The Country House Revealed (2011) s01e05 Episode Script
Episode 5
DAN CRUICKSHANK: Our great country houses.
The most familiar and yet intriguing sights Britain has to offer.
Standing like sentinels in the landscape.
Hundreds of thousands of us visit them every year, but not all are open to the public.
I've been granted the privileged opportunity to pass through the portals of six of our greatest country houses normally hidden from public view.
They've seen five centuries of British history up close and personal.
The families who built these houses played their part in great affairs of state.
Central to their dreams, the great house, the ultimate status symbol, but all too often also the ultimate money drainer.
Few of these families went the distance, but their houses did, with their secrets intact.
This is their story, but it's also our story, for these houses offer a guided tour of our nation's hidden history.
(TRAIN BRAKES SQUEALING) I'm on my way to explore one of the most fascinating country estates in Northern Ireland.
And I get there from here, from Belfast, by train.
The estate, secluded deep in the farmlands and woodlands of County Down, is called Clandeboye.
And rather conveniently, a railway station was constructed within its grounds.
Ah, here it is.
Helen's Bay.
Indeed, very convenient.
The station was built in 1863, by the family living at Clandeboye, the Dufferins.
Up there are the family initials, together with their coronet.
The station's a charming, ornamental gothic structure.
They contain not only the booking office, but also, a private waiting room for the Dufferins, with a staircase, leading down to a private avenue.
Waiting in the avenue, would be a horse-drawn carriage, ready to transport the family to Clandeboye House.
The carriage would pass below this wonderful bridge, a sensational thing, which to me, looks rather like a medieval city gate.
Fantastic portal to a hidden world.
This portal take me to the past, in more ways than one.
Ah! Here it is, Clandeboye.
Very handsome, late Georgian country house.
It's one I've known for well over 30 years.
I've spent some most astonishing times here.
Indeed, this walk for me is very much a journey back in time.
Clandeboye has belonged to the same family for 400 years.
Today, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava lives here.
Born into the Irish aristocratic family, the Guinesses, she moved here in 1964, when she married Sheridan, the fifth Marquess, who died over 20 years ago.
Lady Dufferin also happens to be a very old friend of mine.
(CHATTERING) Simply wonderful that you're back at Clandeboye.
Back here.
It's wonderful to be back.
Fantastic actually! Now, I'll tell you what, I don't think you can resist a sandwich.
No, I can't resist a sandwich - Very lovely.
Beautifully presented.
- It's a tradition.
- Yes.
I'll take that one.
- Actually, very often I make people CRUICKSHANK: I can't remember exactly when I first visited Clandeboye.
It was so long ago, but Lindy may have solved the mystery.
I got this treat because we can now find out when you first came here.
- Yes, all right.
This is the guest book.
- So here we go.
- Okay.
- Now we put our specs on.
- So, here we go.
- Clandeboye What's the first one? What's the first date here? Um, 1931! - Isn't that amazing? - Incredible! Ulster Races.
Who's here? - Evelyn Waugh.
Look that's interesting.
- Evelyn Waugh Actually, he was a great friend of the family's.
- I think he came here quite often.
- Yes.
Let's leap forward a bit, to, I suppose Let's find When did you first come to the house? - I can hardly remember.
We think, 1961.
- '61? Lindy Guinness.
You're here.
- Yes, I think I came - That's in '63.
for Sheridan and Lindy.
Look.
- Here we are again! - David Bailey and you.
- Oh, he was divine.
Now where do we go? I'm longing to find you? Dan Cruickshank! - But that - Gotcha! That's my name but that's not my signature.
I wasn't here.
- I bet it is.
You were drunk.
- I wasn't here.
This is - You were drunk when you wrote it.
- Well, I'm mostly drunk.
- Must be.
- Christmas 1975.
- Gotcha.
- That's it.
That's more like it.
That's how long it goes.
'75, '85, '95, 105 - Do you realise that's 35 years? - 35 years ago.
Okay, that's a sobering thought.
And I must say you look wonderful on it, if you don't mind me saying so.
It's the whisky.
And you are just as handsome or perhaps it's my eyes that are dulling.
- I see you through, sort of, a mist.
- Through rose-tinted Yes, a rosy mist.
CRUICKSHANK: Clandeboye, under Lindy and Sheridan, became a magnet for artists and writers.
It was a bohemian scene, that would surely have startled Sheridan's ancestors, the sober and very sensible Blackwoods.
They were Scots Protestants, who originally came to County Down in the early 17th century and rose to become minor gentry.
They marked this ascent with a massive expansion of their house in 1801 by little-known architect, Robert Woodgate.
I'm now in a part of the house built just after 1800.
Very elegant but somewhat conventional late Georgian architecture.
Ah! Here are the Blackwoods.
And I must say these are portraits of that view them to be a somewhat serious bunch.
Not, I should think, given to flights of fancy.
In fact, one of the Blackwoods admitted they had no interest in art and literature.
And even that they regarded imagination as a mental disease.
Given their lack of imagination, the Blackwoods would surely have been horrified by what was about to happen to their house.
They remain in a part of Clandeboye, that's largely untouched.
But elsewhere, that's very definitely not the case.
This house was radically transformed when the front door was moved to the rear.
And this is where the magic of Clandeboye begins.
I've explored many country houses over the years but I must say, the main entrance of Clandeboye is still the strangest I have ever seen.
It's so understated.
Just a low, long, blank wall and then, a very plain door.
But the moment you step inside, it all starts to make sense.
Open the doors, it's like breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb.
This is high architectural theatre.
Everywhere, wonderful and revealing objects.
Look at this pair of bears, baby bears.
Killed and stuffed.
In here, Indian weapons and armours, Burmese celestial figures.
All telling a tale, about the house, the man that made it.
Utterly incredible.
If a tropical bird flew past now, I wouldn't be surprised.
This is the world of Frederick, Lord Dufferin.
One of the greatest diplomats of his age, Viceroy of India and friend of Queen Victoria.
This house is an embodiment of his achievements.
But it is also a melancholic monument, to the declining fortunes of his class, the Victorian aristocracy.
Lord Dufferin transformed Clandeboye into a fairytale.
The house is a journey through his life, through his age, through the Imperial adventure.
There are wonderful objects everywhere which unite to tell the story of one exceptional man.
This exceptional man was always destined to be different from his staid ancestors.
In 1825, his father, Price, the fourth Lord Dufferin, shocked the rest of the Blackwoods by marrying the granddaughter of the celebrated Irish playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Helen Sheridan was artistic and an accomplished society beauty.
Her world was the fashionable London beau monde.
She was everything the Blackwoods were not.
Ah.
A year after her marriage to Price Blackwood, Helen gave birth to their only child.
A son, Frederick.
And here, is a lovely little portrait of the young chap, aged four or five, painted by Helen.
Very wonderfully done.
And behind it, is a lock of hair, Frederick's hair.
Blond.
When he was one year old.
This hair was cut by Helen and sent to Price Royal Navy, away from home a lot.
as a little reminder of his infant child.
And the hair and portrait were later united, to create this very intimate, very wonderful thing.
Helen's ambitions for her son were always high.
As was usual at that time, she looked across the Irish Sea to England for his future.
She wanted him to be groomed for high public office, to make the right contacts.
And there was nowhere better to do that than at Eton, the finishing school of choice for the aristocratic elite.
In 1839, when Frederick first arrived, Eton had already produced an astonishing 10 prime ministers, and had even won the Battle of Waterloo on its playing fields, according to old boy, the Duke of Wellington.
Here, at the heart of the British power network, Helen hoped that her son would achieve greatness himself.
Dr Andrew Gailey, the Vice-Provost of Eton, is writing a biography of Lord Dufferin.
Like his subject, Andrew comes from Ireland.
Eton, I suppose, was the obvious place to send Frederick.
Well, yes and no, I mean Yes, if you've got ambitions to make something great in England.
And not necessarily in Ireland, at that time.
In fact, most boys would just probably have gone locally.
But if you have ambitions for, to acquire, say, a bit of the polish And certainly provincial Blackwoods were quite interested in acquiring a bit of polish.
then, Eton was the place to go.
To make connections, of course, that's the thing, isn't it? To move into the big world.
To make the connections to To learn about a world that you're going to have to operate in.
And if you wanted to be up with that, in that social world, then you had to be Englishfied.
So his background, when he arrived at Eton, would he have had a very provincial atmosphere about him? His father describes him as being all hunched up in his early days at Eton.
And he was probably a bit bullied too.
And then it all comes good.
He's managed to use his Irishness to effect.
And he was good at speaking, you know, an orator, he had some distinction.
Very much, and he would be the one that, whenever the house was having a great feast or celebration, they would call on the "Little Orator" as they called him, to go and declaim.
And it became an art form for the rest of his life.
And indeed, probably one of his greatest strengths.
CRUICKSHANK: His mother's little orator, was now in the charmed inner circle of Eton life, forming close friendships with the men who'd run Britain and her Empire.
The British aristocracy was at the zenith of its power, owning over half the land in Britain.
And nothing symbolised their grip on the nation more than the great country house.
Places like Hatfield House, owned by the family of Frederick's Eton friend, Lord Robert Cecil.
And Kimberley Hall, the home of his classmate, John Wodehouse, the future Lord Kimberley.
At Eton, Frederick must have fully grasped the notion that behind every great man, lay a great estate.
And he was to have his own estate, sooner than anyone imagined.
One evening, at the end of term, Frederick was on the bridge that stood here, and suddenly turned to a friend that was with him and said, "It's odd.
I have every reason to be happy.
"Tomorrow, I return to Ireland.
And yet, I feel wretched.
" What Frederick did not know was that an hour earlier, his father had died on a ship crossing the Irish Sea.
The father died of an overdose of morphine.
Whether or not it was an accident was never determined.
Suddenly, Frederick, at a tender age of 15, was fatherless and also, had inherited the heavy responsibility of being a lord.
Frederick Temple-Blackwood, was now the fifth Baron Dufferin and Clandeboye.
On paper, he was a rich man.
He had inherited 18,000 acres of land with £ 18,000 a year in rent.
Well, that's the theory.
In reality, his tenants were in arrears to the tune of almost £30,000.
That's over £2,000,000 today.
And on top of that, he'd also inherited a financial obligation to pay another £30,000 in annuities to his family, the Blackwoods.
The young lord was forced to face the bitter truth.
Agriculture no longer paid.
Landlords in Ireland, such as Lord Dufferin, would have made much of their money through rents paid by peasant farmers who lived in cottages rather like this one.
In mid 19th century Ireland, such cottages were all over the landscape.
Huge numbers of them.
This one, actually is a rather large and grand example.
Many would be much smaller, more humble.
This one, well-built of stones from the fields, I suppose.
Inside, only one room, a floor of beaten earth.
Seventy five percent of Ireland's rural population lived in hovels like this.
With a patch of ground so small, there was only one crop they could grow to live on, the potato.
That was the staple diet for the rural poor, the potato.
Very nutritious food but very vulnerable to disease.
And that's what happened in 1845.
A fungus blighted the potatoes.
They blackened and died in the land.
And one blight followed by another, and another, so that the population of the land, was almost literally decimated and Ireland changed forever.
Lord Dufferin was studying at Oxford when reports started to trickle in.
The Irish peasantry was starving.
He was dismayed at the indifference of his English friends, who dismissed the stories as exaggerated.
So, to his mother's horror, Lord Dufferin and a fellow student, George Boyle, went to Ireland to seek the truth for themselves.
This is the road that 21 -year-old Lord Dufferin took, when he entered Skibbereen, in the southwest of Ireland.
He came here because he read this was one of the places hardest hit by the famine.
He wanted to see if the reports of the suffering of the people of Skibbereen were true.
Lord Dufferin soon discovered things were very bad.
In these streets, people were crawling.
They didn't have the energy to walk.
Or lying here by the roadside, quietly dying.
To try and prick the conscience of his well-fed friends back in England, Lord Dufferin wrote a graphic account of what was called "The Great Hunger.
" Today, he is still remembered for it in Skibbereen.
The thing about Dufferin's visit and the narrative was to alert people back in England.
Because in England, there was almost a disbelief, wasn't there, at the seriousness of the famine in Ireland.
GERALD O'BRIEN: There was perhaps a reluctance to believe it was so bad.
And the purpose of the narrative was to bring the truth before the British public, in which it admirably succeeded.
It did make a difference.
TERRI KEARNEY: It certainly made a difference, certainly.
The first three months of 1847, saw the huge majority of charitable contributions from all over the world came in, from Ceylon, from everywhere.
And it was in great part, due to the writings of people who came here and saw things and witnessed themselves, and then wrote about them in the world media and had them reported.
And Dufferin and Boyle would be definitely included in that.
And of course, it shouldn't be forgotten that Lord Dufferin himself, from his personal fortune, gave £1000 to famine relief, an enormous sum.
CRUICKSHANK: This was typical Dufferin, spending money he simply didn't have.
His bank account took another knock with an act of charity closer to home.
The famine also struck his own tenants.
So, he reduced their rents and gave them wages, through a massive programme of works.
What he wanted to do was start a famine relief.
Projects, or several projects on the estate.
And we're standing in front of the lake, which was one of those projects, creating the lake.
And also, looking towards the house, you can see the vista that's opened up.
So, that created employment and also created a beautiful landscape for him.
Very, very brilliant.
That's right, yes, 'cause he was a little worried about the fact that he was living in a higher society than he had an estate to match, as it were.
But Lord Dufferin's desire to keep up appearances and help his tenants came at too high a price.
Every pound he was spending, put him deeper in debt.
He desperately needed a larger income.
And he knew where to find it.
Through connections.
Or, more precisely, his mother's connection to Prime Minister, Lord John Russell.
Thanks to this very important family friend, Lord Dufferin landed his first proper job.
In 1849, at the age of 23, Lord Dufferin was appointed a lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.
This was a very important job that took him to the heart of royal court, which, at that time, was a very happy place.
Queen Victoria was only seven years older than the Lord Dufferin and happily married.
She would have been delightful company.
And Dufferin, as was his habit through life, kept a journal of his time at court.
Now, here are his journals.
And here is the one, let's see, for the right period of time, 1849-50.
Ah! Well, it's a first one here.
Very good.
First one.
Um, interestingly, Lord Dufferin had his journals typed out and bound.
It's not his handwriting.
Now let's have a look.
What's this page say? "November 23rd, left Windsor.
" This is obviously the very beginning of his stint as lord-in-waiting.
Because it says here, "Pleased with my first waiting.
"Liked the people.
" (CHUCKLING) He was a very young man.
And, let's try another one.
Oh, Lord, here.
"1850, London.
March the 15th.
"Played tennis.
"Offered £1000 to be repaid at 5% "by £100 a year instalments.
" We know he had money problems.
So even while at court, he's trying to work out ways of borrowing money.
This is amazing! Goes on to say, "When sitting around the Queen's table, "they all burst out laughing at my melancholic face.
" Poor chap! He's worried about his money, even in the company of the Queen.
When Lord Dufferin was first suggested as a courtier, Queen Victoria is meant to have declared, "Good heavens! He's much too good-looking and captivating.
" And when he was at court, she would giggle and tease him about his poetically long hair.
He was obviously a very charming fellow.
Very determined to amuse and determined to be popular.
I suppose he, um The grandeur of the life at the royal court Indeed, the grandeur of the country houses visited with the Queen, reinforced Dufferin in his determination to create the high life for himself at home, at Clandeboye.
The high life for Lord Dufferin meant only one thing.
A bigger, better Clandeboye.
Ignoring the potential impact on his decimated bank account, he became desperate to emulate his friends at court and build.
In other words, to keep up with the Joneses.
So in 1849, he hired one of Britain's most fashionable architects, William Burn.
He set to work on lavish plans to remodel Clandeboye in a style that was then all the rage, Jacobethan.
Now, at last, Dufferin could fulfil his Eton dreams and vie with the houses of his contemporaries.
Men like the Duke of Sutherland with his Dunrobin Castle.
And the Duke or Argyll, with Inveraray Castle.
The eventual result of Lord Dufferin's bold scheme.
One small tower, dedicated to his mother, Helen.
It wasn't uncommon in a sentimental Victorian age to build monuments to loved ones.
But the sheer scale and architectural ambition of Helen's Tower, is unusual.
It reveals the intensity of the love between Lord Dufferin and his mother, Helen.
And this room is really the epicentre, wonderful, gothic, panelled room.
Lovely vaulted ceiling.
And over here, two brass panels proclaiming the love between the mother and her son.
Here we see a poem written in June, 1847, by Helen.
It says (READING) "With a silver lamp.
Fiat Lux.
" "Let there be light.
" The poem starts (READING) And then she goes on to venerate her son.
Up here, is a poem commissioned by Lord Dufferin, from the great poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Tennyson expresses Lord Dufferin's love for Helen.
"Helen's Tower, here I stand.
"Dominant over sea and land.
"Son's love built me, and I hold, "Mother's love in lettered gold.
" Referring to this proclamation of love here.
Could there be anything more moving? This is the monument to love between mother and son.
It's incredible! If Lord Dufferin couldn't yet afford to build a new house, at least he now had all the fashionable trimmings.
His own folly, his own lake, plus an ornamental park with a railway station pencilled in for good measure.
But none of this came cheap.
By the time, all the grounds were finished, it would cost him £70,000.
That's £5,000,000 today.
And that's not all he splashed out on.
Lord Dufferin had another expensive hobby.
One that only the more adventures young Victorians were indulging in.
Exploring.
In 1854, he borrowed nearly £3,000 to buy an ocean-going yacht.
This model seems somewhat overwhelmed in the setting of the hall but it shows the ship that was to transform Lord Dufferin's life and indeed, life of Clandeboye.
It's a model of a schooner called the Foam.
And in 1856, Lord Dufferin, age 30, and his crew, went on an epic four-month journey into the North Atlantic and the Arctic.
Lord Dufferin's sailing trip was expensive.
But it brought him fame as an intrepid traveller.
He also returned with a collection of curios, as he called them.
A giant piece of driftwood from the Arctic, the skin of a polar bear he'd shot himself, a cannon from his yacht.
And most bizarre of all, tusks from narwhals, that he displayed at the foot of his stairs.
Here were the beginnings of Clandeboye's transformation into a Boy's Own treasure chest.
The next part of the booty was to come from Egypt.
To get there, Dufferin traded in his yacht for a steam ship he called Amelia and set sail in his next adventure.
In 1859, Lord Dufferin started to finance the excavation of a 4000 year old mortuary temple and tomb of the pharaoh, Mentuhotep II at Deir el-Bahari, near Luxor in Egypt.
Wonderful things were found.
Some of those are still at Clandeboye, including this fragment of a column that would have been around the tomb of the pharaoh.
Down here, you see the pharaoh's name, Mentuhotep II.
This proclaims he would live forever.
The best thing and the biggest is over here.
Now, not the wonderful rhinoceros' head, that is tremendous, but what the head is sitting on.
This massive granite altar.
Again, 4000 years old, from Deir el-Bahari.
And on it, are 18 versions of the name of the pharaoh, Mentuhotep II.
It is absolutely tremendous.
Here, objects were offered to the gods, and also, to his spirit, to sustain him in the afterlife.
But it was Lord Dufferin's present life that really needed sustaining.
Particularly, his finances.
His saviour came in the shape of British Imperial power.
With over 50 colonies in six continents by the 1860s, the Empire was growing at an ever-increasing pace.
There were foreign postings aplenty now.
And Lord Duffern's trip to Egypt was opening up more opportunities than just the collection of curios.
Lord Dufferin returned from the Middle East, a man of the world, with direct experience of foreign travel and of Arab culture.
So, in 1860, he was a natural choice when the British government wanted to send a representative to Syria.
Syria was important to the Empire because of its trade routes.
Whilst there, Lord Dufferin proved himself to be a brilliant negotiator, managing to avert a civil war.
At last, he'd found his calling.
And, most importantly, a regular pay cheque.
In demand back home, he was offered plum jobs in the India Office, then the War Office.
Yet he was still in need of a fortune.
But he was soon to be in possession of a wife.
In 1862, Lord Dufferin, at age 36, married Hariot Rowan-Hamilton.
This wonderful water colour captures the moment.
They got married at a church nearby and after the marriage ceremony arrived at the Clandeboye House for a reception.
And here we see Lord Dufferin and Hariot, with a great veil over her, arriving through that door over there.
This is an amazing image one can exactly place the scene that took place then, in the gallery today.
A lot of the paintings and other objects shown in this watercolour are still in the house.
Not necessarily the same place except, here we see, these wonderful curving narwhal tusks.
There they are, still in place at the bottom of the staircase.
An incredible scene, and one can imagine the reception was a great success, very lavish.
Much enjoyed by all.
It wasn't just Lord Dufferin who was going up in the world, his debts were too.
In 1864, he had to take out a mortgage for £21,000 to keep himself afloat.
But his debt didn't stop him hiring yet another fashionable architect.
This time, the London-based, Benjamin Ferrey.
His brief, to design a gothic Clandeboye.
A gothic fantasy as it turned out because, of course, Lord Dufferin couldn't afford to build it.
So, what next? He dismissed Ferrey and hired another architect, one William Lynn.
This time, Clandeboye was to be recast in French château style.
Which also wasn't built.
But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Lord Dufferin decided to continue a less expensive scheme.
He started as long ago as 1869 when he turned the kitchens here at the back of the house, into a new entrance hall.
This was, of course, the cheap solution but as it happened, also, architecturally inspired.
Inspired, because it gave him a home for his curios.
But also, because it allowed him to display them in a very special way.
I believe Lord Dufferin was echoing a layout of the ancient tombs and temples he'd seen in Egypt.
Particularly, the one he'd excavated at Deir el-Bahari.
In those temples, the journey starts down there, the world of man and rises to the world of the Gods.
The visual termination of this route through the house, the focus of this almost spiritual journey, was the statue of the great Egyptian god, Amun.
He stood just up here.
Lord Dufferin had acquired the statue in Egypt and clearly it was an inspirational object.
Amun was here but has now been replaced by this old, wonderful image of the Buddha, who now presides over all who enter the house.
Alas, Amun was sold in 1937.
But given the state of Lord Dufferin's finances, it is lucky to have clung on for so long.
By 1872, Lord Dufferin owed £300,000.
That's around 20,000,000 in today's figures.
Of course, a colossal sum.
So what was to be done? Well, he decided that at that point he had to sell some land.
Must have been heart-breaking.
Sold land he had inherited, land he had hoped to pass on to his descendants.
But to sugar the pill, he decided to sell this land to other aristocratic landowners.
Looked around and found they were in the same position he was.
Not much money.
So then, he was forced to do something, I suppose, he found rather distasteful.
It was to turn to the nouveau riche for funds.
The only nouveaux riche in mid-Victorian Belfast, were industrialists.
They'd grown fat on the fruits of the Empire, manufacturing ships, linen and rope While most of the old landed families were now broke, crushed by agricultural decline.
Ballywalter Park is owned by Lord Dunleath.
His ancestor, Andrew Mulholland, was a linen merchant Lord Dufferin turned to in his financial hour of need.
The Mulhollands lent him so much money, almost £5,000,000 to us, that they became known as Clandeboye's bankers.
I'm sorry about the weather.
Couldn't do anything about it.
It's truly grim.
Let's go inside.
It might be a little warmer inside.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
I think we were, really, a fairly basic family living off the land and Andrew Mulholland's father, sort of started up in a small way as a businessman in Belfast.
And as we all know, in the early to mid 19th century, it was a time for entrepreneurs.
And if they found a niche somewhere, it was a means of getting very wealthy very quickly.
This is quite a key point, isn't it, the generalisation about Ireland at that period.
It's poor because of the agricultural depression and so on but Belfast is different, isn't it? It's more, I imagine at this point, an industrial centre.
Absolutely, it had the largest shipyards in the world, largest rope works in the world, the biggest tobacco factory in the world and this is where we come in, the largest, first of all, cotton mills which were then rebuilt as linen mills.
By tradition your family are said to be the bankers for Lord Dufferin.
He was strapped for cash and then what happened? He approached Yes, I think he certainly approached the family and negotiated a loan of money.
Land would have been pledged against the value of the loan.
And, I guess, when Lord Dufferin was unable to repay it, for whatever reason, some form of foreclosure took place.
By the end of the decade, Lord Dufferin had sold off 12,000 acres.
That's two-thirds of his estate.
All of it went to the new industrialists.
Soon he was facing the unthinkable.
Selling Clandeboye House itself.
Then in 1872, came salvation.
Despite having managed his own finances in such a bizarre way, Lord Dufferin was given management of Canada.
He became the third Governor-General.
This prestigious post, brought him in a handy £ 10,000 a year.
Plus expenses.
Money was for Lord Dufferin in Canada, a very big issue.
He believed that it was part of the Governor-General's job to entertain generously.
That's how one won friends.
And certainly the French-Canadians loved Lord Dufferin for his generosity, his style, his civilisation, his parties.
But, of course, this could be a very expensive business.
Here I have a little document which says, that in those years, 1873-1878, Lord Dufferin entertained through dinners, lunches, balls, theatricals, 35,838 people.
An incredible number! Given this astonishing largesse, it is not surprising to find out how Lord Dufferin was commemorated by the Canadians.
Lord Dufferin was so successful in Canada that he, in fact, look at this, he was commemorated.
On the money of Canada, not Queen Victoria, but there we see Lord Dufferin, Dominion of Canada.
He is on the $2 bill.
And his wife, Hariot, Lady Dufferin on the $1 bill.
There she is.
Absolutely sensational! Of course, Lord Dufferin won recognition for more than being a generous host.
He was also a highly effective negotiator.
Lord Dufferin inherited the aftermath of a rather serious rebellion.
Which was between mixed race people, mixed race French-Canadian and Native Americans, who really didn't want to be part of the British Empire.
And this is a fascinating thing, I discovered here.
These are cartoons relating to this very time.
What happened is that, Dufferin had to display tremendous diplomatic skills to smooth out the relationship between the French-Canadians and the English, Scottish and Irish conflict Catholics, Protestants, and so on.
Very difficult for him.
And in during this sort of, time of diplomacy, during the aftermaths of rebellion, he got a reputation of a man with the wisdom of Solomon.
That's what this cartoon shows him presiding over tricky judgements and getting it right, helping to unite the nations.
Lord Dufferin never stopped sending back treasures from far flung lands.
In 1879, he was made ambassador to Russia.
Then he moved on to Turkey.
He was hailed as one of the greatest diplomats of his generation.
And became an increasingly important figure in Queen Victoria's Empire.
And her affections.
We have here something utterly wonderful.
Letters from Queen Victoria to Lord Dufferin.
Here we see a volume of them.
From Balmoral Castle, 1884, from the Queen to Lord Dufferin.
Incredible.
1884, but still with this black mourning, remembering Sir Albert who'd been dead over 20 years.
Her writing is appalling.
Worse than mine.
They are transcripts I've got to my left here, to that letter.
(READING) "The Queen must now thank Lord Dufferin "for his extremely kind letters.
"It does her good when her lonely, saddened life, "deprived more and more of friends and helps, "and when she sees that people feel for her, and are sorry for her.
" So that's what the Queen says to Dufferin.
He's obviously very important in her life.
And she was important in his.
Lord Dufferin's closeness to the Queen was to help him climb to the very top.
Finally, in 1884, Lord Dufferin got the job he had long wanted.
At the age of 58, he was made Viceroy of India.
The Viceroy was the representative of the Queen Empress in what was Britain's most valuable Imperial possession.
India was Britain's biggest market for manufactured goods and the source of valuable raw materials, such as cotton.
By the end of the 19th century, Britain was economically dependent on the Raj, making Lord Dufferin's position there as Viceroy, crucial.
And with this huge responsibility, came lots of curios to ship back to Clandeboye.
Including a tiger's skin and possibly the blade that skinned it.
These Indian weapons Lord Dufferin collected, possess a sinister beauty.
Look at this sword with serrated edge like a saw.
Imagine the frightful wound that it would inflict.
Some of these are perfect killing machines, very skilful in the manufacture.
They use it as a war quoit, a chakram meaning "wheel.
" I believe used by Sikhs.
They would keep this thing in their turban.
The edge would be razor sharp.
And in battle, with great skill they would throw it, like a frisbee, through the air, cutting the enemy's throat.
(GASPS FEARFULLY) I'll put it over here on this rather welcoming Indian dragon.
Looks very good there.
Ah, this is famous.
Tiger claw.
Look at this thing, absolutely ghastly.
Goes over your fingers, like that.
And would inflict a wound like a tiger claw.
These would be very, very sharp.
Used to restrain greased robbers used by assassins, thuggees.
You'd come up behind your enemy, again, around the throat and just cut like that.
Quick and ghastly death.
This is a katara, a very famous Indian dagger.
One holds like that.
With one's tiger claws as reserve, I suppose.
Used it, of course, to kill an enemy, or indeed, sometimes, to defend oneself from a tiger if it attacked.
In combat with another man, I think you hold it in your left hand.
Sword up here and when your enemy is distracted by your swordplay, you come underneath and deliver the killing blow.
A very, very, I say, good way to dispatch an enemy.
But looking at it, as is typical of these weapons, a very efficient killing machine, yet possessing in its manufacture a poetic beauty.
Fortunately, Lord Dufferin brought back more than weapons of destruction.
He returned also with an unequalled and compelling snapshot of life in the heyday of the British Empire.
Clandeboye is home to an extraordinary collection of photographs.
Some of the best I have ever seen from this time.
Lord Dufferin's photographic albums are an amazing collection.
It offers a sensational insight into an empire.
These are These are all of India here in the 1880s.
I mean, they are little known, I think, wonderful.
In fact, it is one of the best collections of a private individual, photographs of the Empire.
This is just I mean, to me absolutely mind blowing.
- Look, Bombay.
Mumbai, look.
- Bombay.
CRUICKSHANK: I don't believe Oh, there it was in 1880s a wonderful little village on the edge of the sea.
Incredible.
This is an album dedicated entirely to the killing of tigers.
Here, you see Lord Dufferin sitting with his two tigers he's clearly shot with his rather large calibre rifle.
Yep.
I suppose it could be this very tiger that's out there in the hall.
I think you're absolutely right because trophies are normally carried by the people who have shot it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These photographs provide intimate insights into life in the Raj.
From grand parades to family gatherings.
Particularly fascinating are the photographs taken during the British annexation of Burma in 1885.
These offer vignettes of a truly forgotten world.
Our conflict with Burma and the British Raj dated back to the 1820s 1824-25 we had the first of the Anglo-Burmese wars.
And it was absolutely central because at that point of time - they were discovering tea.
- Yeah.
They were discovering the shortest route to China.
- So the British really wanted to get - Trade routes.
Yeah.
Trade routes into China without having to go around the Bay of Bengal.
Yes, this is These portraits are fascinating.
Burmese women are known for their Being extremely shrewd in terms of commerce.
CRUICKSHANK: Yes.
- And they control all business.
- Yes.
Besides that, you also that this woman This portrait she has a cheroot.
- Gigantic - A gigantic cigar.
- CRUICKSHANK: As big as her.
- Which was Yeah.
And which was basically a symbol of her power.
- Okay, status.
- Status and power.
So, indeed, being a Buddhist culture women have more respect.
They had Women Matriarchal societies, they had more control over resources.
- Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
- And family.
I think the most poignant photograph in this tremendous collection is this one.
It shows King Thibaw, the king of Burma and his wife just before their world ended.
Before their land was annexed by the British Indian Empire.
It's also wonderful that The setting, here.
Because it's It's a vignette but on their They're rather like the beds that are here.
I wonder if it could possibly be the bed outside.
And heartbreaking, many of those images.
Lost world.
Worlds that were vibrant and independent and, you know, less than 200 years ago.
World is gone, but as you say, preserved here in these incredible photographic albums.
For four years, Lord Dufferin was in charge of the most important possession of the British Empire.
But more than that, India was to deliver his life's ambition, a great house.
The house he dreamt of for 40 years.
It was built, not at Clandeboye but in the foothills of the Himalayas, at Shimla, which was the summer capital of Imperial India.
In 1886, under Lord Dufferin's supervision, a grand new building was started and here it is.
Planned and elevations.
Wonderful.
It was constructed high up in Shimla, or "Simla," as it was then called.
Golly, it's a wonderful thing.
It's a mix of Tudor-Jacobean architecture.
Very exotic touches of India.
Little pavilions and verandas.
Wonderful.
How satisfying it must have been for him at last.
A great building essentially designed by him was to become a reality.
The Viceregal Lodge was something of a Frankentein's monster.
All of Lord Dufferin's old schemes rolled into one.
Here was the tower he'd always hankered for.
With a nod to the Scottish castle.
Also, Jacobean style gables.
Inside was palatial and extravagantly finished in teak and walnut with a two tier gallery and a grand staircase.
The Viceroy loved it.
Less keen, however, was the British Secretary of State.
It cost a massive £8.
5 million to build in today's money.
And the Dufferins only enjoyed its splendour for four months before their post was up.
It must have been fun while it lasted.
But when the Dufferins returned to Clandeboye it was back to reality with a bump.
Lord Dufferin had commissioned yet more drawings.
This time, for a 130 foot long gallery in which he could display his new collection of curios.
But it was the same old story.
He couldn't afford it.
So had to settle for a couple of new windows instead.
Then, he made a last ditch attempt to build a fortune.
In 1897 he became chairman of the London & Globe Finance Corporation, in which he invested heavily.
Unfortunately, the company soon failed.
Lord Dufferin lost his money and as chairman, he felt obliged to use their own fund to compensate other investors.
He was, of course, left financially bruised and not a little humiliated.
But there was worse.
At about the same time, his eldest son was killed in the Boer War.
Lord Dufferin seemed to have lost the will to live.
He became ill and here, at Clandeboye, in 1902 he died.
Just before his death, Lord Dufferin revisited his plans for Clandeboye one last time but only to have them bound and placed in the library.
Along with them he wrote, "Unless some future owner of Clandeboye turns into a millionaire "I do not imagine it would be wise to change the site of the mansion.
" Today, Clandeboye is pretty much how Lord Dufferin left it and the Viceroy's spirit still lives on with Lady Dufferin.
I think it's an incredible privilege to live in this house.
Because, in a sense, because of the Viceroy and because of all that's actually remained of him here and the spirit of him, somehow or other, you are sort of a friend of his, in a funny way.
It's almost as though you're sort of part of it.
I mean, I feel you That's my responsibility.
To try and follow on, you know, this extraordinary thing he did, you know? CRUICKSHANK: Clandeboye is one of only a handful of privately run estates still surviving in Northern Ireland.
Lady Dufferin tries to strike a balance between the demands of the modern age and respect for the past while putting her own stamp on the house.
Now here we go, on the processional route, and here, this room, of course, used to be the museum painted by the Viceroy.
I'm a little bit ashamed about this room, Dan.
Shame? Shame? Well, the point was, it was this great museum - and now it's Cairo.
- Cairo.
- In we go.
- But that Ah.
Well (LAUGHING) Oh, I see.
Well, it's not shame It's incredibly surprising.
- But - Fantastic, isn't it? So, this is the But of course, the fantastic thing, really, you've been inspired by the Viceroy.
Because the processional route, I'm saying Oh, you're making me feel better.
Remember by Egyptian tombs with Amun at the top, you've You're making me feel much, much better.
CRUICKSHANK: And how do you use it? Robert John, my old butler, he dresses up in Arab clothes and then we have a hookah and then he comes out and we have We lay out coffee and we have a little smoke - and a little chat after dinner.
- Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
- But it is fantastic, isn't it? - I'm still trying to take it all in.
Oh, you make me feel so much better, Dan.
I don't feel I've done something awful now.
I think the Viceroy's entered your brain and inspired In a way, this is so much what he would have done but it's new, isn't it? This is of you, of this moment but continuing a life, the tradition of the house created by him.
Oh, Dan, one day I'm going to put a banquette all the way around like in a proper, you know, Egyptian room.
CRUICKSHANK: It's not the only change she's made since I was last here.
The point is, I think you remember it, you know I do.
Well, we used to have tea there in the big round window.
There used to be The chandelier was hanging here in your day.
And I've now moved it into the dining room.
There, and we're now in the back passages.
But, look, I noticed You remember it runs all the way around the bottom? - Come on, then.
- We're on our journey now.
Where does this one go to? You are not going to open that, are you? No? Okay, I won't.
It's so naughty, no.
Well, what could it be? If it's too shocking, we won't show anybody.
Good heavens.
Okay, I'm going to have to take it away, actually, because he's not grown up any longer.
Well, we could If he (STAMMERING) Well, go on.
It's It's a French model I had in London.
He is I suppose, it is a bit shocking.
- It's wonderful.
- Well, there you are.
That could be perhaps you many years ago.
Perhaps you were the model.
Were you the model, Dan? You were You were not meant to say that.
I wouldn't mind being that chap LINDY: I don't think so.
It was a French boy.
You're all right, you're safe.
It's not completely clear what will happen to Clandeboye in the future.
Lindy has no children to pass it to.
But she has plans to turn it into a centre of learning.
Offering insights into the British Imperial adventure.
This would be a fitting next chapter because Clandeboye offers such a spectacular window in the life of one extraordinary man and into an extraordinary moment in our national history.
The most familiar and yet intriguing sights Britain has to offer.
Standing like sentinels in the landscape.
Hundreds of thousands of us visit them every year, but not all are open to the public.
I've been granted the privileged opportunity to pass through the portals of six of our greatest country houses normally hidden from public view.
They've seen five centuries of British history up close and personal.
The families who built these houses played their part in great affairs of state.
Central to their dreams, the great house, the ultimate status symbol, but all too often also the ultimate money drainer.
Few of these families went the distance, but their houses did, with their secrets intact.
This is their story, but it's also our story, for these houses offer a guided tour of our nation's hidden history.
(TRAIN BRAKES SQUEALING) I'm on my way to explore one of the most fascinating country estates in Northern Ireland.
And I get there from here, from Belfast, by train.
The estate, secluded deep in the farmlands and woodlands of County Down, is called Clandeboye.
And rather conveniently, a railway station was constructed within its grounds.
Ah, here it is.
Helen's Bay.
Indeed, very convenient.
The station was built in 1863, by the family living at Clandeboye, the Dufferins.
Up there are the family initials, together with their coronet.
The station's a charming, ornamental gothic structure.
They contain not only the booking office, but also, a private waiting room for the Dufferins, with a staircase, leading down to a private avenue.
Waiting in the avenue, would be a horse-drawn carriage, ready to transport the family to Clandeboye House.
The carriage would pass below this wonderful bridge, a sensational thing, which to me, looks rather like a medieval city gate.
Fantastic portal to a hidden world.
This portal take me to the past, in more ways than one.
Ah! Here it is, Clandeboye.
Very handsome, late Georgian country house.
It's one I've known for well over 30 years.
I've spent some most astonishing times here.
Indeed, this walk for me is very much a journey back in time.
Clandeboye has belonged to the same family for 400 years.
Today, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava lives here.
Born into the Irish aristocratic family, the Guinesses, she moved here in 1964, when she married Sheridan, the fifth Marquess, who died over 20 years ago.
Lady Dufferin also happens to be a very old friend of mine.
(CHATTERING) Simply wonderful that you're back at Clandeboye.
Back here.
It's wonderful to be back.
Fantastic actually! Now, I'll tell you what, I don't think you can resist a sandwich.
No, I can't resist a sandwich - Very lovely.
Beautifully presented.
- It's a tradition.
- Yes.
I'll take that one.
- Actually, very often I make people CRUICKSHANK: I can't remember exactly when I first visited Clandeboye.
It was so long ago, but Lindy may have solved the mystery.
I got this treat because we can now find out when you first came here.
- Yes, all right.
This is the guest book.
- So here we go.
- Okay.
- Now we put our specs on.
- So, here we go.
- Clandeboye What's the first one? What's the first date here? Um, 1931! - Isn't that amazing? - Incredible! Ulster Races.
Who's here? - Evelyn Waugh.
Look that's interesting.
- Evelyn Waugh Actually, he was a great friend of the family's.
- I think he came here quite often.
- Yes.
Let's leap forward a bit, to, I suppose Let's find When did you first come to the house? - I can hardly remember.
We think, 1961.
- '61? Lindy Guinness.
You're here.
- Yes, I think I came - That's in '63.
for Sheridan and Lindy.
Look.
- Here we are again! - David Bailey and you.
- Oh, he was divine.
Now where do we go? I'm longing to find you? Dan Cruickshank! - But that - Gotcha! That's my name but that's not my signature.
I wasn't here.
- I bet it is.
You were drunk.
- I wasn't here.
This is - You were drunk when you wrote it.
- Well, I'm mostly drunk.
- Must be.
- Christmas 1975.
- Gotcha.
- That's it.
That's more like it.
That's how long it goes.
'75, '85, '95, 105 - Do you realise that's 35 years? - 35 years ago.
Okay, that's a sobering thought.
And I must say you look wonderful on it, if you don't mind me saying so.
It's the whisky.
And you are just as handsome or perhaps it's my eyes that are dulling.
- I see you through, sort of, a mist.
- Through rose-tinted Yes, a rosy mist.
CRUICKSHANK: Clandeboye, under Lindy and Sheridan, became a magnet for artists and writers.
It was a bohemian scene, that would surely have startled Sheridan's ancestors, the sober and very sensible Blackwoods.
They were Scots Protestants, who originally came to County Down in the early 17th century and rose to become minor gentry.
They marked this ascent with a massive expansion of their house in 1801 by little-known architect, Robert Woodgate.
I'm now in a part of the house built just after 1800.
Very elegant but somewhat conventional late Georgian architecture.
Ah! Here are the Blackwoods.
And I must say these are portraits of that view them to be a somewhat serious bunch.
Not, I should think, given to flights of fancy.
In fact, one of the Blackwoods admitted they had no interest in art and literature.
And even that they regarded imagination as a mental disease.
Given their lack of imagination, the Blackwoods would surely have been horrified by what was about to happen to their house.
They remain in a part of Clandeboye, that's largely untouched.
But elsewhere, that's very definitely not the case.
This house was radically transformed when the front door was moved to the rear.
And this is where the magic of Clandeboye begins.
I've explored many country houses over the years but I must say, the main entrance of Clandeboye is still the strangest I have ever seen.
It's so understated.
Just a low, long, blank wall and then, a very plain door.
But the moment you step inside, it all starts to make sense.
Open the doors, it's like breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb.
This is high architectural theatre.
Everywhere, wonderful and revealing objects.
Look at this pair of bears, baby bears.
Killed and stuffed.
In here, Indian weapons and armours, Burmese celestial figures.
All telling a tale, about the house, the man that made it.
Utterly incredible.
If a tropical bird flew past now, I wouldn't be surprised.
This is the world of Frederick, Lord Dufferin.
One of the greatest diplomats of his age, Viceroy of India and friend of Queen Victoria.
This house is an embodiment of his achievements.
But it is also a melancholic monument, to the declining fortunes of his class, the Victorian aristocracy.
Lord Dufferin transformed Clandeboye into a fairytale.
The house is a journey through his life, through his age, through the Imperial adventure.
There are wonderful objects everywhere which unite to tell the story of one exceptional man.
This exceptional man was always destined to be different from his staid ancestors.
In 1825, his father, Price, the fourth Lord Dufferin, shocked the rest of the Blackwoods by marrying the granddaughter of the celebrated Irish playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Helen Sheridan was artistic and an accomplished society beauty.
Her world was the fashionable London beau monde.
She was everything the Blackwoods were not.
Ah.
A year after her marriage to Price Blackwood, Helen gave birth to their only child.
A son, Frederick.
And here, is a lovely little portrait of the young chap, aged four or five, painted by Helen.
Very wonderfully done.
And behind it, is a lock of hair, Frederick's hair.
Blond.
When he was one year old.
This hair was cut by Helen and sent to Price Royal Navy, away from home a lot.
as a little reminder of his infant child.
And the hair and portrait were later united, to create this very intimate, very wonderful thing.
Helen's ambitions for her son were always high.
As was usual at that time, she looked across the Irish Sea to England for his future.
She wanted him to be groomed for high public office, to make the right contacts.
And there was nowhere better to do that than at Eton, the finishing school of choice for the aristocratic elite.
In 1839, when Frederick first arrived, Eton had already produced an astonishing 10 prime ministers, and had even won the Battle of Waterloo on its playing fields, according to old boy, the Duke of Wellington.
Here, at the heart of the British power network, Helen hoped that her son would achieve greatness himself.
Dr Andrew Gailey, the Vice-Provost of Eton, is writing a biography of Lord Dufferin.
Like his subject, Andrew comes from Ireland.
Eton, I suppose, was the obvious place to send Frederick.
Well, yes and no, I mean Yes, if you've got ambitions to make something great in England.
And not necessarily in Ireland, at that time.
In fact, most boys would just probably have gone locally.
But if you have ambitions for, to acquire, say, a bit of the polish And certainly provincial Blackwoods were quite interested in acquiring a bit of polish.
then, Eton was the place to go.
To make connections, of course, that's the thing, isn't it? To move into the big world.
To make the connections to To learn about a world that you're going to have to operate in.
And if you wanted to be up with that, in that social world, then you had to be Englishfied.
So his background, when he arrived at Eton, would he have had a very provincial atmosphere about him? His father describes him as being all hunched up in his early days at Eton.
And he was probably a bit bullied too.
And then it all comes good.
He's managed to use his Irishness to effect.
And he was good at speaking, you know, an orator, he had some distinction.
Very much, and he would be the one that, whenever the house was having a great feast or celebration, they would call on the "Little Orator" as they called him, to go and declaim.
And it became an art form for the rest of his life.
And indeed, probably one of his greatest strengths.
CRUICKSHANK: His mother's little orator, was now in the charmed inner circle of Eton life, forming close friendships with the men who'd run Britain and her Empire.
The British aristocracy was at the zenith of its power, owning over half the land in Britain.
And nothing symbolised their grip on the nation more than the great country house.
Places like Hatfield House, owned by the family of Frederick's Eton friend, Lord Robert Cecil.
And Kimberley Hall, the home of his classmate, John Wodehouse, the future Lord Kimberley.
At Eton, Frederick must have fully grasped the notion that behind every great man, lay a great estate.
And he was to have his own estate, sooner than anyone imagined.
One evening, at the end of term, Frederick was on the bridge that stood here, and suddenly turned to a friend that was with him and said, "It's odd.
I have every reason to be happy.
"Tomorrow, I return to Ireland.
And yet, I feel wretched.
" What Frederick did not know was that an hour earlier, his father had died on a ship crossing the Irish Sea.
The father died of an overdose of morphine.
Whether or not it was an accident was never determined.
Suddenly, Frederick, at a tender age of 15, was fatherless and also, had inherited the heavy responsibility of being a lord.
Frederick Temple-Blackwood, was now the fifth Baron Dufferin and Clandeboye.
On paper, he was a rich man.
He had inherited 18,000 acres of land with £ 18,000 a year in rent.
Well, that's the theory.
In reality, his tenants were in arrears to the tune of almost £30,000.
That's over £2,000,000 today.
And on top of that, he'd also inherited a financial obligation to pay another £30,000 in annuities to his family, the Blackwoods.
The young lord was forced to face the bitter truth.
Agriculture no longer paid.
Landlords in Ireland, such as Lord Dufferin, would have made much of their money through rents paid by peasant farmers who lived in cottages rather like this one.
In mid 19th century Ireland, such cottages were all over the landscape.
Huge numbers of them.
This one, actually is a rather large and grand example.
Many would be much smaller, more humble.
This one, well-built of stones from the fields, I suppose.
Inside, only one room, a floor of beaten earth.
Seventy five percent of Ireland's rural population lived in hovels like this.
With a patch of ground so small, there was only one crop they could grow to live on, the potato.
That was the staple diet for the rural poor, the potato.
Very nutritious food but very vulnerable to disease.
And that's what happened in 1845.
A fungus blighted the potatoes.
They blackened and died in the land.
And one blight followed by another, and another, so that the population of the land, was almost literally decimated and Ireland changed forever.
Lord Dufferin was studying at Oxford when reports started to trickle in.
The Irish peasantry was starving.
He was dismayed at the indifference of his English friends, who dismissed the stories as exaggerated.
So, to his mother's horror, Lord Dufferin and a fellow student, George Boyle, went to Ireland to seek the truth for themselves.
This is the road that 21 -year-old Lord Dufferin took, when he entered Skibbereen, in the southwest of Ireland.
He came here because he read this was one of the places hardest hit by the famine.
He wanted to see if the reports of the suffering of the people of Skibbereen were true.
Lord Dufferin soon discovered things were very bad.
In these streets, people were crawling.
They didn't have the energy to walk.
Or lying here by the roadside, quietly dying.
To try and prick the conscience of his well-fed friends back in England, Lord Dufferin wrote a graphic account of what was called "The Great Hunger.
" Today, he is still remembered for it in Skibbereen.
The thing about Dufferin's visit and the narrative was to alert people back in England.
Because in England, there was almost a disbelief, wasn't there, at the seriousness of the famine in Ireland.
GERALD O'BRIEN: There was perhaps a reluctance to believe it was so bad.
And the purpose of the narrative was to bring the truth before the British public, in which it admirably succeeded.
It did make a difference.
TERRI KEARNEY: It certainly made a difference, certainly.
The first three months of 1847, saw the huge majority of charitable contributions from all over the world came in, from Ceylon, from everywhere.
And it was in great part, due to the writings of people who came here and saw things and witnessed themselves, and then wrote about them in the world media and had them reported.
And Dufferin and Boyle would be definitely included in that.
And of course, it shouldn't be forgotten that Lord Dufferin himself, from his personal fortune, gave £1000 to famine relief, an enormous sum.
CRUICKSHANK: This was typical Dufferin, spending money he simply didn't have.
His bank account took another knock with an act of charity closer to home.
The famine also struck his own tenants.
So, he reduced their rents and gave them wages, through a massive programme of works.
What he wanted to do was start a famine relief.
Projects, or several projects on the estate.
And we're standing in front of the lake, which was one of those projects, creating the lake.
And also, looking towards the house, you can see the vista that's opened up.
So, that created employment and also created a beautiful landscape for him.
Very, very brilliant.
That's right, yes, 'cause he was a little worried about the fact that he was living in a higher society than he had an estate to match, as it were.
But Lord Dufferin's desire to keep up appearances and help his tenants came at too high a price.
Every pound he was spending, put him deeper in debt.
He desperately needed a larger income.
And he knew where to find it.
Through connections.
Or, more precisely, his mother's connection to Prime Minister, Lord John Russell.
Thanks to this very important family friend, Lord Dufferin landed his first proper job.
In 1849, at the age of 23, Lord Dufferin was appointed a lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.
This was a very important job that took him to the heart of royal court, which, at that time, was a very happy place.
Queen Victoria was only seven years older than the Lord Dufferin and happily married.
She would have been delightful company.
And Dufferin, as was his habit through life, kept a journal of his time at court.
Now, here are his journals.
And here is the one, let's see, for the right period of time, 1849-50.
Ah! Well, it's a first one here.
Very good.
First one.
Um, interestingly, Lord Dufferin had his journals typed out and bound.
It's not his handwriting.
Now let's have a look.
What's this page say? "November 23rd, left Windsor.
" This is obviously the very beginning of his stint as lord-in-waiting.
Because it says here, "Pleased with my first waiting.
"Liked the people.
" (CHUCKLING) He was a very young man.
And, let's try another one.
Oh, Lord, here.
"1850, London.
March the 15th.
"Played tennis.
"Offered £1000 to be repaid at 5% "by £100 a year instalments.
" We know he had money problems.
So even while at court, he's trying to work out ways of borrowing money.
This is amazing! Goes on to say, "When sitting around the Queen's table, "they all burst out laughing at my melancholic face.
" Poor chap! He's worried about his money, even in the company of the Queen.
When Lord Dufferin was first suggested as a courtier, Queen Victoria is meant to have declared, "Good heavens! He's much too good-looking and captivating.
" And when he was at court, she would giggle and tease him about his poetically long hair.
He was obviously a very charming fellow.
Very determined to amuse and determined to be popular.
I suppose he, um The grandeur of the life at the royal court Indeed, the grandeur of the country houses visited with the Queen, reinforced Dufferin in his determination to create the high life for himself at home, at Clandeboye.
The high life for Lord Dufferin meant only one thing.
A bigger, better Clandeboye.
Ignoring the potential impact on his decimated bank account, he became desperate to emulate his friends at court and build.
In other words, to keep up with the Joneses.
So in 1849, he hired one of Britain's most fashionable architects, William Burn.
He set to work on lavish plans to remodel Clandeboye in a style that was then all the rage, Jacobethan.
Now, at last, Dufferin could fulfil his Eton dreams and vie with the houses of his contemporaries.
Men like the Duke of Sutherland with his Dunrobin Castle.
And the Duke or Argyll, with Inveraray Castle.
The eventual result of Lord Dufferin's bold scheme.
One small tower, dedicated to his mother, Helen.
It wasn't uncommon in a sentimental Victorian age to build monuments to loved ones.
But the sheer scale and architectural ambition of Helen's Tower, is unusual.
It reveals the intensity of the love between Lord Dufferin and his mother, Helen.
And this room is really the epicentre, wonderful, gothic, panelled room.
Lovely vaulted ceiling.
And over here, two brass panels proclaiming the love between the mother and her son.
Here we see a poem written in June, 1847, by Helen.
It says (READING) "With a silver lamp.
Fiat Lux.
" "Let there be light.
" The poem starts (READING) And then she goes on to venerate her son.
Up here, is a poem commissioned by Lord Dufferin, from the great poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Tennyson expresses Lord Dufferin's love for Helen.
"Helen's Tower, here I stand.
"Dominant over sea and land.
"Son's love built me, and I hold, "Mother's love in lettered gold.
" Referring to this proclamation of love here.
Could there be anything more moving? This is the monument to love between mother and son.
It's incredible! If Lord Dufferin couldn't yet afford to build a new house, at least he now had all the fashionable trimmings.
His own folly, his own lake, plus an ornamental park with a railway station pencilled in for good measure.
But none of this came cheap.
By the time, all the grounds were finished, it would cost him £70,000.
That's £5,000,000 today.
And that's not all he splashed out on.
Lord Dufferin had another expensive hobby.
One that only the more adventures young Victorians were indulging in.
Exploring.
In 1854, he borrowed nearly £3,000 to buy an ocean-going yacht.
This model seems somewhat overwhelmed in the setting of the hall but it shows the ship that was to transform Lord Dufferin's life and indeed, life of Clandeboye.
It's a model of a schooner called the Foam.
And in 1856, Lord Dufferin, age 30, and his crew, went on an epic four-month journey into the North Atlantic and the Arctic.
Lord Dufferin's sailing trip was expensive.
But it brought him fame as an intrepid traveller.
He also returned with a collection of curios, as he called them.
A giant piece of driftwood from the Arctic, the skin of a polar bear he'd shot himself, a cannon from his yacht.
And most bizarre of all, tusks from narwhals, that he displayed at the foot of his stairs.
Here were the beginnings of Clandeboye's transformation into a Boy's Own treasure chest.
The next part of the booty was to come from Egypt.
To get there, Dufferin traded in his yacht for a steam ship he called Amelia and set sail in his next adventure.
In 1859, Lord Dufferin started to finance the excavation of a 4000 year old mortuary temple and tomb of the pharaoh, Mentuhotep II at Deir el-Bahari, near Luxor in Egypt.
Wonderful things were found.
Some of those are still at Clandeboye, including this fragment of a column that would have been around the tomb of the pharaoh.
Down here, you see the pharaoh's name, Mentuhotep II.
This proclaims he would live forever.
The best thing and the biggest is over here.
Now, not the wonderful rhinoceros' head, that is tremendous, but what the head is sitting on.
This massive granite altar.
Again, 4000 years old, from Deir el-Bahari.
And on it, are 18 versions of the name of the pharaoh, Mentuhotep II.
It is absolutely tremendous.
Here, objects were offered to the gods, and also, to his spirit, to sustain him in the afterlife.
But it was Lord Dufferin's present life that really needed sustaining.
Particularly, his finances.
His saviour came in the shape of British Imperial power.
With over 50 colonies in six continents by the 1860s, the Empire was growing at an ever-increasing pace.
There were foreign postings aplenty now.
And Lord Duffern's trip to Egypt was opening up more opportunities than just the collection of curios.
Lord Dufferin returned from the Middle East, a man of the world, with direct experience of foreign travel and of Arab culture.
So, in 1860, he was a natural choice when the British government wanted to send a representative to Syria.
Syria was important to the Empire because of its trade routes.
Whilst there, Lord Dufferin proved himself to be a brilliant negotiator, managing to avert a civil war.
At last, he'd found his calling.
And, most importantly, a regular pay cheque.
In demand back home, he was offered plum jobs in the India Office, then the War Office.
Yet he was still in need of a fortune.
But he was soon to be in possession of a wife.
In 1862, Lord Dufferin, at age 36, married Hariot Rowan-Hamilton.
This wonderful water colour captures the moment.
They got married at a church nearby and after the marriage ceremony arrived at the Clandeboye House for a reception.
And here we see Lord Dufferin and Hariot, with a great veil over her, arriving through that door over there.
This is an amazing image one can exactly place the scene that took place then, in the gallery today.
A lot of the paintings and other objects shown in this watercolour are still in the house.
Not necessarily the same place except, here we see, these wonderful curving narwhal tusks.
There they are, still in place at the bottom of the staircase.
An incredible scene, and one can imagine the reception was a great success, very lavish.
Much enjoyed by all.
It wasn't just Lord Dufferin who was going up in the world, his debts were too.
In 1864, he had to take out a mortgage for £21,000 to keep himself afloat.
But his debt didn't stop him hiring yet another fashionable architect.
This time, the London-based, Benjamin Ferrey.
His brief, to design a gothic Clandeboye.
A gothic fantasy as it turned out because, of course, Lord Dufferin couldn't afford to build it.
So, what next? He dismissed Ferrey and hired another architect, one William Lynn.
This time, Clandeboye was to be recast in French château style.
Which also wasn't built.
But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Lord Dufferin decided to continue a less expensive scheme.
He started as long ago as 1869 when he turned the kitchens here at the back of the house, into a new entrance hall.
This was, of course, the cheap solution but as it happened, also, architecturally inspired.
Inspired, because it gave him a home for his curios.
But also, because it allowed him to display them in a very special way.
I believe Lord Dufferin was echoing a layout of the ancient tombs and temples he'd seen in Egypt.
Particularly, the one he'd excavated at Deir el-Bahari.
In those temples, the journey starts down there, the world of man and rises to the world of the Gods.
The visual termination of this route through the house, the focus of this almost spiritual journey, was the statue of the great Egyptian god, Amun.
He stood just up here.
Lord Dufferin had acquired the statue in Egypt and clearly it was an inspirational object.
Amun was here but has now been replaced by this old, wonderful image of the Buddha, who now presides over all who enter the house.
Alas, Amun was sold in 1937.
But given the state of Lord Dufferin's finances, it is lucky to have clung on for so long.
By 1872, Lord Dufferin owed £300,000.
That's around 20,000,000 in today's figures.
Of course, a colossal sum.
So what was to be done? Well, he decided that at that point he had to sell some land.
Must have been heart-breaking.
Sold land he had inherited, land he had hoped to pass on to his descendants.
But to sugar the pill, he decided to sell this land to other aristocratic landowners.
Looked around and found they were in the same position he was.
Not much money.
So then, he was forced to do something, I suppose, he found rather distasteful.
It was to turn to the nouveau riche for funds.
The only nouveaux riche in mid-Victorian Belfast, were industrialists.
They'd grown fat on the fruits of the Empire, manufacturing ships, linen and rope While most of the old landed families were now broke, crushed by agricultural decline.
Ballywalter Park is owned by Lord Dunleath.
His ancestor, Andrew Mulholland, was a linen merchant Lord Dufferin turned to in his financial hour of need.
The Mulhollands lent him so much money, almost £5,000,000 to us, that they became known as Clandeboye's bankers.
I'm sorry about the weather.
Couldn't do anything about it.
It's truly grim.
Let's go inside.
It might be a little warmer inside.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
I think we were, really, a fairly basic family living off the land and Andrew Mulholland's father, sort of started up in a small way as a businessman in Belfast.
And as we all know, in the early to mid 19th century, it was a time for entrepreneurs.
And if they found a niche somewhere, it was a means of getting very wealthy very quickly.
This is quite a key point, isn't it, the generalisation about Ireland at that period.
It's poor because of the agricultural depression and so on but Belfast is different, isn't it? It's more, I imagine at this point, an industrial centre.
Absolutely, it had the largest shipyards in the world, largest rope works in the world, the biggest tobacco factory in the world and this is where we come in, the largest, first of all, cotton mills which were then rebuilt as linen mills.
By tradition your family are said to be the bankers for Lord Dufferin.
He was strapped for cash and then what happened? He approached Yes, I think he certainly approached the family and negotiated a loan of money.
Land would have been pledged against the value of the loan.
And, I guess, when Lord Dufferin was unable to repay it, for whatever reason, some form of foreclosure took place.
By the end of the decade, Lord Dufferin had sold off 12,000 acres.
That's two-thirds of his estate.
All of it went to the new industrialists.
Soon he was facing the unthinkable.
Selling Clandeboye House itself.
Then in 1872, came salvation.
Despite having managed his own finances in such a bizarre way, Lord Dufferin was given management of Canada.
He became the third Governor-General.
This prestigious post, brought him in a handy £ 10,000 a year.
Plus expenses.
Money was for Lord Dufferin in Canada, a very big issue.
He believed that it was part of the Governor-General's job to entertain generously.
That's how one won friends.
And certainly the French-Canadians loved Lord Dufferin for his generosity, his style, his civilisation, his parties.
But, of course, this could be a very expensive business.
Here I have a little document which says, that in those years, 1873-1878, Lord Dufferin entertained through dinners, lunches, balls, theatricals, 35,838 people.
An incredible number! Given this astonishing largesse, it is not surprising to find out how Lord Dufferin was commemorated by the Canadians.
Lord Dufferin was so successful in Canada that he, in fact, look at this, he was commemorated.
On the money of Canada, not Queen Victoria, but there we see Lord Dufferin, Dominion of Canada.
He is on the $2 bill.
And his wife, Hariot, Lady Dufferin on the $1 bill.
There she is.
Absolutely sensational! Of course, Lord Dufferin won recognition for more than being a generous host.
He was also a highly effective negotiator.
Lord Dufferin inherited the aftermath of a rather serious rebellion.
Which was between mixed race people, mixed race French-Canadian and Native Americans, who really didn't want to be part of the British Empire.
And this is a fascinating thing, I discovered here.
These are cartoons relating to this very time.
What happened is that, Dufferin had to display tremendous diplomatic skills to smooth out the relationship between the French-Canadians and the English, Scottish and Irish conflict Catholics, Protestants, and so on.
Very difficult for him.
And in during this sort of, time of diplomacy, during the aftermaths of rebellion, he got a reputation of a man with the wisdom of Solomon.
That's what this cartoon shows him presiding over tricky judgements and getting it right, helping to unite the nations.
Lord Dufferin never stopped sending back treasures from far flung lands.
In 1879, he was made ambassador to Russia.
Then he moved on to Turkey.
He was hailed as one of the greatest diplomats of his generation.
And became an increasingly important figure in Queen Victoria's Empire.
And her affections.
We have here something utterly wonderful.
Letters from Queen Victoria to Lord Dufferin.
Here we see a volume of them.
From Balmoral Castle, 1884, from the Queen to Lord Dufferin.
Incredible.
1884, but still with this black mourning, remembering Sir Albert who'd been dead over 20 years.
Her writing is appalling.
Worse than mine.
They are transcripts I've got to my left here, to that letter.
(READING) "The Queen must now thank Lord Dufferin "for his extremely kind letters.
"It does her good when her lonely, saddened life, "deprived more and more of friends and helps, "and when she sees that people feel for her, and are sorry for her.
" So that's what the Queen says to Dufferin.
He's obviously very important in her life.
And she was important in his.
Lord Dufferin's closeness to the Queen was to help him climb to the very top.
Finally, in 1884, Lord Dufferin got the job he had long wanted.
At the age of 58, he was made Viceroy of India.
The Viceroy was the representative of the Queen Empress in what was Britain's most valuable Imperial possession.
India was Britain's biggest market for manufactured goods and the source of valuable raw materials, such as cotton.
By the end of the 19th century, Britain was economically dependent on the Raj, making Lord Dufferin's position there as Viceroy, crucial.
And with this huge responsibility, came lots of curios to ship back to Clandeboye.
Including a tiger's skin and possibly the blade that skinned it.
These Indian weapons Lord Dufferin collected, possess a sinister beauty.
Look at this sword with serrated edge like a saw.
Imagine the frightful wound that it would inflict.
Some of these are perfect killing machines, very skilful in the manufacture.
They use it as a war quoit, a chakram meaning "wheel.
" I believe used by Sikhs.
They would keep this thing in their turban.
The edge would be razor sharp.
And in battle, with great skill they would throw it, like a frisbee, through the air, cutting the enemy's throat.
(GASPS FEARFULLY) I'll put it over here on this rather welcoming Indian dragon.
Looks very good there.
Ah, this is famous.
Tiger claw.
Look at this thing, absolutely ghastly.
Goes over your fingers, like that.
And would inflict a wound like a tiger claw.
These would be very, very sharp.
Used to restrain greased robbers used by assassins, thuggees.
You'd come up behind your enemy, again, around the throat and just cut like that.
Quick and ghastly death.
This is a katara, a very famous Indian dagger.
One holds like that.
With one's tiger claws as reserve, I suppose.
Used it, of course, to kill an enemy, or indeed, sometimes, to defend oneself from a tiger if it attacked.
In combat with another man, I think you hold it in your left hand.
Sword up here and when your enemy is distracted by your swordplay, you come underneath and deliver the killing blow.
A very, very, I say, good way to dispatch an enemy.
But looking at it, as is typical of these weapons, a very efficient killing machine, yet possessing in its manufacture a poetic beauty.
Fortunately, Lord Dufferin brought back more than weapons of destruction.
He returned also with an unequalled and compelling snapshot of life in the heyday of the British Empire.
Clandeboye is home to an extraordinary collection of photographs.
Some of the best I have ever seen from this time.
Lord Dufferin's photographic albums are an amazing collection.
It offers a sensational insight into an empire.
These are These are all of India here in the 1880s.
I mean, they are little known, I think, wonderful.
In fact, it is one of the best collections of a private individual, photographs of the Empire.
This is just I mean, to me absolutely mind blowing.
- Look, Bombay.
Mumbai, look.
- Bombay.
CRUICKSHANK: I don't believe Oh, there it was in 1880s a wonderful little village on the edge of the sea.
Incredible.
This is an album dedicated entirely to the killing of tigers.
Here, you see Lord Dufferin sitting with his two tigers he's clearly shot with his rather large calibre rifle.
Yep.
I suppose it could be this very tiger that's out there in the hall.
I think you're absolutely right because trophies are normally carried by the people who have shot it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These photographs provide intimate insights into life in the Raj.
From grand parades to family gatherings.
Particularly fascinating are the photographs taken during the British annexation of Burma in 1885.
These offer vignettes of a truly forgotten world.
Our conflict with Burma and the British Raj dated back to the 1820s 1824-25 we had the first of the Anglo-Burmese wars.
And it was absolutely central because at that point of time - they were discovering tea.
- Yeah.
They were discovering the shortest route to China.
- So the British really wanted to get - Trade routes.
Yeah.
Trade routes into China without having to go around the Bay of Bengal.
Yes, this is These portraits are fascinating.
Burmese women are known for their Being extremely shrewd in terms of commerce.
CRUICKSHANK: Yes.
- And they control all business.
- Yes.
Besides that, you also that this woman This portrait she has a cheroot.
- Gigantic - A gigantic cigar.
- CRUICKSHANK: As big as her.
- Which was Yeah.
And which was basically a symbol of her power.
- Okay, status.
- Status and power.
So, indeed, being a Buddhist culture women have more respect.
They had Women Matriarchal societies, they had more control over resources.
- Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
- And family.
I think the most poignant photograph in this tremendous collection is this one.
It shows King Thibaw, the king of Burma and his wife just before their world ended.
Before their land was annexed by the British Indian Empire.
It's also wonderful that The setting, here.
Because it's It's a vignette but on their They're rather like the beds that are here.
I wonder if it could possibly be the bed outside.
And heartbreaking, many of those images.
Lost world.
Worlds that were vibrant and independent and, you know, less than 200 years ago.
World is gone, but as you say, preserved here in these incredible photographic albums.
For four years, Lord Dufferin was in charge of the most important possession of the British Empire.
But more than that, India was to deliver his life's ambition, a great house.
The house he dreamt of for 40 years.
It was built, not at Clandeboye but in the foothills of the Himalayas, at Shimla, which was the summer capital of Imperial India.
In 1886, under Lord Dufferin's supervision, a grand new building was started and here it is.
Planned and elevations.
Wonderful.
It was constructed high up in Shimla, or "Simla," as it was then called.
Golly, it's a wonderful thing.
It's a mix of Tudor-Jacobean architecture.
Very exotic touches of India.
Little pavilions and verandas.
Wonderful.
How satisfying it must have been for him at last.
A great building essentially designed by him was to become a reality.
The Viceregal Lodge was something of a Frankentein's monster.
All of Lord Dufferin's old schemes rolled into one.
Here was the tower he'd always hankered for.
With a nod to the Scottish castle.
Also, Jacobean style gables.
Inside was palatial and extravagantly finished in teak and walnut with a two tier gallery and a grand staircase.
The Viceroy loved it.
Less keen, however, was the British Secretary of State.
It cost a massive £8.
5 million to build in today's money.
And the Dufferins only enjoyed its splendour for four months before their post was up.
It must have been fun while it lasted.
But when the Dufferins returned to Clandeboye it was back to reality with a bump.
Lord Dufferin had commissioned yet more drawings.
This time, for a 130 foot long gallery in which he could display his new collection of curios.
But it was the same old story.
He couldn't afford it.
So had to settle for a couple of new windows instead.
Then, he made a last ditch attempt to build a fortune.
In 1897 he became chairman of the London & Globe Finance Corporation, in which he invested heavily.
Unfortunately, the company soon failed.
Lord Dufferin lost his money and as chairman, he felt obliged to use their own fund to compensate other investors.
He was, of course, left financially bruised and not a little humiliated.
But there was worse.
At about the same time, his eldest son was killed in the Boer War.
Lord Dufferin seemed to have lost the will to live.
He became ill and here, at Clandeboye, in 1902 he died.
Just before his death, Lord Dufferin revisited his plans for Clandeboye one last time but only to have them bound and placed in the library.
Along with them he wrote, "Unless some future owner of Clandeboye turns into a millionaire "I do not imagine it would be wise to change the site of the mansion.
" Today, Clandeboye is pretty much how Lord Dufferin left it and the Viceroy's spirit still lives on with Lady Dufferin.
I think it's an incredible privilege to live in this house.
Because, in a sense, because of the Viceroy and because of all that's actually remained of him here and the spirit of him, somehow or other, you are sort of a friend of his, in a funny way.
It's almost as though you're sort of part of it.
I mean, I feel you That's my responsibility.
To try and follow on, you know, this extraordinary thing he did, you know? CRUICKSHANK: Clandeboye is one of only a handful of privately run estates still surviving in Northern Ireland.
Lady Dufferin tries to strike a balance between the demands of the modern age and respect for the past while putting her own stamp on the house.
Now here we go, on the processional route, and here, this room, of course, used to be the museum painted by the Viceroy.
I'm a little bit ashamed about this room, Dan.
Shame? Shame? Well, the point was, it was this great museum - and now it's Cairo.
- Cairo.
- In we go.
- But that Ah.
Well (LAUGHING) Oh, I see.
Well, it's not shame It's incredibly surprising.
- But - Fantastic, isn't it? So, this is the But of course, the fantastic thing, really, you've been inspired by the Viceroy.
Because the processional route, I'm saying Oh, you're making me feel better.
Remember by Egyptian tombs with Amun at the top, you've You're making me feel much, much better.
CRUICKSHANK: And how do you use it? Robert John, my old butler, he dresses up in Arab clothes and then we have a hookah and then he comes out and we have We lay out coffee and we have a little smoke - and a little chat after dinner.
- Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
- But it is fantastic, isn't it? - I'm still trying to take it all in.
Oh, you make me feel so much better, Dan.
I don't feel I've done something awful now.
I think the Viceroy's entered your brain and inspired In a way, this is so much what he would have done but it's new, isn't it? This is of you, of this moment but continuing a life, the tradition of the house created by him.
Oh, Dan, one day I'm going to put a banquette all the way around like in a proper, you know, Egyptian room.
CRUICKSHANK: It's not the only change she's made since I was last here.
The point is, I think you remember it, you know I do.
Well, we used to have tea there in the big round window.
There used to be The chandelier was hanging here in your day.
And I've now moved it into the dining room.
There, and we're now in the back passages.
But, look, I noticed You remember it runs all the way around the bottom? - Come on, then.
- We're on our journey now.
Where does this one go to? You are not going to open that, are you? No? Okay, I won't.
It's so naughty, no.
Well, what could it be? If it's too shocking, we won't show anybody.
Good heavens.
Okay, I'm going to have to take it away, actually, because he's not grown up any longer.
Well, we could If he (STAMMERING) Well, go on.
It's It's a French model I had in London.
He is I suppose, it is a bit shocking.
- It's wonderful.
- Well, there you are.
That could be perhaps you many years ago.
Perhaps you were the model.
Were you the model, Dan? You were You were not meant to say that.
I wouldn't mind being that chap LINDY: I don't think so.
It was a French boy.
You're all right, you're safe.
It's not completely clear what will happen to Clandeboye in the future.
Lindy has no children to pass it to.
But she has plans to turn it into a centre of learning.
Offering insights into the British Imperial adventure.
This would be a fitting next chapter because Clandeboye offers such a spectacular window in the life of one extraordinary man and into an extraordinary moment in our national history.