Follies occasionally appear in literature, but seldom in works aimed at a younger readership. So it was hugely exciting to find that one of Britain’s best-loved writers of children’s fiction had featured a folly in a recent work. This year, a new work by the acclaimed writer Dame Jacqueline Wilson (100 plus books and counting) was published. The Girl Who Wasn’t There is a ghost story within a tale of family life and is beautifully illustrated by Rachael Dean. The reader is only a few pages in when young Luna and Aurora are first introduced to the dilapidated Stark’s Folly, somewhere on the south coast of England…

‘What’s a folly?’ asks Luna when she visits the tower, ‘Isn’t it something foolish?’. Her step-father, Greg, is quick to correct her, and explains that a folly is ‘an amazing building made by someone eccentric’. After years of neglect Stark’s Folly is falling apart, but it is a listed building – much to the fury of the landowner, who would very much like to reverse his tractor into it. Dreaming of sea views and a quirky home Greg snaps it up – but without asking the family first, and it is fair to say their reaction is mixed. This being Jacqueline Wilson, there are the disputes and dramas of family life, but also friendship and warmth, and whilst there is not a fairytale ending, it is a heartwarming (and spine-tingling) one.

Stark’s Folly is the product of Dame Jacqueline’s considerable imagination, beautifully brought to life by Rachael Dean, but Molly the cavapoo is real and is the author’s own dog.

Dame Jacqueline’s touching story and Rachael Dean’s enchanting illustrations will introduce a whole new generation to follies, and that can only be A Very Good Thing. The book is the perfect Christmas present for any young readers you might know (the Flâneuse is not on commission).

And proving that one is never too old to learn, the book introduced the Flâneuse to the word bungaroosh, of which Stark’s Folly is constructed (and therefore crumbling). Thanks to her bonny Brighton correspondent, the Flâneuse now knows that bungaroosh is an unusual building product. It was used almost exclusively in the Brighton area and is made of miscellaneous materials, including stones from the beach, mixed into hydraulic lime and then poured into shutters until set. It is the ‘bane of Brighton’ as it is hygroscopic and soaks up moisture from the air causing damp and collapse. The etymology of the word does not seem to be known, but as Dame Jacqueline says, it’s a ‘fantastic name’.

See the Penguin website for more on The Girl Who Wasn’t There.

And Rachael Dean’s website will tell you more about her vibrant illustrations.

Huge thanks to Dame Jacqueline Wilson and Rachael Dean for their help with this post.

Thank you for reading and please scroll down to the foot of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or comments.

Denton Welch was a talented artist and writer, but his career was sadly cut short by his early death in 1948. A few years before he died, he described an ornate 18th century grotto in one of his novels: the fabulous grotto was for real, but it was demolished in the same year that Welch died, making his description all the more poignant.

Denton Welch (1915-1948) was an unhappy, motherless schoolboy, on a summer break from Repton school, when he joined his father and brothers for a holiday in the early 1930s. This experience inspired the novel In Youth is Pleasure, published in 1945, in which Denton Welch becomes the fifteen year old Orvil Pym.

The opening lines set the scene:

‘One summer, several years before the war began, a young boy of fifteen was staying with his father and two elder brothers at a hotel near the Thames in Surrey. The hotel had once been a country house…’

Although not named in the novel, the hotel was Oatlands Park. In the 18th century the estate was home to the Duke of Newcastle, and amongst his landscape embellishments was an amazing grotto. Its early history has been well-told elsewhere, so only the briefest of summaries is necessary here: there were three chambers in the lower storey, one of which contained a cold bath, and a banqueting room above. The grotto was decorated inside and out with fossils, tufa and shells and one of the floors was made of polished horses’ teeth. A visitor in 1783 wrote that ‘it gives one the idea that it was intended as a Mansion for the Queen of the Fairy.’

In the novel Orvil sneaks out of the hotel to explore, and first encounters a ‘cottage orné’ in the pleasure grounds. Feeling ‘delightfully like a criminal’ he jemmies open a window to climb inside where ‘everything was in a terrible decay’.

There was stained glass in the windows, and a ‘grotesque’ little fireplace. Elaborate Gothic paper, designed to imitate stone arcades filled with cinquefoil tracery, ‘hung down from the walls in weeping strips’. Upstairs, the ceiling had collapsed and throughout there was a ‘terrible smell of death and decay’.

The impressionable Orvil longed to renovate the cottage as his romantic retreat, but sadly, no-one would ever have that pleasure. The ‘cottage orné’, also known as the Hermitage or Grotto Cottage, survived for only a decade or so after Welch’s visit. It continued to decay and disappeared completely some time before the Second World War.

To return to the novel, Orvil leaves the cottage and enters the grotto, where he is astonished by the decoration: ‘All the walls of the cave were lined with giant shells, feldspars, quartzes, stalactites and fossils. In one place, a thin trickle of water dripped from pink lip to pink lip of enormous scallop-shells’. Welch’s prose is deliciously sensuous, and prepares the reader for the next scene when Orvil, ‘tremors’ passing through him, progresses through the chambers only to discover two of the hotel guests in a compromising position (you will have to read the book to find out more).

Welch fills the reader in with some historical detail, whilst allowing young Orvil to be entirely innocent of it: ‘King George IV had once been entertained to dinner here by the son of the duke who had made the grotto, but Orvil knew nothing of this. He loved the grotto for itself alone as something beautiful and strange’.

In 1870 the Grotto was described as ‘ugly and neglected’ and ‘sadly dilapidated’ by none other than Queen Victoria. Wartime vandalism caused further damage, and by 1947 it was in urgent need of repair. The hotel owner felt unable to meet the costs of renovation and, considering the building a danger to the ‘innumerable trespassers, whom barbed wire and the strongest chains have failed to keep out’, applied for a license to demolish. This was approved by the local authority, which failed to raise the issue with the County Council, despite an undertaking to do so. Despite last minute attempts by heritage bodies to save the structure, it was demolished in the first months of 1948, only a few years after Barbara Jones recorded the interior.

Happily, Dorothy Grenside, the then curator of the Weybridge Museum, had the foresight to request permission to collect ‘specimens and fragments’ from the grotto before demolition began. As well as some of the decorative rockwork, she also took custody of the marble Venus which stood in the bath chamber.

The Twickenham MP Edward Keeling felt that the Grotto had been let down by the system. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 had introduced the listing of historic buildings, but compiling the lists was a slow process. Keeling raised the matter of the grotto in Parliament, urging the Minister of Town and Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, to ‘accelerate the issue of lists’, concluding that there must be no ‘further such ignorant demolitions’.

The Architectural Review ran an article on the destruction of the grotto under the headline ‘Vandalism Triumphant’. Marcus Whiffen wrote that the demolition was a ‘tragic business’, and shared Keeling’s frustration that the Town and Country Planning Act had failed to safeguard the structure.

In May 1948, Lavender Westwood told the tale of the demolition in Country Life, and took some consolation from the fact that the ‘wanton’ destruction had proved ‘considerably longer and more expensive than was anticipated.’ Writing in his journal that same month, Welch’s dismay is apparent in his terse opening sentence: ‘They have destroyed the Grotto at Oatlands’, and he concluded ‘When something beautiful and fantastic that will never be made again is destroyed, one feels that the earth is just that bit drearier…’

To conclude on a slightly brighter note, in 1937 Welch was one of the young artists whose work featured in the Shell advertising campaign ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’, which focused on British follies. Welch painted Hadlow Castle, aka May’s Folly, which was close to his home in Kent. So after a largely monochrome post about two sad losses, here’s some colour to cheer you up.

For the early history of the grotto and the Oatlands landscape a quick internet search will lead you to a series of articles by garden historian Michael Symes. This link will take you to a paper on the grotto by Tim Knox https://georgiangroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/GGJ_1992_10_Knox_0001.pdf

In Youth is Pleasure was recently reprinted as a Penguin Classic https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/319/319677/in-youth-is-pleasure/9780241464137.html

Oatlands Park is still a hotel, but sadly without the glorious garden ornaments https://www.oatlandsparkhotel.com

Weybridge Museum is no more, but the collection, including the Oatlands grotto artefacts, can be seen on the Elmbridge Museum website. There is, for instance, a photo of the statue of Venus here https://elmbridgemuseum.org.uk/collections/?keyword=venus&searchbut=doSearch&object=&collection=&timePeriod=&place=&personOrg=&AccessionNum=

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts are always welcome: please go to the bottom of the page to share any comments.

The rotunda at Stowe in Buckinghamshire was designed by Vanbrugh in around 1720, and stands on a sweeping lawn in front of the grand mansion. In the middle of the 20th century author T.H. White used a little artistic licence, and for the purposes of his story moved it to an island in one of the two lakes. There it became home to a colony of tiny people, and the adventure that is Mistress Masham’s Repose began.

Ten year old Maria, who has ‘eyes the colour of Marmite’, is an orphan.  She has been placed in the care of a scheming governess who is in cahoots with the local vicar to steal her inheritance – the vast Malplaquet estate. The house at Malplaquet is ‘surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas and Palladian Bridges’, all of which are slipping into decay after years of neglect. On an island in the lake stands a domed open rotunda called Mistress Masham’s Repose, home to around 500 little people who we learn are Lilliputians ‘in exile’, this being a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels. Can Maria and the little people thwart the gruesome governess and her vile vicar sidekick? The Folly Flâneuse will reveal no more here.

In the story, the Malplaquet mansion is shut up apart from two rooms where Maria and her governess live. It has been abandoned because ‘nobody could be persuaded to buy the place for a school’. This was of course an in-joke, for Malplaquet was based on Stowe, near Buckingham, which had been a school since 1923 after descendants of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos sold up. Terence ‘Tim’ Hanbury White (1906-1964) was the Head of English at the school in the early 1930s, and then spent some time living in a cottage in the grounds where he could concentrate on his writing (and in which guise he appears in the books as an eccentric academic). Familiar features at Stowe appear in the novel: the Temple of Concord and Victory for example becomes Neptune’s Temple, but the garden buildings, including some not mentioned in the text, are most easily identifiable in the wonderful map that forms the endpapers.

The map was drawn by White’s friend from his Cambridge days Raymond McGrath (1903-1977), an Australian born architect, illustrator, watercolorist, printmaker and interior designer, who arrived in London in the 1920s. In 1940 he moved to Ireland, where White also spent the war years. There he became an architect to the Ministry of Works, whilst still sketching and illustrating both for fun and commercially. McGrath was paid $50 by the American publishing house, G.P. Putnam & Sons, for the map of Malplaquet, apparently a ‘top fee for a map of this sort’.

Tim White’s Arthurian stories (later published together as The Once and Future King), were already very popular and would be adapted for the stage as Camelot, and by Walt Disney as the animated The Sword in the Stone. So his reputation was well established when Mistress Masham’s Repose was published first in America in 1946, and then in Britain by Jonathan Cape early the following year. The press advertisements announced it amongst other ‘forthcoming novels’, and were clearly targeting an adult audience with the blurb ‘a richly amusing fantasy with philosophical implications’. Reviewing it for the Daily Herald John Betjeman described it as a ‘thrilling story’, and concluded that ‘Mr White has written a story which will be good reading for all people from 12 to 100’. Tim White would have appreciated this comment, as he didn’t like to be pigeon-holed and said he never wrote for ‘anybody in particular’. The book was an instant success, bolstered by being chosen as a Book of the Month in America – this subscription scheme had close to 900,000 members when Mistress Masham’s Repose was selected.

The story was dedicated to Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, daughter of White’s friend and agent David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, a member of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. Although the story is written as if being read to Amaryllis, she was only born in 1943 and must have had to wait a few years to hear the story.

The Folly Flâneuse throughly enjoyed revisiting the story, which is still in print today but not as well known as it should be. Although there was a radio play in 1952, the book has never been adapted for the screen. The late screenwriter and producer Carl Foreman owned the film and TV rights, but despite hints at a film in 1967, and discussions with Granada Television for an adaptation using the very latest technology in 1983, the projects were shelved.

Like the Lilliputians, White too enjoyed life on an island, and moved to the channel isle of Alderney after the success of Mistress Masham’s Repose to avoid what he saw as punitive British taxes. He also had a folly of his own, building a Temple to Hadrian (‘a very fine fellow’) in his garden. You can catch a glimpse of it in this wonderful bit of archive footage from the BBC, in which White is interviewed (? interrogated) by Robert Robinson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013h5b3

Mistress Masham’s Repose is a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels, and in turn Andrew Dalton’s Malplaquet trilogy beautifully illustrated by Jonny Boatfield advances Maria’s story. You can read Rita Boogaart’s account here http://follies.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/ebulletin/Foll-e-46-Malplaquet.pdf Rita sadly passed away recently and will be greatly missed.

Read about Raymond McGrath’s amazing design for a modernist house in Surrey here https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/architect-of-the-week-raymond-mcgrath/

Stowe House remains a school, although visitors are welcome at certain times of the year (under normal circumstances), and the pleasure grounds are in the care of the National Trust. The park is now open for pre-booked visits https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stowe

Mistress Masham’s Repose has been through many editions and is still in print https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1098952/mistress-masham-s-repose/9780099595175.html

Thank you for reading.