Telegraph Magazine, 28 October 2000
Reconstructing Nancy
By Selina Hastings

(Alan Bates and Celia Imrie as Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie
Photo for the Telegraph Magazine by Joss Barratt)

REARED ON the novels of Nancy Mitford, I know exactly where I am one sunny morning in July, driving up to a large, golden-stone manor house in the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds are Mitford country. It is here that the family of seven grew up, their childhood indelibly described by Nancy in her two great bestsellers, "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate." Although wildly funny and eccentric in the extreme, there is surprisingly little exaggeration in her account: the children, uncompromising individualists, leading a renegade existence with their beloved dogs, rats, snakes, chickens and horses, under the fierce blue eye of their terrifying father, Lord Alconleigh ('Uncle Matthew').
Uncle Matthew's original, Nancy's father, Lord Redesdale, was a restless man, and after leaving London for the country moved his family three times, ending up in a house largely designed by himself at Swinbrook ('too hideous for words,' in Nancy's opinion). But the first family house in the Cotswolds was Batsford Park, near Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire.

It is here at Batsford that an extraordinary reconstruction is taking place, during the filming by the BBC of "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate." As one comes up the drive, all looks much as it ever did, a park and arboretum leading to lawns, a terrace, a gazebo, then the house itself. But now on one side is a huge campsite of trucks and trailers, and a bustling army of actors, technicians, production team, make-up artists in overalls, animal trainers and chaperons; in front of one trailer an immense table is being loaded with lunch; the ring of mobile telephones is everywhere. Round by the front door, the scene changes again: an angry-looking man in tweed coat and leather gaiters cracks a stock-whip while herding indoors a gaggle of dogs and little girls. This is Alan Bates in costume as Uncle Matthew. He looks frighteningly convincing, but also strangely familiar; for a moment it is difficult to take in that we are not in fact back in time and in the bosom of Miss Mitford's fictional family, so firmly are they established in our national consciousness, with the Radletts, Linda, Fanny and the rest as real as our own relations.
...The character who dominates all else, just as he dominates his own large family is Uncle Matthew, the very image of Nancy Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale ('Farve'), drawn with that devastating combination of caricature and unerring psychological accuracy which is one of Mitford's greatest gifts as a novelist. Irascible, unreasonable and tender-hearted, Farve is vividly recreated, cracking his stock-whips on the lawn, his eyes flashing a furious blue as he roars out his favourite term of abuse, 'Sewer!' (derived from 'sua', the Tamil word for 'pig', picked up by Farve during a stint as a tea-planter in Ceylon), and repeats his unshakeable conviction that 'abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends!' According to Fanny, narrator of the story and cousin to the Radletts, Uncle Matthew either loved or he hated, 'and mostly, it has to be said, he hated'.

However, although in adulthood Nancy used to claim she had never been fond of her father, her depiction of him is both affectionate and admiring, and there is no question but that she was speaking her own mind in these words of Fanny's: 'Much as we feared, much as we disapproved of, passionately as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew, he still remained for us a sort of criterion of English manhood.'
...So immaculate is the re-creation that disbelief is only temporarily suspended when coming downstairs I find Uncle Matthew (Alan Bates) standing patiently in the hall having his forehead powdered, while one little Radlett girl, pet rat on her shoulder, smokes a quick cigarette, another fiddles with her GameBoy, and Aunt Sadie (Celia Imrie), serenely dowdy in coolie coat and tweed skirt, talks quietly into her mobile. Outside the ravishing Elizabeth Dermot Walsh, playing Linda, lies stretched on the grass, her face half hidden by enormous sunglasses, while Lady Montdore (Sheila Gish) in a pink hairnet leans amiably out of the door of her trailer.

The director, Tom Hooper, who has worked his way up in television through "Byker Grove" and "EastEnders," is determined to stay true both to the period and to the novels' social code. When he first approached the project, he assumed he would have to undertake a considerable amount of research, but was pleased to discover that Nancy Mitford herself was the most reliable guide. 'It's all there in the novels, how people spoke, how they sat, what they wore, how they were announced when they came into a room at a party.'
Indeed, this is part of Nancy's extraordinary gift as a novelist, the brilliant sleight of hand with which she creates her world and the immediacy with which she establishes a rapport with her reader. Within the first few sentences of "The Pursuit of Love," she effortlessly takes possession: 'There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching-tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out.'

Sunday Telegraph, 23 July 2000
Mitfords' home restored for BBC drama
By Oliver Poole

THE home of Nancy Mitford is to be returned to its former glory for a BBC dramatisation of two of her novels.
Batsford Park, the 250-year-old Cotswolds estate, which is now owned by a trust, is being transformed for the adaptation of "Love in a Cold Climate" and "The Pursuit of Love," a semi-autobiographical study of the English upper class. The house will play the part of Alconleigh, the rambling home of the fictional Radlett family and the centre of glamour and gossip. [Ed.'s note: I have not found a photo of the house, no doubt because it is privately owned and not shown The links here will give an idea of the location, and the Batsford Arboretum, which is open for tours.]
Set in four acres of grounds, the 100-room mansion was owned by Mitford's father, the second Baron Redesdale, who was the inspiration for the character Uncle Matthew, a tyrannical aristocrat whose pet hates were foreigners, well-dressed women and socialists.
Programme makers will make the house look as it did when Nancy Mitford lived there between the ages of 11 and 13. Furniture imitating the original pieces has been built and the bedrooms and ballroom restored to their Edwardian appearance.
Deborah Moggach, who adapted the novels, said: "There are people still alive who knew her. We did not want to be copying other television dramas but wanted to find out what it was really like. The Duchess of Devonshire, her sister, Deborah, told us that at parties they smoked cigarettes all the time except in the ballroom and servants were always on the move and never stood around as they do in television dramas. She said for goodness sake don't let them bob up and down and say ma'am as they didn't behave like that."
The adaptation will condense the two novels, both of which were written in the Forties, and feature many of the same characters. The drama is scheduled for November with two 75-minute episodes on successive nights. Uncle Matthew will be played by the actor Alan Bates, and Boy, the dandy ostracised for marrying an aristocrat half his age, by Anthony Andrews.
Three newcomers - Rosamund Pike, Elizabeth Dermot-Walsh and Megan Dodds - will play Fanny, the narrator; Linda, the rebellious Radlett daughter and Polly, the beautiful but unemotional debutante who falls for the lecherous Boy.
Syon House in London [right, the red drawing room], owned by the Duke of Northumberland, is being used as the setting for Hampton, the home of the imperious Lord Montdore, Polly's father.
The decision to dramatise the novels - previously adapted by Thames Television for a series in 1980 - is expected to generate fresh interest in the Mitfords. The family became notorious after two of the sisters, Unity and Diana, flirted with fascism and befriended Adolph Hitler.
Diana deserted her husband, the wealthy Bryan Guiness, to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Unity became so enamoured with the Third Reich that she committed suicide after Britain declared war on Germany. Another sister, Jessica, turned to Left-wing politics and emigrated to the United States where she became involved in the trades union movement.
Nancy also lived abroad for much of her life, moving to Paris, where she died of cancer in 1973, aged 69. |||