Clophill House

In 1936 Amyas and Mary Phillips started a mammoth restoration of the house. Much of the work they did to the exterior can be distinguished from the original but inside is not so easy as the work was done to a very high standard internally, so we mostly have to go on what Mary Phillips says in her history of the house. We also have the architectural plans drawn up at that time for them, showing other work that they undertook. We know, then, that the Phillips's removed many of the subdividing walls that had been added to create corridors through rooms that would previously have been connected to each other directly. The remains of the removed wall in the panelled room downstairs can easily be seen. They also removed the arch that had joined the front and rear sitting rooms and moved the door to the library from the stair hall to the drawing room. They further moved the door from the book store from facing into the library to facing into the corner of the drawing room.

Upstairs they converted the dressing room off the large bedrrom at the front of the house into a family bathroom with a new door into the stair hall. Mary states that the door was brought from Hitchin. They added central heating, which would have involved huge rebuilding of the house given the pipes run underground between the two cellars and then up inside the walls to the upper floors. A hot water cuircuit was installed to bring hot water to other parts of the house. This runs through a false beam in the hall ceiling - the only way it can connect the two halves of the house.

Mary Phillips informs us that they fitted the two fireplaces and hob grates in the drawing room and library, but that the plain bolection mantlepieces and grates in the bedrooms are original. They also fitted the antique delft tiles in the morning room, which was then the kitchen.

In the 1960s, just before Amyas's death, they did a second phase of development. This included restoring the frontage to symmetry by rebuilding the windows in the library, rebuilding the parapet wall at the top of the house (unfortunatelly in a different style from the original one, which had rececessed panels in it to echo the windows below) and adding the wrough iron railings and gate at the rear, which they imported from Italy, together with busts and urns and statuary throughout the garden. Unfortunatelly the urns were stolen in an overnight raid during the 1980s, and Sir Douglas left the statuary to a relative in his will so they were all removed after his death, along with most of the fixtures and fittings.

The front gate was bought by the Phillips's from the Grange on North End Road in Hammersmith, London when this was demolished in the 1930s. This had once been the home from 1739 to 1754 of Samuel Richardson, the father of the English novel and author of 'Pamela' and 'Clarissa' which had been written while living there. It later became the home of Edward Burne-Jones, the pre-raphelite painter, and his wife Georgiana. The young Rudyard Kipling came to stay here each December during his unhappy childhood in Britain. He describes in his autobiography 'Something of Myself' it as "the wonderful gate that led me to all felicity". When the Grange was demolished Kipling took the bell-pull to his home at Batemans, so that other children might enjoy pulling it as he had done, but the gate itself came to Clophill.