Curator findings part two: RSA purchase

The National Trust wasn't the first to give love, care and affection to West Wycombe Village. Eighty years ago the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) spent time and money preserving cottages and improving quality of life for its tenants. Curator Oonagh Kennedy found a 1933 journal written by the RSA which chronicles their work after buying it from the Dashwood family. I wrote about the parallels Oonagh drew in my last post. But continuing here, she describes how the RSA overspent their budget after buying the village for a mere 7,200 pounds. Bargain!

Sold by the Dashwood Estate to the Royal Society of Arts in 1929

Sold by the Dashwood Estate to the Royal Society of Arts in 1929, original documents

Nina: Each page of the RSA journal and each document you find including these sale agreement papers appear to have the a much bigger story to tell. Lots of potential and it’s just a small part of a big project, how will you uncover it all?

Oonagh Kennedy: Volunteers can help research and tell the story of West Wycombe Village. I’m recruiting and encouraging volunteers to pick up and run with small projects which can help tell a bigger story. Hopefully some of our research volunteers will pick or find ideas like building materials and their suppliers.

We haven’t covered money, not for the volunteers but for the village and how much it cost the RSA for the 60 lots?

For the 60 lots the RSA paid the Dashwood family a sum in the region of 7,200 pounds.

What a bargain.

But they underestimated how much it would cost to recondition the village and for that they had to take out a further two mortgages which brought the total spend up to 11,200 pounds. This included the purchase and refurbishment work.

The original sale document of 1929 put the village up as separate lots so an interesting question to me would be why was the village put up for sale in the first place?

What’s the answer?

We haven’t found out. We know that the RSA approached the Dashwood family and that the RSA suggested taking on the village as a village so that they could preserve the character. There seems to have been a very short window of opportunity between the village going up for sale and the RSA purchase. It’s possible that the RSA might have already identified West Wycombe as a very special village.

Just to be clear, the Dashwoods put the village up for sale first before the RSA approach, what’s so interesting about this?

In the sale document which was produced for Sir Dashwood, he actually added a little caveat and said that in purchasing one or two or three lots he wanted to have something like a covenant on the village to “thereby ensure that the character of the buildings facing the main street shall be preserved for the benefit of all concerned.”

Do you think the Dashwoods knew the RSA would approach them before they put the village up for sale?

Not necessarily because I could imagine that if for example it had been sold off in 60 seperate lots, people could have bought it as a business. They could have bought it as public houses or individual cottages which they could’ve either lived in or rented. Had the RSA not stepped in I would imagine in 1929 there could have been people who bought individual properties or businesses. Perhaps the history of how the village evolved would have been quite different.

Could you speculate what it would be like today if the RSA hadn’t bought it?

It’s very hard to say. It would have depended on whether the Dashwood estate maintained an interest so that there would’ve been uniformity in the village for colour presentation and in the painted joinery.

Presumably there have been a lot more development so High Wycombe and West Wycombe could’ve been even closer together than they are now which is pretty close anyway. I think it would be hard to speculate but it certainly wouldn’t have developed necessarily as a village with a central heart. A central character. 

Sold by the Dashwood Estate to the Royal Society of Arts in 1929, original documents.

….thereby ensure that the character of the buildings facing the  main street shall be preserved for the benefit of all concerned. 

N: How does your work here differ from other curatorial jobs? What makes this project unique?

Curating West Wycombe Village is really quite different from the way in which I approach other properties. A curator has to think very carefully about the presentation of a property so that we can safeguard its specialness and its significance. West Wycombe has another step to consider - how to tell the story to the public when the property is a private home like most of the cottages in the village.

When a property is open to the public we try to tell the story to visitors and this can be in the presentation of historic collections to give the public an insight into the specialness and uniqueness of that property.

West Wycombe is different in that I’m being asked to do different things such as researching historical conservation projects, learning about the evolution of the village and how previous members of staff and architects approached conservation issues. I’m additionally thinking about how to share all that information.

An important part of sharing the information is now working with volunteers who are going to collect and collate historical information about West Wycombe. For example we’ll get to know who lived at number 26 over the last 150 years, what were their lives like, how might they have furnished their home, and then what does this tell us about how a village of this kind develops over centuries.

What we really want is to devise a system where anyone who is interested in the village can come along and search to find sequential photographs, a photographic survey of the village over time, or something about the current project. So that if a visitor wants to know more about the RSA’s or National Trust’s work in West Wycombe they can do so.

It’s a goal to share that picture of the village, not just with National Trust staff but also with the volunteers and those who live in the village. Outside of this community there are people with a specialised interest in vernacular buildings who could also use this historical information as a springboard to find out more about the whole village changing over time.

So I’d say that’s the main difference - finding new ways through digital media to share information because it’s highly unlikely that we can open the private homes and doors of West Wycombe Village to the general public. We need to think of new ways of telling that story.

*If you're interested in joining the digital media team at West Wycombe Village, please contact helpingout@nationaltrust.org.uk . This role will suit people who have an eye for detail, can work in a methodical way to finish a project, have an interest in the vernacular architecture of this region, and are computer literate. Time commitment: Flexible, but preferably once a week or once a fortnight on Monday or Tuesday for a fixed period of about two months. There may be an opportunity to extend this role to include other properties after this period. 

Parallels: 2013 vs 1933

Chatting with Mark Wells about old paint and building materials spurred a discussion with National Trust curator Oonagh Kennedy. Oonagh shared some parallels between today’s conservation work and the 1930s project by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).

Front and back cover of a journal by the RSA in 1933, enlarged view below.

Before and after pictures of cottage 24, RSA 1933.

NV: Thanks to your digging and research we have an actual journal written by the RSA about West Wycombe Village in 1933. You’ve discovered it was in fact quite a major conservation project for the RSA. What aspects of today’s conservation work parallel with what was performed nearly a century ago?

OK: A few weeks ago I found a document they wrote up about their project work which they called a ‘reconditioning’ of West Wycombe Village. So we started investigating the work they had done and began to see some parallels in the refurbishment work now and the RSA’s over 80 years ago.

After the RSA purchased the village from the Dashwood family they started on the project in 1930 and they finished in 1933 - that’s roughly the same time scale as this project.

Similar time scales and goals but what about building materials, Mark described the importance of lime wash instead of paint, what did the RSA use?

Just as Mark is using lime wash instead of vinyl paint so did the RSA. From our research we know that the aspiration of the RSA was to maintain the character and the atmosphere of the old cottages but to make them fit for people to live in, so they went and sourced the best possible insulation materials that they believed were available to them at the time.

Mark is sourcing the most modern and up-to-date insulation board. Similarly the Royal Society of Arts was also looking for new developments in building technology which could be incorporated into a historic setting. In 1929 this meant that they imported from the United States an insulation board which went under the trade name Maftex.

What was Maftex made of and is it still sold and used?

Maftex is actually made of a natural substance, liquorice root. This discovery is quite interesting and amusing to me. I’ve learned how they made it to create dead-air cells which are naturally occurring in the fibre which of course is a further insulation and I suppose has similarities to the insulation materials used today. I’m certainly not an expert but I’m definitely learning.

Maftex was marketed in the United States as a thermal insulation board that had structural strength. This meant that if for example the RSA wanted to amalgamate two cottages into one – and they did – then they could then use Maftex like a stud partition wall.

The RSA under the direction of architect William Weir sourced what they believed to be the best materials in the upgrade of historic buildings and Mark is doing the same today.

Why we’re still not using MAFTEX I don’t know. Maybe it had a life and was overtaken by another. I haven’t found anything about it being hazardous. The fact that it was insulation material derived from a natural substance like licorice root makes toxicity concerns unlikely. So the parallel here is Maftex to Mark’s sustainable insulation boards called Pavaflex which is sourced from a Buckinghamshire-based environmental construction materials company. You sort of think everything changes but nothing changes at the same time.

What else can you compare with the work completed nearly a century ago?

Thanks to the RSA’s detailed account we can see that like Mark, they did a lot of work on the roofs, namely: they stripped the roofs down, they tried to source local handmade tiles, they tried to reuse as many old tiles as they could, but where they were not available they brought in the local handmade tiles.

Interestingly, findings today are confirming what the RSA accounted. For example they described that when they were re-roofing cottages that they laid the tiles onto a bed of wheat straw. Some of that wheat straw was found this year when the roofs were removed. Looking at the RSA’s old recordings have helped inform what we are finding and help tell the story, like the evidence of straw that had been there for over 80 years.

Adverts in RSA Journal for West Wycombe 1933

Adverts in RSA Journal for West Wycombe 1933

This journal is only about a dozen pages but you’ve learned so much. At a glance, what do you think about these pages which look like adverts and they credit their suppliers and contractors?

How they used local firms was very interesting to me. Who took the photographs, who did the electrical wiring, where did they get their paint from. And in one section it says where they got their distemper paints from - the company Walpamure which was a Lancashire company. It’s finding out things like that.

Would these pages be the equivalent of today placing a banner on a website or billboard to thank all the contractors from the tile artisans to the electricity company?

It would if you think about it, and maybe when the project finishes and when we’re assessing it for ourselves we will want to keep a log of who were the involved contractors and the suppliers like the RSA did. 

Looking at this I don’t think it was done in an advertising way – well it may have done, but it was also a way of just explaining what was used, and where they got it from. It tells historians like us how paint was bought and sold. Like the distemper paint from Walpmure in Lancashire – it is interesting and nice to learn that those cans which the distemper came in went back to the manufacturer after they were used. They were washed out with caustic soda and then refilled. So in the 1930s you returned your paint can and then it came back. Refilled and replenished.

Is this paint bucket recycling evidence of environmental awareness in the 1930’s?

Yes, or maybe it was just how things were done at that time. It could have just been the convention since disposables and the idea of throw-away had not quite developed yet.  Most people returned their lemonade bottles, their milk bottles and had them refilled. So this must’ve been a little extension of that.

On a personal level, turning old cottages into cosy homes for families is another parallel you mentioned, what did the RSA do about making the village liveable?

This conservation project is focussed on the tenants – and sometimes that means doing new bathrooms and new kitchens. The RSA did that in the 1930s, too. They documented their addition of new glazed sinks, draining boards, ventilated larders; they even added new washing lines with hard paths underneath in the gardens so that as you hung up your washing you were not standing on mud or lawn. It’s in the detail that we can see that they really considered how the cottages would actually be used by families. And there’s a lot more we can do to understand what the RSA did.

In their closing paragraphs of the 1933 journal they wrote that they believed the work they had done would be far reaching, saying “it proves beyond all question that all cottages can be reconditioned to provide homes for our fellow countrymen, women and children. And when so reconditioned these houses are second to none.”

This shows they were genuinely happy and pleased with the work they had done and felt they really contributed not only to the village but to the lives of the people in West Wycombe.

This rings true with what I’ve heard at the building project team meetings with Mark and FWA that after completing a cottage they’ve often individually said that they would happily live there.

Yes and I think the RSA felt proud of what they did and justifiably so. 
But another parallel, I think is that this is the kind of thing the National Trust is quite good at. The National  Trust is very good at taking on a project and managing it. For example taking on something like a 17^th century cottage to conserve it but in a sympathetic way so that it is also a comfortable home, and so that its occupancy, its use and the life of the house is part of its conservation.

Enlarged views of above.

More discussion with curator Oonagh Kennedy about West Wycombe village and it's sale to the RSA is to follow. The full journal is available to view online upon request to ninavillaroman@nationaltrust.org.uk