Dan Snow's History Hit - I’m a Celeb Special: Gwrych Castle

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Gwrych Castle dominates the road into North Wales. A sprawling Victorian ruin on land that belonged to the same family for over 500 years. It is now famous in the UK as the Covid convenient set for "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" which launched to huge audiences this weekend. But history fans will be more interested in the the remarkable story of the castle itself than the antics of the celebs in its shadow. From an illustrious stately home, and safe haven for dozens of child refugees it fell on hard times, was stripped for its materials and came close to complete collapse. The fact that it survives at all is thanks to one very remarkable young boy, Mark Baker. In this episode of the podcast Dan visits the castle and talks to Mark about the history, and how he saved it.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got an I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here special. For those of you overseas who don't know, that is the show in which they lock up a bunch of celebrities, previously in a lovely Australian rainforest, but now thanks to Covid, in the confines of an ancient, ruinous castle here in good old Britain. The castle isn't just any old castle. You've heard it on this podcast before. Obviously, folks, I keep you all up to speed on what's going on in the world. This is Gury Castle, an amazing Victorian castle now ruined. It looks out over Liverpool Bay, the

wonderful northwest corner where England meets Wales, where the mighty rivers, the Dee, the Ribble, the Mersey, and many others empty out into the Irish Sea. It sits high on the escarpment there, dominating Edward I's invasion route west into Gwynedd, into North Wales, where my family are from, by the way, so we take these things very seriously. It's the route, I say, Edward I, the route the Romans would have taken from Chester up along the north coast of Wales to Anglesey, and Obed I did it during his invasions in later centuries. The site was owned by the Lloyd family, who were the ancestral owners of Gurek, apparently for a thousand years. Remarkable. In the 19th century, Lloyd Hesketh Bamford Hesketh, who was the High Sheriff of Denbighshire.

He built a kind of mock earliest of Victorian Gothic castle high on the escarpment there. It was then one of the prime houses of 19th century England and Wales for generations. But it fell on hard times subsequently, as you'll hear in this podcast, and ended up ruinous, completely destroyed, stripped for the lead and the building materials that scavengers could prize from its craggy walls. Until that is, it was rescued by a schoolboy. This is truly one of the most remarkable stories I have come across in history since I've been doing this podcast. A wonderful young man, Mark Baker, who grew up in a a nearby school saved the castle in a way that

you're about to hear in this episode of history i visit guri castle got underneath the security fence itv didn't stop me and just before they started filming i was able to get rid of it i went to meet mark baker and find out just how he saved this castle and what his plans are to revive this national treasure if If you want to watch the documentary that accompanies this, you can see shots of the castle and watch the interview between me and Mark and learn more about the history. You can just say History Hit TV. What it is, guys, it's like Netflix, but it's only history. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, we'll know you're a podcast listener. So we'll know that we'll give you a month for free and then your second month

for just one pound, euro or dollar. It's a sweet deal. So please go and check that out. You can go to our shop, History Hit Shop, and gift subscriptions to people and buy stupid hats and aprons, obviously, as well. In the meantime, everyone, here is Gurri Castle and Mark Baker, the man who saved it. Enjoy.

who saved it. Enjoy. So this is the writing room built in right about 1837 by Lloyd Hesketh Bamford Hesketh and he built the castle for his home. His family had lived here for nearly six or seven hundred years in the earlier house and he wanted to build this monument to his mother's family, the Lloyds of Grieg. So when we bought the castle in 2018, this was completely ruinous. And we've spent the last couple of years doing it up. Well, this is clearly the place to talk about the history of the castle because it's cosy, it's got a fire. It's not like a ruin like the rest of the castle. It looks medieval, but how old is what we're seeing here? So it's quite an interesting construction because you've got this medieval core

which was the house of the Lloyds of Grieg and then around about 1810 they started to build and build and build and the guy who did the work was really interested in archaeology was really interested in archaeology and he was studying lots of the castles of Edward I and the native princes of Wales and he wanted to create this homage to medieval architecture. So what you see mostly is Georgian but when you look closer you can see hints of the medieval that was here originally.

We're on the big Edward I invasion route into North Wales and we've got Conway Castle. Well it's medieval revivalism. The first proper attempt at medieval architecture being rebuilt in Europe. So it's more into the tradition of the native castles rather than Edward I

because Lloyd who built it was descended from the native princes. Right, so Crickith Castle. Yeah, yeah. Not these English castles up the road here. No, although the towering at the moment is a copy of one at Rudland Castle, which was built by Edward I in, I think, the 1270s, 1280s. So this is a copy of the Water Tower.

So there was a family who lived here for hundreds of years and had a substantial medieval house up here. And do we know what that looked like? So from what we can tell from the archaeology, it's a timber-framed hall house, and lots of that was reused by Lloyd in 1810. It wasn't huge. There are a couple of illustrations.

We've got a really good kind of corpus of material from around about 1800, because there was a poet that lived here called Felicia Hemans, Felicia Brown, who had her first book published when she was 13 or 14, and she was inspired by the landscape and the medieval buildings and so on. So we know quite a bit about it, we know what the landscape was like, and in the records there's references to the house being burnt in a fire around about 1810, which I think was a catalyst for Lloyd to kind of look at rebuilding. And it became this huge castle.

And I think the actual process of building fascinated him and going into the techniques of using hot lime, which was what the medieval masons would have done, through to selecting the stone from very close to the site. All of this was in this tradition. And he studied medieval manuscripts. He studied the buildings. He even had an architect called Thomas Rickman from Liverpool advise on the Gothic windows, which are a mixture of designs from Chester Cathedral, where Lloyd had grown up in Chester in the 1780s and 90s. So it's all, it's a fusion of, in the melting pot of his mind, he had all of these references, but then it was putting it together as this kind

of monument to his mother who died when he was about 11 or 12. So we're in the Countess's writing room here what did this Countess live? The descent went through the female line so you have the surname changes so Lloyd's mother was the heiress of the estate then Lloyd's family name was Hesketh so Francis Lloyd Lloyd's mother married a Robert Hesketh of Chester in the 1780s so the family name became Hesketh and then two generations later the heiress of the estate Miss Hesketh married the 12th Earl of Dundonald and she viewed herself and she would say this in various speeches and so on, that she was the last of the Lloyds of Grieg, so she was the last of this nearly 1,000-year history.

And when we go down to the beach house, you'll see the family tree. There's a pedigree roll-up, which shows it kind of going back over 1,000 years. She was born in 1859, very wealthy. She was the only child, and this room really kind of captures her life story. So at the fireplace, you've got a picture of her becoming a druid at the 1910 Estevod in Colwyn Bay. And she had the stones dragged from the estate here so she could be kind of awarded her Bardic degree on the stones of her ancestors. And she took the name Rhiannon from the Mabinogion,

so this whole kind of Welsh revival, this romanticism she really bought into. And she was also a poet, so this is why this is called the writing room. So she had her desk in front of the window, and she would be inspired by the view out. And what happened after her? So she married when she was 19 and her husband was in the military and they had five children. By her mid-30s she had come into her inheritance here, she found that she was very rich, she wanted more independence but because of the Great Reform Act she really didn't have many rights. But her father had been quite savvy and

created a trust for her. So she had complete control with her trustees of everything. And then with every successive kind of Act of Parliament giving women's rights back, she had more control. So by the early 20th century, she felt that she didn't really need a husband around. So she basically not asked him to leave I think they'd grown apart and he bought a house in Scotland she remained here and she became really dedicated to things such as women's suffrage and Welsh culture she became very involved with the royal court so like with Alexandra and Edward VII. They were friends of hers and she kind of became part of society and, you know, all of the gentry, she was involved with them.

So did Edward VII come here? He nearly did, but we know that Queen Alexandra was going to visit, but then the First World War broke out, so there was a great wing built onto the castle which had the marble staircase and that was to receive Queen Dowager or the Queen Mother at the time. But then August 1914, war broke out and everything kind of stopped. So the Countess died in 1924, and she hadn't revealed what was in her will.

So when the great reading of the will came, a year after her death, she had disinherited her husband and most of the family and left it to the nation. So she had a lot of foresight that she saw in Wales all the national institutions going to Cardiff or Aberystwyth. There was nothing up here. There still isn't a national institution on the north coast. So she was trying to circumnavigate that by leaving the castle to the nation so she left the castle first of all to the Prince of Wales who would later be Edward VIII who had visited in 1923 so a year before she died and then it was also going to be a royal home so that was the main main aim that the royal family hadn't had a house in Wales

since technically the dismantling of the castles in the Restoration, so the 1660s, when they were decommissioned. So she saw that there was a need, that the royal family would have to stay in the aristocracy's houses in Wales. They had nowhere to stay. So that was what she thought would happen. But because she died so suddenly, she had diabetes and she had a heart attack at the age of 64. Everything fell apart. So her husband came out the woodwork and said that she'd gone mad and they didn't want a scandal. And then you

got to see the kind of the position from George V, you know, his cousin had just been executed, the Tsar of Russia, 1918. Six years later, she's been left a huge castle in Wales with quite a bit of cash and great collections, but it was just they didn't know whether they would be around as a royal family. So the husband's kind of in this room, apparently. He burnt all of his wife's papers. So it's all very dramatic. So the family held on to it?

So the family bought it back and the Earl said to his children who were very keen to kind of take up residence that no member of the family shall ever live here again and that's what happened. So the contents were mostly sold off in the late 20s, 1928 and then there was a series of sales in the 1940s and the final estate sale was in 1946 so you've got nearly a thousand years of this family's history on this one site coming to an

end under an auctioneer's hammer so land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal j in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And then it had a bit of a sad life after that. Well, it did and it didn't. So in the late 40s, it was the first country house to open to the public and it became the showplace of Wales.

It was fantastic for employing people it's had about 200 employees so when the family lived here they had about the same amount of people and that continued right up until the early 1970s when it became a jousting centre a medieval kind of theme park and it was then that the rot started to set in because they were more interested in the entertainments outside rather than looking after the fabric of the house so the roof was never maintained you know basic things like gutters weren't repaired and you know over a decade room by room they started to shut it down so by 1985 which is when it shut to the public there was only three rooms open which was

the bar the restaurant and one of the bar lounges which were the big rooms in the house and then it was bought by an american property developer in 1989 and he had grand plans for turning it into a hotel an opera center but all of that fell apart and new age travelers moved in in 1995 and that's the kind of the death knoll for the place because they asset stripped everything from slates on the roofs down to mint and tiles in the kitchens. So it was just being torn apart, the fabric was being torn apart. Totally. And what was really sad was that in the mid-'90s

most of that kind of historic fabric, which is what makes a place, was intact, but we're quite thankful in some ways that it wasn't a fire, that it was asset stripped so the items do survive somewhere. So one day we hope to get them back. And what state is it in now? So throughout the late 90s it was because there was no roof basically. The interior has just, so there's virtually nothing surviving inside. It's completely ruined. What stage does the young Mark Baker get involved? So it was in the mid-'90s that I first got involved.

So I was passing it every day to and from school and seeing it go from, you know, it was a caretaker here until 1994, and then suddenly the place was in darkness and going back and from school you would see lights on and suddenly that stopped and then I saw loads of kind of like caravans and one of the New Age travellers had a huge coach which they parked on the main terrace you could just see this big coach I thought like what's going on there so as a kid just kind of snuck up here and just walked into this scene of kind of it was like an apocalypse but everything was like out of the

building laid out for sale and that really kind of struck a chord as a child just seeing so much history just being kind of sold off for no reason. So from the 1920s onward the family weren't living here? So from 1924 the family stopped being in residency with the death of Count Sass. It's really kind of very typical of what's happened to the country house in Britain however like many many country houses during World War II it was requisitioned by the war Office and it had a very special purpose. It was a home to 200 Jewish refugees and they were brought over as part of Operation Kindertransport. And the story goes that it was one of the last trains out of Germany that these children were on and they ended up here in North Wales. You've obviously got this extraordinary castle up here.

How many rooms? So there's around about 120 rooms originally. We need to do a proper count to make sure. And then what else is around it? I mean, is there a big estate? So there is an estate. It's about 250 acres still. Originally it was about 6,000 acres,

so it's kind of reduced down a lot. But one of the buildings that we've just finished restoring is the beach house which was used by the family so if you want to have a look we can head down let's do it cool next up mark baker took me to the beach house a few hundred meters away from the castle where the family used to head down to the beach and go swimming so this beach house is obviously completely restored this is your dream for the wider estate? So this building was burnt out in 2006. So we bought it same time as the castle.

And I wanted to kind of just test out some ideas on how to restore somewhere. This is basically a miniature version of the castle built by the same designer, same craftspeople, same colour schemes and so on. So it's just quite fun to, on a smaller scale, just try things out. Well, you mentioned you bought this. I mean, fill in the gap of the story from the school kid walking past and breaking in and looking at the place being smashed up to international man of, you know, estate-owning mystery.

Oh, dear. So when I was about probably 12 I set up the Carson Trust I just wanted to do something to kind of save the place hang on you were 12 years old yeah yeah it's quite weird looking back but at the time it you know it was normality for me how do you set up a trust when you're 12 I don't know how I did it really I just kind of followed the instructions and went through all of the you know rigmarole of having a solicitor. I wasn't able to be a trustee at the time, but I could be the company secretary because there was no kind of limit on age and had to raise a certain amount of money to get charity registration. So I quite like a challenge.

You're not from a vast amount of family wealth, is it? No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. But my parents were just very encouraging and said, you know, do what you like if you're well behaved. And I think they approved of me doing this sort of thing. Did it begin as a school project? No, no, it was outside of school. It was something that kind of developed during the summer holidays.

So being an only child, it was quite boring. So I had to kind of get something to occupy my mind. And I was always in love with history. And then you started a campaign to save the castle. And what was your first step? So one of my first steps was to write to the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at the time. So he'd just been elected, so this would have been 1997.

And I was like 11 12 and I just said that it was really kind of shocked by the state of the castle and why nothing was being done and to my surprise I got a reply back from the Prince of Wales who was very encouraging and then a year later ended up meeting him and he said to me that you should write a book about the place and took that you know by royal command to kind of turn all my research into something that was you know the first ever kind of work on the castle so at the age of 14 I had my first book published. So okay so 14 you've published a book on the castle was there a turning point when you thought actually this is going to happen we're going to bring this back into the public space? So I think the big turning point was probably in the early 2000s when we did a big feasibility study,

looking at the economic viability of the castle because there's been talk about it being demolished, that it could never be restored. And then we were able to prove it could still be a going concern. So that kind of set us up on quite a strong footing to approach the local authority who considered compulsory purchase and it came very very close to it being purchased by the local council in the 2000s but I think the big change was getting the American owner who was absentee to put it up for sale and it broke that deadlock that had just been

trundling along for years and years and it was during his ownership that the place got asset strips so you found some american who probably half forgotten he owned the place it was difficult um so you know you've got to kind of think back to the 90s when the internet was in its infancy and california was like another world away you know they were just like a name in a phone book. But today you've got things like Street View and so on. You can see where they live. But back then it felt like he was literally on the other side of the world. But you got in touch with him?

Yeah, it was useful because having that dialogue, you know, did start to move things forward and getting him to sell the place. And it was breaking that deadlock, which really has kind of been the catalyst you know if he was still owning it now it would still be stuck and how much money do you have to raise to buy it off him so he actually sold it to a property developer who we were partnering with called clayton hotels they paid about 850 000 2006 so and then we paid um in 2018 you know not short of a million so it was a bit more but sometimes you've got to pay a bit more to to break that that cycle because it just gets kind of bounced around the market there's got to be kind of a point where you say you know this is this is it and what's the plan now the long-term plan is to re-roof the main house bring it back into use and it'd be great to um it's all about public

access getting people in there enjoying the place learning about local history and also it's unusual because there's about 2 000 years of history on this one site starts with the iron age the perio-iron age hill forts it goes right goes right through to medieval battles taking place in the park. You've got the building of the castle. And then you've got the story of the country house in the 21st century. So it's about storytelling, engaging people, but also it's got to pay for itself as well. So that's why doing it at the Beach House,

T-Crun as a kind of a pilot to see how doing a holiday let landmark trust style. So it's very much kind of in keeping with being a historic building. That's a long term use for most of the building. I mean, the main rooms will be open for exhibitions, events, weddings and so on. Filming, you know, it's kind of very versatile. There's a glint in your eye, you're still a young man, are there any other gigantic heritage rescue projects you've got in mind over the next few decades?

Maybe, I haven't really thought about it. There was a house I always loved because it was so kind of gothic and romantic, a house called Bryn Ciar, near to Porthmadoc, which was ruined in the Second World War. Did some archaeological excavations there. I'd love to see that restored one day. The last thing we did was pop inside the beach house

and look at the enormous family tree that hangs on the wall. It goes way back. So here we go, family tree now. We've got the top swelling, obviously. And then it goes all the way down. Sorry, what date is this? So we think that's late medieval right okay so this one so we're in the elizabeth first and then there's a few missing and then

they go back to one of the earlier ancestors and then it kind of comes down so this is the definitely know that this guy was living in... John at William. Yeah. 1598. And we've got it going down right to the heiress, Frances, who was the last of the Lloyds of Gryff. She married Robert Hesketh of Chester and their son Lloyd built the castle. Right. And he married Lady Emily Ligon,

who was daughter of the Earl of Beecham from Madrasfield, and then went down to Robert, who married Ellen Jones-Bakeman from Abergally, who was a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's family. And then you go down to the Countess, who was the last member of the family to live at the castle. So this was made probably mid-early 1880s. With that, I wished Mark Baker all the best.

Left Gourick Castle. I'll visit next time, hopefully, when we're allowed to go poking around, when I'm a celebrity, get me out of here, has left and got out of there. In the meantime, as you're watching the TV show, just remember the extraordinary story of the place where it is set and look forward to visiting it when Mark and his team have restored it to its former glory. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that.

It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there. And I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.