Sandringham: The Story of a Royal Home (The Royal House of Windsor) by Helen Cathcart

Author:Helen Cathcart [Cathcart, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2021-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

7: THE COTTAGE AND THE CHILDREN

I

The newly-weds arrived to a smell of fresh paint and supper and came down to their first honeymoon breakfast at a new table set in the bay window of the dining-room, amid a tasteful array of glistening new Maple’s furniture. The view was a strip of lawn leading down to the reedy “smaller lake” and its island. The young couple began their explorations to the sound of quacking ducks in an atmosphere of new wallpapers and carpets and even new mortar.

The Bachelors’ Cottage had been thrown off by the architect Humbert as a trifle in gabled Victorian Gothic, slate-roofed and stone-walled, merely to provide a guest annexe to the main house. Twenty years of ivy had softened its main lines and the indefatigable Edis had been commissioned to redecorate and improve the place as a residence for the Yorks.

He achieved this chiefly by flinging out new windows in bays of new stone and roughcast, and fitting the interior with overmantled fireplaces and white-painted panelling. There are signs that Humbert intended it to seem a miniature edition of Sandringham House. When Edis finished his earlier alterations, it could boast slightly enlarged rooms and two extra bathrooms but little more.

Following his father’s example, Prince George bought the new modern furniture without consulting his future wife: he was astonished and dismayed to learn that she had looked forward to choosing and buying everything herself. The rearranging she still could do and she moved the furniture around and rehung pictures in her first week of marriage.

“The cottage is very nice but very small. However, I think we can make it charming,” she wrote to a friend. Her mother echoed the results in a letter four months later, “Charming, most cosy, comfortable,” she apostrophised, “the perfection of an ideal cottage! but far too small.”

Promptly taking this difficulty in hand, however, the forthright Princess May tactfully talked to the Princess of Wales about the desirability of adding on and won her agreement. But as if to spare Colonel Edis’s feelings, the new work was assigned to one of the tribe of Becks, an architect practising in Norwich.

Curiously, the various additions of the Sandringham estate invariably became outmoded although always conscientiously carried out in the latest style and to the highest standard of the day. Princess May’s addition — Queen Mary’s as it was to be one day — was a three-storey wing in roughcast and pebbledash, with a facing of black mock Tudor beams and a wooden-railed balcony to embellish the upper floor. By way of linking this to the main house a small tower with an hexagonal slate turret appeared.

When the sunblinds were drawn in the summer and the canvas awnings afforded shade, when the inhabitants could call and chat from their balconies, the effect had colour and gaiety. York Cottage has been variously called a bijou residence, an ornate hutch, a glum little villa, a rabbit-warren of tiny rooms, but Princess May thought continually that it “looked very nice” and it remained the Norfolk home of the Yorks for over thirty years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.