Four Winds of Heaven
Julie Ann Anley, who took me on a tour of Mourne Park 15 years ago, was the first person to take me there. “It’s great!”She laughed. “No one ever bothers us here because the house isn’t architecturally important.”Belvoir Castle is a popular tourist attraction. The country house as time capsule may have become a cliché, coined in the Eighties when Calke Abbey came to the public’s attention, but it certainly applied to MPH.
When I last visited, April 2003, the house was bustling with people looking for the soon to be-disposed contents. It was beginning to fall apart. The kitchen sink was covered in small, white labels from the auction. The courtyard was engulfed by a striped marquee, and the structure itself looked worse.
After Nicholas Anley died in 1992, a family dispute erupted that continued through the law courts and ended up at the auction. The auction was concluded on February 14th without any filial or siblings love.
“It’s something which all our family very much care about,”Marion Scarlett Russell was Julie Ann’s younger sister. She spoke to Martin Cassidy, BBC Northern Ireland Rural Affairs correspondent back in 1994.
“We’ve always known that this house and its land were non negotiable and it was something we would do everything to keep,”Debonaire Norah Needham Horsman, or “Bonnie” as her elder sister.
This harmony was broken by disagreements about how to manage the estate. Marion took what she believed to be her fair portion of the contents out of the house during a midnight run. The courts demanded that Marion reveal whereabouts of the “chattels”, as she called them. This resulted in Marion spending one week at Her Majesty’s delight.
The five-year struggle of legal negotiations that cost thousands upon thousands of pounds and took hundreds of thousands off the total value of the property, finally came to an end when Marion was allowed to keep her part of the proceeds. Her siblings were then permitted to auction their shares.
MPH (pronounced “pronounced”) was where the Earls Of Kilmorey lived. “Kilmurray”What do you think about Calke’s upper class and their love for nomenclature mispronunciation, or Calke? “Cock”; Belvoir as “Beaver”Blakley, et al. “Blakely”?).
It can be traced back through Nicholas Bagnel who founded Newry, an Elizabethan soldier. In 1962, the 4th Earl Kilmorey passed away. The family inheritance was changed shortly before his death. He had no children, so Major Patrick Needham (subsequently the 5th Earl) of Kilmorey waived his right to succession to MPH to exchange assets equal in value. So the title returned back to England after Charles I, who had established the original viscountcy of 1625.
The compromise enabled Lady Norah (4th Earl) and her daughters (Lady Norah) to live in the house. Patrick’s son Richard Needham is known better as Richard Needham. He was the former Conservative Northern Ireland Economics Minister. Now he is the chairman deputy of a vacuum company, but he declines his Anglo Irish title. His son, however, is Viscount Newry or Mourne.
Nicholas, the younger daughter of 4th Earl’s, was married to Julie Ann in the Sixties. He then moved into Mourne Park’s converted stables. The title was lost to him when he took over the house in 1984.
Julie Ann might have described it as architecturally insignificant, but it does not compete with the Ballyedmond Castle baronial battlements or Seaforde House’s symmetrical severity. This is not a typical Edwardian house, even though it’s in an area where Victorian or Georgian seems to be the standard.
MPH exudes charm thanks to its low, long elevations made from local granite, lavish green paint use on windows frames, porches, barsgeboards and garden furniture and the large number of French doors. The house’s interior decorations date back to the 20th century, giving it a charming Edwardian feel.
It is a stunning setting. The craggy Knockcree Mountain rises 130m high above the estate’s oak and beech forests.
W E Russell (Victorian visitor) waxed poetic on Mourne Park as archived and maintained by Dr Anthony Malcomson. The scene from the front door is very beautiful. In the precincts surrounding the mansion is a lake. The demesne extends beyond this lake with a gentle rising slope that conceals the land between. One can imagine the ocean waves lapping the parks lawns.
It was built by Thadeus Gallier, a County Louth man who later became Thomas Gallagher. Most likely, it replaced an older house.
Gallagher, an architect or ‘journeyman-builder’, had already built Anaverna at Ravensdale a decade earlier. This five-bay, two-storey home was built by Baron McClelland near Dundalk. This house is now home to the Lenox-Conynghams. This handsome house of modest size, which is too large for a glebe and too small for a home, proudly stands in its serene setting, overlooking the meadow. Gallagher’s three-bay breakfront has a large fanlight above the entry door. However, the porch is partially covering the view. Gallagher’s semicircular reliever arches above upstairs windows are a design he would later use at MPH. He proved to be an extremely sophisticated designer at Anaverna.
James Gallagher, Gallagher’s only son, wrote in his autobiography, that his father had worked for MPH nine months in 1818. He then emigrated from New Orleans to continue the family tradition of building fine structures. James Gallier Junior, his grandson, was an architect of the third generation. His 1857 New Orleans house is now known as Gallier House Museum.
Gallagher designed the first six MPH designs. It was a two-storey late Georgian country house. There were Wyatt windows at each end of a doorway that looked like Anaverna’s, and a fanlight above it. The third floor was then added, and two more stories were added to the front. Finally, the front was rebuilt at the same height as the original house. This allowed for higher ceilings in all rooms than the old one.
The replacement façade is three bays wide like the original front but in place of Wyatt windows is bipartite fenestration set in shallow recesses rising through both storeys with relieving arches over them. The front has a distinctive look because of its combination of paired windows with gentle arches that are like brows above the eyes.
The shallow recess that runs along the breakfront is located above the entrance door. It’s treated like another window and flanked by windows of similar size and shape on each side. The hipped roof wraps around Staircase Hall’s roof lantern. It is partially hidden by a thin cornice and a low parapet.
The estate was subject to a series of improvements. After his father, the 12th Vicar, became an earl in 1840s for his contribution to Newry development, the 2nd Earl (1787-1880), whose Kilmoreys were at the top of the aristocratic ladder, commissioned a famine wall’. This was an Irish family’s method of creating work during the Irish potato crisis. It also made a profit from granite walls, which were cheaply built. Kimmitt Dean says that Tullyframe Lodge, which was the third of four lodges in the estate’s portfolio, was constructed by the 2nd Earl. Whitewater Gate Lodge was constructed in 1830s, and Ballymaglogh Gate Lodge built in 1850s.
MPH’s Edwardian flavor was created by the changes made by the 4th and 3rd Earls. “Not fit for a gentleman to live in!”On his inheritance, the 3rd Earl (1842-1915), exclaimed. He began remedial Gentrifications in 1892 with the addition of rectangular ground-floor bay windows to the front. This continued until 1904, when he constructed a one-storey wing that ran perpendicularly to the rear. This wing includes Lady Kilmorey’s Sitting Room (the latter was finished in time for the 21st-birthday celebrations of his son).
The son of the current 4th Earl, 1883-1961, built an enormous flat-roofed extension on the avenue side and moved the entry to that elevation between 1919 and 1921. Two doors were built to replace the old entrance. They were framed with pairs of square-squat pillars and complemented by Lord Kilmorey’s Study windows. Green Gate Lodge, a house of two stories built from the same granite as MPH was the final addition to the estate.
The fascinating structure has been built over a century by each generation of MPH, with many surprising variations in the floor heights and ceiling heights. It is laid out like three slices of square cake in parallel. Each one has its own unique essence. Three storeys back, the oldest one has low ceilings. There are small windows. However some of them still have their Georgian panes. It is located in the middle of the house and has a top-lit slice. This contains the Long Corridor that runs parallel to the Hall. Finaly, you will find the latest slice which contains an enfilade reception rooms, including the Billiard Room (formerly known as the Large Drawing Room), Dining Room; Ante Room; Blue Drawing Room and the above-mentioned principal bedrooms, with their plates glass windows.
The rear of the house looks out onto a small courtyard that is enclosed by the Long Room and a Low Two-Storey Nursery Wing. There are also obligatory rows of outbuildings running parallel to the house.
The auction preview weekend saw all the rooms open on both the ground floor and the first floor. It was the same tour that I’d taken a decade before, with only a written guide. The troop of Persian cats had not been there the second time around.
“Come on, get out of this room!”Julie Ann bellowed at the cats when she closed each bedroom’s door. “Otherwise you could be locked in for a year or two!”I comment to her. “At least you won’t have mice.”She responded,” They just watch the mice race by.”
People were now talking with hushed murmurs, as though at wake, leafing through The Connoisseur issues in the Estate Office while thoughtfully looking at the Rosie Passage caricature prints.
This Hall is arranged as a gallery of paintings on white panels with walls. It leads to the Staircase Hall which, in my opinion, represents the best architectural moment MPH can offer. Between 1919-1921, the staircase extended in the direction to the new entrance. The original flight of stairs that led into the Inner Hall through an archway was preserved. You can see the corridors in which ghosts lurk, with more openings and archways.
The Study of Lord Kilmorey was located close to the new entry. It had a formal air, in contrast with the intimate Lady Kilmoreys Sitting Room that is at the back. A 7m long oak bookcase, used as a temporary display cabinet for the preview (sold for £3,000) and a chesterfield sofa (sold for £800) completed the butch mood of the good Lord’s room. On the other hand, the femininity of Lady Kilmorey’s Sitting Room was exaggerated by the delicate double arched overmantle (sold for £1,000) and the 17th century Chinoserie cabinet on a carved giltwood stand (sold for £11,000) similar to those in the State Drawing Room of 11 Downing Street. HOK’s auction staff was making final minute notes about a stack pile of books that was in the middle floor. This house was not private anymore.
These three reception rooms are Edwardian in style. The comfortable mix of period items and family portraits was achieved with the use of chintz couches. ‘Shabby chic’, another Eighties cliché, is an apt description. After decades of decadence, decay had set in where King Edward VII (the Prince of Wales) once lived.
The Billiard Room’s off-centre brick and timber chimneypiece declares that this room dates back to the 1920s. The curtains and paint were peeling.
Long Room was filled with a sense of lost grandeur. A few tatters of triumphal flags, and faded wall lamps indicating past glory and events were visible in the Long Room. John McArevey, Newry supplied a suite of oak bookcases to go between rows of long-windowed windows in the Long Room. One pair sold for £3,000.
My memories of the kitchen’s lived-in look were fading. With rows of copper jelly moulds, tin pots, and painted pine dressers, it was cleaner. The clock stopped high up, on the wall.
Simple furniture was the norm in the main bedrooms. They were called the Avenue Bedroom (or Corner Bedroom), Caroline’s Room (or Caroline’s Room), Caroline’s Room (or Caroline’s Room), Caroline’s Bedroom, Her Lordship’s Bedroom, and Caroline’s Bedroom. Each room was dominated by a mahogany wardrobe with matching half tester, or four-post bed. It was accompanied in each case by a matching desk as well as a pot cabinet and pot cabinet. On average the wardrobes sold for £3,000; the beds for £5,000.
They looked a bit sparse in their bedrooms. Maybe they were fuller during happier times. Minor bedrooms and servants’ rooms had brass beds (the one in the Housekeeper’s Room sold for £70), lower ceilings, less dramatic views, and were full of clutter. But not for long.
“People say it’s as if time stopped in the house,”Philip Anley stated this on the first day of the auction. “That’s a tribute to mum,”He also acknowledged Julie Ann’s effort to keep MPH alive, he said.
Mourne Park was the scene of sales before. Nicholas, who died shortly before his death had already sold half of the 800-hectare estate to Mourne Golf Club. This club extended its nine-hole golf course to an 18-hole one. His aunt Lady Hyacinth had been his beneficiary a decade prior to Nicholas’ death. This meant their family could remove many heirlooms and not have any ownership in the house. In 1960, the estate and title had been divided. This sale however was different. It was the beginning of a new era. “the end of an era”According to Philip.
I am reminded of Herbert Jackson Stops’ introduction for the Stowe 1920s sales catalogue. “It’s with deep regret that the auctioneer begins a sale catalog which could destroy the glory of the house and scatter to the four winds heaven its magnificent collections, leaving only the memories of the spacious past.” It is rare to find honesty in the face of the recent excuses to sell off family silver, from “wanting to share chattels” to “streamlining the collection”.
Sara Kenny from HOK Fine Art conducted the auction, raising a total of £1.3m. Dealers bid on locals against collectors to get high prices. “My dad worked on the estate so I want some sort of keepsake,”One bidder was what I heard. Everybody wanted their part in MPH’s past.
Lot 1391, which was on sale for the last time, brought forth a lot of excitement. The Red Book of Shavington in County of Salop was up for sale. It is the seat of The Right Honble. [sic]Lord Viscount Kilmorey. Red Books are the work of Humphrey Repton, a pioneer of landscape architecture. More than 200 English estates were transformed or created by Repton. Natural beauty was enhanced through art. This was his mantra. He would complete a Red Book each time he worked with a client.
A slim, leather-bound volume, The Shavington Red Book, contained his suggestions for improvements. It was written in copperplate handwriting, and included maps, drawings, and watercolours. Many bidders were impressed by its historic importance and beautiful beauty. In the end it went under the hammer for £41,000.
To pay off his father’s debts, the 3rd Earl Kilmorey sold Shavington in Shropshire in 1881. Many of his furniture was packed into the MPH. Shavington items auctioned included two early 19th century pieces by Gillows of Lancaster which both sold for £11,000: the Corner Bedroom wardrobe and the architect’s desk from the Library.
Although Mourne park estate might not have had the romance of Humphrey Repton, its rugged nature, which is derived from Knockcree’s granite face, has not been altered by faded 19th-century landscape photos. This is not true for the inside of the granite-face house.
“I’ll always remember the day you visited Mourne Park,” Julie Ann said. She continued to walk up the old driveway. “As the day the boathouse collapsed.”
Sure enough, after centuries of being there, the gabled wooden boathouse collapsed. Instead, it slipped in to the lake, like a young maiden aunt taking a bath. It vanished after a few waves. Forever.
The boathouse is gone 15 years after Edwardian masterpieces, miscellany and other records of Edwardian life were created. This is the end of a collection that was the heart of Ulster’s Big Houses. This is sad for both the family, and the Newry/Mourne residents whose labor allowed them to acquire a fortune in antiques.
It is still standing in the middle, empty and unadorned, as the classic statues which once graced the grounds around the lake.
Since this article was published, Marion Scarlett Russell placed MPH on the market with Knight Frank for £10 million. The asking price has now been reduced to £6.5 million. This item remains available for sale.