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Strawberry Hill's Jewish history

A neo-gothic stately home has a surprising Jewish history

March 11, 2021 15:54
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5 min read

Strawberry Hill in Twickenham is England’s ultimate neo-gothic folly. Kenneth Clark described it as a “monument to mood”, echoing the poetic sensibility of its novelist creator, Horace Walpole. By 1763, with the assistance of his antiquarian friends, Walpole had grafted an eccentric medley of towers, battlements and a cloister on to his suburban villa. The interiors were equally evocative, with fan-vaulted stucco ceilings and fragments of stained glass, exuding the warmth and seclusion that Walpole dubbed “gloomth”.

Peer around the corner, though, and the visitor will see that this iconic Georgian building also has a Victorian wing. Between 1860-62, the new resident of Strawberry Hill, the Countess Waldegrave, substantially enlarged Walpole’s house. Her portrait is still discernible on the façade of the new wing, just as her coat of arms, and proud monogram (FW), can be detected in stained glass panels, on door handles and inlaid in the parquet floor of the Gallery. Frances, Countess Waldegrave, cut a remarkable figure in Victorian society not just because of her gender, and influence as a political hostess, but because of her Jewish background.

Her story is at the heart of a new digital exhibition, which seeks to shed light on the unexpected Jewish histories of Strawberry Hill. This forms a sequel, in some ways, to the triumphant reunion of some of Walpole’s fabled collection in Twickenham in 2019. If that show celebrated Strawberry at its heyday, this new exhibition tells the forgotten story of how successive “Jewish” actors — not just Lady Waldegrave but also the Stern family at the dawn of the 20th century — helped bring the house and its collections back to life.

These saviours of Strawberry Hill occupied an unconventional place in elite British society. Lady Waldegrave was the daughter of John Braham, the superstar Jewish tenor of Regency London. Born in poverty in Whitechapel in 1774, Braham had been taken under the wing of Meyer Lyon, an opera singer under the alias Michel Leoni, but who also worked as cantor at Duke’s Place Synagogue. From his beginnings as a meshorrer, or junior chazan, Braham gained the patronage of the Goldsmid family, and made his debut at Covent Garden in 1787.