Mavis Batey: from codebreaker to campaigner for historic parks and gardens - The beginnings of activism
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Sarah Jackson
The beginnings of activism
Mavis had long taken joy in the natural landscape, escaping to the Shirley Hills beyond Croydon as a child. In Oxford, she fell under the spell of the influential William Hoskins, author of Making of the English Landscape, and joined the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE).
She was on the Executive Committee of the Oxfordshire branch of the CPRE at a time when the county's historic landscapes were at risk from development and the CPRE took a lead in campaigning to protect them.
‘It seemed to me that the moment I'd got interested in these lovely landscape parks, they came under threat. The Ministry of Transport actually said that putting a road through Highclere Park would give the motorist something good to look at as they drove through!' she says indignantly.
Discovering Nuneham Courtenay
Mavis came to the history of gardens almost by chance when she and her family moved to the 18th-century estate of Nuneham Courtenay, which was owned by the University of Oxford.
‘We lived in the agent's house, right in the middle of a Capability Brown park, but it was William Mason's garden that really got me. We had to cut our way into it. It was all overgrown and garden ornaments were buried in the grass, but I knew at once it wasn't just an ordinary derelict garden: someone had tried to say something there, I knew at once it wasn't just an ordinary derelict garden: someone had tried to say something there,' she recalls.
Mavis spent the next few years researching the garden, and to her delight she found that it was not only part of garden history but of the history of literature as well. The garden turned out to have been inspired by Julie's garden in Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise.
The Flower Garden at Nuneham. Engraving, 1777. Mavis was pleased to be able to establish that that Nuneham was in fact the village immortalised in Oliver Goldsmith's celebrated poem, ‘The Deserted Village'. Her article in Oxoniensa in 1968, ‘Nuneham Courtenay: an Oxfordshire 18th-century Deserted Village' revealed just how many villages had been removed in the making of landscape parks during the 18th century.
A Jekyll coup
With her family growing up, Mavis joined the Oxford Department of External Studies in 1970 as a part-time tutor in the history of landscape. She took part in Oxford American summer schools, taking students on tours of gardens and landscapes. This resulted in an unexpected coup at the end of the 1970s.
‘On one occasion we went round looking at Lutyens houses and Jekyll gardens, and they loved them, and I said "Well, we've got the gardens and you in America have got the Jekyll plans needed for restoration!" And, bless their hearts - it was the University of California - they had everything copied and sent back, and so suddenly I was confronted with this huge Jekyll record!' she recalls.
The Jekyll papers had been auctioned after the Second World War and bought by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand who had taken them to America, where they ended up at Berkeley. Now for the first time they were all available to English researchers on microfilm.
‘It was terribly exciting, all kinds of things we didn't even know Lutyens had done, but he'd sent Jekyll the plans so that when she couldn't get around she could design actually on the plan. There were some of the war cemeteries in France and even one of the Cenotaph, all in this great stack,‘ says Mavis. Richard Bisgrove looked after and administered them for the GHS for many years before a permanent home was found at the National Monuments Record.
The Garden History Society campaigns
Mavis's research on Nuneham brought her into contact with the GHS, which had been founded in 1965, and in 1971 she became its Honorary Secretary.
The protection of historic buildings had long been on the public agenda, but in the 1970s historic gardens simply did not figure on the official radar. Mavis and her colleagues realised that as well as being a learned society, the GHS would have to take on a campaigning role if historic landscapes were to be preserved for future generations. Important sites such as Petworth and Chillington were threatened by roads, and Audley End with the indignity of sewage works.
The GHS fixed on European Architectural Heritage Year in 1975 as an opportunity to achieve recognition for historic gardens in their own right. The Society set up a conservation committee in 1974, with Mavis at the helm, and lobbied on the Town and Country Amenities Bill then going through Parliament.
The resulting Town and Country Amenities Act (1974) was the first piece of legislation to recognise the concept of the historic garden in its own right, and to offer some protection for gardens as the settings of listed buildings.
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Anglesey Abbey England, Lode.
Formal and landscaped gardens of 47 hectares (116 acres) dating from 1926 onwards, surround the former 13th-century Augustinian priory. The garden features a notable collection of statuary, herbaceous borders, a dahlia garden, island shrub beds, and arboretums of conifers and deciduous trees.
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Birkenhead Park England, Wirral.
Birkenhead Park is a mid-19th-century public park occupying 90 hectares. It features parkland, woodland and meadows as well as two lakes and sports facilities.
It is reputed to be the oldest public park in England, and elements of its design occur in Central Park, New York.
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Claremont England, Esher.
Claremont has 18th-century landscaped pleasure grounds and a park. Features include a lake, amphitheatre, grotto and water pavilion.
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Craig y parc Wales, Cardiff.
The house and garden are integrated into a strongly axial design, taking full advantage of the southward slope. The garden survives in its entirety, is well preserved, and is a very good example of this type of architectural Edwardian garden.
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Hall Place, Bexley England, Dartford.
Hall Place is a Grade I listed manor house surrounded by extensive parkland on the banks of the River Cray at Bexley. There are formal gardens around the house, with topiary and herbaceous borders. The walled gardens contain a plant nursery.
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Hestercombe England, Taunton.
Hestercombe House is set in 120 hectares of parkland. There is a formal garden of around 3 hectares beside the house, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll from 1904 to 1908. There is also a landscaped valley behind the house of around 13.5 hectares, created by Coplestone Warre Bampfylde between 1750 and 1790.
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Howick England, Alnwick.
Howick has an early-20th-century woodland garden set within 35 acres of 19th-century wooded pleasure grounds and a 50-hectare late-18th-century parkland.
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Iscoyd Park Wales, Grindley Brook.
Iscoyd Park is a complete, small 18th-century park, although its origins could be much earlier. It has fine specimen trees such as oak, beech and sycamore, and a pond with a mount next to it. The park was enlarged in the 19th century and boundary oak paling erected at that time. There are pleasure grounds around the house.
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Little Sodbury Manor England, South Gloucestershire.
Little Sodbury Manor is a garden on a 15th-century site. There are a number of gardens, including a formal garden and a sunken garden. There are also ponds, a kitchen garden, bowling green and many mature trees.
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Prior Park England, Bath.
Prior Park is a landscaped pleasure grounds and park, laid out from 1734 on by Ralph Allen with advice from Pope to 1743. There are terraced balustraded steps by Goodridge, dating from 1834. These replaced terraces by Allen and Pope. Other features include a Palladian bridge, two gate lodges and a grotto.
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Sydney Gardens England, Bath.
Sydney Gardens occupy a 4 hectare elongated hexagon-shaped site in a residential area to the north-east of Bath. The gardens were opened as a public pleasure ground on the 11th May 1795. They have since been subject to a series of alterations.
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Mayfield Park England, Southampton.
Mayfield Park is a municipal park in the south-east of Southampton with wooded gardens, a walled garden and playing fields.
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Dumbleton Old Hall England, Dumbleton.
The site has humps and hollows in a grass field, the remains of a formal garden which surrounded the 1690s house. An engraving of Dumbleton Hall by Johannes Kip in 1712 shows a formal landscape. A new information panel shows very clearly where the original canals and walkways shown in the Kip engraving were.
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Glandyfi Castle Wales, Machynlleth.
Glandyfi Castle is a Regency gothic castle built on a commanding site overlooking the Dyfi estuary. It has a walled kitchen garden, a setting of mature deciduous woodland, exotic shrubs, lawns and borders.
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Easton Lodge Gardens England, Bishop's Stortford.
The gardens of Easton Lodge, designed by Harold Peto in 1902, include an Italianate garden, Japanese garden, formal lawns and flower beds, and a rose walk. The gardens have been under restoration since the 1970s.
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Glyn Aur Wales, Abergwili, Carmarthen.
Glyn Aur was a cottage garden with extensive topiary, much of it representing biblical figures and events. It was sometimes known as the Garden of Eden. The garden was open in its heyday but is now sadly lost. There are, however, a number of old postcards based on photographs taken by the then owner, which show the full glory of the topiary.
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Brooksby Hall England, Melton Mowbray.
Brooksby Hall is set in 31 acres of grounds, sloping northwards down to the River Wreake. The estate is the country campus of Brooksby Melton College of Further Education and offers training in a wide range of country skills. It was formerly the county agricultural college. The Hall, originally a late 16th Century country house, was extended in the late 19th century. It houses administrative offices for the College as well as offering conference, banqueting and wedding facilities. In the grounds to the south of the Hall, is the Church of St Michael, which dominates the landscape. Modern college buildings, dating from the 1950s to 1970s are located to the north and east of the Hall. The gardens, which are informal in style, include a lake and a stream. The wide range of planting reflects the College's status as a horticultural college.
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Glenfall House England, Charlton Kings.
Glenfall House has a stream garden through a glen with waterfalls. It is partly accessible under Defra's Farm Conservation Scheme until September 2014. The garden has been supplemented by terraces designed by Norman Jewson.
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James Backhouse (3) was a nurseryman and alpine specialist active in the 19th century. He was a member of the noted Backhouse family of horticulturalists and naturalists and a member of the Society of Friends.
Backhouse was born in Darlington, England on 8 July 1794, the son of James Backhouse (2) (1757-1804).
In 1815, together with his brother, Thomas Backhouse (1792-1845), James Backhouse established James Backhouse & Son of York (and later of Leeds), a plant nursery first based at Telford Nursery, York, on what was once the old York Friars Gardens owned by the Telford family.
James married Deborah Lowe (1793-1827) of Worcester in November 1822. Deborah had been very ill when she was young, and suffered ill-health after her marriage to James. She died at the age of 34 on 10 December 1827, and was memorialised by her husband in A Memoir of Deborah Backhouse of York, 1828.
In 1831, Backhouse embarked on a combined missionary tour and plant collecting expedition of Australia, Mauritius and southern Africa, leaving his two young children in the care of family. During his decade abroad, he corresponded with his friends and family in England, including his brother Thomas who was managing and developing the nursery in his absence.
In 1851, together with his son, James (4) (1825-1890), he travelled to Norway. The two also toured the Arctic Circle and several parts of Great Britain in search of plants. Backhouse died in 1869.
Sources:
Backhouse, James, A Memoir of Deborah Backhouse of York; Who Died the Tenth of the Twelfth Month, 1827; Aged Thirty-four Years (W. Alexander & Son, York, 1828).
Davis, Peter, ?Backhouse family (per. c.1770–1945)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/56500> [accessed
21 Nov 2008]- 'The Backhouses of Weardale, Co. Durham, and Sutton Court, Hereford: Their Botanical and Horticultural Interests', Garden History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 57-68.
Hadfield, Miles, Robert Harling and Leonine Highton, British Gardeners: A Biographical Dictionary (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1980), p. 19.
Further reading:
Mary Bartram Trott, 'Backhouse, James (1794 - 1869)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1 (Melbourne University Press, 1966), pp 45-46.
Also online at: Mary Bartram Trott, 'Backhouse, James (1794 - 1869)', Australian Dictionary of Biography at http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010042b.htm [accessed 12/01/2009] .
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Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, 4th Earl of Cork
Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, was an architect and garden designer, a major landowner in Ireland and in England, and a great patron of the arts, active in the 18th century.
In England he had houses at Londesborough, in London's Piccadilly and at Chiswick. Boyle was born at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, England on 25 April 1694. He died on 3 December 1753 at Chiswick and was buried in the family vault at Londesborough on 15 December 1753. Boyle is particularly noted for his patronage of William Kent and for his promotion of the revival of the Palladian style.
Sources:
Colvin, Howard, A Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, 3rd edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 147-152.
Kingsbury, Pamela Denman, ?Boyle, Richard, third earl of Burlington and fourth earl of Cork (1694–1753)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3136> [accessed 21 Nov 2008]
Further Reading:
Carre, Jacques, 'Lord Burlington's Garden at Chiswick', Garden History, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer, 1973), pp. 23-30.
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Alan Barber: champion of the people's parks
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An Overview of Research and Recording Practice
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Mavis Batey: from codebreaker to campaigner for historic parks and gardens
Mavis Batey, literary and garden historian, talks to Sarah Jackson about how she became interested in historic designed landscapes, and involved in campaigning to conserve them.
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