Chapter 3: Three centuries
The Ordnance Survey map shown to the left illustrates Cannizaro in 1865, nearly a quarter of a century after the deaths of the Duke and Duchess. The outlines are clearly recognisable if compared with the park today. However the full story of Cannizaro dates back 300 years before that to the early 1570s, when Sir Thomas Cecil, later Lord of the Manor, created a deer hunting area of nearly 300 acres west of Wimbledon Common. In time it became known as the Old Park to distinguish it from the New Park across the Common which later became Wimbledon Park. That was designed by Lancelot Capability Brown for another Lord of the Manor, Earl Spencer in the 18th century.
Brown never turned his attention to the Old Park and it was a namesake who first established an identity there. In 1705, William Browne, a London merchant, bought what had by then become a successful rabbit breeding centre known as The Warren. In 1710 he built two large houses on the estate, Warren House and Westside House, living with his mistress Anne Needham in the latter while leasing what would later become Cannizaro House to friends.
The small community of Wimbledon centred on St Mary’s Church in the village. Browne made a mark by clashing with the vicar, Edward Collins, over the raising of fees for baptisms, marriages and burials. In 1722 he disrupted a Sunday service by storming out of his pew as the vicar entered his pulpit and slamming the church door behind him. He repeated this performance on at least eight Sundays and at a meeting of the Vestry he called the vicar a “rogue, robber of the church and cozener of the poor”15.
It made him enemies. The churchwardens sided with Rev Collins and denounced Browne to the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1724 the Warren estate owner was found guilty of defamation, ordered to pay the vicar £20 in compensation, and eventually excommunicated. He died in 1738 and although both he and Anne were later buried in St Mary’s churchyard, the word “dung” was irreverently added to his name in the burial register.
The estate was purchased by a local landowner, Thomas Walker,
Surveyor General of the Land Revenue and an intimate friend of Britain’s first
Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Walker, shown left, was also described as “a great frequenter
of Newmarket and a notorious usurer”. In 1748 he bequeathed the estate to his
nephew, Stephen Skinner, from whom it passed to three daughters. One of these,
Deborah, married Thomas Grosvenor of Swell, Somerset, and from 1769-1827 the
Grosvenor family leased it to wealthy tenants. It passed in turn to the Drax
family of Dorset in 1827 and continued to provide income to absentee landlords
for the century that followed.
Thomas Walker’s parkland estate appears on a map from 1746 published by the cartographer John Rocque.16 This shows the pleasure grounds including gardens and plantations along with the fish pond and Kitchen Garden surrounded by the same high wall we see today around the Italian Garden. Beyond lay a copse with large open fields for grazing cattle, now the Royal Wimbledon Golf Course. The estate leased after 1748 covered some 60 acres with shooting rights over 130 acres of Warren Farm beyond.
Leaseholders in the 18th century
The first notable leaseholder was yet another namesake of the founder, this time Lyde Browne, a director of the Bank of England, who lived there from 1757-85, inheriting Walker’s specially created pew in St Mary’s. Over many years he accumulated a collection of more than 80 classical Greek and Roman artworks, mainly sculptures, displaying them at Warren House and establishing a link between the estate and the arts that continues right to the present day.
Two years after his departure from Wimbledon he negotiated the collection’s sale to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia for £22,000. Part of it can still be seen today in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, (including a rare sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti, see Chapter 6) as well as at Pavlovsk Palace, built by Catherine for her son and successor, Tsar Paul. However, good fortune had run out for Lyde Browne. His St Petersburg agent only paid him £10,000 of the £22,000 before going bust and the shock brought on a stroke which killed him in 1787.
The Warren House lease had already passed in 1785 to the Scottish lawyer and politician Henry Dundas, a political enemy of George Johnstone, father of the later Duchess of Cannizzaro who was born in the same year. Dundas was Home Secretary from 1791 under Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and then Secretary of State for War from 1794-1801. Elevated to the peerage as Viscount Melville in 1802, he lived there until 1806, also leasing Westside House from 1791 for his family. His son Robert, second Viscount Melville, renewed that lease in 1820, remaining until 1822.
Dundas,
pictured left,
had no partner in his early years at Warren House, having divorced her first
wife after her elopement with an army officer. His 1791marriage proposal to a
neighbour, Lady Anne Lindsay of Gothic Lodge, Woodhayes Road, was rejected but
two years later he married Lady Jane Hope, 20 years his junior, and planted
beech trees in what became known as Lady Jane’s Wood to celebrate their wedding.
The wood remains to this day and some original
beeches survived right into
the 1990s.Unfortunately the marriage was not a
success, Lady Jane being described as “unsuitable” for him.
Unlucky in love, Dundas was still a great party-giver and his wine cellar became renowned. Pitt himself was a frequent guest with his own set of rooms, used as a restful rural alternative to Downing Street. King George III also breakfasted there on several occasions after military reviews on Wimbledon Common. However, Dundas fell foul of a former neighbour, the great reformer William Wilberforce over the proposed abolition of the slave trade, even though both of them were friends of Pitt. Wilberforce lived at the nearby Lauriston House before moving from Wimbledon to Clapham soon after Dundas’s arrival.
Dundas enjoyed mixed fortunes generally and his sparkling career ended in corruption charges. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1804 but aroused suspicion about his earlier financial management there when acting as its treasurer from 1782-1800. A commission of enquiry was appointed which reported in 1805 and resulted in his impeachment in 1806. Although acquitted in the last impeachment trial ever held in the House of Lords, he never again held office and financial pressures forced him to downsize to a smaller house nearby before he left Wimbledon to return to Scotland. He died in 1811. Nevertheless his role in Wimbledon’s history was significant enough to warrant a blue commemorative plaque on Cannizaro House some two centuries after he first arrived. Installed by the Wimbledon Society beside the Sunken Garden in the 1950s, it was designed by the Wimbledon School of Art but disappeared during a hotel refurbishment.
Another mutual friend of Pitt and Dundas was the young Earl of Aberdeen who replaced the latter as lease-holder of Warren House. Many years later in 1852 he would become Prime Minister but that was long after he had left Wimbledon. Three further tenancies followed at Warren House before the arrival of the future Duke and Duchess of Cannizzaro in 1817 and the estate’s eventual name change.
Victorian leaseholders
Cannizaro’s impressive credentials continued after the deaths of the Duke and Duchess in 1841. The following year the lease passed to a senior Treasury official, Arthur Eden, nephew of Lord Auckland. Very briefly in 1854 the young exiled Maharajah Duleep Singh, deposed ruler of the Punjab, took over the lease but moved on quickly. In 1860 it passed to Ceylon tea plantation owner John Boustead and in 1879 to a Mrs Schuster, whose late husband Leo had been chairman of the London and Brighton Railway and director of the Union Bank. She extended Cannizaro House with many additional rooms and the estate became known for its fashionable garden parties for as many as 1000 guests. The grounds had to be maintained accordingly as shown in the picture below, taken in the 1880s.
Mrs Schuster, formerly governess to Leo’s daughter Adela, was said to be notorious for making “malaprop remarks”. Despite this, her visitors included the Prince and Princess of Wales and other royals including those from Spain and Denmark. She also hosted famous literary guests, among them Lord Tennyson, Henry James, Max Beebohm, and Oscar Wilde, who described Adela Schuster as “The Lady of Wimbledon”. The ill-fated genius had good reason to admire her: she gave him £1000 for his personal use while he was on bail and he described her as “a soul that renders the Common air sweet” when he was freed from Reading Prison in 1897.
Like the Duchess before her, Mrs Schuster foreshadowed Cannizaro’s later open air festivals with extensive musical entertainments. Concerts and performances of pastoral plays were held in the grounds, among them “Fair Rosamund” based on a poem by Tennyson. This was performed in 1886, using a woodland glade as a stage with the auditorium sloping gradually upwards until mingling with the trees. Tickets cost a guinea and the distinguished audience of royal and aristocratic celebrities reached their places by a side gate opening on to Caesar’s Camp. In the interval they were served that now traditional fare of Wimbledon tennis fortnight, strawberries and cream.
The social distinctions of the day may have been immutable but poorer people were also entertained at Mrs Schuster’s Cannizaro. Costermongers, girls’ friendly societies and mothers’ meetings were hosted there and in September 1891 an outing to Cannizaro was organised for pupils of the Ragged School, among society’s poorest. After her stepmother died in 1896, Adela left Cannizaro and in 1898 bought the nearby Cottenham House in Copse Hill, a handsome villa named after Lord Chancellor the Earl of Cottenham. (Many years later she would conflict with her neighbour there, Atkinson Morley’s Hospital, over marauding rabbits on her land.)
The Schusters’ successor at Cannizaro was Colonel Thomas Mitchell, a renowned athlete. He was the tenant when the house burned down on 14th October 1900. After he returned over a year later, the rebuilt property boasted electric lighting, telephones, an electric burglar alarm, and a verandah overlooking the lawns, a predecessor of today’s hotel terrace. In 1904 the lease was taken by a writer, linguist and convert to Buddhism, John Savile, Earl of Mexborough, who remained until his death in 1916.
The house was used as a convalescent home for army officers during the First World War. It was known as American Red Cross Hospital No 102 and those staying there enjoyed luxurious conditions far from the Western Front.
The last absentee landlord
The freehold of the Cannizaro estate had been held by the Drax family since 1827. By the early 20th century the owner was the Honourable Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, KCB, DSO, JP, DL (1880–1967) whose lengthy series of titles, names and post-nominals marked him out and throws light on the origins of a number of today’s local street names.
Reginald and his elder brother, the writer Lord Dunsany, were sons of the 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853–1899) and Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax (1855-1916), née Burton. It is believed the family may have inspired some of the fanciful aristocrats created by writers such as PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.
In fact Sir Reginald Drax was a Royal Navy officer who was promoted to captain after the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and nearly changed the face of history at the start of the Second World War. Enjoying a notable diplomatic career, he led a failed attempt to form an Anglo-French alliance with the Soviet Union in August 1939. Had he succeeded he might have pre-empted the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which gave Hitler free range over eastern Europe before attacking Russia two years later. Despite the failure, Drax was later heavily involved with the Atlantic convoys that kept Britain going during the war’s darkest days.
He clearly had an instinct for the dramatic. Years before, while director of the Naval Staff College at Greenwich, he had set the ball rolling for the eventual transformation of his property in Wimbledon by starting to sell off all the land and buildings of the original Old Park for potential development. Westside House was leased once more to an American heiress who turned it into a Theosophist Centre. But the departure of Cannizaro’s final lease-holder - Percy Chubb, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society, from 1918-1919 - was followed by sale of the freehold for £30,750 to Edward Kenneth Wilson, director of the Ellerman and Wilson shipping line and a Lloyds underwriter. He had first expressed interest in the property back in 1914.
Wimbledon Wood along Copse Hill and Woodhayes Road disappeared for housing development and it was only after intervention by the John Evelyn Society (now the Wimbledon Society) that the borough council stopped further development on the Royal Wimbledon Golf Course. This had been leased by the club since 1907 and in 1938, rather than see the course disappear, Wimbledon Council paid Drax £151,000 for the freehold on 140 acres, leasing it back to the club for 50 years. (Merton has since been extended the lease virtually in perpetuity.) Drax sold the last remaining eight acres of Warren Farm to Leslie Hore-Belisha. He was War Minister from 1937-40 under Neville Chamberlain and the inventor of the Belisha beacon.
Seeds of the modern park
Wilson’s arrival at Cannizaro marked far more than just a change of freehold ownership. Surprisingly perhaps, the estate’s social prestige before 1920 had not been matched by a particularly imaginative approach to its horticulture or even its landscaping. With Capability Brown’s attention elsewhere in the 18th century and little evidence of the Victorian lease-holders following the fashion for plant collecting, the grounds of Cannizaro generally reflected native species and natural rather than cultivated beauty.
Some leaseholders were interested in the grounds. The Edwardian Buddhist Lord Mexborough was said to be a keen gardener and some trees were planted by others but there are few really ancient specimens today apart from those in Lady Jane’s Wood and the stunted oaks on the upper lawn near the statue of Diana and the Fawn. One hollow stump is estimated at 300 years old. The biggest oak, in the Mediterranean Garden on the lower slope, is some 25 metres in height with the girth of over two metres. William Browne might have spotted it.
The real change came after 1920. As members of the Rhododendron Society and the Royal Horticultural Society, Wilson and his wife Adela can take most of the credit for the many rare trees and shrubs that justify today’s English Heritage Grade II* registration. Employing a landscape architect, George Dillistone, to lay out a new garden, they created rhododendron, camellia and magnolia walks in Lady Jane’s Wood and planted many unusual shrubs and trees from North America and the Far East. They also established both the Maple Avenue leading to Diana and the Sunken Garden.
The Wilsons moved to Cannizaro from an estate in Yorkshire and stayed for the rest of their lives. The wrought iron gate at the main entrance still bears his “EKW” monogram. It was brought from Roehampton House in 1920 and moved from the bottom of the Kitchen Garden in 1948. They also brought from Yorkshire their head gardener, a Mr Allison and his family. He is shown left, standing beside the Wilsons, Centre, and George Dillistone. He took up the same post at Cannizaro and his son Richard would later succeed him in the job, remaining a total of 52 years until 6th November 1970 – well into the modern period of public ownership. Richard and Ida Allison lived with their son Billy in an 18th century cottage beside the pond right up to his retirement. It was demolished soon afterwards to save renovation costs.
Like their predecessors at Cannizaro, the Wilsons’ also had other staff living on the estate. Keir Cottage in Camp Road was occupied by their butler, Mr Key, and his wife. They also would remain long after the estate’s takeover by the local authority. Only when Mr Key died in the 1960s, would his widow move away.
Keen dog-lovers, the Wilsons and their daughter Hilary had several pets. They are shown below with two of them. Following the fashion of the day, they created their own dogs cemetery in the grounds and this would survive as a point of interest right into the 1990s until being fenced off, the little stones now broken and neglected. Dogs on the gates of the Dutch Garden are an additional legacy. How the pets reacted to the grazing sheep that were still there in the 1920s, is unrecorded.
In 1932, Wilson bought the
neighbouring property, The Keir, to head off
another housing development plan. Having secured the land and extended
Cannizaro accordingly, he re-sold The Keir itself
with a reduced area of space for continued use as its own garden17
.
The Guides Chapel by Camp Road, one-time home of a Catholic priest, had belonged to The Keir. During the 1930s, the Wilsons invited the local Brownies and Girl Guides to use this building and the recently added part of the former Keir Garden for games and singing. Their daughter Hilary is believed to have belonged to the organisation and the Wilsons certainly took great interest in it. An international jamboree camp was held in the grounds of Cannizaro shortly before the Second World War.
They bequeathed the chapel to
the local Brownies and a pack continued to use it
as their lair until moving away to newly built accommodation in the 1950s.
However, the link remains to this day (see picture below right). Brownie Revels have traditionally been held there
bi-annually and “Yummy” Sunday teas are served to
the public from the building each summer as an established feature of the
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annizaro Park year.
The Wilsons were more generous than their predecessors in allowing local residents access to the gardens. Adela would often chat with them and point out particular plants in bloom. During the war the couple lent the land to local people for use as rent-free allotments. In order to access their produce the holders would walk down Camp Road, enter through a gate beside Diana, and walk back through the grounds along a track known as the “cinder road”. There were no sheds for storage so they brought their own gardening tools each visit.
Today’s allotments lie on what was formerly the 18th hole of the Royal Wimbledon Golf Course. The wartime allotments actually covered a much larger area of the estate than today, most of which was restored to parkland in 1949.
After the inspired garden designing of the 1920s and 30s, the war took its toll on the estate in a number of ways. Cannizaro was used for exercises by the Home Guard and its maintenance was neglected. The rhododendrons became overgrown and honey fungus became widespread. A bomb demolished a bungalow directly opposite what is now the site of the Aviary. Two people were killed, including a retired employee of the Wilsons. The site was cleared of rubble and a gardener, Mr Chapman, was later busily preparing the ground for Jerusalem artichokes when he unearthed the clock mechanism of an unexploded 500lb bomb. Despite the damage it had never actually exploded. Had it done so, much of Cannizaro might have gone up too.
African icon
A bust of the late Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie now stands in the Old Tennis Garden amid the rhododendron bushes. Previously located outside Keir Cottage, it was moved to its present position in the early 1990s and underwent a major restoration in 2005. It was created by Hilda Seligman, a neighbour of the Wilsons at Lincoln House on Parkside during the 1930s, who campaigned on behalf of the Emperor and provided a refuge for him and his family when they were driven into exile by the Italian invasion of their country, then called Abyssinia, in 1935.
The iconic bust depicts one of the most significant historical
figures now associated with Cannizaro yet there is no evidence that Haile
Selassie actually visited the Wilsons during his stay across the Common.
The British Government
of the day had tried to appease Mussolini by refusing
the
imperial family entry to the country but the Seligman family overcame this
resistance. From his base in Wimbledon, Haile Selassie made several trips to
Geneva to plead his country’s case to the League of Nations. He also met black
groups in London including Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement
Association and spoke at many public meetings. When it became
clear that a rapid return home was not on the cards, he bought a house in Bath
and moved there.
He had to wait until Britain was at war before flying to Sudan in 1940 and leading a liberation campaign to free Abyssinia with British military support. From 1941 he was back in power and donated his house in Bath as a local residence for the elderly. He is shown left with Hilda Seligman and members of her family during a return visit to Wimbledon after the war. Other relatives later visited him in Ethiopia. When Hilda's sculpture was restored in 2005, it was formally unveiled by the Mayor of Merton in the presence of both Ethiopian imperial and Seligman family members as well as Rastafarian followers of Haile Selassie. It was another historic moment for Cannizaro.
The final curtain
Adela Wilson died in August 1946, followed in February 1947 by her husband. They had celebrated their golden wedding the previous year. During their time at Cannizaro they had created such a spectacular garden that even the neglect of the war years could not hide its value as a horticultural collection and place of beauty to be treasured.
Hilary had married the 5th Earl of Munster in 1928 and 20 years later, after her parents' deaths she sold the entire estate to Wimbledon Council. Most of the land would become today’s Cannizaro Park. Hilary’s husband, Geoffrey William Richard Hugh FitzClarence (1906-75), was the great-great-grandson of King William IV and his mistress, Dorothy Jordan. He succeeded to his title in the same year as his wedding and was a prominent politician who held ministerial office under five Prime Ministers. Also Lord Lieutenant of Surrey from 1957-73, he was succeeded in the title by a second cousin whose son became the seventh and last Earl of Munster, dying in 2000.
The couple lived at Sandhills, Bletchingley on the Surrey North Downs. In true Cannizaro tradition, Hilary was a great lover of music. A talented pianist herself, in 1958 she founded the Countess of Munster Musical Trust to help young musicians achieve their full potential as performers. Her endowment now provides assistance to young musicians amounting to almost £200,000 a year. She spent the following 21 years until her death in November 1979 watching her Trust’s steady growth. She took a keen interest in all its activities, regularly attending meetings and audition days and actively following the careers of its beneficiaries, whether singers, instrumentalists or composers.
So musical entertainment has played a significant part in much of the Cannizaro story, whether organised by the Duchess, by Mrs Schuster, or at a distance by the Countess of Munster. We can only speculate on what any of them would have thought of the strains heard at Cannizaro in more recent years - the rock, pop and jazz of open air festivals. But part of Cannizaro’s special quality is its appeal to the senses - sound as well as sight and smell. Music has its own magic. It is a good fit.
NOTES
15. Historic Wimbledon, R Milward, 1989.
16. “Exact Survey of the Cities of London, Westminster and the Country
nearly ten miles round”. John Rocque, 1746. British Library
17. The Keir land he re-sold was eventually used for Stonecourt on the corner of Camp Road. It became known as “the house that Jack built” because the horse Jack brought the building materials up Wimbledon Hill. The Keir itself was turned into flats.