01 December 2017

Which old country house was the
true inspiration for Toad Hall?

Toad Hall … ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is popular Christmas reading (Image: Artstation.com)

Patrick Comerford

One of my favourite childhood and Christmas-time books is The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Milne, and I look forward to any of the cartoon versions that are scheduled for television channels at this time of the year.

The book was first published in 1908, and despite its place in children’s fiction it is also appropriate reading at Christmas, not only because of its many winter settings, but also because of the themes of mysticism, morality and camaraderie that run through its storylines.

This is not accidental, for Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was introduced to the riverside and boating by his uncle, Canon David Ingles, who was then the curate at Cookham Dean in Berkshire and who had rowed for Cambridge in 1860. He would often take his sister’s children out on the ponds and the river, telling them stories as they explored the waterways. Cookham was also the home of the artist Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), who often used Cookham and the river as the backdrop to his religious paintings.

But The Wind in the Willows is also a hymn to a long-lost England that may never have existed. It was an England that Edwardian society wistfully hoped could be conjured up but that could never be returned to, and it is an England conjured up by the Brexiteers but, ironically, is being destroyed by them.

The sign at Toad Hall, Abbots Bromley (Photograph: Hackworthappenings)

Sometimes as I travel through the Staffordshire countryside beyond Lichfield, I have noticed a house called Toad Hall on Bagot Street in Abbots Bromley, about 19 km north of Lichfield.

This Toad Hall is period village home with beamed rooms and a witty name plate outside. It is a long-established bed and breakfast house, and was recently on the market through John German, estate agents in Lichfield and Burton on Trent, with an asking price of £475,000.

But since my childhood I have wondered about the original house that inspired Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows.

Grahame is said to have been inspired by the River Thames at Cookham, where he lived at ‘The Mount’ as a child, and he returned to the village to write the book. Quarry Wood nearby in Bisham is said to have been the original Wild Wood.

But a number of houses claim to be the original inspiration for Ernest Howard (EH) Shepard’s illustrations of Toad Hall, including Mapledurham House in Oxfordshire, as well as neighbouring Hardwick House, Foxwarren Park in Surrey, Fawley Court in Buckinghamshire, Nymans in West Sussex and Fowey Hall Hotel in Cornwall.

Mapledurham House, near Reading (Photograph: Motmit / Wikipedia)

Mapledurham House was built ca 1585 in the Elizabethan E-shape, and a later 18th-century chapel was built in the Strawberry Hill Gothic style for its Roman Catholic owners, the Blount family.

Like the Moat House in Tamworth, the house has priest holes, used to hide Catholic priests in the 16th and 17th centuries. The house was a location for the filming The Eagle Has Landed (1976) and for several television series, including Midsomer Murders.

Hardwick House was the home of Sir Charles Rose (Photograph: Andy Stephenson / Wikipedia)

Hardwick House, a nearby Tudor-style house on the banks of the River Thames, near Whitchurch-on-Thames, also claims to be the inspiration for EH Shepard’s illustrations of Toad Hall.

The Liberal politician and horse breeder Sir Charles Day Rose (1847-1913), who bought Hardwick House shortly before he was given the title of baronet in 1909, is also said to have been one of the models for Toad of Toad Hall.

Foxwarren Park, at Wisley in Surrey, is a Victorian country house designed in 1860 by the railway architect Frederick Barnes for the brewer and Liberal politician, Charles Buxton (1823-1871).

It is a stark Neo-Gothic house, with polychrome brickwork, red with blue diapering, and terracotta dressings, and renewed plain-tiled roofs with crow-stepped gables. It has been the location for films and TV series, including The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Fawley Court … built by Christopher Wren and rebuilt by the Wyatt brothers (Photograph: Paul Highnam / Country Life)

Fawley Court is a country house on the west bank of the River Thames at Fawley in Buckinghamshire, near Henley-on-Thames.

The story of Fawley Court dates back to the Domesday Book. The house was completely rebuilt by Christopher Wren for William Freeman in 1684, and was redesigned by James Wyatt and his brother Samuel Wyatt, from Weeford near Lichfield, in the 1760s and 1770s.

After World War II, Fawley Court, was acquired run by Polish Congregation of Marian Fathers, who ran a library, museum, school and Polish cultural centre from the house.

The house was severely damaged by fire in 1973, the school closed in 1986, and the house became a retreat centre. It was finally closed and sold in 2009 to Aida Hersham, an Iranian heiress, reportedly for £13 million.

Nymans in West Sussex also claims to be the inspiration for Toad Hall

Nymans in West Sussex, owned by the National Trust, also claims to be the inspiration for Toad Hall. The gallery at the rear of the house has hosted a collection of Wind in the Willows pictures, including a few of EH Shepard’s original pencil-drawn sketches for the book and others that were hand-coloured by the artist.

The exhibits included a pencil drawing of Nymans that Shepard did during a visit there, and it is suggested that Toad Hall may have been based partly on the Nymans House.

Fowey Hall Hotel … often visited by Kenneth Grahame

Fowey Hall Hotel, overlooking the Fowey Estuary in Cornwall, also claims to have inspired Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows. Kenneth Grahame was certainly a frequent visitor when it was a family house, and it advertises itself as ‘a perfect location for messing about on the river like Ratty and his friends.’

The house was built by Sir Charles Augustin Hanson (1846-1922), who made his fortune in the lumber trade in Canada. When he returned to England, he built this house on a plot of land bought from the Rashleigh family, owners of Daphne du Maurier’s Menabilly.

Hanson was Conservative MP for Bodmin (1916-1922) and Lord Mayor of London in 1917. Fowey Hall was sold in the late 1950s, and became an hotel in 1968. The ground floor remains largely in its original layout, with the library, morning, drawing and billiard rooms and the dining area returned to their original uses.

Kenneth Grahame was a first cousin was Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863-1933), a son of the Revd Edwards Comerford Hawkins (1827-1906), Vicar of Saint Bride’s in Fleet Street, London. As Anthony Hope, he was the author of another early 20th century Edwardian fantasy, The Prisoner of Zenda, and they were cousins too of the Irish rugby superstar and war hero Basil Maclear (1881-1915).

The Moat House on Lichfield Street, Tamworth … can make no claims to being the original Toad Hall (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I should like to think – but would be totally wrong – to suggest, with these Comerford family connections, that Grahame’s Toad Hall was inspired by the Moat House on Lichfield Street in Tamworth. The former Comberford Tudor-era manor house certainly would have been an ideal choice over 100 years ago, before its sylvan setting gave way to the urban needs of an expanding Tamworth.

When I visit the Moat House, with its riverside setting – by the River Tame rather than the River Thames – and surrounded by willows, it often reminds me when I visit it of childhood images of Toad Hall.

Kenneth Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, in 1932, and is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.

Grahame’s cousin Anthony Hope wrote his epitaph, which reads: ‘To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time.’

Santorini’s churches point to the
difference between Aldi and Lidl

The image of Santorini that Aldi uses on their supermarket shelves … a stark contrast with their rivals Lidl (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

It is said that wherever Aldi goes, Lidl follows, and that wherever Lidl goes, Aldi is sure to follow.

So often I find it difficult to figure out which is which that I cannot figure out whether I am Aldied or Lidled.

But I have watched them follow each other as they open one supermarket after the other in similar venues, in Ireland, in England, and in Greece. Now I see that they are taking their shared competitive streak to the US.

The difference between the two, and the experience many of us have shared when we go shopping in these two German-based supermarkets is told by my former Irish Times colleague Mickey McConnell in The Ballad of Lidl & Aldi, recorded recently in John B Keane’s Bar in Listowel, Co Kerry:



But there is one place Aldi is not following Lidl – in their depictions of Santorini, which is unrivalled as the most photographed island in Greece and is the face of Greece to the rest of the world.

The island’s cubist white buildings, its pastel coloured doors and windows and the blue domes of its churches are the basic ingredients of picture-postcard Greece. Those blue domes complement the blue skies and blue seas that decorate so many postcards, calendars, coasters, fridge magnets and CDs that tourists bring home with them.

They are sometimes the first images that captivate potential visitors when they are dreaming about and planning a package holiday in Greece. And when those tourists return home, these calendars and posters decorate their homes as a reminder to return again.

In the rectory in Askeaton, I have a number of prints of photographs by Georges Meis, whose work in Santorini is celebrated in so many of those calendars, posters and coffee table books.

In Dublin, I have prints of two paintings by the artist Manolis Sivridakis that continue to remind me of all the sounds, sights, tastes, smells and thoughts of a sunny Sunday afternoon in Santorini almost 30 years ago.

The other ways lingering memories of a summer holiday on a Greek island holiday are brought back to life for wistful tourists include listening to those CDs – and finding Greek food on the supermarket shelves.

I have a small block of Feta cheese from Greece in the fridge in the Rectory at the moment. I say at the moment, because now that I have found it it’s not going to stay there for very long.

This is not Greek-style Feta, as you get in many supermarkets, but real Greek Feta, produced in Greece, using sheep and goat’s milk, under the Emporium brand name.

The label shows a blue domed church in Santorini, with the crater of the volcano and the blue Greek sea and sky in the background.

But there is something that makes this label very different from the labels in the Lidl Eridanous range.

Churches and domes without crosses ... airbrushed images of Santorini seen recently on my kitchen shelves and in my fridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

The Eridanous range in Lidl is also packaged and marketed with those white cubist buildings and blue domes that instantly transport you back from the grey days of winter in Ireland to the blue-and-white days of summer in Greece.

Prominent in all of those packaging images – on tins, bags and cardboard packages – is the dome of the Anastasis Church, the most photographed church and the most photographed building on the island of Santorini.

The problem, though, is that Lidl airbrushed the cross from the dome of the church. I wrote a few weeks ago about how Lidl had eliminated all crosses and transformed the landscape of Santorini on its packaging, claiming it wants to remain ‘religiously neutral.’ Greek history, culture and landscape had been airbrushed away by the very people who claim they are marketing a taste of authentic Greek living.

Unlike Lidl, however, Aldi has kept the cross on the dome of the church in Santorini in its packaging and labelling of Greek food in the Emporium range.

The image of Santorini that Lidl does not want you to see on their supermarket shelves

Despite an outcry a few months ago, the Eridanous range, including Greek olive oil, honey, moussaka, honey, yogurt, gyros, butter beans and pastry swirls, remains on shelves in Lidl outlets in Ireland in their photo-shopped packaging.

And so, I now know the difference between Aldi and Lidl and the differences between their branding of Greek foods.