CD1

(54 mins)
 

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BORN 1932 / EXMOOR CONNECTIONS / FATHER AND MOTHER / MOTHER'S BACKGROUND / SIBLINGS / DUNSTER CASTLE

Recorded Friday 11 January 2002, Bicknoller.

JL was born in London on 7^th December 1932. His parents were Geoffrey Luttrell and Alyce Luttrell. When he was about 2 weeks old he came back from London and lived at Dunster [Castle] and was brought up there. He lived there on and off for 40 years. His connections with Exmoor are fairly peripheral insofar as he has never lived on Exmoor. Always had a great love for it. He was for a period of 3 years an appointed member of the Exmoor National Park Committee, about 1990.

His father was in the diplomatic service and he worked abroad in a number of places in South America. Then he was appointed principal private secretary to the Governor General of Australia. He was out there for nearly 4 years during which time he met JL's mother, whose father had retired from the British Navy, had inherited unexpectedly a property in Victoria and brought up his family, 1 son and 3 daughters, in Australia. JL's father and mother married in Australia and went back to England when he finished his tour of duty. His father's father, JL's grandfather, was living at East Quantoxhead, a house about 8 miles away from Dunster and has been in the family for even longer than Dunster. His grandfather was a widower and asked his son, JL's father, and mother, whether they would like to go and live at Dunster Castle, which they said they'd love to do. They both lived there until they died. JL and his brother and sister were brought up there.

JL had an older brother, now Sir Walter, a sister and then himself. Sir Walter lives at Quantoxhead. His sister, Penelope, sadly died a number of years ago.

Dunster Castle was a house of great antiquity. Up until the Civil War, it had been a very important military fortress, one of a number down the southwest coast of England. It was only after the Civil War that it really was adapted to become a comfortable dwelling house. Most of the special parts of the interior were done after the Civil War when it was no longer fortified. It had stood out for a long siege in support of the Royalists and was finally forced to surrender. Part of the fortifications were pulled down on Cromwell's orders. Luckily the main part of the house remained. It was a fascinating house because it was basically a fortress, not a stately home. It was a hotchpotch of many different periods of architecture. Above all, it was superbly sited. Fascinating gardens, totally informal but built on this great escarpment with a river running below it. Wonderful place to be brought up.

JL's family had been at Dunster since 1372. One couldn't regard the house in terms of pure bricks and mortar, it meant much more to one than that - the enormous continuity of the family being there and surrounded by great history of many periods of time. [Back to top]
 

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FATHER / MOVE TO DUNSTER / ESTATE OBLIGATIONS / MOTHER / MOTHER'S FAMILY

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JL's father absolutely loved coming out of the diplomatic service. He was brought up at Quantoxhead. It was sad because his mother died when he was quite young, in her 30s. He probably enjoyed Quantoxhead. He was very ill with TB as a young man. When he was offered the chance of living at Dunster he was very thrilled.

There were obligations living at Dunster. With a house and estate of that age, obligations of looking after a very considerable number of people who worked on the estate, their employment and welfare. If you have those advantages it is incumbent upon you to put back into that society whatever you can do to benefit that society. JL's father felt that strongly and followed it through in a practical sense to a high degree. He was a very respected man by the people who worked for him and the local village population.

JL's mother is exactly the same. She had a great sense of duty. She did an enormous amount of voluntary work. She was extremely interested in all matters concerning the village and village life. She was involved to a very great degree in charities, particularly St John, local nursing homes, the hospital. More than most, she had a great interest in the actual people who lived in the village. Like his father, she was very committed to Dunster.

JL's mother, her father being an admiral, they were posted about all over the place. Originally her parents lived for quite a long time in Essex, quite near Manningtree. Her grandmother was Scottish. With his grandfather being in the Navy they moved wherever he was posted to until finally he was retired and inherited the property in Australia. He died in 1920 and his widow, JL's grandmother, 2 or 3 years later sold the property and went back to live for quite a long time in the south of France. Finally, at the beginning of the last world war, she went to England and lived in London until she died. She often went to stay at Dunster. She lived to the age of 99 and 9 months. Her family all came over here, JL's mother because she had married his father, her 3 sisters (2 married and 1 remained a spinster). The spinster lived mainly in London; his uncle lived at a place called Croydon near Washford. He had a house called Croydon Hall. He had 1 daughter who sadly is now dead. She lived quite a long time in Australia. She went back to England and lived until she died for 10 years in a nice house called Melcombe, just outside Exford.

At its biggest when JL was a child, the estate was between 12 and 13,000 acres. [Back to top]
 

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DUNSTER CASTLE AS A HOME / INSIDE THE HOUSE / CHILDHOOD GAMES / PARENTS / PUBLIC VISITORS / ESTATE WORKERS

JL refers to Dunster Castle as a house; it was designated as a castle purely on a military assessment. He saw it entirely as a home, shabbily comfortable inside. The rooms were large by the sort of houses that we live in, but not if compared to rooms found in Longleat or Buckingham Palace.

JL as a child was not different to any other contemporary other than the fact that he had a larger garden, more rooms to play red Indians in! He probably had a more disciplined life because a house of that size had to have staff. As a youth, with a garden of that size, one could indulge all of one's pursuits, having games, shooting, fishing, country pursuits.

About 4 years between his sister and himself and 14 years between JL and his eldest brother.

Inside the house, JL would have been in the nursery playing with tin or lead soldiers, played various games with his parents, friends went to visit or stay, read and ate, all the normal things any child would do at that age. He enjoyed the beauty of the place. The house was open to the public for quite a lot of the time. They had to share the house with them and saw amusing incidents in relation to people going round. The public could believe that the people who lived there were actually human rather than something out of their imagination.

The workers and gamekeepers on the estate were all great friends. It was a wonderful family of people, employers and employees. JL would have thought there would have been between 30 and 40 workers.

In those days, one had a nanny to start with, for a year or two one had a governess, before one went off to school. That ended and went to preparatory school and public school and so on. Might have just overlapped with his sister in the nursery; they would have been in the house together before she went off to her preparatory school.

He and his brother were brought up one considerably before the war and one during the war, so one's childhood memories of him were fairly limited. When JL was ready to go to public school, his brother was just about to go into the army, which he was in during the whole of the last world war. JL didn't know him closely and in a family manner until they were both grown up.

He saw his parents as much as the system of education in those days allowed you to. Saw them twice a term when at boarding school, which started when you were 7 and finished when you were 17 or 18. In the holidays, you saw them very regularly. His father had various duties being chairman of the magistrates' bench, vice chairman of the Great Western Railway and that took him to London quite a lot and other functions. One saw him whenever he was physically there and available. JL did not eat with his parents in the early stages. Once one had gone to boarding school and gone back for holidays, one had breakfast, lunch and tea with them and gone to bed before supper. As one became older, all meals were taken in their company. [Back to top]
 

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SCHOOLS / NATIONAL SERVICE / PRIMO GENITUR  INHERITANCE / BUSINESS / HOME FARM / NATIONAL TRUST

JL was at Cothill Prep School in Oxfordshire. After that he was at Canford School in Dorset. After that he went into the army at the time when National Service was obligatory. His father's view was that as the younger son one would have to earn a living; to get a job was rather better than to go to university unless one specifically needed a degree, which JL didn't.

JL went into the army and served with the 3^rd Carbiniers Regiment, quite an eye opener. Overall, looking back, it was very useful and interesting, widened one's perspective. Failing to pass an inspection of one's kit or being told of an extra guard duty would have made him think the army was the most ghastly thing! After National Service he was in the Army Emergency Reserve for 6 years.

JL was in a family that practised primogeniture inheritance, therefore the estate, a lot of which had been sold, because of problems of death duties, government policies, etc [went to the older son]. So there wasn't a lot to be inherited by the younger son. Whereas before the war if there had been 2 properties, the main one would have gone to the older son and the other one to the younger son, after the war things had changed greatly. Much as he would have loved to have farmed or done forestry, it wasn't possible, he had to find a job. He worked for a short time in London and then started a business with a great friend who had been in the army with him. He did that for 17 or 18 years. Then he got engaged at the ancient age of 41. The opportunity after he was married was to go back to Dunster [Castle] where his mother was living (his father had died a number of years before) to take on the tenancy of the home farm.

He lived at Dunster for about 3 years. When it was made over to the National Trust, he would like to have stayed as a tenant but sadly it didn't turn out like that. The negotiations with the National Trust were fairly fraught. On the basis of one's wife and family, he made the decision to go elsewhere. He left Dunster, still keeping the farm, the land below the castle, about 330 acres. The house Thorncombe became available and they moved there 23 years ago. It is at the foot of the Quantocks, 8 miles outside the boundary of the national park. [Back to top]
 

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LEAVING DUNSTER CASTLE / THE DUNSTER ESTATE

JL was terribly upset to leave Dunster. It was nothing to do with being the youngest son; he was aware he was never going to inherit the estate. Having to leave Dunster as a dwelling house was a great blow. It was the right decision but didn't lessen the sadness, but one has to be grateful for having lived there for at least 40 years. He is still in the area and still farms the land around it. He is glad his children are very interested in the history of it and the family. He hopes they will continue to farm there.

The Dunster estate originally took in most of the farmland from Minehead on the one side, Dunster itself, nearly up to Timberscombe and on the other side out to Carhampton and Withycombe. By Somerset standards it was a large estate, number of villages and very nice farms. Hunting, beagling, shooting, fishing. Spaniel trials on the deer park and polo used to be played before the war. An estate with an enormous number of diverse factors, farming, forestry, unimproved land, very good farmland.

JL's father sold a considerable part of the Dunster estate; most of the agricultural part was sold, in the 1950's. His father continued to live at Dunster until he died 10 years later. It is now owned mainly by the Commissioners for Crown Lands. [Back to top]
 

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MEMORIES OF WAR / PARENTS' WAR DUTIES / CASTLE AS A CONVALESCENT HOME / ARMY AND AMERICAN AIR FORCE / NURSES

JL was 8 when war broke out. He certainly remembers some of the effects of it, gas masks and blackout, air raid wardens sirens going off, the odd bomb fell, one near Porlock, German aircraft crashed quite near Dunster. One can remember ration books, car headlights being shrouded, blackout curtain being put up. He remembers school food being more ghastly than it normally would have been if there hadn't been a war. One didn't have any great understanding of the cause of the war or how it was progressing, although when home one always listened to the news. The family gathered round the rather ancient wireless for the 6 o'clock news, in the library where they lived for most of the time during the war.

JL's father was very involved being vice chairman of the Great Western Railway. There were a considerable number of raids on all the marshalling yards. The Great Western Railway yards were at Acton, which got badly bombed. His father was quite often in London.

JL can remember the Home Guard. Most of the older members of the estate were in the Home Guard. One remembered Winston Churchill's voice on the radio.

During the war his mother did very much what she did before. The house was offered to the Government as a convalescent home, which it was during the war. She helped in the running of that. They had the army camped in part of the estate near the beach. They had the American Air Force on the polo ground; they were using it as a training ground for spotter aeroplanes. One tried to entertain them and make their life more amenable. His mother was very much involved in the hospital and other charitable activities, Minehead and West Somerset Hospital, which was actually built by an ancestor of JL in memory of his wife.

His father had local duties. He was an air raid warden and still continued as a JP. He sat on numerous committees involving things like War Ag, timber production for war use, agriculture. A lot of land girls and a number of schools from London were evacuated to the area.

Having his house turned into a convalescent home meant nothing to JL except when he went home; it was rather exciting, took it in one's stride. The nurses were probably supplied either by the Women's Royal Nursing Corps or the Women's Naval Nursing Corps; maybe some of them were VAD's, who gave their services during the war. [Back to top]
 

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ESTATE WORKERS / HORSE RIDING

Gamekeepers on the estate were all splendid people, great characters. They taught one a great deal about wildlife, rural crafts. There were the carters who looked after the carthorses on the estate before tractors. One got to know the carthorses and how they worked and how they were looked after. The grooms taught one to ride, full of knowledge, wonderfully loyal people. Gardeners who had been on the estate for years and one learnt the way in which gardening and plants were developed. JL has kept his great love of gardening to this day. Farm manager, farm workers, JL used to go out with the forester. The whole lot were a wonderful team. Not as materialistic as most of society appears to be today.

Most of them have now sadly passed on to a better place. Hardwick was the head gardener for about 50 years; Harry Hole was one of the underkeepers who'd had a very bad accident out in the forest; Jack Passmore the chauffeur was with them for about 35 years.

His mother and local riding instructor at Dunster taught JL to ride and one's family groom. None of them were terribly successful; JL never had natural empathy with the horse. His wife is a very natural horsewoman of great ability. He was made and not born as a horseman. [Back to top]
 

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CHILDHOOD PLAYMATES

JL played to a degree with his sister as a child, otherwise local children of one's own age. There were a lot of people in Dunster at that time whose families had lived there for a long time. A number of them had children about JL's age. He used to go and play in their houses or they went to his. After one had gone to school, friends used to go to stay in the holidays or vice versa. No shortage of playmates. Used to have great parties. One of the great advantages of Dunster was its sheer size, acres of house in which to play.

JL was aware in the general physical sense that one's house was larger than any of the other local houses, but it didn't make any difference. He was always treated extremely well when he went to their houses. Parents of boys he played with were not deferential to him in the slightest.

There were other landed gentry families that JL was friendly with, not a vast number. One met one's friends by chance, where they came from was immaterial. He still has friends from that era and all eras of his life. School friends did not affect matters at all regarding relationships with local friends except there were more people to join in! He played with the girls reluctantly! Good manners dictated! [Back to top]