Rodmarton Manor, the English arts and crafts movement at its best

Magazine Antiques, June, 2001 by Mary Greensted

Rodmarton Manor, about six miles southwest of the English market town of Cirencester in the Cotswolds, was designed in 1909 by the arts and crafts architect Ernest Barnsley for Claud and Margaret Biddulph. It was traditionally built more or less by hand over a twenty-year period with a break during World War I. As well as a country house, the building was intended to be a focal point for the community. It was seen as a way of supporting traditional crafts and the rural social order, and providing training and employment for local people. Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), the energetic, intellectual, and visionary founder of the Guild of Handicraft, visited the house in October 1914. It made a tremendous impression on him and inspired the following comment in his journal:

I've seen no modern work equal to it, nothing I know of Lutyens or Baker comes up to it. And when I ask why I find the answer is in the system, the method rather than the man. It is a house built on the basis of confidence and Barnsley has been allowed a free hand to put all his personal knowledge and technique into the work. The Eng. Arts and Crafts Movement at its best is here-so are the vanishing traditions of the Cotswolds. (1)

The Biddulphs were a wealthy newly married couple. Claud Biddulph was the second son of a banker, landowner, and farmer based in Herefordshire. His father, Michael (1823-1904), had inherited a large estate in the neighboring county of Gloucestershire from a family friend. He gave the bulk of the estate to his elder son, John Michael Gordon (1869-1961), but in 1894 he passed on 551 acres of farmland centered around the village of Rodmarton to the eighteen-year-old Claud. To begin with, this inheritance made little difference to Claud's way of life, for he was a stockbroker in the London firm of Gordon, Askew and Biddulph. However, when he was in his twenties he met Margaret Howard (Fig. 1) and was captivated by her stunning Pre-Raphaelite good looks and strong character. She was born in 1880 into an aristocratic family and grew up at Warton Hall, Isleworth, Middlesex. As a young single woman she had shown some measure of her future determination by attending gardening classes at Studley Agricultural College for Women in Worcestershire.

After their marriage in 1906, and with thoughts of raising a family, the Biddulphs considered the desirability of acquiring a country home. They had no base on the Rodmarton estate because the medieval manor house in the village had been destroyed by fire in the late eighteenth century. They were introduced to Ernest Barnsley as a potential architect for the project by Seymour Henry Bathurst (1864-1943), seventh earl of Bathurst, the largest landowner in Gloucestershire, who had firsthand experience and a very high opinion of Barnsley's work.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ernest Barnsley was born in Birmingham in 1863 into a successful family of builders. With his younger brother Sidney, he chose to complete his architectural training in London in the 1880s. They became part of the creative circle of young architects who, inspired by the designer and socialist William Morris (1834-1896), developed the ideas, practices, and associations which became known as the arts and crafts movement. They wanted to break down the barriers between art and craftwork and believed that working creatively by hand would improve the quality of life both of the individual and of society.

After completing his training in London in 1887, Ernest Barnsley returned to Birmingham where he set up an architectural practice. He married Alice Townsley (1863-1952), fathered two daughters, and seemed comfortably settled. In 1893, at the age of thirty, he was persuaded to join a scheme concocted by his brother Sidney and their mutual friend Ernest Gimson. The three men gave up their careers as professional architects to create a new living and working environment for themselves. They wanted to get to know an area, its craft and building traditions, and to build up a community of craftsmen. Their first step was to move from Birmingham and London to the rural Cotswolds.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Cotswolds today are a popular tourist attraction, but in the past the landscape was not appreciated. The earl of Northumberland in Shakespeare's Richard II commented on "the high wild hills and rough uneven ways" of the region. (2) From medieval times the wool trade had brought prosperity to Cotswold towns such as Cirencester and Chipping Campden and the surrounding countryside. The area certainly had its fair share of physical deprivations in the nineteenth century. Economic decline had been dramatic during the industrial revolution when the wool trade moved to new northern centers. In his Rural Rides ... (1830), the writer William Cobbett (1763-1835) described the general cheerlessness, austerity, and poverty of the Cotswold landscape. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the architect Edward Guy Dawber (1861-1938), William Morris, and the Anglo-American artist Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) began to write books and articles illustrating the visual harmony between the vernacular Cotswold buildings and the landscape. (3) Their enthusiasm for this relatively unknown yet accessible part of Britain was seized upon by the young architects and designers of the arts and crafts movement, particularly as property was readily available and rents were cheap.