The House Where Time Stopped in 1924: Calke Abbey

The House Where Time Stopped in 1924: Calke Abbey There are houses that welcome you and houses that simply let you in, and Calke Abbey belongs firmly to the second kind. Standing in its fold of Derbyshire parkland near Ticknall, this baroque mansion of pale stone was raised between 1701 and 1704 to announce a family's arrival, yet the Harpur Crewe line spent its final generations turning a statement into a hiding place. In this episode we trace three hundred years from Henry Harpur, the third son who bought the estate in 1622 and a baronetcy from Charles I in 1626, through the reclusive Sir Vauncey who paid three hundred guineas for a single great auk egg and barred motor cars from his thousand acres, to the hinge year of 1924 when his death extinguished the male line and began a sixty year slow freeze. When the National Trust took possession in 1985 it found children's toys still on the nursery floor, several thousand stuffed birds and mounted animals crowding every room, and a set of Chinese silk bed hangings folded in their packing chest for two hundred and fifty one years, never once hung. Rather than restore the house the Trust chose to arrest its decay, so the rooms you would walk today are very nearly the rooms the family walked away from. This is the story of how a house built to be seen became a place of concealment, and of the quiet, private people who froze it in time. Sources: National Trust, History of Calke Abbey. National Trust, Visiting the house at Calke Abbey. National Trust, Our work in the house at Calke Abbey. National Trust Collections, State Bed probably made for George I, object 291768. Wikipedia, Calke Abbey. Wikipedia, Vauncey Harpur Crewe. Wikipedia, Sir Henry Crewe, 7th Baronet. Wikipedia, Harpur Crewe baronets. Ticknall Life, Who lived at Calke Abbey? Harpur Crewe family. Yahoo News UK, The eccentricity of the Harpur Crewe aristocrats passed down the generations. The Velvet Drawing Room, The Gentlemen Collectors: Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe. The Velvet Drawing Room, The history of Calke Abbey. Subterranea Britannica, Calke Abbey Gardeners' Tunnel. Find a Grave, Charles Arthur Richard Harpur Crewe (1917 to 1981).