The Connaught Mirror ( VILLAGE TALES EP. 34 )

A mirror frame rotting in The Old Drum and Monkey’s cellar has been there for a century or more.

 It’s history as a mirror reveals it’s witnessed some horrific acts. 

Can mirrors really show us what horrors they remember?

Dave at our local asked me during a busy Sunday lunchtime whether I knew anything about ‘gilding’. A frame had been in his cellar ever since he had been given the pub to run by the Blythe Estate. Diane, Lady Blythe’s secretary had told Dave that if it was the same frame, it was the frame of a mirror purchased from the Connaught Estate by Lady Blythe’s father-in-law. No sooner had it been installed in his Lordship’s dressing room, it was removed but she didn’t know why. When his lordship found out it had been stored in an outbuilding, he instructed a couple of gardeners to destroy it and to put anything that remained onto one of their regular bonfires. Obviously that hadn’t happened.

A few days later I was examining the mirror frame which was in a very poor state. It featured deeply carved foliage all around, and some of the wood was visible due to the gesso having fallen away and taking the gilding with it. I explained to Dave that in good condition frames like that were very valuable. 

Traditionally a frame of that quality and period would be carved in a fruit wood, then many layers of gesso, a kind of primer filler made from chalk and glue, applied hot and painted over the rough carvings. The fine detail could then be carved into the chalky surface which would then be smoothed and burnished before the gold leaf was applied. I suggested someone might take it on as a project, but a full restoration would cost thousands. I thought it too far gone to be considered ‘shabby chic’ however stripping it back to the wood could be an option, but not a cheap one.

I joined Rachael during the following week whilst she was walking up to the common with her Jack Russel ‘Perry’. I asked her, as a local historian what she knew about the Connaught Estate. She asked me what I wanted to know and I told her about the frame.She told me that the Delameres, whose family seat was Connaught House, particularly the only son, Percy Delamere, was a philanderer par excellence who indulged in all sorts of dubious activities. She then asked me if I had ever heard of the Hell Fire club and Sir Francis Dashwood? I replied I had and had a rough idea of what they got up to.

‘Well,’ Rachael continued, ‘Percy wanted to revive the Hell Fire Club and went to great lengths to try to buy the caves and the ruins of Medmenham Abbey where their rituals took place. That failed because Percy had little of his own money however when his father died he became Baronet and so could do what he wished, and do it on his doorstep.’

‘Which was where?’ I asked.

‘Just north of Shaftesbury, in fact the railway runs through part of the old Connaught estate.’

‘When was this?’

‘The second half of the nineteen hundreds. There were families, like the Delameres, who had made their fortunes in the slave trade and could buy anything and indulge their fantasies, however shocking they might be. There were plenty of poor people, particularly women, who were desperate enough to do whatever it took, even at the risk of losing their lives.’ 

At the end of our walk, Rachael popped into her cottage and returned with a booklet. It featured a list of country estates that through bad management, bad luck, profligacy or indulgence, cease to exist. We seem to have more than our fair share of stately homes, but if you include those that there used to be, there would hardly be a vista that didn’t have more than few stately piles within view.

When money comes easily it’s more than often abused, and that was certainly true of Percy Delamere. When he wasn’t hosting lavish parties, he was losing thousands gambling. Often in the courts bribing and threatening witnesses and judges, anyone that got in his way risked their livelihood, if not their life. He was a truly ‘bad lot’. 

Trades folk waiting on bills began to withhold their trade, legal actions were considered inadvisable against the gentry as other estates, in solidarity and mindful of their own debts, may withdraw their patronage. It could easily have been Percy that gave rise to the phrase, ‘Posh tones and unpaid bills,’ if it hadn’t been in use for a century already. As Percy’s health deteriorated, several heirs, all born out of wedlock, began disputing their rights to inherit and it was while this was going on that Percy Montague Fitzroy Delamere, baronet, died. The cause of death was recorded as ‘flatulence’ but poisoning would seem more likely, by accident or by a person or persons unknown. Following his death, the house contents, lands and other properties were sold but barely covered debts and death duties. The house had been stripped of its contents by the time a fire broke out and destroyed much of the western part of the house. What was left was eventually purchased for the materials, mainly stone and timber, by the railway company so that all that remained were some foundations and a gatehouse.

You might be asking, what has all this got to do with the mirror? It is not uncommon when someone accedes to a title that an inventory is made so as to calculate duties, etc. At the time of Percy’s death several rooms on the western side of the house, those that by chance suffered the blaze, were referred to by the staff as the ‘games rooms’. They were off-limits to all except Percy and his special guests. Amongst some very bizarre and risqué items the inventory listed several Bacchanalian sculptures, sculptures depicting males and females in the ‘Greek Style’, and a collection of gentlemen’s drawings and prints. A small dressing room had a dozen or more monks robes and nuns habits. Rachael had no need to elaborate on what she had found, the contents of the rooms and presumably the decor, were intended to recreate the atmosphere of Dashwood’s Hell Fire Club and the activities for which it was famous. Of importance to us was the listing of a large mirror, in a frame richly carved with Acanthus leaf detail and gilded. As good a description as we needed to know it was the same as the one residing in less opulent surroundings in the cellar of the Old Drum and Monkey. 

I wondered whether I should tell Dave what we had found out but considered it would have little relevance to whether he decided to use it in the pub. That was until I had an unexpected call from Diane, Lady Blythe’s secretary. She had been looking into the day books around the time the mirror had been bought, and why, on the night of the 30th of April, his lordship had demanded its removal. From the Connaught sale the week before, the mirror had only just been installed into his lordship’s dressing room before, at the beginning of May, it had been removed. Diane then wondered how, when his lordship had demanded it be destroyed, it wasn’t. She could only presume that the two gardeners given the job, recognising its value, had sold it. Diane looked at the Drum’s records, but unsurprisingly, no mention of a mirror was found, but what she did find was a report of the landlord’s death exactly a year later. 

I put this new information to Rachael over a drink at the Drum, sitting about where the frame was leaning against a wall in the cellar below.

Rachael’s draw dropped as I mentioned the 30th of April.

‘Walpurgis night?’ she said, then with a look of astonishment, ‘that was the Hellfire Club’s special night. The club was founded on Walpurgis night, the 30th of April, and something spectacular would always be planned.’

Whatever horrors Percy had arranged for Walpurgis night, the mirror would have been on the wall, and witnessing everything. Was it those appalling images held in the mirror that Lord Blythe saw on the same night years later that had so revolted him to want rid of it?

Rachael asked me when when it was that the landlord of the Drum died?

I phoned Diane and got the answer I feared. It was thought that he had died in the cellar on the night of the 30th of April, shortly after the pub had closed. Down in the cellar he must have seen in the mirror Percy Delamere and his friends carrying out their demonic fantasies. One thing Diane added was, next to the landlord’s body, the mirror had been smashed. Had the landlord smashed it to escape the dreadful images, or had he tried to join them?

We often stare into mirrors, but do we ever wonder what else it has seen, and who or what else stares back at us?

Listen to Village Tales and other short stories from the HONKEYMOON CAFE

 on Spotify, Anchor FM, Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Pocket Casts, 

Google Podcasts, Breaker and other platforms. 

Written and read by Barkley Johnson.