Castle Drogo

The story begins with a marriage between two biscuit empires - Meredith & Drew, and Peek Freans.  Julius Drew was a descendant of both the former and the latter, his bride, Frances Richardson was a descendant of the latter.  Aged 34 at the time of his wedding, Julius had recently retired from running the large and profitable grocery chain he had founded in 1878 - Home and Colonial Stores - and planning a life of country pursuits and genealogy research. Having no doubt been exposed to the condescension of the aristocracy, routinely directed towards those they considered to be nouveaux riches, Julius developed a passion for genealogy in his search for more illustrious and titled forebears.  One of his cousins was Rector in the Devon village of Drewsteignton and Julius paid several visits in search of any evidence that might connect him with the Norman family, Dru, that gave their name to the village. Julius began buying land in the neighbourhood of Drewsteignton and conceived the idea of building himself a modern Norman-style castle in the locality. His masterstroke was to engage the services of Edwin Lutyens as architect - though Lutyens was initially reluctant and would have preferred a more orthodox commission for a large scale country house, he eventually accepted the task of designing a home with all the features of a traditional castle fitted out with the best of modern comforts.

It turned out to be a protracted project that had to be juggled with many other demands on Lutyens’s attention over two decades.  A site was chosen in 1910 on the top of a granite outcrop high above the Teign Valley, perfectly placed for repelling intruders. Lutyens had to be persuaded to abandon his initial proposal for a Tudorbethan fantasy in favour of a more rugged medievalism and came up with a plan for a sprawling monumental design on such a grand scale that it had to be reduced by two thirds to be affordable.  Locally quarried Dartmoor granite was the basic construction material and the client rejected Lutyens’s plan for to go for cavity wall construction (two walls two foot thick with a gap between) and insisted on solid walls six feet in depth. A further round of economy measures was imposed in 1920 requiring the relocation of key features and demolition of several partially completed elements.  The project muddled along, not helped by Lutyens’s frequent and prolonged visits to New Delhi in the service of the Raj and it was 1925 before the family were able to partially occupy their home and another five years before it was finally complete by which time it was one third of what was initially envisaged and had cost three times its original estimate.  All this effort to somehow give credibility to Julius Drewe’s unsubstantiated claim to be a living descendant of an ancient Norman family.

Julius died in 1931 leaving his heirs with an ever expanding financial burden of maintaining the vast edifice in sound condition and watertight.  Later generations toiled away through the privations of wartime, giving up the struggle in 1974 when the castle was acquired by the National Trust (NT).  The NT had the funds to stabilise the condition of the building and conserve and curate it as a memorial to Julius Drewe and his campaign for acceptance by the nobility and Edwin Lutyens and his eccentric brilliance as an architect.  In the chapel there’s an architectural model of the Lutyens designed war memorial at Thiepval dedicated to the Missing of the Somme that intentionally or not seems to underline the point.

Dartmoor granite is the hardest to be found in the UK and the precision cut granite forms, steps and archways make a powerful expression.  Lutyens’s command of internal spaces, alternating the spacious and the confined, creating forward glimpses that lead us around the building all combine to make the corridors, stairwells and passageways the most interesting elements in his scheme. Together with a restrained sensibility and formal austerity the castle transcends its faintly absurd rationale by force of personality.  And it’s the lower ground level that offers the finest transitions and the delights of the kitchen and scullery where Lutyens-designed fixtures and furnishings are illuminated by natural light from overhead lunette and lantern windows.  In the family rooms most of the furnishings and wall hangings are drawn from Drewe’s enormous collection of Spanish furniture that came into his possession in 1898 when he bought the palatial Wadhurst Park in East Sussex along with the opulent contents that had been assembled by the previous owner, Spanish banker Adrian de Murietta. Despite their often ponderous forms, the high ceilings, massive windows and overall spatial grandeur of Lutyens’s rooms cuts them down to size and deprives them of any power to detract from the overall impression.  It is a tribute to Lutyens’s ability to orchestrate these complex and demanding spaces into a coherent whole that we often find ourselves overlooking the essential frivolity of the entire project.