n 1776, Henry Sandford, for- merly an Irish MP, now a wealthy valetudinarian, came to Bath, A gentleman’s taking the lease one of the most Iprestigious houses in the town, the newly built 1, Royal Crescent. From the tall sash windows of this residence, retreat he kept an enquiring, sometimes scienti- fic eye on the world around him, rec- 1, Royal Crescent, Bath ording the curious facts that engaged A property of the Bath Preservation Trust his interest in two commonplace books, now in the National Library of Ireland. These books provided the Bath Pre- The renovation of a celebrated house museum servation Trust (BPT) with a key to the offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on domestic life of 1, Royal Crescent, when they re-presented the house to the 18th-century Bath. Clive Aslet investigates public last year, following the acqui- sition, due to the generosity of Andrew Photographs by Will Pryce Brownsword, of the Palladian service annexe of 1a. The Duke of York, of the nursery‘ rhyme, took No 1 for a period in 1796 Only a short way from the Circus, begun by John Wood the Elder in 1754, Royal Crescent was conceived on’ simi- larly grand and geometrical lines, the sweep of its semi-elliptical curve being controlled by a double-height Ionic order of 114 columns (Fig 4). But the laying of the foundation stone of 1, Royal Crescent in 1767 by John Wood the Younger marked a departure in taste: whereas the Circus, inspired by the Coliseum in Rome and Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, was enclosed and inward-looking, Royal Crescent opens out towards the landscape, command- ing a view of common land and distant woods. Architectural formality had given way to the Picturesque. Brock Street, running between the Circus and Royal Crescent, was kept deliberately low and plain, because Wood wanted the revelation of the splen- did terrace of Royal Crescent and of the view that it faced to come as a coup de théâtre. Two and a half centuries later, visitors still catch their breath. As a speculation, Royal Crescent was ➢ Fig 1: The first-floor Withdrawing Room enjoyed, according to the Bath Journal in 1772, ‘the most pleasing view of... the whole sweep of the Crescent with the Country and Serpentine River’ 40 Country Life, January 22, 2014 an immediate success. Early residents last to be occupied. Did Wood change Fig 2: included the beautiful Mrs Thicknesse his mind and keep hold of it, as the The basement and Elizabeth Linley, who eloped with Georgian equivalent of a show home? kitchen: the Richard Brinsley Sheridan; both It was something of an oddity, not dresser dates ladies were painted by Gainsborough. having the deep garden of many of from about The wit Christopher Anstey arrived Royal Crescent’s other 29 houses. (The 1800. Four in 1770, having already celebrated plan was also different from most of separate ‘the Crescent’ in his verse satire The the other houses, as it was entered on alcoves permit- New Bath Guide. the return elevation, rather than in the ted different Admittedly, flâneurs such as Horace centre of the main front.) Although methods Walpole refused to walk up Gay Street 1a provided ‘an excellent Kitchen, of cooking to locate themselves in the Upper Town, Brew-House, Wash-House, Laundry, but hills were, famously, no obstacle to and Servant-Maid’s Rooms’, it seems George III’s son, Frederick Augustus, strange that the ground floor should Duke of York, of the nursery rhyme, have been provided with not one but who took 1, Royal Crescent for a period two Palladian windows. It suggests that after Henry Sandford’s death in Wood used it for eight years as a suit- 1796, followed by a spell at No 16. ably architectural base of operations As William Lowndes observes in The while Royal Crescent was going up. Royal Crescent in Bath, 1981, Wood The first leaseholder, Thomas Brock, pre-empted the Duke’s arrival by the Town Clerk of Chester after whom referring to the ‘Royall Crescent’ in Brock Street was named, was Wood’s a contract of 1767, long before any brother-in-law. However, we do not know member of the royal family had been whether Brock ever lived in the property Fig 3: The associated with it. or simply owned it as an investment. dining room. An advertisement of 1772 announced Although undoubtedly genteel, Henry By the end of that ‘all that elegant and well-built Sandford did not bring a large family to the 18th cen- House and Offices at the East End of the house in 1776. His wife, Sarah Moore, tury, dining the Crescent’ was ‘completely ready’ for daughter of the 1st Viscount Mountcashel, rooms, like this the ‘Reception of a genteel and large had died 12 years earlier and his eldest one, could be Family’. Among its attractions were son, Harry, was, at 25, of an age to run located on the the ‘pleasing’ views of the city, the the family’s estate of Castlerea in ground floor, Crescent itself and the countryside. Co Roscommon. Educated at Trinity not the first— But, if No 1 was the first house in College, Dublin, in the 1730s, Henry convenient as Royal Crescent to have been built, it Sandford had become MP for Co being nearer appears to have remained one of the Roscommon in 1741 and remained ➢ the kitchen 42 Country Life, January 22, 2014 in Parliament until 1776, the year that he began to pay rates in Bath. At a time when Bath made its living from visitors, who occupied the prin- cipal floors of the houses while their permanent residents squeezed into basements and attics, Sandford was unusual in establishing his principal base here. One of the attractions of 1, Royal Crescent, for a man of his taste, would surely have been what the advertisement described as the ‘Library and Gentleman’s Retreat, with Water Closets in the Court-way adjoining’: the main room is displayed by the BPT with ‘scientific instruments’ similar to the ones that Sandford is known to have owned, including an electri- cal machine and a telescope. Although the first in the crescent to‘ be built, No 1 was the last to be occupied The commonplace books take the form of notes made by Sandford, with passages copied from books’ and newspaper snippets pasted in. On ‘he had a salmon of 51 pounds’. There Fig 4: No 1, In another place, he preserved this evidence, he read quite widely must have been a bad spring in 1782, Royal Crescent, a newspaper account entitled ‘Bath in about travel, quoting, for example as peas did not appear in Bath market Bath, to the Uproar’, describing a disastrous party from John Bell’s Travels from St until June 15, in contrast to May 2 the extreme right, at which some of the male guests Petersburg in Russia, to diverse parts year before. was the first over-indulged. Having come ‘down with of Asia, 1763, and J. Bew’s American Lystor, the surgeon, felt little duty of the houses her eyes rolling about like a ball grind- Husbandry, although he never person- of confidentiality towards his patients, built in John ing mustard seed in a wooden bowl’, ally voyaged beyond Germany. Curio- sharing details of the inordinate Wood the Old Mother Mac announced that her sities of natural history, from the quantities of laudanum taken by Younger’s cellar doors were now locked, and ‘those eruption of Mount Etna in 1669 to the some respectable members of the development who will not go up and dance, are great snow of 1776, caught his interest, community. Perhaps it was Lystor desired to walk out of my house’. as did strange facts about human who enabled Sandford, in June 1783, But, continued the newspaper, ‘as reproduction and mortality. He pasted to see ‘a gall stone voided by a young Fig 5: Old Women must be considered as into one book an advertisement for lady in Bath as large as the largest An imaginative Old Women, and Young Men will be Dr Graham’s sex-therapy lecture on ‘the nutmeg, it weighed 101 grams’. re-creation of Young Men, neither was complied Art of exalting and rendering perma- As time went on and Sandford Henry Sand- with’ and some indecorous behavi- nent the joys of the marriage Bed’. became more familiar with the person- ford’s bedroom. our involving broken glasses and Although reticent about the architect- alities of the town, he took pleasure in Both the carpet chicken bones ensued. One imagines ure and decoration of Royal Crescent, recording social events, cutting para- and the wall- the equivalent of the net curtains the commonplace books do evoke graphs from the Bath Chronicle and, paper, with its at No 1 twitching. contemporary Bath in other ways. in the case of those of a scurrilous contrasting Sandford’s son, Harry, who became Perhaps surprisingly, Sandford seems nature, carefully writing the names of border, are 1st Lord Mount Sandford in 1800, to have done his own shopping, noting participants into the spaces left blank. copies of origi- had his portrait painted, as a country tradesmen’s observations about remark- Mrs MacCartney, otherwise known nal 18th-cen- squire, loading his gun surrounded able fish and animals as he did so. ‘I saw as Old Mother Mac or the MacDevil, tury designs. by spaniels. There is no portrait, alas, at Gill’s shop in Bath a Carp 2 foot one who lived at the opposite end of Royal A gentleman of Sandford himself.