, though, Lady Leicester is not exactly slacking off. Every morning she swims 30 lengths of the indoor swimming pool in the farmhouse that she and Lord Leicester now occupy. After which, there are countless local interests to keep her busy.
Most notable of these is her position as High Sheriff of Norfolk, which she occupies until April of this year. ‘The law fascinates me,’ she says. ‘I enjoy the courts so much that I want to do witness support in the future.’
And then comes a last surprise. The Countess takes me into a workshop, which is full of reproductions of statues from Holkham, all made by herself, all pretty much indistinguishable from the originals, and all for sale at surprisingly reasonable prices. It’s a proper small business, called Holkham Sculpture Reproductions… and it provides yet a further reminder that perhaps the main requirement for anyone running a stately home nowadays is energy. Lots of it.
Holkham Hall: 01328-710227, www.holkham.co.uk