How David Roper-Curzon saved Pylewell Park with sculpture. By Marcus Scriven
The gas, says David Roper-Curzon, as a man wielding a primitive sort of Geiger-counter breezes past him into the hall at Pylewell Park, on the edge of the New Forest, has been ‘leaking all over the place’. It was installed, explains Roper-Curzon, by his great-grandfather ‘just before the First World War. I don’t think,’ he adds, ‘it’s ever been properly serviced.’
Elemental winter forces have also recently contributed to Pylewell’s somewhat haphazard evolution, felling at least 100 trees, snapping the balustrading above the ha-ha, and disconnecting all power for four days over Christmas. ‘We had 37 to lunch on Christmas Day,’ recalls Roper-Curzon; fortunately, he adds, his wife, Mel, is ‘frightfully efficient’.
Today, with the magnolias hesitantly unfolding in intermittent ‘springshine’, it’s the chimney stacks – a dozen of them, standing on Pylewell’s roof like steroidal chess pieces – which catch the eye as you drive down an avenue of holm oaks, before arriving at the house whose northern façade is a thrilling, madcap conglomeration. ‘The middle bit is 17th century,’ says Roper-Curzon, descending steps which are impressively pock-marked. ‘The lower bits are 18th century.’
Pylewell’s southern face, by contrast, coheres into singular beauty, its central bay looking out across garden, parkland and woodland of beech and oak ‘and larch and spruce and God knows what’ to theSolent and the Isle of Wight – a dazzling fragment in four miles of coastline which delineate one boundary of the 1,700-acre estate.
It could be the inspiration for an Alan Hollinghurst novel or a Stoppard play, with figures from past generations ghosting across the landscape – an irresistible setting for the Curious Arts Festival next month (July), a feast of readings and performance by musicians and writers, amongst them Antonia Fraser – mother-in-law of one of Roper-Curzon’s sisters – who is to arrive by Aston Martin, a festival sponsor.
Other innovations are in the offing: Roper-Curzon has earmarked the south park for ‘the pop-up hotel thing’ – sumptuously lined tents, accoutred with glamping paraphernalia. He envisages guests coming in by powerboat before transferring, more sedately, onto Pylewell’s 15-acre lake.
In high summer, he adds, the place blazes with so much colour ‘you could be in the South of France’. Mature palms nurture the illusion. ‘Maybe also a bar on one of the islands,’ muses Roper-Curzon, who has ambitions for a pop-up restaurant (‘I’m going to cut back the laurel here’), and perhaps for a permanent one in the three-acres of walled garden which he sees as an obvious spot ‘for opera and stuff like that’.
But this is not the first step in Pylewell’s transmogrification into another plot of theme parked England, pasteurised and packaged to insipid perfection. ‘Over commercialise it and it will lose its charm.’
That charm stems from his forebears, the Whitakers – whom the Roper-Curzons married into a couple of generations ago – who made an indecent fortune exporting marsala (‘a revolting drink’) from Sicily in the early 19th century. Within 50 years, they’d sold the business, invested in north American railroads, acquired 54th Street in Manhattan and, by 1874, Pylewell, to which they added an east and a west wing, and to whose grounds Roper-Curzon’s great-grandfather introduced innumerable rhododendrons.
Thereafter, the Whitakers remained impressively fallow. ‘Laziest people on earth,’ laughs Roper-Curzon proudly. ‘I think it’s the sea air.’
Even as their fortune dwindled, protocol was maintained, notably when, with Pylewell requisitioned by the USAAF during the war, the family was obliged to retreat to the home farm; his great-grandmother’s air-raid shelter was, he explains, ‘very sophisticated – it had a servants’ entrance.’
He adds that, from the age of about nine, he – as the eldest of Lord Teynham’s ten offspring – would be detached from his siblings for half the summer holidays. ‘The rest of the family went to Scotland; I was sent here on my own.’ By then, Pylewell had been shorn of its east and west wings – demolished in 1951 – and was in the hands of his great uncle, Billy Whitaker. ‘His sister, Great Aunt Penelope, lived on the top floor. There was a butler and various maids.’ Dinner, for which young David had to change, was ‘strictly at eight’, the two hours before which Billy and Penelope spent in the study, taking refreshment, silent other than for the occasional slurp. ‘They didn’t really talk. You’d get these moments, known as “Whitakers”, when you’d just hear the clock.’ Roper-Curzon’s presence sporadically broke the spell. He channels Edith Evans in mimicry of Aunt Penelope. ‘She used to say the same thing every night: “David’s been sailing today”. The disclosure was almost too much for Billy, who managed one exhausted syllable: “Ohhh…” That was it, really.’
Progress to the dining room tended to be unsteady – ‘they’d knock into walls’ – but, once there, the Whitakers re-established rigid silence. It was too much for one visitor. ‘He lost his head, blurted out: “Don’t you bloody Whitakers ever say anything?” Ten minutes later Billy spoke: “The garden’s looking awfully nice.”’
Roper-Curzon’s immersion into Pylewell life was, he says, ‘an insurance policy’ – advisable in the light of his parents’ unstoppable fecundity. The same need to conserve cash saw him entered for a music scholarship at Radley (easier than Eton); he duly obliged, but left after three years, most of which he had spent in the art rooms.
There followed a brief but memorable association with the Irish Guards (he reported for training with a white Mary Quant suitcase), a penurious stint at Christie’s and an improbable one at Fleming’s, where the personnel director, a former Sergeant Major in the Scots Guards, assured him [he drops into convincing gangland Jock]: ‘If yer **** it up, I’ll smash yer *******’ face in’.
He soon left; happily his head – rather against the odds – remained intact. Courtesy of a precocious first marriage, he had already further extended the family tree (his eldest son is now 28, just two years junior to Roper-Curzon’s youngest sister), and had his own fairly pressing need for cash. It was then that he began sculpting – rather well; his work was spotted by plutocratic Canadians on a visit to England, which yielded an invitation to Montreal, where one patron proved especially influential (this time, he assumes a flawless Homer Simpson accent): ‘This is David Roper-Curzon, he’s from England and he’s a sculptor – and you gotta have your head done.’ The plutocrat’s friends obliged; soon the word spread to New York. Scores of commissions followed.
These days, Roper-Curzon’s clients include Crispin Odey and other deities of the hedge-fund classes. With an outbuilding as his studio, his parents in the dower house and various siblings installed in other Pylewell dwellings, he has the fondest memories of Billy and Penelope – they were, he says, ‘very loving’ – and appears admirably undistracted by their gaseous bequests.
The Curious Arts Festival, Pylewell Park, Hampshire, 18-20 July
curiousartsfestival.com