Blood, Sweat and Scones
Copyright © 2017 Keith James Bell
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN: 978 1788030 229
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
This book is dedicated to my family for all their support, especially my mum and dad for their enormous help and, of course, to Maggie without whom none of it would have been possible. Maggie also spent many an hour proof reading my writing and reshaping my ramblings. Although, now I come to think of it, she has spent the whole of her married life doing the latter. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all those people – employees, suppliers and visitors who have made our dream a reality. Thank you.
List of Photographs
1.Crook Hall from the South
2.Aerial view of Crook Hall - permission of Philip Fearnley photography
3.Crook Hall from the North - permission of Peter Robinson
4.Aerial View of the Maze - permission of Visit County Durham
5.Aerial View of the Maze - permission of Visit County Durham
6.The View of Durham City from Crook Hall
7.Maggie and Keith in the Medieval Hall
8.Our son, Ian and his wife Rebecca, at their wedding
9.Our daughter, Amanda and her husband Mehdi, at their wedding - permission of Sean Elliot photography
10.Keith’s parents, May and Harold, in the Walled Garden
11.The Entrance to the Orchard
12.Reroofing the Hall in 2009
13.Plan of the Hall
14.Plan of the Gardens
15.The Garden Gate Café and Apartment
16.The Sleeping Giant
Contents
Preface
1.Our Links With The North East
2.Making Crook Hall Our Home
3.From Family Home To Open House
4.PROMOTING THE BUSINESS
5.Developing The Gardens
6.Good Times And Bad Times
7.Our Ghosts – The Uninvited Guests
8.Tying The Knot
9.Events And Visits
10.Building For The Future
11.Our Team
Afterthoughts
Owners of Crook Hall and Key Events at that Time
Crook Hall’s Secret Scone Recipe
Preface
When your family home is a house that has stood for over 800 years, on a site which has been inhabited for a considerably greater length of time, your own mortality often enters your thoughts. When we moved to Crook Hall, a local historian Margot Johnson, mentioned that she was undertaking research in order to write a book on the history of Crook Hall. Our former neighbour, Pauline Smith, told me she too was considering writing a history of the Hall. I have the greatest respect for these people, and as I grow older I feel that I am not academic enough to write such a history. Maybe I am also too emotionally involved with the fabric of the building and its surrounds to do justice to such a work.
However, many people have suggested that Maggie and I have a tale to tell. We certainly have. It is a tale of our part in the history of the Hall and Gardens. It’s not a history of Crook Hall and it’s certainly not my or Maggie’s biography. It is an account of our part, albeit a very small part, in the history of the site. A few grains of sand in a fairly full hourglass. This book is an insight into our psyche, motivations and the pain and pleasure of looking after a part of our country’s heritage. There have been many challenges along the way, and no doubt there will be challenges to come but our time at Crook Hall has been, and continues to be, full of joy and laughter despite the blood, sweat and tears.
The chronological order may be confusing as those twenty-one years have gone in a flash. With so many other things to juggle, keeping a daily diary of events was never seen as a priority. Consequently some things may have happened longer ago than I recall. I may have forgotten other events altogether, sometimes a day washing dishes, followed by a day weeding, two days decorating and then three days greeting and taking entrance charges at the gate meant that weeks can hurtle past in a blur.
I hope you enjoy reading this account and appreciate the help I have had from Maggie, our family, friends and all the team members both past and present who have contributed to this work both intentionally and unintentionally. I would also like to thank all those people who have helped in making our vision for Crook Hall a reality. We could not have done it on our own.
1
Our Links With
The North East
1973. I wake up to the sun shining through the crack between my curtains. My first morning at university. Here I am at Bede College studying for my degree. I part the curtains and there below my window lies the City of Durham, overlooked by the majestic Cathedral. In turn the buildings at its feet are looking up at it as if in adulation. The size of the Cathedral is only checked by the river which snakes around its base keeping it contained within the peninsula. Alongside it is the castle occupied by students, the previous castle occupants having long since left. I hear the Cathedral clock strike once, quarter past the hour.
Time I made a move, I think.
* * *
2017. I open the Georgian shutters of Crook Hall to see the same ageless Norman building lording it over an ever changing townscape. In that moment I think of the first time I saw Durham Cathedral and all that has happened to me in those intervening years. I look down at the walled gardens which lie below the drawing room windows, I see the first drivers parking their cars in the car park before heading off to work in the city. Work. Yes that’s all waiting for me downstairs. I make myself a coffee and sit in the window seat as a south-westerly gust brings the first spots of rain rattling against the window panes. The dark clouds begin to roll across the landscape veiling the tower of the Cathedral. I take a few sips of coffee, it tastes good. My mind wanders back to my childhood and my memories of my first visit to County Durham.
* * *
At that time I lived in a small village near Hereford, in the West Country. I was five and it was the school holidays. My parents had just bought a new Ford Prefect, registration PMG 178. It was super. One of the few motor cars in the street. That summer we were going up north to see our relatives. The destination was 5 Thames Street, Chopwell, County Durham. I had seen it so many times on the envelopes I had helped my mum post.
Durham seemed a long way away so our visits were always quite an adventure. When the day came I could guess what was happening and where we were going long before I was told: Dad was already in a panic, stressed by his attempts to pack, repack and pack yet again the endless luggage into what seemed the ever diminishing size of the boot. I
was warned by Mum not to ask if he needed any help.
“It will be all unpacked and repacked at least twice if not three times before we set off,” she sighed.
She was right. I watched my older brother as he ignored Mum’s advice and offered to help Dad, only to be met with his holiday snarl. Dad fought with bags and suitcases which seemed to have minds of their own and going into a boot of a car was not part of their mind set. How he wrestled. The more he grimaced and grappled the less likely it was that the brown holdall would sit still in its assigned position. It appeared to have an innate attachment to a square metre of tarmac on the road and continually sought sanctuary back there. My dad was very determined. He finally pushed the boot closed on top of the brown holdall and its friends. I kept my fingers crossed that none of us would need that boot open until we arrived at our destination. There was pride in my dad’s eyes as he marched back to the house to announce the car was packed and it was time to go.
His face changed as I told him I needed to go to the toilet, my brother added that he was now hungry and Mum said she had another bag to put in the boot. I hoped she was joking but she was not. Dad fumed. Our three pairs of eyes had been focused on Dad’s antics with such concentration that we boys had failed to recognise our bodily needs whilst Mum had forgotten her extra bag. Dad did not look happy. Once I had gone to the toilet, my brother had some bread and Mum was sitting in the front with a bag on her knees the engine burst into life. We were off. I now realise why Dad would have been stressed; taking two young children on a journey of over ten hours in a car without a heater or radio, on pre-motorway roads, would not have been fun.
There was no sat nav. My mum was the map reader. Dad would have failed her had she sat a navigation exam. The verbal fireworks continued as we traversed the many towns which lay between us and the North East. There were occasional stops to allow my parents to exchange words and give my dad the opportunity to grab the map and explain cartographical nuances to mum, such as which way was north. Verbal commentary from the driver continued throughout. Dad insisted he knew the way without the help of a map. He usually did. Why on earth they had the map at all was beyond me. However, we two boys in the back were amused by our parents’ antics which helped to keep us entertained throughout the trip.
After a gruelling journey with endless games of ‘I Spy’ and family map reading lessons, we arrived in the North East. We could always tell when we had arrived in Durham. Our nostrils filled with the smell of coal. Out of the window the view started to take on a grey hue as the smoke extracted the colour from everything it touched. Alongside the roads were large coal and spoil heaps and huge diggers acting as spoons stirring the coal and slag. The coal dust was hanging in the air, darkening everything it touched. The doors and windows of the houses had blackened edges. You even noticed the older men whose wrinkles seemed to stand out as if edged by coal dust. On many of our visits to the north we stayed with my wonderful Uncle Fred and Auntie Betty in Ashington. This was known as the biggest village in the country where everyone was dependent on the financial benefits of coal mining. All seemed to be happy to live with the environmental fallout from the pits. Every weekday morning you would hear the heavy boots of the men as they clomped off to work. The women left at home would often be hanging out washing that seemed to blacken in the breeze. Everyone appeared to keep themselves very busy.
What I really enjoyed in those visits to the North East were the warm friendly people we met whether it was in Chopwell or Ashington, this sense of belonging to a wider family. Everyone wanted to know your business and your business was of interest to everyone. There seemed to be no hierarchy. Everyone worked together and everyone was accepted as an equal. There seemed to be a genuine respect for each individual. A really strong sense of community which I have rarely experienced elsewhere.
* * *
My father had been born in Chopwell and joined the Royal Air Force in the 1940s. Whilst stationed in Egypt he met my mother. She was in the Women’s Royal Air Force. They had a quiet military wedding and a year later my brother was born. They returned to England and, although it was a number of years after the war, there was still a housing shortage so the three of them lived in a caravan in Lincolnshire until I came along. Soon afterwards our family were on the move again, this time to the Midlands, then to Hereford and finally, when I was ten, to West Wales. Despite our itinerant existence we always retained links with my father’s roots in North East England. I was eleven when my brother and I went to boarding school in Blackpool. The following year my father accepted a posting to Hong Kong. My brother and I grabbed the atlas to see where on earth it was. A long way away. We had been told we could go out twice a year to visit them. In effect I would visit my parents six times between the ages of twelve and fifteen. One of the benefits of this was that I was to spend my other four holidays each year with my Auntie Betty and Uncle Fred in Ashington.
* * *
By the age of eighteen I had lived in ten houses which had been spread around the country but I knew my home was in the North East. That’s where my heart was. On my brother’s twenty-first birthday, I visited him at Bede College in Durham where he was training to be a PE teacher. This was my first visit to Durham City. As with many first time visitors before and since I found the view of the Cathedral totally breath-taking. At that time, struggling along the crowded pavements from the railway station to the college through the narrow streets filled with cars and buses, the whole town seemed so welcoming. I decided then and there that I too would be coming to university in Durham. I just needed those elusive A levels.
By the time I returned to Durham to ‘study’, my future wife Maggie was studying for her A levels in Cumbria. I had come to the city and found it very small after living in London and Hong Kong. Maggie arrived at Neville’s Cross College to study English a year later and saw Durham as rather large compared to her home in the small rural village of Sedbergh.
Maggie had been born in Darlington. Her early schooling had been in West Auckland. Maggie’s maternal grandfather worked in a Darlington Chemical Factory while her other grandfather was a coal mine manager. Her father was a farmer. All her extended family lived in the North East.
We met in my last year at university. Within a year we were married and had moved to a house in Carrville, just outside Durham City. Maggie secured a teaching position and I joined an engineering company in Sunderland as a personnel officer. These were to be our chosen careers for the early years of married life. We moved to the nearby town of Washington for a few years but missed Durham and shortly afterwards moved back to life in the centre of the city.
2
Making Crook Hall
Our Home
After a career in personnel management I set up a management consultancy business and Maggie was a teacher working in the Child Psychiatry department of Sunderland General Hospital. We lived in Western Hill in a lovely Victorian terraced house in the middle of Durham City with our two children who attended local schools. Initially, I was able to operate the business from home but, as the business expanded, we began looking for larger premises and fortunately Crook Hall came on to the market.
We had first seen the Hall some years earlier. I had been looking at an old ordnance survey map of the city and spotted ‘Croke’ Hall. This was strange because I had lived in the city for at least fifteen years and felt I knew Durham really well. Now, looking at the map, here was a place which I had not known existed. The Hall was just around the corner, about a mile and half away from where we were living. My curiosity was aroused. We thought we would pay a visit. The Hall was not open to the public and we cheekily drove up the private road (something we hate people doing now that we own the place). I peeked over the stone wall and before me was a timeless picture that blew me away. Someone was working in a beautiful walled garden in front of a building which I guessed was early Georgian. The perennial borders were in full colour. Flowers were jo
stling with each other to catch the rays of the afternoon sun. There were many different types of roses and some of the climbers were spilling over the garden wall. It was a quintessential English country garden. I already had walled garden envy and now, seeing Crook Hall, this emotion was in overdrive. I was captivated. It was unlike anywhere else in the city. I was drawn towards the whole scene that lay before me. A masterpiece, a mixture of a Millais and a Monet and, like a well-executed landscape canvas, it just dragged me willingly into the painting. I felt at peace.
* * *
Ten years later, in 1995, we bought it.
* * *
When we came back to the house as prospective purchasers we received specific instructions as to where to park. We had to use the parking spot which was at the bottom of the Georgian walled garden. The first thing I noticed was the fancy name plate on the left-hand brick pillar. I pushed the black wrought iron gate open and there in front of me lay a straight stone path leading up to a traditional Georgian front door. On the left of this white door the nine windows of the Georgian house stared down at me through the leaves of the pear trees. Above the main door was a rather plain casement window and to the right were smaller mullioned windows peeking out through the rambling vegetation. What struck me was that the garden ran into the house and the house in turn seemed to grow out of the garden. They were just made for each other. This was the scene I had viewed so many years ago and now that I was actually in it, it did not disappoint. The perennial borders dwarfed us as we walked up the path, the fragrances were almost overpowering.
A knock at the door brought Mary Hawgood, the owner, to the door. A severe looking women with a school-mistress look about her. However, once she smiled and greeted us, that all changed and she was totally charming. We were invited in and shown to the first-floor drawing room where we were offered tea. At that time I did not realise how many famous people had made a similar journey. Wordsworth, Ruskin and Oscar Wilde to name but a few.