Category: Victoria Hinshaw

The London and Waterloo Tour: The Lansdowne Club

One of the spots in London that Kristine and I plan to visit is the Lansdowne Club. It occupies the remaining part of Lansdowne House, built in the 1760’s and partially torn down in the 1930’s to put through a street to Berkeley Square. In its former glory, the house had a garden which met the south side of the Square. This former garden property is now office buildings (one called Lansdowne House).
On the 1830 map of London, you can see that the original Lansdowne garden (lower left) was positioned to allow a clear view of Berkeley Square from Devonshire House on Piccadilly (fully demolished in the 1920’s). Lansdowne House itself actually faced east.
Only in our imaginations can we picture the way Lansdowne House looked before the wreckers arrived. But in the Club, some of the original rooms designed by Robert Adam (Scottish, 1728-1792) have been preserved and recently restored to their full beauty.
One of these rooms, The Round Bar, displays pictures of Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams, for it was here that these gentlemen signed the preliminary agreements that led to the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the American Revolution and established the independent United States of America. In the picture from the Club’s website, Lord Lansdowne’s picture is on the wall.
At the time, Lord Shelburne (who was named Marquis of Lansdowne in 1784), prime minister for part of the war, led the British negotiators. On my first visit to the Club, one of the barmen overheard our American accents and showed us around. If you are a member of a private club in the U.S., check to see if you have reciprocity with the Lansdowne Club, and if you do, when in London you can enjoy a visit for a meal or tea or even stay in one of the lovely bedrooms on the premises.
                                                                        
After parts of Lansdowne House were demolished, the Club added facilities including a swimming pool, workout areas, and the dining room on an upper floor. In keeping with the styles of the day, these areas were designed and decorated in the Art Moderne style. The juxtaposition of the Adam and Deco styles works amazingly well. The entrance foyer, the Adam Room, the Round Bar, and the ballroom are the originals, beautifully restored.
Two of the rooms removed in the partial demolition are in U.S. museums. The brightly-colored saloon, a main reception room in the house, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Adam designs, many based on motifs from classical sites uncovered in his lifetime in Pompeii, are brilliant. The dining room is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Another amusing American connection is the fact that H. Gordon Selfridge, who founded the great department store on Oxford Street, leased Lansdowne House in the 1920’s before it suffered its partial demise. Selfridge was born in Wisconsin and was an executive with Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago before he moved to England. During Selfridge’s tenure, the house was the scene of many famous parties, most attended by his intimate friends, the celebrated dancing Dolly Sisters.

The Dolly Sisters, above; left, Selfridge’s on Oxford Street

More on Lansdowne House, the family, and their country home at Bowood will be posted soon.  

Below, The Adam Room in the Lansdowne Club                                                
                     
Above, the dining room in the Metropolitan Museumn of Art, New York
Above, the Drawing Room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Incomparable Jane Austen

 by Victoria Hinshaw

As a lover of Jane Austen, I regret I could not attend the Morgan Library’s exhibition that just closed in New York City. I know several people who saw it and all of them were mesmerized by the display of letters and a manuscript in Jane’s hand.

But in this age of the internet, we are fortunate to have wonderful resources right on our computer screens. So I encourage you to go to the Morgan site and feast your eyes on the films and exhibits available there. You won’t be disappointed.

Below you see Jane’s Chawton Cottage in Hampshire as it appeared in May 2009, with its scaffolding. Substantial renovations were finished last year, 200 years since Jane Austen, Cassandra and their mother moved to the house. Jane Austen lived here for the last years of her life. Scholars seem to agree that she did her finest work here, both writing full novels and refining previous versions for publication. Visit Chawton Cottage here. One of the additions since I last visited a year ago is the reopened kitchen in which Jane helped to prepare breakfast. Now I have to go back.

Chawton Cottage

One of my favorite “pictures” of Jane is below, where she is portrayed as going Hollywood. It is probably apocryphal, but a story has circulated of the Hollywood studio CEO, who, upon reading a script based on Austen, said, “What else will she write for us?”

Hollywood Jane
The Jane Austen Society of North America is thirty years old. Its current President, Marsha Huff, is a delightful friend and excellent keeper of the flame. JASNA’s next AGM, the annual meeting at which we talk nothing but Jane Austen for three days, will be held in Portland, OR, on the last weekend of October, 2010.
JASNA President Marsha Huff
Marsha and I are part of the JASNA Wisconsin chapter; we have many more excellent and accomplished members about whom I will be writing soon, right here at Number One London.
Finally, I want to include a lovely picture used by the Morgan Library for their exhibit. This is exactly how I think Jane Austen must have looked.
I know this is exactly how I look when I am at my writing table.  You too????

Author Victoria Hinshaw's Passion for Stately Homes

I am delighted to share some of my research at Number One London. Here’s a little info about me and how my research interests developed.
I grew up near Chicago and spent my summers at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a sparkling glacial lake just north of the Illinois border. Many of the properties along the 27-mile shoreline were great mansions built by Chicago millionaires (back when a million meant something!) as their summer homes in the mid-19th century. How I fantasized about life in those huge houses. I imagined myself as the heiress daughter, beautiful beyond belief, who was destined to marry a prince. May I point out that I blame my father for giving me royal illusions by choosing the name Victoria?
My mother told me her first visit to Lake Geneva was as a child in the 1920’s when she and her family visited an aunt, the Swedish cook at one of the great houses. Even the downstairs servants were allowed to invite their families from time to time. But I identified more with upstairs residents, of course. Wishful thinking. This photo of Stone Manor on Geneva Lake, WI, is used by the courtesy of Mark Czerniec. Thanks, Mark.
Geneva Lake is ringed with the great mansions of
Chicago titans like the Wrigleys and the Schwinns.
This one, known both as Younglands and as Stone Manor, was built by Otto Young, developer of the long gone State Street landmark, The Fair Store, as well a real estate mogul and financier. Young was born in Germany in 1844 and died at Lake Geneva in 1906. He had been treasurer of the board of the  World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago.
If you visit Geneva Lake, you may want to schedule a tour of Black Point, shown at left.
The home has been open to the public for a few years, with acess only by the cruise boats of Gage Marine.  I used to come here as a teenager when Uncle Ernie Schmidt entertained the young sailors on the lake. The house was built in 1888 by Chicago beer baron Conrad Seipp, one of Uncle Ernie’s relatives.
Ever since childhood, I have had a great interest in the homes of the wealthy, be it in Newport, NYC, Florida, or anywhere. Mostly, I am interested in the families who lived in these houses. And my interests widened to English country houses when I visited England as a college student.
 After college and grad school and time working in Washington D.C., my husband and I moved to Milwaukee where we have lived ever since, except for winters, which we spend in Naples, FL, from which I am currently writing.
I have published a dozen books, mostly regency-era romances. Lately I have been working on some new projects about which I will write someday. But my fascination with great houses and the families that lived in them remains.
A few years ago, several friends and I took a course at Oxford University (through the Smithsonian Associates) to study the history of stately homes in Britain. We were in residence at Worcester College and traveled around Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire to various estates under the leadership of Geoffrey Tyack, as delightful a professor as I have ever known.
I will be writing about some of these houses soon on this blog. But first, remember some of the earliest remains of English Country Houses are actually Roman. The Romans were in Britain for over 400 years, beginning in 55 B.C. and left behind remains from the Channel ports to Hadrian’s Wall. Bath has its famous Roman springs. Excavations have uncovered the ruins of many country estates, such as the Chedworth Roman Villa, below, now run by the National Trust in Gloucestershire.
Soon, we’ll move forward in time to a wonderful medieval house, Haddon Hall. If you have a favorite stately home in England (or elsewhere), let me know. I love to hear your experiences. I have occasionaly run into the house owners, all of whom did not pay the slightest attention to their paying guests. One was the Duke of Northumberland at  Syon Park; another was the 10th Duke of Roxburghe at Floors Castle. Can’t say I blamed them a bit! But Her Grace, the lovely Duchess of Bedford actually waved to  our group at Woburn Abbey.
Until later, cheers, Victoria Hinshaw