Time & Tide (VILLAGE TALES EP. 25 )

To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose, in other words nothing lasts forever and no one.  Those who were masters have ceased to be, and those who were poor become less so, everybody’s going through changes, and everybody changes places, but the world goes on the same.

Drive up the high street then just before the village shop on the right there’s a turning. It’s a winding lane that heads south of Shipston and eventually to a village called Shipston Delamere, referred to by those locals who have a sense of irony as ‘The Delly'. Two substantial stone pillars surmounted by finely carved eagles stand proudly as an entrance to - nothing but open fields. They are all that remain of the entrance to Delamere Park, once the seat of the Delamere family. Like many families their wealth was built on commerce and farming. The Delamere’s were traders and their ships travelled the oceans carrying herbs, spices and other exotic foodstuffs, hence the name, ’The Delli’. During the eighteenth century that stopped when they got into the very lucrative ’triangular trade’. From Liverpool, and later Bristol, ships travelled laden with brandy, cloth and weaponry to Africa where the goods were exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then taken to the West Indies where they were sold, and sugar, tobacco and rum was then brought back to England. After the abolition of the slave trade, though not slaving itself, the ‘triangular trade’ ceased. Successive Delamere heirs refused to curb their profligate lifestyle  and brought the estate into disrepute and eventually ruin. There was no National Trust to take on the property and maintain its fine Rococo facades so like many other fine houses at the time, it fell into disrepair, suffered a fire or two, and eventually collapsed. To pay off debts, Delamere Park was divided into lots and sold, mostly to neighbouring farms. The last of the Delameres jumped from the seventh floor of an office block on 43rd street, New York, during the 1930s depression. The entrance, sans wrought iron gates, is all that remains of one of England’s richest families. 

What was left of the great house was scavenged for building materials. Several fine houses were built in Shipston out of the rubble. With so much salvageable material the village doubled in size and the existing housing stock upgraded using whatever might be available. If  take a walk to ‘The Delly’ there’s a long stone wall on the southern edge of the village with many carved stone blocks that once belonged to the grand house. The rather splendid fountain in the centre of the village looks far too grand for its surroundings. A must is McCullough’s wood mill that boasts, set into the fabric of the buildings, at least half a dozen carved stone finials, a length of bas-relief frieze, several Delamere stone escutcheons and most of a portico which forms the entrance to their office. Their ancestor, Samuel McCullough having access to several sturdy carts used for hauling timber, enabled him and his family of ten, to assist the locals, and themselves, in picking out anything from the ruins of the house that they found useful. That ‘eye for an opportunity’ has served them well over a century and a half, and now due to the resurgence of ‘green oak’ as a building material, a recently constructed barn serves as a framing yard from which their oak frames for new buildings are dispatched country wide. What they don’t use for construction, cladding or decorative features is stored and matured for log burners, which, unsurprisingly they also sell. 

It’s logs that brought me into contact with Nathan McCullough several years ago. He arrived one Saturday morning with a load in his pick up. At the time he was a teenager and as we loaded the logs into my store we began chatting. We talked about his family history and I presumed he would be continuing the tradition. He explained that his two elder brothers, Daniel and Robbie, were enough to keep the business thriving and the one day he was helping out was enough, and besides he was bent on going to university.

I admit to there being some doubt as to whether he would achieve his ambition, but I wished him well. We are all subject to rash judgement, standing there in his overalls I couldn’t imagine him in a cap and gown. It must have been the same thing that occurred to Penny Robson’s father when Nathan called to take her to the school disco, though I doubt he would  have been wearing his overalls. Penny was a high-flyer at school, one of those achievers that succeed at everything. Sean Robson, whose executive home up in the new close always has the latest BMW on the drive, a beautifully manicured garden, and, along with his wife, an all year round tan, and not from a bottle, or a bed. He was an account executive with a London promotions agency, lobbying parliament and handling re-branding for which the rewards are astronomical.

So Nathan and Penny Robson, apple of her father’s eye, super executive Sean Robson, were shall we say, ’getting it together’. Penny’s route to university and law had already been planned by mom and dad, and dad in particular had no intention of letting a country bumpkin with no more talent than to haul logs about in a beaten up old pick-up for the rest of his natural, get in his way or his daughter’s. It came as a surprise, if not a joke to the Robsons, that Nathan should even think of going to University,

‘I’d be surprised if he could even spell it,’ was Sean’s reaction.

A lot of effort was being put into ensuring the two lovers weren’t going be spending the next, however many years, anywhere near each other. Mrs. Robson and the school secretary were members of the same golf club, so she could keep tracks on - to where Nathan was applying. There was, of course, no chance of him get the grades, but then he did. 

A year or two later rumours, a pro pos of nothing in particular, began circulating about Sean Robson. It was at first noticed that the tan was less evident, then the BMW had been replaced with an older model. The gardener had been laid off, and raised voices had been heard by the neighbours. This was while Penny was in her final year so as a source of information, she wasn’t. The inhabitants of ‘the close’ was all that was left but as they tended towards the bitchiness, their fanciful suggestions had to be modulated.

There was then what Paul described as a ‘fan and faeces’ situation. After a particularly noisy altercation between the Robsons, Sean Robson was seen leaving the house by taxi with several suitcases. The gossip mill was emboldened by a colourful report in the Daily Mail regarding a government contract, slush funds, kick-backs, a middle-aged lobbying executive, and a secretary in the home office, described as an attractive, unmarried blonde of 23. The Robson ‘house of cards’, collapsed as quick as if someone had opened a window during a hurricane. Bailiffs removed the BMW, the immense mortgage hadn’t’ being paid and the bank was threatening re-possession, HMRC were investigating both VAT and pension abnormalities, and the gardener was suing for two months wages. The irony of the story is that all this time Nathan and Penny had been spending weekends together. Sean Robson was very lucky, actually luck had nothing to do with it, in finding a one bedroom flat to rent in Shipston via an agent who was unable to reveal the identity of the freeholder, but we know his surname was McCullough. Penny’s mother was able to stay in the house by selling to an understanding buyer, no guesses, who allowed her to stay on in the property at a reasonable rent. 

Miraculously the initial dislike of Nathan by Penny’s mother, his family and his relationship with her daughter, changed virtually overnight and he was welcomed with open arms, literally. 

Nowadays I seldom see Nathan. As a structural engineer as he is often on a site surveying it for a new timber-framed building or in their office working on the drawings. Penny is expecting, her mother is now divorced and a regional organiser of singles parties. Of her father, I know little other than he moved to New York and works on 43rd street. I wonder if . . . I don’t expect it’s the same building.

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Written and read by Barkley Johnson.