Heir today: centuries of Suffolk history under the hammer
Article, originally published in The Sunday Times on 17 September 2006
It is a quarter of a century since Lord de Saumarez last used his best tableware, but his memory of the occasion is still fresh. “We probably should not have, but we got it out for my sister’s wedding,” he recalls, with a frown. “I still shudder to remember watching a Hooray Henry friend of hers stubbing a cigarette out on one of the bowls.”
Now Sotheby’s has put a guide price of between £80,000 and £120,000 on his plates and cups, it is easy to see why the affable baron was displeased. The Meissen service was commissioned by Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1761, and several museums are expected to be in the bidding for it later this month.
Of the other 1,600 lots of paintings, clothes, furniture and family hand-me-downs, however, Eric — as he encourages everyone to call him — has far less recall. “Most of this stuff I have never seen before. Over the generations it has been collected, displayed for a while and then packed up and stored. Every day that the auctioneers have been here I have been amazed to see what I actually own.”
On the prospect of his epic declutter-ing — Sotheby’s estimates that the sale of his house contents alone might raise £3m — he feels nothing but eager anticipation. “For me it is the chance for a completely new start, and with a bucket of cash. I consider myself very lucky.”
For the rest of us, it is the kind of opportunity that arrives only occasionally — the chance to tour a stately home and then bid for its contents before we leave.
Light as his Lordship might make of the sale, however, it does mark the passing of an era. Shrubland Hall, in its 1,400 acres of rolling Suffolk parkland, is considered among the finest Italianate country homes in Britain — the equal, some say, of Queen Victoria’s Osborne, on the Isle of Wight. De Saumarez’s ancestors bought Shrubland Park, as the estate is known, in 1798 and it has been their home, and the focus for their improving habits, ever since. Among those who live in the 42 houses that are included in the sale of the estate, many have worked for the family for four or five generations.
Initial agreement on a sale of the entire estate is now in place, subject to contractual negotiations — it was advertised in April for a price of £23m and, although offered in 41 lots, is now expected to sell as a single entity.
Whether it survives as a single entity, of course, remains to be seen. Many estates have been sold whole, only to be split up immediately. If that happens, there are enticing prospects: the modernist house built for de Saumarez’s parents, the Japanese timber house brought back from the Far East by his grandfather and a clutch of thatched cottages.
Then there are the goods and chattels that will go under the hammer, in a tent in the shadow of the house, over three days from this Tuesday.
Walking around Shrubland Hall, the scale of the de Saumarez possessions is dizzying. The main staircase — a palatial epic itself — is lined with Chinese Qing dynasty urns, which are expected to fetch £10,000-£15,000 (lot 709).
Georgian chairs — hundreds of them — fill the floor of the dining room, with its elaborately gilded ceiling. And in the basement, four heavily fortified walk-in safes are jammed with silverware, cutlery, tableware and fine ornaments.
The house runs to nearly 40,000sq ft, but there is no space to spare now that the contents are being sorted for sale.
Entire rooms are given over to different categories of lots — successive notes pinned to doors along one corridor say hardback books, paperback books, lamps, clothing, paintings and textiles. Sotheby’s has been at work on the sale since February, with staff permanently on site since April. The glossy catalogue is well over an inch thick, but still new lots come to light daily.
“I really can’t see how the sale can be done in three days,” de Saumarez worries. “In the end we will have to bundle up some big, unsorted lots and put them into an agricultural auction afterwards.”
In part this is because he is determined to sell absolutely everything.
Keepsakes and mementoes have been removed by the family, but anything else must go. Because of this, there is rather more on offer for those of modest means than is usually the case when a posh auctioneer is wielding the gavel. More than 1,200 lots have guide prices of less than £1,000 and no reserves, and some will go for only a few pounds.
Several hundred years of family accumulation provide a cornucopia for anyone interested in the trappings of human existence. Other large local houses, such as Livermere and Broke Hall, were emptied into Shrubland Hall as their families married into that of their neighbour — so a peculiarly large repository of Suffolk history is on offer.
De Saumarez was brought up with Shrubland Park as his home. He happily remembers tricycling through the state rooms and is particularly delighted to have woken recently on his 50th birthday in the same bed and room as that in which he was born. A stint at agricultural college and at university are the only times he has been away from the family pile and, unusually for an aristocrat, there is a trace of Suffolk in his accent.
So why is he selling? The official reason is that inheritance tax has finally done for the estate: de Saumarez’s father died in 1991, his mother in 2004. There is rather more to it than that, however, according to his lordship. “After my mother passed away, I took a long hard look at what to do. Once I had thought of more than 30 reasons for wanting to sell up, I realised that it was time to go.”
Since 1966, the main house has been run as a health clinic. In this, the late Lady Julia de Saumarez — a former Royal Ballet dancer — was the driving force. “She was a dictator,” remembers her son. Guests — or patients as they were called until very recently — lived on a diet of salad; alcohol was banned, there was a strict regime of treatments with medical staff on hand day and night to supervise. The program was Spartan, but with a worldwide reputation.
Famously, the clinic played a prominent role in Thunderball, the most financially successful of the James Bond films. Sean Connery, in the lead role, is sent to Shrubland Hall to detox when M judges his Martini-and-red-meat diet to be dulling his performance. For many Britons, it was their first sight of a “health farm”, and it did much to confirm the idea that they were weird, foreign places.
Bond is nearly killed when an enemy pushes the lever on a mechanical massage machine to overload yet lives to exact his revenge by trapping his assailant in one of those steam boxes that you sit in with your head sticking out of the top. Eventually, an amorous tangle with a masseuse in a steam room leads to 007 discovering that an arch-enemy is obtaining secret treatments.
The clinic was operating at full, 40-room, capacity until April and cost £500 for a three-day break. When he announced the closure, de Saumarez says he received lots of angry calls from dozens of former clients. “Even they were not willing to pay what it was really costing to run, however,” he says.
Indeed, the truth, if one digs into his 30 reasons for selling, appears to be that the estate was a complex financial edifice supported by 10 businesses, including commercial lettings, gravel extraction, farming, a saw mill, a stonemasons and a nursery, as well as the clinic.
Perhaps the most poignant reason for the sale, however, appears to date from a moment in 1956 when, 12 minutes after the current Lord de Saumarez was born, his twin brother Victor appeared to the world.
Despite having shared a womb, the British convention of primogeniture prevailed. Eric’s earlier arrival meant that he inherited the title and the estate. His brother, with whom de Saumarez admits to having had “a difficult, and not very close relationship”, now lives in Los Angeles where he makes his living as a jazz guitarist.
“The thing about money,” says de Saumarez, “is that it is very easy to split up. When I pass my things on to my daughters (he has two from his first marriage, Claire and Emily who are 22 and 21 respectively), the money can be easily divided, straight down the middle, without any difficulties.”
Quite where he, and his wife Susan, will go once the estate is finally disposed of in November, he is not sure — save that it won’t be Suffolk — “it’s no longer the county I grew up in,” he says. After a couple of years “considering his options”, he may then return to what he calls his real profession, farming.
In the meantime, for anyone wanting to grab a slice of English country history, there is a very thick catalogue to thumb through. A far more modest auction at the nearby home of Lord Belstead – who led the House of Lords under Margaret Thatcher — was mobbed two months ago. So quite how the crowds at Shrubland Park could be quite a challenge.
De Saumarez was told to make space available for up to 10 helicopters. But for those with the resources and the ability to catch the auctioneer’s eye, for three days this week it promises to be like a supermarket sweep laid on by the National Trust.
ends
The main illustration is taken from the sales particulars produced by Summers Wykes-Sneyd and Knight Frank – possibly the most lavish I have ever seen.
In 2008, The Sunday Times reported that much of the estate had been sold off piecemeal and that the asking price for the main house had been reduced from £8m to £6.5m. A year later, the Evening Star and The Times reported that the house had been sold to a London businessman for £6.5m. Since then, a new fence has been erected around much of the land.