The poshest game you've (n)ever heard of
As the owner of the big house in Saltburn complains about unwanted visitors, why we should pity the poor old toffs who inherit such millstones...
(I did warn you some of these newsletters might be quite silly. So here’s quite a silly one to kick off with.)
Forget Charades. Forget Ibble Dibble. Forget even Are You There, Moriarty?, which is currently enjoying a renaissance thanks to its appearance in Netflix’s One Day. The poshest game going, which you may never have heard of, is called Pass The Castle.
The rules are pretty simple. You inherit a castle (or a big house) and take your turn running it for 20 years until you gratefully hand the castle (or big house) on to the next generation.
I came across this meritocratic game a few years ago while interviewing a posh chap who owned a whopping house a few hours outside London. It’s a very beautiful house but the maintenance costs are so high, and the pressure of running such a place so great, that the family decided some time ago that each generation would only have to be in charge for 20 years, before passing it on to the next in line. Thus, Pass The Castle.
‘How long have you got until you can give it to your son?’ I asked this posh chap, and quick as a flash he replied something like, ‘Nine years, seven months, two weeks and three days…’ He couldn’t wait to shift it, in other words.
I was reminded of this game a couple of days ago when I read that the owner of the 700-year-old house in Saltburn is peeved by all the sudden visitors, flocking to take selfies in front of the place where Barry Keoghan drank that bathwater. The house in question is called Drayton House, a penny loafer’s throw from Kettering, and the owner called Charles Stopford Sackville. He told the Mail on Sunday, ‘I never envisaged the amount of interest there would be. It’s quite weird.’
I particularly liked the contribution from the lady who works in the local pub, The Snooty Fox, who told another reporter, ‘One lady drove three hours from Wales in a bright pink Jeep. I think she was an influencer.’
Poor old toffs. Can they never have a moment’s peace in their big houses? I interviewed the Duke of Northumberland once, who said that he and his family had decided to clear out of Alnwick Castle every summer when the hordes started rolling in to peer at the place used for Hogwarts in Harry Potter. ‘We couldn’t get in or out without going through crowds,’ the duke told me, ‘and because we lived in the keep, there were no private gardens so the children just ended up staying inside all the time.’ You can read that interview (and see pics of his taxidermied pets) HERE if you like.
When the interview was published in Tatler, that part of it was picked up by the Telegraph who stuck it on their front page and declared that the duke was grumbling about the plague of so many tourists. I subsequently received quite a terse email from His Grace, saying that this kind of thing was precisely why he didn’t usually do interviews, which I thought was a bit unjust seeing as I’d only reported what he told me.
Anyway. The owner of Knebworth, Henry Lytton-Cobbold, once told me that he’d raised £9m for the pile but still needed another £5m, ‘just to keep the roof from falling in.’ At Manderston in Scotland, a large Edwardian house, the late Lord Palmer used to get a team of volunteers in every summer to clean the silver-plated staircase with toothbrushes.
They’re not easy, these castles and big houses*. You might think it would be splendid to buy a big place if you won the lottery tomorrow, and lark about like Rosamund Pike as Lady Elspeth in Saltburn. But think of the heating bills! Think of the upkeep! Think of the pesky visitors sticking their noses up against your window! And yet none of them want to be the black sheep who decides to flog the family house and goes to live in a nice cosy bungalow, instead. So you see, poor old stately home owners. We should really offer them our sympathies, if anything.
(*Princess Margaret offers a rare example of someone posh who was absolutely delighted when they moved from a small(ish) house to a bigger house in her fabulous 1981 episode of Desert Island Discs. Wasn’t it very daunting to move into Buckingham Palace (775 rooms) from a smaller home at 145 Piccadilly, asks the then-presenter, Roy Plomley. ‘Well no,’ Princess Margaret says airily back, ‘because Buckingham Palace is a very cosy house!’ Please please listen to this episode if you haven’t before. HERE look I’m even giving you the link.)
Recommendation of the week
Sometimes this will be telly, sometimes a book, sometimes an article or a new and thrilling type of biscuit I’ve discovered. This week it’s theatre, which I hesitated over because theatre tickets are SO VERY expensive and, while I want to support the theatre industry with all my heart, I also want to eat and clothe myself. However, this play, The Hills of California, was written by Jez Butterworth, of Jerusalem and The Ferryman fame, and I loved it.
In a nutshell, and without giving anything away, it’s the story of four sisters and their ambitious mother, who runs a guesthouse in 1970s Blackpool. It includes zingy one-liners (there’s a particularly good one about a woman ‘who gets good use from a chair’), but also manages to be moving and poignant about family and siblings, and the ambitions that become diluted (or get forgotten?) as we age. It’s had more mixed reviews than his previous plays. The FT gave it five stars and The Guardian three, but I had a great time. Also, even though my favourite kind of play is one that’s about half an hour long and has no interval, and the Hills of California is three hours and has TWO intervals, I didn’t look at the time once or wonder when it was going to finish so I could leap on the Tube home. Find tickets HERE.
Pic of the week
I slightly lost my mind, yesterday. It all started in the morning, when I wandered up the high street in my parts (Crystal Palace) to get some yoghurt and bananas from Sainsbury’s. There were traffic cones everywhere on one of the main shopping streets and lots of suspended parking signs. Also, dozens of trucks, lorries and catering vans. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked a hovering security men, who told me they were filming Slow Horses. I LOVE Slow Horses, the brilliant books by Mick Herron AND the Apple TV series which, I think, is one of those rare productions that does the books justice. I made an embarrassing noise which startled the security man, and immediately texted my local WhatsApp group, who started debating where Gary Oldman might be hanging out. The coffee shop on the corner? The new cafe-slash-fishmonger? Probably the dodgy pub, we decided. Then, when Gary was spotted yesterday afternoon by another local, I hurried back up to the main street and loitered like a groupie. And lo and behold, after 20 minutes of waiting in the blistering cold, there was Jackson Lamb (Exhibit A) stepping out of his knackered yellow car (Exhibit B). What a Monday.
Nonsense of the week
Bunettone, or a hot-cross-bun-panettone. Waitrose is selling them for Easter and I take a very dim view of silly hot cross bun collabs (I’ve actually managed a whole column on this topic before, which you can read HERE). Salted caramel hot cross bun? Sticky toffee hot cross bun? White chocolate and lemon hot cross bun? Grow up, supermarkets. Why mess with perfection, which is a PLAIN toasted hot cross bun with slabs of butter so thick you can see your teeth marks in it.
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Growing up, one of my BFs who we'll call A lived in a ( Scottish) castle not far from our cottage. Rainy days in the school hols were often spent wandering around long unused rooms upstairs looking into cupboards and drawers and finding treasures and junk in equal quantities.
When I returned to the Highlands as a middle aged mum, if A was visiting them, her parents would ask me over for lunch and I would wear thermals even in August as the dining room was on the north side, with a one bar electric fire ' for the dog' ( an ancient Jack Russell).
After A's father died, her brother said he didn't want to live in the castle, he and his family preferred their cosy farmhouse further down the glen, so it was sold to a billionaire.
A while later, I met A's mum in the local town. "It must be such a change, living in a bungalow" I said. (I knew her childhood has been spent between Scottish country houses and her grandfather's very VERY stately home in England).
Her eyes lit up. " It IS! Every morning when I wake up....it's WARM!"
Incidentally ,the billionaire installed central heating in the castle at absolutely vast expense - cast iron radiators with acanthus leaves everywhere. At A's mum's wake - he is a rather kind billionaire, he let them use the castle at no cost - everyone ran around exclaiming "But...it's *WARM*!".
Like most of the castles and big houses A and I were invited to parties at, long ago ( huddling close to or actually in huge fireplaces to stave off hypothermia) it is now a hotel. Où sont les neiges d'antan?
Hey! I enjoyed reading this. Posh people are the best/worst, and always entertaining. And hey, I've worked on Slow Horses! First day working in the UK was with Gary Oldman and it went something like this:
The scene was for Jackson Lamb to exit a shop with a glass front. They were shooting from inside, looking out. It was my job in that moment to keep the public from walking in front of the store. Easy. Rolling! We're 10 seconds into the take and a man on a mission (this is 7am, by the way) is heading straight forward me, straight... past me. Hey, wait! I whisper-yelled. FUCK OFF I'M GOING HOME! he screeched back, on camera, mid-glass front, Jackson/Oldman stepping out on the pavement. I died and this is my ghost writing the comment. The London public are very special.