Wanted one hermit, previous experience desirable

 

Early Saturday mornings, as I prepare our breakfast, I listen to BBC Radio 4’s Open Country, which focuses on an aspect of rural Britain. On 22 January, the subject was Stoke Park Estate, 108 hectares on Purdown with views over Bristol. About 1338 the powerful Berkeley family of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire acquired the estate, but it was not until 1563 that Sir Richard Berkeley, MP for Gloucestershire, built the original house. By the 18^th century the family had become still richer from a coal mining concession near Bristol. No doubt it was money from coal that funded the replacement of Richard’s house by Norborne Berkeley, 4^th Baron Botetourt (1717-1770), about 1760, with an imposing residence in ‘Jacobethan Revival’ style, with splendid views across the landscape.

 

Stoke Park Estate and the c18th century house

Like many an owner of a grand country house, Norborne wanted an imposing landscape to provide an impressive setting for it. He commissioned a noted landscape architect of the time, Thomas Wright of Durham (1711-1786). Stoke Park is the best surviving example of Wright’s work. Open Country caught my ear with a curious fact. It seems that when one designed a magnificent park landscape, one needed an attraction to entice visitors. So, Norborne employed a hermit. I thought of Jayne Eyre responding to a gentleman’s advertisement for a governess. Perhaps Norborne advertised for his hermit in some publication where gentlemen’s hermits sought employment.            

                                      

Norborne’s employment of a hermit was by no means eccentric or novel. In the early 15^th century Francis Paola, an Italian mendicant friar, is reported to have lived as a hermit in a cave on his father’s estate. In 16^th century France estates included a chapel or another small building to house a hermit. The first was perhaps at Château de Gaillon whose hermitage consisted of a chapel, house and garden. Hermits caught on with British aristocrats in the 18^th and 19^th century. Charles Hamilton, owner of Painshill, prudently issued his hermit with a seven-year contract of employment, which must have included a termination clause, since the hermit was sacked after three weeks when he was discovered in a pub.      

 

Unfortunately, Norbert made some bad investments and was forced to accept an appointment as Governor of Virginia in 1786.  He died there two years later. The estate and the house were inherited by Norborne’s sister, Elizabeth, widow of the 4^th Duke of Beaufort, and remained in the Beaufort family until 1915, by which time the house had become Stoke Park Colony for the mentally handicapped. The NHS took it over in 1948 until it closed in 1988.

 

Stoke Park hospital

During World War II, the park was a site for anti-aircraft guns to protect the city and port of Bristol. The concrete structures remain. Many years’ growth of brambles and ivy covered the artillery emplacements. Goats employed to clear the growth are a popular attraction for Bristol’s children, and so, in a sense, have replaced the 18^th century hermit.

 

The story of Stoke Park’s hermit recalled my meetings with Buddhist monks in Japan. When we visited our son John in Kanazawa the mother of his host family took us to a monastery in the hills above her home. She called into the office where she was told that there was an Australian monk (“Australia-jin”) working in the garden who could tell us something about the monastic life. The monk was called away from his work. He wore a long robe of rough material and round his waist a censer which issued smoke to drive away insects (he could not harm or kill them). The Australian explained that he lied a simple life of meditation and work in the garden as preparation for his return to Australia.

 

Another encounter with a monk was quite a contrast. My colleague Ms Matsumoto had taken me to an exhibition opening in a small gallery on the fashionable Omotesando street in Tokyo. There I met a young monk, a relative of the artist, dressed in a splendid saffron robe and drinking a beer. I asked him about his life. He explained that he walked in the mountains and bathed in waterfalls. I asked him how he fed himself: simple, people gave him his meals. I commented that this seemed like a nice lifestyle if one could also join fashionable gatherings in Tokyo and drink beer.

 

On another occasion, I had taken my colleague Jane Turner, editor of The Dictionary of Art, to Asakusa, a large complex of Buddhist temples. We had paid a fee to choose a small stick on which was written something in Japanese characters, which you match to the drawers of a large wooden cabinet to select a sheet of paper (an omikuji) on which your fortune is written. I had suggested that we keep them until we might meet somebody who could read them for us. That evening we attended a reception. There I met another monk, also wearing a saffron robe, and sipping a drink. I asked him if he could read my omikuji. He agreed and told me that mine predicted good fortune. I found Jane and introduced her to the monk. She produced her paper. The monk shook his head and told her that he had rarely seen such a bad prediction. I am glad to reassure my readers that at the last report both Jane and I are alive and well, so perhaps misfortune was not her lot after all.

 

Choosing an omikuji at Asakusa

I had thought at the time of meeting the party monks that a drinking monk in fashionable gatherings in Tokyo was slightly incongruous. Perhaps they had a function rather like Norborne’s monk, to add something extra to the venue. This set me thinking about parallels in my own profession. I recalled that when renting office space in New York the usually hard-nosed agent would make a few (invariably small) concessions to attract a publishing client. Apparently, we attracted other tenants.

 

I recall being invited to a fundraising dinner for Friends of the Sir John Soane Museum in Soane’s house in Lincoln Inn Fields in the 1990s. At the time I was Publisher of The Dictionary of Art, which was how I met Peter Thornton the director of the museum. I found myself seated at a table with assorted wealthy Americans, Bridget Cherry, editor of Pevsner’s guides to the architecture of England and a very distinguished elderly member of the aristocracy. We three were meant to charm the moneyed guests out of their money. Unfortunately, the aristocratic lady became quite drunk so Bridget and I had to keep talking to distract the Americans from her inebriated state. Around the same time, I was invited occasionally to lunches at Sotheby’s. I would find myself at a table with the auction house’s finance director, owners of works he hoped would sell them at Sotheby’s and one or two characters like me who I suppose were meant to impart an air of scholarship far removed from the grubby subject of money.

 

As I commented in a previous post, the BBC, which enriches the culture of our country with a range of programming which will never be matched by for-profit broadcasters, and which provides this service for £0.44 per day, is a remarkable institution. For entirely ideological and self-serving reasons, it has long been threatened by elements of the Conservative Party, which are now in charge of the party and the government. The same faction has already undermined the British Council, another fine institution. It must not be allowed to destroy the BBC.