Searching for an image of the Egyptian Spring, a garden ornament at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, the Folly Flâneuse found a picture postcard from the early years of the 20th century. But instead of the usual cheery message to a friend, the back of the card promised palatable prizes. So why was a folly being used to promote foodstuffs?

(Please indulge this brief diversion – we will return to the garden ornament in due course…)

Food manufacturers Symington’s were innovators in the field of customer promotions. As well as branded giveaways such as books of needles, thimbles and stamp books, the company produced picture postcards and asked shoppers to send them on to their friends.

The friend would then visit the grocer and ask for Symington’s ‘Table Delicacies’ in the hope of finding one of the yellow prize vouchers which were slipped into randomly selected products. The voucher entitled the holder to rewards such as a ‘box of samples’, or the latest cookery book. There were further rewards for those who recruited new customers via the postcard promotion.

The Folly Flâneuse was disappointed to discover that the campaign did not take follies as an overall theme, and the Egyptian Spring was possibly chosen for the marketing campaign because around the turn of the 19th century Symington’s claimed to be one of the first manufacturers to ‘promote the benefits of a healthy diet with their Egyptian food range’. The only other topographical card found to date featured a scene in Ceylon – presumably because Symington’s sold tea. Other cards had a more overt message:

After going off at that tasty tangent, we must get back to the garden ornament that started it all: the Egyptian Springs at Lower Hartwell.

It was commissioned by Dr John Lee (1783-1866) of Hartwell House as a garden ornament over a natural spring, and built in around 1850-1851 to a design by Joseph Bonomi junior (1796-1878)

Lee had a museum of Egyptian antiquities in the house and he had the well decorated with hieroglyphics, including a cartouche with characters that spell out (Queen) Victoria:

The building also had a Greek inscription, taken from Pindar’s First Pythian Ode, which translated as ‘Water, of all the elements is the best’. Early accounts of the Egyptian Springs suggest that this quotation was chosen because Lee was an advocate of temperance.

An account of 1912 states that inside the building there were carved lists of ‘celebrated men who were temperance reformers’. The author surmised that it was these unpopular temperance principles that led to the neglect of the temple after Lee’s death in 1866. By 1903, when the postcard below was sent, the building was looking pretty shabby.

By 1981 the building was described as looking ‘like a well-vandalized bus shelter’. Happily it was restored that same decade after Richard Broyd’s Historic House Hotels group rescued Hartwell House and turned it into a hotel. The spring and other garden features were restored under the supervision of architect Eric Throssel.

To end on a sweet note: Barbara Jones called the Egyptian Springs a ‘trifling curiosity’.

Although no longer in family ownership, Symington’s are still manufacturing today, so in return for this 21st century promotion the Folly Flâneuse awaits her box of ‘table delicacies’.

Hartwell House was given to the National Trust in 2008. The grounds are open to hotel guests only, but the Egyptian Springs can be found by continuing along the lane past the hotel entrance https://www.hartwell-house.com/

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In 1908 T.W. Wilkinson submitted an article on ‘Remarkable Follies’ to Wide World Magazine. This popular publication was launched in 1898 and was aimed at men, and in particular what one writer has called ‘armchair adventurers’. It specialised in true-life tales of derring-do with titles such as ‘The Underground Pirates’ and ‘Across Africa by Boat’. One wonders what the readership made of Wilkinson’s article: exciting as follies are, they don’t quite have the drama of ‘A Subterranean Duel’.

Perhaps it was to compete with such adventures that Wilkinson launched into a dramatic introduction:

‘There is no stranger human foible than that which finds vent in the erection of what are popularly known as “follies”. It impels men to begin building without counting the cost, and to create freakish and unnecessary structures, with a consequent enormous waste of money; and its results are seen all over the countryside in half-finished undertakings, architectural atrocities, sham antiquities, and other more or less ridiculous objects. Incredible though it may seem, it is none the less a fact that millions – literally millions – of pounds have been spent on such superfluities’.

After that controversial conspectus Wilkinson goes on to discuss, very briefly, around 20 follies – all fairly well-known examples, with some accompanying photographs. Despite his introduction he isn’t particularly disparaging in most cases, and he even concedes that Ralph Allen’s sham castle on the Bath skyline is ‘picturesque’. A curiosity of his paper is that he uses the word “freaks” as a synonym for “follies”, and to stress this both words almost always appear in inverted commas. Thus the Egyptian Well at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire is a “freak” which ‘appears as if it has just strayed from the British Museum’ (Wilkinson seems oblivious to the fact that this was the builder’s intention).

And Beckford’s Tower on the edge of Bath is noted as ‘one of the most elaborate towers of the freak variety’.

As well as isolated “freaks” such as the foregoing (as Wilkinson wrote) there were also examples of groups of follies built by one man ‘in whom the passion for erecting such things developed into a monomania’. Wilkinson picked out the Brightling “follies” of Mad Jack Fuller and the scattered “follies” of J.S.W.S Erle-Drax on his Dorset estates.

As well as Drax’s elegant tower at Charborough there were, according to Wilkinson, two or three sham antiquities, a huge mausoleum, and other “freaks”. The mausoleum stood in the churchyard at Holnest and was indeed huge – Wilkinson would no doubt have approved when it was pulled down in 1935.

The Charborough Tower still stands and is claimed as inspiration for Thomas Hardy when he was writing Two on a Tower.

Wilkinson ended with the question ‘Is “folly” building dying out now?’. His conclusion was that it didn’t look like it. But he picks the most unlikely structure to argue his case – a factory chimney in Bingley in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire. Whilst a very functional feature of the Roundhill Tannery, the chimney must have qualified as folly in Wilkinson’s eyes as it was unlike any other chimney, and would have been much more expensive than a conventional design. According to another contemporary account of the chimney, each brick was placed 3.16 of an inch out of place so that when it reached a height of 50 feet each face would be opposite the compass point where it had started. Sadly the chimney was pulled down in the early 1970s.

In conclusion Wilkinson makes the bizarre and unqualified statement that “folly” houses are ‘actually now under construction in various parts of the country’. The Flâneuse would love to know which structures he had in mind.

Thanks to Sheila Donaldson of Bingley and District Local History Society for telling me the history of the chimney.

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