Squire White of Tattingstone Place in Suffolk wanted an eye-catcher to enrich the view from his mansion. Rather than start from scratch, he simply enlarged and embellished a couple of existing cottages, adding a tower and some gothic windows. He called his folly The Tattingstone Wonder, and the story goes that he declared that the local people were wont to wonder at nothing, so he would give them something to wonder at. 

There’s a chimney brick inscribed with Thomas White’s initials and ‘1790’, so that must be the approximate date, but we know little more. The building does not seem to have been discussed in guides or histories until the middle of the next century, when it is described as ‘an ornamental building in the form of a church, commonly called the Tattingstone Wonder.’

We do however have a lovely record of the folly from the 1930s, when it was studied by Walter Steggles (1908-1997), a prominent member of the East London Group of artists.

In 1937 Steggles was invited by Jack Beddington, Publicity Manager for Shell, to contribute a painting for use in the To Visit Britain’s Landmarks You Can Be Sure of Shell advertising campaign: a series of posters featuring follies (see recent post https://thefollyflaneuse.com/oswell-blakestons-folly-suitcase/). Beddington’s secretary wrote to Steggles in April of that year to ask if he had decided which folly he would represent. Steggles produced a shortlist of Sevendroog Castle in London and three Suffolk structures: the obelisk at Wolverston (sic), Ickworth and The Tattingstone Wonder.

He chose the latter and his charming working drawings and a photograph survive in his archive (now part of the Shell Heritage Art Collection). Steggles chose to depict the rear of the folly, exposing the mechanics of the building and its cottage-into-folly status.

And the finished poster…

The Grade II* listed Tattingstone Wonder had fallen into disrepair by the later 1970s, but has been restored as a private house. It can be seen from the road.

The Tattingstone Wonder, the round house at Ickworth (a curiosity rather than a folly), and Sevendroog Castle stand today. Had Steggles chosen to record the Woolverstone Obelisk it would have been one of the last representations of the monument, as it was demolished after fire damage in 1943. There’s a good account of it here http://woolverstone.onesuffolk.net/assets/Uploads/Woolverstone-Park-Obelisk.pdf

Thanks to Alan Waltham for information on the Steggles commission, follow him @EastLondonGroup or visit his excellent website  http://www.eastlondongroup.co.uk/walter-steggles/4573465108 

Oswell Blakeston (1907-1985), was born Henry Joseph Hasslacher, and created his nom de plume by condensing ‘Osbert Sitwell’, whom he admired, into ‘Oswell’ and adding his mother’s maiden name. He was a British writer and artist with wide interests, and one of his passions was follies; his role in bringing the genre to a wider audience deserves to be better known.

In a letter of 1953 Barbara Jones thanked Blakeston for the loan of his ‘folly suitcase’, which she had used as a major resource when writing the first edition of Follies & Grottoes. Her book was published in that same year, with special thanks to Blakeston in the acknowledgements.

The pair had probably been introduced by John Betjeman, who had known of Blakeston’s interest in follies since the 1930s. Betjeman had been working as a copywriter for Jack Beddington, Shell’s Publicity Manager, at the time that Beddington was commissioning young artists to produce artwork for advertising.  This included the series of posters which promoted motoring (and therefore sales of petrol) and adorned the sides of lorries as they sedately travelled the roads of Britain.

It was Blakeston who suggested follies as a subject for a series of posters, shortly before his report on ‘Architectural Follies’ was broadcast on the wireless in October 1936. Blakeston’s idea came to fruition as the ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks You Can Be Sure of Shell’ campaign, which ran throughout 1936 and 1937 with 27 posters produced, each by a different artist.*

The contents of the mysterious ‘folly suitcase’ were assumed lost, but in fact they are in the collection of the RIBA and can be consulted in the Architecture Study Room at the V&A Museum. The valise is long gone, but Blakeston’s county-by-county files of notes and clippings on follies are there alongside transcripts of his radio broadcasts. His correspondence shows that other writers and photographers of the period also relied on his help. The ‘folly files’ were also borrowed by husband and wife team Edwin Smith and Olive Cook when they were researching the Gothic Revival.

Looking at Blakeston’s output as a writer it is easy to see why he didn’t find time to publish his folly research himself. He wrote on film theory, on photography (Cruising with a Camera) and on travel, and also wrote 15 novels, 10 volumes of poetry and the occasional one-act play. He authored three books on food, including the rather niche Cooking with Nuts. His long term partner, the artist Max Chapman, contributed illustrations to many of these works. Long before Morph or Aardman studios used the technique, Chapman modelled figures in clay and then photographed them to illustrate a book for older boys, Jim’s Gun; ‘unusual and attractive’ said a reviewer. Blakeston’s art didn’t achieve wide acclaim in his lifetime, and is largely forgotten today. His work was considered avant garde, or as one establishment critic preferred to call it ‘the childish fumblings of a youthful dilettante.’

As well as the folly files in the RIBA Architecture Study Room there is a large deposit of Blakeston’s papers at the University of Texas at Austin https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingaid.cfm?eadid=00014

Thanks to the Shell Heritage Art Collection for permission to reproduce the two posters. The collection is based at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, Hampshire and items from the large collection are always on display. Watch out for an exciting new touring exhibition in 2020 https://nationalmotormuseum.org.uk/collections/shell-heritage-art-collection/news/

* For a fully illustrated account see ‘Visit Britain’s Landmarks: Follies on Shell Advertising Posters in the 1930s’ in The Follies Journal Vol 5 http://follies.org.uk/index.php/journal/