It seems that the house changed hands about once a century after the death of Boscawen's widow and after an interlude as a school is now the property of the National Trust who have one Alec Cobbe as a tenant on the basis that the ground floor of the house is open to the public in the approved National Trust manner. Alec Cobbe is the subject of the first restraining order on google that I have come across, with my being advised this morning that searches for him may have been qualified to respect the recently strengthened data protection regulations. Certainly, there is little enough there for someone who appears to come from a monied background in Dublin and who is, inter alia, an authority on the restoration of the interiors of buildings of this sort.
We started with tea (plentiful), coffee and cake, taken in what looks to have once been the kitchen, part of the complex of service buildings to the side of the main house, a complex which served to keep the servants in their place. During consumption we were able to admire the coffee grinder, very solidly built into a large & solid dresser, taking precedence over the marmalade grinder below, a contraption for turning oranges into the sort of peel that you put in marmalade (see illustration upper left). See also the instructions for servants hung to the right, sufficiently quaint that I wondered whether they were not a spoof.
Onto to the modest gardens and the not so modest park, all very pleasant. Fields of grass in full flower looking very well. Fine view across the western end of the weald to the runway at Gatwick Airport. Fine herd of Dexter cows, complete with substantial and somewhat crumpled horns. A board advised that the cows were very friendly and reasonably unlikely to try to use their horns on one. Various interesting vegetable smells. Sadly the lower leaves of a number of horse chestnuts, young and old, were turning brown; not good this early in the year.
Back in the kitchen we took a light lunch and then onto the interior of the house, with the entrance to same graced by a very large demountable & portable ramp to facilitate the entry of wheel chairs, prams and such like. The ramp looked very expensive, far more expensive and far more intrusive visually than the more usual masonry ramp would have been. So what was the idea?
The house is notable for its collection of paintings and for its collection of keyboard instruments (plus the odd harp and a couple of organs). One of which, for example, was once owned by Chopin and another by Mahler. Although the instruments are kept in playing order, they are kept shut and one is not allowed to touch, so there was not all that much to see apart from the mostly elaborate cases. But I did learn that in some early pianos at least the wires were strung across the instrument rather than down it. I wondered whether one would not have done better to display the instruments, open, in a regular museum with more space and with more supporting information, about, for example, the workings of the interiors. A sample of the sort of thing that I had in mind had been exiled to the stable, there being something of a clash between it and the interior scheme of design. Part of the answer is that the collection is intended to be used, and is indeed used in what look like interesting concerts given in the music room, but another part might be money. The web site at http://www.cobbecollection.co.uk/ tells us that just keeping the instruments in playing order is expensive enough.
One of the pianos was made by Pleyel, so I now know that that the Salle Pleyel in Paris is named for a piano maker, in the same way the the Wigmore Hall was once named for another piano maker, a chap called Steinway. But unlike the Wigmore Hall, the Salle Pleyel appears to be more for orchestral concerts. In any event a place which has intrigued me ever since I first came across it in 'Au Piano' by Jean Echenoz, there spelled, as it happens, with lower case 's'.
PS: I read the other day about George Washington's house at Mount Vernon. It now turns out that Mount Vernon was named by George's older, half & naval brother for the same Admiral Vernon under whom the then young Boscawen served in aforesaid war of the Ear. The same Vernon who went on to give his name to a large stone frigate in Portsmouth, a stone frigate on which our naval uncle once served. Entirely appropriately, Mount Vernon is operated by a US version of the National Trust called the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. See http://www.mountvernon.org/.
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