Hughenden Manor

An outing to Hughenden Manor, just outside High Wycombe, provided the perfect opportunity to get some fresh air after a week sat behind a desk. Having said that, I thought I had made a mistake as I set off by train. Thick fog bathed the countryside and underneath lay an icy white frost. Not exactly ideal conditions for a trip to a country estate! As the fog burned off to reveal beautifully clear blue skies I knew that I had made the right call.

Hughenden Manor

Hughenden Manor was the home of Benjamin Disraeli, a two time Prime Minister (for six months in 1868, then from 1874 to 1880) and founder of one-nation conservatism.

It’s a slightly odd beast, having been purchased as a plain white struccoed manor house in 1848 and then stripped back to the brickwork and transformed with one architect’s interpretation of the fashionable Gothic features of the day. Pevsner described these ‘would-be-Jacobean embellishments’ in cut and moulded brick as ‘excruciating’, saying that it gave the place the look of a Victorian institution rather than a country house.

It’s not hard to spot the ‘sharp, angular and aggressive’ details that so offended Pevsner but Disraeli clearly loved the place. Our guide told us that he rejected the remote Chequers (for sale at the same time) in favour of this place.

The manor house has changed hands relatively little over the years before passing to the Disraeli Society in 1937 and then to the National Trust in 1947. The existence of comprehensive interior photographs, taken not long after Disraeli’s death, enabled the National Trust to restore the interior to something that would have seemed reasonably familiar to Disraeli, allowing for those rooms that have been switched around.

Christmas decorations in the library

The story of Disraeli’s career and his life in the house was really brought to life as we took a tour through the rooms, with our guide pointing out the most interesting features and curiosities (such as the surprisingly large number of royal portraits lining the walls of his bedroom). Unsurprisingly, it was the library that captured my attention the most.

The library at Hughenden holds a collection of 4,000 books with the earliest dating to the 1470s. The collection comprises volumes from three generations, including some of the 25,000 work’s collected by Disraeli’s father. The library was originally located in one of the rooms facing the gardens, but was switched around with a drawing room by Disraeli’s nephew Coningsby as the sun was started to affect the leather bindings of the books on the shelves.

In 2015 the library suffered from an overnight leak which resulted in the collapse of plasterwork from the ceiling, plus water damage to the furniture and those books on open display (such as an ornately bound copy of Goethe’s Faust, a Christmas present from Queen Victoria in 1876, only recently returned from conservation freeze-drying). It was lovely to see the library looking so good in the circumstances.

The Ice House

It was long known that Hughenden Manor had been used during wartime, but the exact nature of the work carried out had proven somewhat elusive until a visitor in 2004 was overheard telling his grandson where he used to work in the building. Once the small matter of the Official Secrets Act was addressed the wartime story of ‘Hillside’ (as it was codenamed) was revealed.

In 1941 the estate was requisitioned by the Air Ministry and became home to a top secret mapping unit, responsible for producing accurate maps that could be read in the low light of a bomber cockpit. A new exhibition, opened in July 2019, explores the process of mapmaking at the manor house and a separate display in the external ice house shows how the space was adapted as a photographic studio. It’s a fascinating story and an important one – the maps produced here were used in critical missions such as the Dam Busters raid and the bombing of the rocket factory at Peenemunde.

Overall, my visit to the manor house and the nearby church of St Michael took around three hours. I came away understanding quite a bit more about one of those figures in history that I have heard mentioned so many times, but had very little sense of. It was fascinating to learn about his relationship with Queen Victoria and to hear the tale of her sad pilgrimage to his house and grave a few weeks after his death.

A trip in the winter months means that you are never going to see the gardens at their most colourful and the statues might have been wrapped up for the winter, but the compensation is to see the house decorated for Christmas. The theme for this year was a 1940s Christmas which would see rooms decorated with paper chains, a tree made from a patchwork of rag rugs and shimmering lametta. All rather lovely, it has to be said.

Practicalities

I took a Chiltern train to High Wycombe and then made the 15 minute walk to the bus station to pick up a bus (300) for the 5 minute ride up to the bus stop on the A4128, opposite the end of the driveway up to Hughenden Manor. It’s still an uphill slog from here, so if you are not at your fittest the National Trust’s suggestion of a taxi is not a bad idea. Half-way up the drive you can stop off at the 13th/14th century church of St Michael and see the Disraeli family vault.

St Michael’s church, Hughenden

There is a bus stop on this route a bit closer to the centre of High Wycombe but the bus driver bombed past this without any hope of spotting anyone waiting (probably untypical, but perhaps safer to board at the bus station where the route starts) and then bombed past my stop too (thankfully the walk back from the next stop wasn’t too painful). The ticket cost £3.30 return, paid on the bus, though you can also buy slightly more expensive day tickets from the counter in the bus station.

The cost of an adult admission to Hughenden Manor came in at £11.80 (£13.00 with Gift Aid) at the time of my visit with a welcome voucher for a free tea or coffee for taking public transport. The grounds of Hughenden Manor open at 10 o’clock, followed by the house an hour later.

I took the opportunity to join a guided tour of the house (at 10.40) just before it opened for the day, which really helped bring the place to life. There are few explanations of what you are looking at inside the house so the guides really help you make sense of what you are seeing and how this fits into Disraeli’s life (even down to details such as the worn piece of carpet where Disraeli liked to pace in front of the fireplace).

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