Innehållsförteckning för November 26, 2025 från Country Life

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk AN advertisement for the first ever Christmas card, in 1843, ran: ‘Just published. A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends.’ The image, commissioned by the civil servant and innovator Sir Henry Cole, was a perhaps slightly insensitive juxtaposition of charitable acts—‘feeding the hungry’ and ‘clothing the naked’—alongside a cosy family heartlessly imbibing (the images of children drinking wine did not please those in the temperance movement, but didn’t affect sales). It was designed by John Callcott Horsley, who sold the cards for a shilling each (about £1.60 in today’s money). In 1884, The Illustrated London News published a cartoon depicting the chaotic, frenzied buying of…

The happiness conundrum MY flatmate has started taking online French lessons. It’s a lot harder than when we took the subject at GCSE, she says, because her current teacher insists on over-philosophising everything. Truthfully, I once overheard him lecture the class on how happiness has become a pipe dream due to technology and that people were far happier in the days when Nero was setting Rome ablaze, amid a lesson purportedly about the past participle. She may have had a point. When pressed for actual evidence of the ancient world’s superior happiness, the teacher cited its ‘superior production of art’. I have since had countless conversations about the incident with people and, although we all agree that production of art is no metric by which to measure happiness, we also…

A string to the bow LORD EDWARD MANNERS stands in the 14th-century Eagle Tower at Haddon Hall with one hand resting on a curious timber frame fixed into the fabric. Nothing quite like it is known to exist elsewhere and, to add to the mystery, the frame is evidently missing several attachments. In the late 19th century, when the earliest notices of this object were published, it was described as a stringing rack for longbows. That is to say, a frame that would hold the bow as it was bent and strung. This operation, however, is perfectly straightforward to do by hand. One alternative possibility is that it was used for stringing crossbows, yet operating such a machine at an angle and in this constrained setting would have been almost…

IN 1822, Charles Lillie published The British Perfumer, a 400-page book he hoped would save the country’s fragrance industry ‘from total annihilation’. He claimed those who ‘style themselves Perfumers, as well as most buyers, are entirely ignorant, the former of what they sell, and the latter of what they purchase’. Chapters were categorised by scent family, sectioned to address each ingredient—from ambergris, found in the digestive system of whales, to aromatic seeds. He explained preparation, advising that most should be found in Britain and where to source them if not (orris, for instance, ‘comes in the greatest perfection from Florence’). Two centuries later, Lillie would be pleased to find British perfumery is thriving and Nature is a driving force. ‘Our starting point was unique,’ explains Emily Cameron, who co-founded Somerset…

IN the Financial Times last month, Charles Spencer described how a new generation of historic homeowners is refusing to be enslaved to tradition and is, in many cases, incorporating both contemporary art and bold colour. He could also have mentioned that their guest bedrooms have been dragged into the 21st century, with more creature comforts, fewer cupboards stuffed with mothballed clothes and bathrooms no longer distant. In his book The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family, photographer and writer Christopher Simon Sykes recalls staying in a house in Ireland where a trip to the bathroom required a circuitous route that took him through the billiard room. ‘The greatest compliment a guest can inadvertently pay me is having a lie in’ The best guest accommodation comprises…

MY father and my mother belonged by birth to the old English world of country-house gentlefolk,’ wrote biographer and belle-lettrist Lytton Strachey in 1922. It was a world, he suggested, ‘in which such things as footmen, silver, and wine were the necessary appurtenances of civilised life’. Not so for Strachey and his unconventional Bloomsbury friends in the 1920s. Virginia Woolf may have stated that ‘one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well’, but Blooms-bury’s rebellion against Victorianisms saw them dispense with butlers, foot-men and ladies’ maids, dressing for dinner and even napkins; in place of silver, they more often used pottery made by their friends. ‘Set a table so that you feel as if you’re dining, not merely sitting and eating’ In houses up…

Mentioned in dispatches I WAS pleased to see the inclusion of The Defence of Rorke’s Drift (right) by Elizabeth Butler in your feature on depictions of combat (‘The art of war’, November 5), but was disappointed that you stated the battle was fought by the ‘Royal Engineers’: although it was commanded by Lt John Chard of the 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers, he was the only Royal Engineer present. The majority of British soldiers present were members of the 24th Regiment of Foot, seven of whom were awarded the Victoria Cross. Col (Rtd) Simon Kitching, by email Best guess COUNTRY LIFE gives us plenty with which to test our brains: the secret ladybird on the cover, the quiz and riddle on Town & Country Notebook. However, not happy enough with…

Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth by J. M. W. Turner ‘My parents had a print of this painting framed in their room when I was very young. The motion–and emotion–captivated me. My first artistic love, before dance, was drawing. This scene surges with movement and the technique in evoking that power overwhelmed me and continues to awe. Turner captures when sky and sea seem to create one vortex: there is no discernible division between the two–and that is the terror we feel, that those on the boat feel. Present tense seems the only way to describe this painting, because it is alive to me. It pulls me in, every time I see it. I don’t think any other artist has captured this ineffable moment in Nature the way…

FEW writers have captured the atmosphere of the English country house as acutely as Daphne du Maurier. The celebrated opening line of Rebecca (1938)—‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’—is followed by a description that is both particular and could also be anywhere in the British Isles. Evoking a route through trees that hints at a great house in the near—but not too near—vicinity, the narrator finds that ‘the drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning’. We never learn the young heroine’s name. She is simply the second Mrs de Winter, the Rebecca of the title being the first. But on her first arrival at this country house with its poetic name (Fig 4), she is an ingénue, quite unprepared for its underlying structures, hierarchies…

THE cream cracker is a bona fide foodie icon. Superficially dull, these burnished squares—dry and gently undulating, with a geometric design of ‘dock and prick’ patterned holes to release hot air during baking—are, in fact, quietly suffused with intrigue, both historical and cultural. The definitive cream crackers are, of course, those made by Jacob’s. The brand was founded in Waterford, Ireland, in 1851, by brothers Robert and William Beale Jacob—scions to a lineage of local bakers—who uprooted operations to Dublin a year later. Savoury biscuits, as a convenience foodstuff, were wildly popular at the time. Piqued by the boom, William Beale zipped over to the US on a cracker research trip, returning with the recipe for what he’d first sell as Wave Crest Crackers. They bombed, but a local baker…

IN this festive season, he personifies kindness; the very essence of Christian magnanimity whereby those possessing wealth or rank who bless the poor shall themselves be blessed. For all his goodness, however, Wenceslas, Duke of Bohemia, was a victim of the shifting allegiances and treacherous alliances of 10th-century eastern Europe. In AD935, invited to share a saints-day feast in Stará Boleslav, a township near Prague, he was set upon and stabbed by three conspiring nobles before being speared to death by his younger brother, Boleslaus, who then purloined the duke-dom. No blessing for Wenceslas, then. Yet his reputation blossomed. Within decades of his assassination, he had kingly status conferred upon him by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I. His story was widely circulated; cults concerning him were established locally and particularly…

AND now the leaves suddenly lose strength… New strong/Rain-bearing night-winds come,’ wrote Philip Larkin in a poem about autumn. ‘Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air,/Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men/Through mists at morning.’ Larkin alone might have managed to make the appearance of a council worker—recently viral on video because he continued his leaf blowing in a gale—sound elegiac. We ‘vague broomed’ gardeners prefer to watch another year going quietly, holding a rake and pushing a wheelbarrow. This way we smell the earth at its warmest, wet and fertile. In this household, there are arguments about the extent of the mowing, but no question over the non-necessity of a leaf blower. Common sense suggests that when authorities began to speak of leaves as ‘litter’ something went…

THE season of peace on earth and goodwill to men is upon us and with it a certain amount of pressure to buy or (if you are a child/into macramé) make suitable gifts for your nearest and dearest. One wants, after all, to get it right. Present-givers fall into various categories. At one extreme are the smug, long-term planners, many of whom completed their Christmas shopping at knockdown prices during the summer sales. At the other extreme are the desperate last-minuters, who leave everything until 6pm on Christmas Eve, when they are to be found fighting in pharmacies with others of their kind over shop-soiled gift sets. I fall into a completely different group. I am so relieved (and pleased with myself) whenever I come across a present that I…

Quiz of the week 1) In which country were tea bags invented? 2) Name the sport that featured on the cover of Blur’s 1994 album Parklife 3) What is the collective noun for a group of moles? 4) Which British cattle breed was introduced to the US by politician Henry Clay in 1817? 5) A 14th-century Brian Boru harp appears on the logo of which brand? 1) US 2) Greyhound racing 3) Labour 4) Hereford 5) Guinness. Riddle me this Throw away my outside and cook the inside, then eat the outside and throw away the inside. What am I? Riddle me this: Corn on the cob Time to buy On this day… November 26, 1983 More than £26 million worth (equivalent to £290 million today) of gold bullion bound…

IT is 200 years since the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway signal-led the end of the Canal Age. Yet those very canals that serviced Britain’s Industrial Revolution still play a vital part in modern Britain. The Llangollen canal is not only one of the most beautiful and remarkable waterways in the world, it enables United Utilities to provide water to 330,000 people in Cheshire. The Grand Union is used by thousands for boating and recreation, but is also a crucial link carrying water from the Midlands to the increasingly water-stressed South-East. The Gloucester and Sharpness canal takes water from the River Severn to provide for 600,000 people in Bristol. Canals help to reduce flooding when there is too much rain and they deliver water when drought threatens farmers’…

THE Giles family, whose daily doings kept Daily Express readers amused for 48 years, were born out of their creator Carl Giles’s job as the paper’s official Second World War cartoonist: he coped with it by depicting Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Mussolini as a dysfunctional family. On August 5, 1945, he launched a new, multi-generation household, from twin babies to drippy, hypochondriac Aunt Vera. Cultural analysts tried in vain to pigeonhole them socially, as George (Dad)—adapted from a wartime soldier character—did not appear to have a job and wore both string vests and golfing trousers. The family, one day crammed into a squalid kitchen, would next enjoy a yachting holiday. Giles’s own politics were left of centre; he joined the right-wing Express reluctantly, lured by the then circulation of 3.9…

OF all Britain’s Christmas traditions, special stamps are perhaps the most surprisingly modern—only 59 years old, to be exact. Before 1966, if you were from the UK and wanted to pay for your postage at this time of year with something seasonally suitable, you had to be serving with the Armed Forces abroad: during the 1930s, British troops in Egypt sent Christmas post home bearing an ‘Xmas Seal’ decorated with a camel. Commemorative stamps were already in circulation: following the launch of the prepaid, adhesive Penny Black in 1840, the first special-edition stamps celebrated the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, featuring a lion and George V (himself a keen philatelist). By the mid 1960s, sets were being printed every year, marking milestones ranging from the 25th anniversary of the Battle…

WITHIN cork-popping distance of St James’s Palace, Berry Bros & Rudd has been in business since 1698, which makes it Britain’s oldest wine and spirit merchant. The 327-year-old establishment has supplied the Royal Household since 1760 and has held a Royal Warrant since 1903. It also hosts events, the majority of which, as you would expect, celebrate world-class wines. Tonight, however, the focus is on something rather more readily available—crisps. It’s fair to call them a national obsession: one recent survey had us buying an average of two packets of them each week. Some crisps and a pint is Britain’s down-to-earth answer to Italy’s aperitivo or Spanish tapas: no office leaving do or pub get-together would be complete without a couple of bags torn open for communal consumption. As a…

WITH his Gaelic name and love of board games, 6ft 3in, russet-bearded furniture-maker Eion Gibbs bears more than a passing resemblance to his medieval predecessors, those Norse-Gaels who whiled away the dark northern evenings playing chess and backgammon in their chilly longhouses and castle halls. Based in the Highlands, where he was brought up and now works in a converted cow byre, Mr Gibbs makes furniture and fittings for private houses, whisky companies, pubs and clubs, but his speciality is beautifully crafted board games. His trademark pieces are of Scottish elm inlaid with dark and pale walnut and sycamore, backgammon points recessed into the slab, chequerboards laid flush within a border of oak from the surrounding woodlands. Contrasting with these geometrical veneers, the gnarled cracks and swirling grains of the…

From the ground up SAM STIRRAT, founder of fine jewellers Blackacre, is fascinated by journeys. More specifically, the journey from raw gemstone to refined masterpiece, encapsulated in his latest collection, Origins. It is anchored by three flagship designs: the Chivor ring, Muzo ring and Muzo earrings (below right), made with striking Colombian emeralds and rare gems such as Paraiba tourmaline and unheated pink sapphires. Although the B-Corp jeweller always champions the traceability of materials, Mr Stirrat invites us deeper into this journey with a documentary film of the entire process, tracking his expeditions into the Colombian mines (right) to handcrafting the pieces in the London atelier. The arresting collection is Blackacre’s first limited-edition ready-to-wear selection, but every design can be adapted, honouring its made-to-order custom. ‘It is the journey that…

The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind Simon Winchester (Harper Collins, £25) IT’S tricky stuff, wind. We can’t live without it—the wind dispersal of crop pollen being an obvious instance—but sometimes we rather feel we might like to. The frequency of wrecking hurricanes across the planet per annum would be monotonous if it were not tragic. It is tricky to grasp, too, wind. Quite a portion of this book by veteran journalist Simon Winchester is given over to human attempts to classify it. To the prehistorics, wind, being invisible, was largely inexplicable, but Aristotle, in his Meteorologica, ‘finally got a handle on the scientific method’, the why and how winds arise due to climate and temperature. Being an Ancient Greek, he left a place for…

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