The MAGICIAN's castle:

Cragside House, a victorian marvel

Cragside House is the building which appears on the site’s homepage, cavalierly juxtaposed by me against a background of Swiss mountains. Its true setting, the Northumberland countryside, is hardly less dramatic, though less prone to snow. Cragside was chosen to act as an introduction to the site and a sort of emblem of its contents because it unites many of the other elements featuring in articles here: it is a thoroughly comfortable Victorian house (the first in the world to be lit by hydro-electric power), and it has a particularly momentous Russian connection.  Coincidentally, Cragside even lies just a few miles away from the birthplace of W.T. Stead. In one episode of a well-regarded t.v. series of the 1970s it starred as an infamous royal home, and like many stately homes of the era, it also played host in its heyday to genuine royalty – including the subject of yet another article on this site.

Cragside's spectacular gorge garden, seen from the house

The fact that Cragside was host in 1884 to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, says a lot about the increasing social mobility of late Victorian England. The house’s builder and first owner had been born in comfortable but decidedly middle class circumstances in Newcastle in 1810. He was William George Armstrong, son of a self-made corn merchant who became mayor of Newcastle, and in keeping with typical aspirations at the time, his family had him educated to join the upper middle classes through taking up a profession: - young William was to go into the law. There were times however when it seemed unlikely that he would make it: he was a sickly boy, prone to chest infections and coughs, which the smoky atmosphere of booming, industrial Newcastle did nothing to help. But his family were fortunate in having friends with a country house out at Rothbury in the foothills of the Cheviots, and here they spent summers. Paddling in the river Coquet and scrambling around the hillside, William was restored miraculously to health, and in later years he attributed his survival solely to Rothbury air. “If it had not been for its curative effect, there would have been no Cragside today,” he declared.

As a young man, Armstrong worked as a solicitor in London and Newcastle, but his hobby and passion was a less genteel field of work - engineering. He took a great interest in hydraulics, wrote papers on the generation of hydro-electric power, and built an electro-static generator, for which he was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1846. The following year, he set up his own manufacturing company, which eventually came to occupy him full-time. Armstrong and his ever-increasing staff of innovators made cranes and other moving equipment, but the most profitable line of work proved to be guns, with his company gaining for a time after the Crimean War a virtual monopoly in supplying them to the government. After that, they branched out into ship-building, and in 1882 Armstrong floated his successful company on the stock market.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the corporation Armstrong, Mitchell and Co. was the largest ship-builder in the world, rivalled only the German firm of Krupp. It built at least half of the modernised Japanese Navy, which in 1905 sank the Russian fleet at Tsushima and delivered a body-blow to the Tsarist regime from which the latter never recovered. Thus William Armstrong and his enterprises can be seen to have had decisive influence on the shaping of the modern world, in political terms as well as technological.  

The Japanese cruiser Tokiwa, built by Armstrong, 1899

From the 1870s, the essentially well-balanced William Armstrong became less involved in the day-to-day running of his firm, and took an honorific role, with his energy diverted to collecting, building, and philanthropic works. In 1863, he had bought large tracts of land very close to his childhood haunt of Rothbury, intending to build a lodge there so he could indulge his favourite sport – fishing. This lodge as first constructed was a small and modest house set on a natural ledge in the eponymous crag. Over the years that followed it grew vastly in all directions as Armstrong came to spend more and more time there, transferring much of his entertaining from his house in Jesmond – a Newcastle suburb - to the marvellous Cragside.

His great ally in extending and developing the house was the popular architect Norman Shaw, a pioneer of the (erroneously-named) “Queen Anne” style of vernacular revival architecture. The awkward site of the house was a positive advantage to both men. For Shaw, it enabled him to make best use of his asymmetrical and apparently random style of design, with dramatic contrasts presented by drawn-out horizontal and vertical planes, gabled roofs, and blank walls sitting alongside others with windows scattered all around. Some floors are raised considerably on one side of the house but touch the ground on the other, such is the slant of its site.

The house seen from the gorge, its uneven front aspect clearly apparent

Of necessity, part of the house was built back into the cliff, and here Armstrong’s skills as an engineer came into their own, as they did in the garden, thousands of acres of trees, paths and rhododendrons laid out on the side of the gorge - over which soared a graceful steel footbridge. His wife, Margaret, a knowledgeable botanist, must have played a significant role in stocking the garden when the heavy work of blasting and digging was done. In 1880, the electric lighting was installed, using the lamp designed by Armstrong’s friend Joseph Swan, and run from a power plant on the estate.

The house was ready for its formal debut as a country seat in 1884, when it hosted to the Prince of Wales on his trip to the north-east. Welcomed by a spectacular display of lights strung along branches of trees throughout the estate, the Prince came with his family, and his three daughters were painted playing on the bridge. There was one anomaly amid the splendour: Armstrong had no smoking room, so the gentlemen were obliged to repair to the garden for their cigars – and here they too were painted.

Maud, Victoria and Louise of Wales in the garden at Cragside,

with another, unnamed girl (painted by HH Emerson)

The Prince, Armstrong and friends smoking on the terrace

(painted by HH Emerson)

In every other respect, Shaw’s and Armstrong’s Cragside House was the very epitome of modern luxury and innovation, more like an outsize suburban villa in appearance than a traditional country estate. In addition to the electric lighting, it had a telephone system that connected the rooms, and a hydraulic passenger lift used mainly by the servants in carrying coal and other heavy goods between floors. The basement featured a whole suite of bathrooms, housing a hot air bath, a plunge bath and a shower-bath, along with a room for cooling in and a dressing room. Here Armstrong and his friends could spend several hours at their ablutions if they wished, relaxing and enjoying the century’s scientific achievements. The sculleries and larders are also in the basement, communicating by a separate staircase with the kitchens above.

On the ground floor, the service rooms were set around an inner courtyard, with a bakery and still room on one side, kitchen and pantries on the other, close to the dining room. The kitchen, tiled from top to bottom in cream ceramic, even had a form of early dishwasher. A spit for roasting meat, like so much else in the house, was automated, controlled by hydraulic machinery in the “jigger” room below, which also held valves and pistons associated with the operation of the lift. The two public rooms on this floor, the dining room and library, were both decorated in arts and craft style, with panelled dados and coffered ceilings.

The dining room, 1890, with built-in sideboard and inglenook fireplace

The paper above the dining room dado was rich green, and to finish off the “Old English” theme there was a massive inglenook fireplace, on either side of which stood wooden settles. William Morris himself designed the stained glass panels just above them. 

William Armstrong reading in the inglenook, with Morris's stained glass figures visible

In the library, which Armstrong used as the main living room, the predominant colours were red and gold, with both woven into the carpet. The wallpaper was snuff or parchment-coloured and the curtains red. A large bay window overlooking the crag had some stained glass panels with these colours in it too, and the wood of the furniture was mainly black, the overall effect here being of rather delicate furnishings with a slightly Japanese feeling.

The library bay, with Armstrong at work, ca. 1890

The rest of the ground floor consisted of smaller rooms left over from the older lodge, including a dedicated Japanese room and Armstrong’s study.

An imposing oak staircase, right, with newel posts adorned with lions holding lamps, led to the first floor, where there were numerous bedrooms, most with William Morris wallpaper, and some left over from the original house. There was also a morning room, the least appealing room at Cragside, which from around 1890 was decorated in ersatz eighteenth-century style and became associated with the lady of the house as her own space, called “Mother’s room” (ironically, though, William and Margaret Armstrong had no children to whom to bequeath their fortune). The rest of the floor was public: a long gallery in which Armstrong displayed some of his picture collection, and a vast drawing room which held more of them. Both of these rooms are top-lit by lamps and skylights, without windows, and are built partially into the cliff, producing a warm and rather subterranean effect, almost like being the hull of an upturned ship. In the gallery this effect was exacerbated by the curved wooden struts supporting the roof. The sitting room walls were papered in dark red, with a white plaster ceiling and huge double-storey marble chimneypiece. This roof of this room formed the longest horizontal plane of the house, with the tower of Armstrong’s personal observatory rising dramatically next to it. It had no downstairs room below it, and was placed instead over a massive agglomeration of central heating pipes on the floor below. Since the house was built on a slope, the sitting room was actually much closer to the ground than a room on the same, second floor at the opposite side of the building.  

The long, low side aspect of Cragside House from its terrace. On the opposite side of the house, this floor appears considerably further from the ground.

Close to the gallery, another minor staircase ran up to the second floor, where the guest suite lay. Called the “Owl” rooms, this suite was first used by the Prince and Princess of Wales during their visit, and was papered in cream with blue-grey flowers. The name derived from the birds sanding on the posts of the big wooden half-tester bed. Here as in the gallery and drawing room just below, the house’s position determined the lighting: there were small windows on one side of the master bedroom, but otherwise substantial expanses of wall and cream-panelled ceiling with no inlet for natural light. Although large and light, the rooms felt somewhat enclosed as a result.

The drawing room, 1890

In the years that followed the Prince’s visit, further alterations were made to the house, including the addition of a billiard/smoking room to one side of the drawing room. Ennobled in 1887, the owner took the title Baron Armstrong of Cragside, and continued to enterain royalty in his home. Most of these later visitors, who included the King of Siam, came to buy his armaments as much as to enjoy his hospitality, but all were suitably fêted. He died in 1900, leaving the house – and his latest acquisition, the ancient Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast - to his nephew, who also eventually received the title, as Baron Armstrong of the second creation. 

The Armstrongs were still technically the owners when the house played a role in the celebrated 1970s television series, “Fall of eagles,” taking the part of the hunting lodge at Mayerling  near Vienna – which, as it happens, resembles it not at all – where the heir to the Austrian throne shot himself in 1889. Cragside is clearly recognisable in many interior and exterior shots of the dark events at the lodge.

In 1977, the Armstrong family passed the house to the National Trust, who opened it to the public. As so often happens, the house which William Armstrong built on money earned in trading dangerous weapons has become a beautiful and peaceful memorial to the creative side of his personality, and will be remembered far after his sinister business interests. 

It is currently closed for renovation and repairs, due to re-open in spring 2007.

Bibliography:

Cragside, Northumberland [guidebook]. London, National Trust, 1992

Girouard, Marc. The Victorian country house. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979

And additional information provided by Greg King

Fritilleries in the garden at Cragside

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text copyright J. Ashton, 2007

contemporary photographs, c. 2004 by J.Ashton & C.Martyn

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