Lord Beaverbrook
At the Vineyard
Kirsty Aitken
On a hot summer afternoon in 1918, Lord Beaverbrook decided to leave his Fleet Street office and drive down to the Hurlingham Club to play tennis. He was obsessed with exercise, and tennis in particular. He preferred it to golf because "it was over quicker". Enraged on being informed that all the courts were booked for the afternoon, he stormed down Hurling ham Road. This was a dirt road with high elm trees and wooden fences. Halfway down was a high wall with an imposing wrought-iron gate bearing a small brass plaque which read 'VINEYARD'.
The Beaver peered through and saw a ramshackle creeper-covered house with an intri cate green lattice porch heavily laden with jasmine. There did not seem to be any signs of habitation, and he had almost lost interest when he saw what he thought was tennis netting in the garden.
Captain Frederick Dorrian answered his knock and asked the Beaver in. The elderly captain was delighted with the idea of selling the house, and Beaverbrook, for his part, could hardly wait to restore the weed patch divided by rotting nets to its former glory. He could already visualise his tennis-loving friends, Lord Birkenhead, Arnold Bennett and Bonar Law, spending strenuous hours at the Vineyard.
The Vineyard was a tiny Tudor house, built in the early seventeenth century with an eight eenth-century white stucco facade and large windows. There were numerous outhouses; meat larders with vicious hooks hanging from the beams, and a pantiled stable just large enough for one uncomplaining horse. The orchard surrounding the house was all that was left of Fulham's vastly fertile acres of market gardens and small vineyards of the eighteenth century. The house recorded 100 hogshead of wine one year.
Large but unimportant houses were built all over this area. But by the middle of the nineteenth century long terraces of workingclass houses were encroaching on them, so many were pulled down or converted to Institutions. Fulham seems to have had more than its quota of lunatic asylums and prisons. However the Vineyard escaped, and it was the peace of this green acre, three miles from• Piccadilly, that so appealed to Beaverbrook.
After the restoration of the tennis court came the house. It was very dilapidated and uncared
the garden and a fireplace of ox-roastlag panelling was badly cracked. These were replaced with asbestos panels and painted aver' Beaverbrook seems to have had an unfortunate available surface in the house was covered, except in the small drawing room. This room has four large french windows leading out. to were being eaten by worms and the old wooden liking for glossy cream paint, with which everY for. The large ships' timbers used for beams proportions. Under the house are two large cellars. Wine bins and cast-iron boilers fill one of them. The other is reached through a trap-door under the floorboards, concealed by rugs. This is supposed to be a secret passage down to the Thames 300 yards away. Bathrooms were installed and an incredible glass-walled shower sat in the corner of the large cloakroom, used to douse down the sweating tennis players. The cloakroom adjoins the kitchen. The cook must have been amazed by such immodesty. There was even a bell in the cloakroom to summon a maid.
A strange brick arcade was built around the east corner of the house, under which tea was served. Unfortunately arcade and terrace face north, so tea must often have been a chilly affair. There is a sizeable balcony over the arcade on which the Beaver used to sleep out in the open. looking up into the spreading acacia tree above. This extension made the house much larger from the garden side, and various alterations at the other end incorporating larders, bootrooms and coalholes to make a mammoth kitchen, soon turned the house into a purist's bad dream. However the original structure was lovingly repointed and the tall diamond -shaped chimneys made safe. The local council decided to pave the road outside and in doing so had to move the wall back several yards.
A new iron gate set into the wall was always kept locked. Visitors had to ring for the butler to check them and let them in. Thence through a large shuttered front door into a panelled hail with a massive beam running the length of the ceiling and supporting the weight of the house. Books lined the walls, books on strange to dadg.e subjects: 'Don't trust to luck'; 'How your creditors'; 'The divine propagandist', endless religious tomes. The dining ro_ orn nineteenth-century, was very gloomy, fille a ,With green furniture and gilted oak torcheires. Lit there was more to it than that, for behind a gr. een corduroy curtain at one end was a cinema screen and at the other a projection r,nc'm filled with arc lamps and transformers orn the United States. Films were shown after nner for the amusement of guests, who must "ave been very irritated by the Beaver's
eanstant chatter.
There were many dinner parties at this refuge of Beaverbrook's. He felt unreachable °nee behind the iron gate with Albert his valet dconstant protector. His guests ranged from ,u1s lovers, ladies like Jean Norton — a constant siavourite — to the beauties of the time, who eefled to find irresistible attraction in the rich cand Powerful, and his political friends. His wife tklads preferred the seclusion of Cherkley, Ugly house in Surrey, or Stornoway House 111 St James's, and seldom came to Fulham. The Vineyard was never a home for 7averbrook or his family: it was a hideout, a 1)1,ayground, a rendezvous. There were only two ,.uearooms for guests and a top floor for 7rvants. The chauffeur lived in a cottage at the 'id of the garden, the gardener above the _garage. As the house could cope with only a few PeoPle at a time, large parties were reserved for
weekends at Cherkley. Gradually the novelty of the Vineyard wore off, and after Lady Beaverbrook died in 1927 Beaverbrook moved out, setting up his sister in the house. He seldom went there after that until 1955, when he moved back for a month while he campaigned for Bill Astor, who was standing as Conservative candidate for Fulham. Thereafter the Beaver abandoned Fulham entirely.
The house grew quiet and settled back on to its old foundations. It gave shelter to old ladies, spinsters and widows who loved the acre of garden and filled it with unimaginative hybrid tea roses. A smooth lawn replaced the tennis court and the only hurried movements were those of yapping little dogs. The cinema screen and the arc lamps were stored away in the cellar along with huge tartan umbrellas and moulding golf clubs. Blackout curtains and air-raid helmets and crate upon crate of letters, bills and brown photographs were stored away. Lord Beaverbrook died in 1964 and his sister in 1970. There was speculation about the future of the Vineyard. Pulled down for bijoux houses, flats, shops, offices? Sold to a rock star for a huge sum? No. I live here with my family, and wonder what my grandfather would think of his peaceful Vineyard now.
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