In the historic house business, May and early June are the seasonal dress rehearsal months before the big summer business.
Or as one stares out into a near empty visitor car park as the rain buckets down on yet another May or June weekend, that is what one hopes. This season so far has been a wash out.
Opening up one’s house to the public is not unlike when we put on an open air Shakespeare play on the Moat Lawn – things often have a way of not going according to script, or as advertised on your website or the Hudson’s Heritage guide book, the ‘bible’ of heritage trippers.
Forget any musings about ‘All the World’s a Stage…. In the heritage tour business, all your house is the stage. For four months a year, your house and garden resemble a heritage theatre set as the curtain goes up on your private life; at least in the rooms that are open to visitors. Not that this normally stops people from trying to snoop around other parts of the house that are officially closed: bedrooms, loos, attics and so on. The other day we caught somebody down in the laundry room below the kitchen having a peek inside our airing cupboard. Maybe they were a lingerie thief ?
Al this can be often difficult for people marrying owners of historic houses who aren’t used to having visitors trekking around their house, inspecting your family photographs and asking to use your private downstairs loo. As they politely sit listening to your 800 year old house history and family anecdotes during the tour, they are secretly wanting to know how long it will be until they can sit down for a cup of tea and judge that ‘home-made’ walnut cake that your website boasts is made by your very own cake-maker.
In our case this is a lovely woman from the village called Margaret who can out bake Paul Hollywood any day when it comes to the perfect lemon cake icing but woe betide anybody who forgets to drop off her cake holding trays and tins at Beaman’s, our local Bridgnorth butcher. There is no wrath – a baking fatwa has been threatened – like a cake-maker sans her own baking tins.
But my wife Laura and I love opening up Upton Cressett to heritage punters. Being brought up in a house open to the public is the perfect apprenticeship for an acting career. I’ve been doing house tours since I was about twelve – earning 50p in the Seventies which my mother allowed me to keep. Before each tour these days, I will sit in the kitchen- perhaps finishing off a glass of rose after Sunday lunch whilst reading the papers – watching the kitchen clock slowly turn towards 2.30pm. This is my cue to walk through the dining room, through the panelled doors into the Salon and then open the front door to start the show with the first tour of the day.
This year, I have to confess, I have opened that front door on more than one occasion at 2.30pm in May to find just one couple waiting in the rain under an umbrella. I certainly know what it must feel like to be an actor on tour playing to an all but empty house at a Wednesday matinee in Chester.
But the show goes on, and business always picks up in June, July and August. As with dress rehearsals for plays, things have a way of going badly wrong as they have been this season which has been the slowest I can recall for many years.
Over the second May Bank Holiday, we had five guests, although two of these – a couple that could have walked off the set of Alan Bennett’s People, his satire on the National Trust – were so embarrassed at being the only people to show up in the driving Shrosphire rain that they ‘apologised’ for coming and for wasting my time with the idea of doing an exclusive house tour
‘We’ll be back when the weather is better – in August!’ they reliably exclaimed as they scuttled away to their car which was emblazoned with National Trust Member stickers and a pile of tourist leaflets and local tourist maps on the ‘rear parcel shelf’ of their sky blue Ford Fiesta collected from other houses and attractions in the area. I know that actors get used to ‘walk outs’, but you don’t expect them in what I call the ‘Teas, Tours and Toilets’ house opening business. I’m now used to them.
We are under-staffed this year after our head guide, Bridget – a former West Midlands police ‘forensic’ officer with a strong interest in local history – has sadly left us for a more lucrative position as a full time housekeeper elsewhere in Shropshire. I’ve advertised in the Bridgnorth Journal and on the notice board of the sweet shop in Much Wenlock – the best local place to find local services, from a mole catcher to a cat sitter – but so far we haven’t had much of a response. Volunteer guides are paid in cake & tea.
The first Bank Holiday also had Elizabethan costume dancing in the grounds. A typical example of what I mean by ‘dress rehearsal’ is when our two dancers from the Shropshire historic dance group Courtesie started doing an elaborate jumping manoeuvre in the middle of the Great Hall bedroom, (right) I had to tell them to cut the dance from their routine as I was worried they could end up crashing through the floor of the Great Hall, which is not original and is flimsy compared to the solid 16th oak floorboards in the rest of the house.
There are new walks this year including our new medieval wood ‘Bluebell Walk’, which can be pretty dangerous if its wet as you can easily slip on the wooden steps and and end up falling into a 20 foot deep 15th century brook) and new gardeners and landscapers.
From May through to late June – before the schools break up for the holidays and parents are looking for an ‘educational’ or heritage day out of the house in Shropshire – the weeks are used as an opportunity to get the garden ready, scrub off the bird droppings that have mysteriously appeared on the tea-tables that have been stored away in an old barn and dust off the ‘parking’ signs’ that we put up in the hope that people don’t park in the middle of the drive-way.
People often ask me why I drive about with a selection of sledge hammers in the back of my car. I have been stopped by the police before and questioned on the subject. Well, the week before each May Bank Holiday weekend, I have to drive around the local lanes and roundabouts around Bridgnorth, putting up signs advertising that we are open over the Bank Holiday.
This involves stopping on the edges of roundabouts and then hauling out a wooden sign from the back of the car – I wish I owned a Range Rover but alas it is only an old Mercedes saloon – that has to be smashed into the ground next to all the other May Day and Bank Holiday attractions – including the Morville Flower Festival, the Bridgnorth Walk and the Apley Jousting Fair, run by my freinds Lord and Lady Hamilton.
If your Bank Holiday opening signs are any good (mine are all wood), they are likely to be stolen from the side of the road by local farm shop owners and the like. Then, providing you haven’t been run over or arrested by the police for parking illegally whilst putting up your signs, you then sit at home for the rest of the week up until the Bank Holiday waiting to be called up by a bureaucrat at the Council for daring to fix a sign to a gate or post without permission. Everybody does it, but I’ve had my share of cautions. I wonder if the organisers of the Bridgnorth Walk or the local point- to point also get such calls?