Chequers: The Prime Minister's Country House and Its History

by Norma Major, Mark Fiennes (Photographer)

Dating from the 16th century, Chequers is one of Britain's most familiar yet least known country houses. As the country residence of the Prime Minister, it is not open to the public, and until now few photographs of it have been published. In this enlightening, well-researched history of the estate, Norma Major, wife of the current Prime Minister, opens the door to Chequers and takes us on a guided tour of one of Britain's most interesting national treasures.Thanks to her unprecedented access to photographs and documents that have not been available to the public, Mrs. Major not only shows us the house and its spectacular collection of paintings and furnishings but also introduces us to many of its colorful former inhabitants, including Lady Mary Grey, who was imprisoned there, and Sir Winston Churchill, who made many of his stirring wartime speeches from Chequers. The author has also had the opportunity to talk to past prime ministers and their families about how they used the house and the changes they made during their occupancy.Mark Fiennes's specially commissioned photographs reveal the interiors as they now look and provide intriguing comparisons with early photographs from the Chequers archives. With its combination of historical anecdotes and architectural research, this book is the perfect gift for Anglophiles, history buffs, and those interested in architecture and the decorative arts.

Genres: History

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 29, 1996

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

In October 1917, the First World War had been dragging on for three years, the stagnation epitomised by the ongoing inability to dislodge German forces at Passchendaele. In response, Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited a party that included France's new premier Paul Painlevé and the South African general Jan Smuts for unofficial talks on how unity of command might transform the Allies' prospects. The venue for the meeting was Chequers, the Buckinghamshire country home of Arthur Lee MP, although Lee yielded the role of host – and his bedroom – to Lloyd George.

This was the first time that the sixteenth-century house had been put at the disposal of a prime minister, two months before the Chequers Estate Act designated it as the future official country residence of the serving prime minister from the time that Arthur Lee and his wife Ruth relinquished their interest. The Lees moved out in 1921, and since then it has been used by all Prime Ministers aside from Bonar Law, whose premiership was cut short by mortal illness after 209 days (even Liz Truss used the property for "farewell parties" towards the end of her 45-day reign in 2022). The author of this book, of course, is the wife of John Major, and it was written and published while he was in office. Many of the historical details have been culled from previously published works and memoirs, but her choice of material is judicious and shaped into a pleasing narrative overview. The book is heavily illustrated both with newly commissioned photographs by Mark Fiennes and older black-and-white images for comparison.

Lee, the son of a clergyman, was a former military man and diplomat, and while serving as military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington he had married Ruth Moore, the wealthy daughter of the New York banker John Godfrey Moore. The Lees took a lifetime tenancy of Chequers in 1909, and contracted Reginald Blomfield to undertake numerous restoration works, including the removal of Victorian pseudo-gothic accretions. The owner at this time was an aristocrat named Henry Astley, and after his death in an aviation accident in 1912 Ruth and her sister Faith took the opportunity to make an outright purchase from his widow May Kinder (a former comedy actress), which they then gifted to Arthur. However, being childless, Arthur and Ruth saw donation to the nation as the best way to preserve the legacy of their domestic vision. The 1917 Act covers all bases politically:

It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power in this country will be drawn. Some may be as in the past men of wealth and famous descent; some may belong to the world of trade and business; others may spring from the ranks of the manual toilers. To none of these in the midst of their strenuous and responsible labours could the spirit and anodyne of Chequers do anything but good. In the city-bred man especially, the periodic contact with the most typical rural life would create and preserve a just sense of proportion between the claims of town and country. To the revolutionary statesman the antiquity and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history and exercise a check upon too hasty upheavals, whilst even the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden, Burke and Milton.

The last part of the book is on "political life at Chequers", treating each prime minister in turn and ending with personal anecdotes of how she and John received at different times various foreign leaders, such as the Clintons and Boris Yeltsin – famously, John Major took Yeltsin to the local pub, the Bernard Arms (now gone), which opened up especially for them after Yeltsin knocked on the door. Prime ministers resident at Chequers also sometimes patronised that other village establishment, the local church: a service attended by Harold Macmillan and Dwight Eisenhower saw "the largest congregation since Janet Attlee's wedding"; the vicar, the Rev. Cyril White, "had preached to every Prime Minister since Baldwin".

This account of Chequers in the twentieth century is preceded by a more general history and guided tour. The estate's distinctive name refers to the chequer-board (or, more precisely, a chequered tablecloth) on which the monarch's finances were tallied in the medieval period; in the twelfth century, the land on which the house would be built was transferred from the Knights Hospitallers to Elias Ostiarius, an official of the Court of the Exchequer who took the name "De Scaccario" or "de Chekers" to reflect his responsibility for setting up the table. The estate may simply reflect his name, although antiquarians theorised that it may have been the place where payments were made.
De Scaccario's great-daughter married a landowner named William de Alta Ripa, whose name in Norman French, "Haut Rive", evolved into Dawtrey and then Hawtrey – a surname that is commemorated at Chequers with the Hawtrey Room. The last male Hawtrey in residence was William Hawtrey, a founder of the Muscovy Company of London in the sixteenth century, and it was he who rebuilt the house as the Tudor residence it is today. This Hawtrey was also for a time the reluctant custodian of Lady Mary Grey, a granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary and the younger sister of the ill-fated Lady Janes Grey. Mary had been packed off to Chequers following an "indiscreet" marriage, and her attic room remains known as the "Prison Room".

The house then passed down through various families through intermarriage – William Hawtrey's granddaughter Mary was contracted into a child marriage ("by special licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury") to Francis Wolley, the son of Elizabeth’s Latin secretary, and after their deaths, Chequers Court (as it was known then) passed to Mary's sister Bridget, wife of Sir Henry Croke. Henry's granddaughter, another Mary, married John Thurbarane, having been wooed with notes scribbled into the margins of a copy of Paradise Lost, and their daughter Joanna married first one Colonel Edmund Rivett and after his death Sir John Russell, grandson of Oliver Cromwell through his daughter Frances. It was a Russell descendant, Rosalind Frankland Russell, who married into the Astley family; thus the purchase from May Kinder in 1917 was the first time the house had ever been sold rather an inherited – but given so many female inheritors it seems appropriate that the seller was a woman selling to two other women.

Introducing the "guidebook" part of the book, Major writes that "Chequers can never be open to the public and I like to think Arthur Lee would have no objection to this book, which takes the reader behind the scenes of an intriguing part of our national heritage". As well as describing the architecture and décor, Major notes various artefacts: Cromwell memorabilia; a table used by Napoleon on St Helena; a ring once owned by Elizabeth I; and various paintings, including a work formely attributed to Rembrandt that Lee purchased from the Earl of Ashburnham's collection and a Rubens that according to legend had been "touched up" by Winston Churchill.

Of particular interest, though, are the items on the bookshelves in the Long Gallery, collected by different owners over the years:

The most treasured is an exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript Missal from Bressanone in the Tyrol, immaculately preserved in its original velvet binding with gilt bosses and clasps. The other is a first edition of Albertus Magnus’ Paradise Animae, printed in, Cologne in 1483, seven years before Caxton first brought printing to England. There is a first printed edition (1503) of all but four of Euripides’ tragedies, added to the library by Sir George Russell, as well as sixteenth-century first editions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Thermophoriazusae and a translation by Erasmus of Lucian of Samosata’s Saturnalia (published in Cologne), with the arms of Louis XIII on the binding. In a first illustrated edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1688) are Sergeant Thurbarne’s annotations; and a sixteenth-century volume of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has Sir Robert Croke’s name inscribed on the fly-leaf.

Less fortunate is The Gollywogg Book, which recalls when Faith Moore brought a number of the grotesque dolls to the house for auction as a fundraising effort in the First World War: "The book remains in the second floor corridor, where Golliwogg lived, which is still known as the Golliwogg Corridor". Hopefully that is no longer the case.

Of course, every country house needs a touch of the uncanny, and Lloyd George thought his dog Chong could see a ghost: "Chong was particularly restless in the Long Gallery, where his master liked to rest in the afternoon. With his eyes fixed on one spot in the room, the dog used to set up a persistent barking."

[John Bowis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully researched, written and illustrated book by Norma Major, the wife of Prime Minister John. The House was given to the Nation by MP Arthur Lee for the private use of succeeding prime ministers. It is not open to the public. I had the great pleasure of being invited there while a Minister in John Major's government. A beautiful house and garden, with a wealth of items of interest, which Norma Major draws to our attention, including trees planted by prime ministers from Lloyd George to Major and many items that link the House to a wide range of politicians and a collection of Cromwellian memorabilia. Some references, such as to Jimmy Saville, predate his posthumous exposure but cannot be excised. Otherwise a very readable and balanced account of a place of peace and beauty that soothed the troubled breasts of its residents and was the backdrop to many moments of historic decision making.

[Harry Balden]

I like that the queen was at multiple points in her life taken round and shown Cromwells death mask and the sword he used at the battle of naesby