Snowshill Manor

Snowshill Manor has lodged deep in my memory since the day it came up as a quiz question
'Name the eccentric collector who lived at Snowshill Manor'
and I hadn't a clue.
So finding myself within hopping distance off I went to be a National Trust tourist.
It's a balance that is never quite reconciled in my mind, the preservation of these fabulous places versus the National Trustification of a property but without it we wouldn't have them, I know.
It's therefore best to imbibe the beauty of the setting whilst rising above the numberless signs spelling out the serious implications of touching it, and likewise avoiding the prickly burr heads strategically placed to prevent you sitting on any chair. Look beyond and see the sheer magic of Snowshill, swaddled in history and harbouring countless untold stories which your imagination starts writing for itself.
The rules and regulations with their veiled admonitions had clearly affected a German couple quite deeply, in fact they were on the brink of traumatic stress disorder when they saw me about to sit on a seat in the garden. Dashing over they breathlessly begged me, whilst looking over their shoulders, absolutely not to sit on the seat, it was very verboten indeed. We discussed the absence of the prickly burr, of any signs saying not to sit, nothing to warn us how quickly the wood might deteriorate and the fact it was a bog standard garden seat. Reassuring them that I'd take the flak if we were wrong we all collapsed onto it thankfully and admired this rather fine dovecote.
So it was Charles Wade who inherited a fortune from family sugar plantations, bought the house in near-derelict condition in 1919, proceeded to renovate and then started collecting.
A hugely eclectic mix of the unusual and the rare and truly you never know what will be around the next corner or up the next staircase. So much in fact (22,000 objects and 2000 costumes) that there was no room for Charles to live in the house so he lived in a tiny little Priest's Cottage alongside.
Setting aside any qualms over the origins of the fortune, hats off to Charles Wade for doing something marvellously individual and unusual with it all when he returned from fighting in the Great War. In his little memoir Days Far Away, Charles Wade does indeed do much of the imaginative back-story writing that his collection demands, and with ease I imagined the man as I read it. Trained with the eye of an architect and in the finer aspects of design he invested a joy to his collecting,

'I have not bought things because they were rare or valuable...but of interest as records of various vanished handicrafts. What joy these old things are to live with, each piece made by the hand of a craftsman, each has a feeling of individuality that no machine could ever attain...this collection, not a museum, will be a valuable record in times to come.'

If you haven't been to Snowshill don't miss it, you'd be in great company, J.B.Priestley, the Johns Betjeman, Buchan and Masefield, Edwin Lutyens and Virginia Woolf all paid a call, and you may also sight the pure white Snowshill cat suitably named Tinker.
Mind you, Virginia was not impressed. She visited along with Susan, Lady Tweedsmuir (wife of John Buchan) and Elizabeth Bowen on July 3rd 1935 and wrote that same day to Vanessa Bell,

'We went 40 miles to see a necromancer - that is a retired East India planter who lives in a mediaeval farm [Snowshill] which he has filled with old clothes, bicycles, mummies, alligators, Italian altars - not, I thought, very interesting, and I think rather a fraud, as he pretended to have no watch, and so I lost my train and only got back at 8.30.'

John Betjeman, in a letter to Charles Wade requesting photos for a magazine article, less than optimistic about a return visit,

'I hope I shall see you if ever I come to the Cotswolds again, but with the likelihood of a revolution in London, and death by motor accident or rapid disease, any sort of peace seems out of the question.'

Pay no heed, despite veiled hints of witchcraft and the occult, Charles Wade seems harmless enough and Snowshill a real horde of treasures in the finest traditions of English eccentricity.