Eclipse by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409080794
Publisher: Transworld

Cannons (now spelled Canons) in Edgware, the villa built by Hallett, the last home of Eclipse and of Dennis O’Kelly. The house is now part of the North London Collegiate School for Girls.

If you were going to spend a fortune at this time, you did not want that fortune to be secured by South Sea stock. Unfortunately, Chandos was an investor in the apparently booming South Sea Company, and he took a heavy hit when the share price collapsed.119 He carried on, undaunted, but bequeathed family finances that were seriously in the red. In 1747, the second Duke sold Cannons, with the result that the palace, completed just twenty-five years earlier, was broken up and dispersed. The marble staircase went to Lord Chesterfield’s Mayfair house – which was later demolished too. According to a history of Cannons, the eight Ionic columns in front of the National Gallery in London are from the Cannons colonnade. The ornamental gates stand at an Epsom mansion called The Durdans. A cabinet-maker called William Hallett bought the estate, and built a more modest villa there, of Portland stone.

In 1785, Dennis bought Hallett’s villa, with some of the grounds, and the following year he struck a deal for the remainder of the estate. A document in the London Metropolitan Archives tells us that the second purchase cost him £10, 500. He tookpossession of a park some two miles round, containing between three and four hundred deer, with lakes and avenues, as well as smallholdings with cows, sheep and horses.

Horace Walpole, that barbed critic, disapproved of Hallett’s taste, referring to his decorations as ‘mongrel chinoise’. The third Duke of Chandos also had criticisms of the new Cannons house: ‘The kitchen [is] not much larger than a Tunbridge kitchen, and smokes and stinks the house infernally. The only way of letting the smoke out, for none goes out of the chimney, is through the window, which lets it in again at the window above it.’

In spite of these drawbacks, the villa Dennis bought and subsequently lived in was a smart place. In the basement were a housekeeper’s room, kitchen, scullery, butler’s pantry, ice-house, servants’ hall, dairy and larder, with cellars for wine, beer and coal. The ground floor contained a library, a breakfast parlour, a dining room, a grand saloon of forty-five feet by twenty-one feet, a drawing room, a stone hall and a stone staircase. There were six bedchambers and a dressing room on the first floor, and a further six bedchambers, for servants, on the attic storey. Today, this house is part of the North London Collegiate School for girls.

Dennis was slowing down, without mellowing. The company he kept at Cannons was ‘more select’ than that of his former days, consisting of ‘people of the first class of his own sex’ as well as ‘unexceptionable’ female friends. He was demanding and difficult with his brother Philip, and he berated his nephew, Andrew, for the kind of behaviour in which he himself, when younger, had specialized. His friends had to endure boorish joshing.

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