The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family. Christopher Sykes Simon

I know every nook and cranny of it and, sometimes, if I am lying in bed at night trying to sleep, I play a game in which I return home and take a journey round the rooms.

      I walk through the back door, the way in which everyone enters the house, and on the left is the Lift Room, depository for all coats, hats and boots. A large cupboard which faces me is filled with bric-à-brac – discarded shoes, old kites, tennis rackets, dog leads etc. – its drawers overflowing with objects that remain there year after year. In one corner there is a rack full of walking sticks, which immediately remind me of my late father. When my brother’s bull terrier, Lambchop, occupied the room for years, it became known as the Dog’s Lobby. To the right is the lift, to which the room owes its name. Built by Pickerings of Hull, it has steel folding doors with a small viewing window. As a child I was terrified of getting stuck in it between floors: something that did occasionally happen and, even today, my brother, Tatton, who now inhabits the house, won’t travel in it alone at night.

      Beyond the lift, a stone passage runs the width of the house, leading on the left to the Staff Cloak Room, the Brush Room and the Servants’ Hall, and on the right to the Kitchen, the Small Dining Room and the Pantry. It is a hive of activity, particularly in the mornings, with Sue, the housekeeper, and her ladies arriving at eight to clean and dust, Maureen, the cook, soon afterwards, to prepare breakfast, and from then on a succession of callers – the postman, the gardeners, the works department – coming to conduct their business. This is where I spent much of my childhood, in and out of the Kitchen, the Servants’ Hall and what was then my father’s secretary, Mouzelle’s room, now the Small Dining Room.

      I pass through a heavy swing door, halfway up the passage, which leads into the main part of the house, the first space being the stairwell of the back staircase, known as the Blue Stairs. It is dominated by a vast marble Roman statue of Caesar Augustus, which throws eerie shadows on the wall at night. Opposite the stairs, a door leads into the Turkish Room, decorated from floor to ceiling with twentieth-century copies of ancient Iznik tiles. This was my grandfather, Mark Sykes’s folly, a monument to his love of the Middle East, and if his ghost walks anywhere in the house, then it is in here. In the nineteen-sixties, I used to set up my music in the Turkish Room, fill it with candles, and come and smoke and chill out in it. Below it, down a flight of stone steps, are the Gentleman’s Cloakroom and the Gun Room.

      Walking past the Turkish Room and turning left, I reach the Entrance Hall, which is the main entrance into the house. It is dominated by a huge statue of Laocoon and his sons being devoured by serpents, another object which generated fear when I was little. There are muskets on the walls that were used by a regiment raised by my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Christopher Sykes, during the Napoleonic Wars. Walking out of the left-hand door, I find myself in the Stone Hall, which occupies the central space on the ground floor, and whose tall windows look south across the park. Looking down towards the windows, the first room on the left is the Horse Room, formerly my father’s study, the walls covered with paintings of horses. Next comes the Music Room, painted in shades of grey and pink, which is the comfortable family sitting room containing the drinks tray and the newspapers. The room opposite is the formal Drawing Room, with its highly decorative ceiling. It is dominated by a great equestrian portrait of my Great, Great Grandfather, Tatton Sykes, mounted on his favourite hack and carrying a walking stick, which sits on the side table below it. If I turn left out of here, I find myself first in the Boudoir which, though now changed beyond recognition, fills me with memories of my mother, since it was once her sitting room, and then in the Dining Room, with its beautiful portrait by Romney of Christopher Sykes and his wife.

      At the north end of the Hall, I ascend the grand stone staircase leading up to the most unexpected room in the house, the Library. Nobody entering this room for the first time, through its plain mahogany door, could help but catch their breath at the sheer audacity of its monumental scale. Two storeys high, with a vaulted ceiling inspired by the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian in Rome, and running the entire width of the house, with nine windows overlooking the landscape, the 120-foot long polished oak and mahogany floor was a paradise to slide about on as a child. The other three sides of the staircase have a balcony running round them, overlooking the Hall, behind which runs a bedroom passage. There are six bedrooms and a pantry on the first floor, including the last bedroom I slept in before leaving home, the Orange Room, which includes a charming portrait of my Great Grandmother, Jessica Sykes, as a child. There are a further nine bedrooms, another pantry and the linen cupboard on the top floor, which once upon a time was the nursery floor where we spent the first few years of our lives.

      Turning left at the top of the Blue Stairs and immediately right through tall, double, glass-fronted doors, I push open a grey door on the left and climb a narrow metal staircase which winds up into the attics, a rabbit warren of passages, long-abandoned servants’ bedrooms, spacious galleries lit by glass domes and dark, ghostly areas of roof space. I then take the lift down five floors to the cellars, and walk down dark passages to the very back, beyond the wine cellar, where there are remnants of ancient walls dug from the local Garton Shale, which makes up the ground beneath the house. In the seventeenth century the builders would have carved their cellars straight out of this material, which forms the foundations of the house. The vaulted arches are extremely well built, as good as anything you will see. I walk past the wine cellar, through the first arch, turn left and through the next arch, and look at the wall on the left leading up to the door. Garton Shale and an immensely thick opening make me believe that this is probably where the house was born.

      Sledmere is one of those houses in which very little has ever been thrown away. Every drawer in every desk or cabinet seems to be stuffed with an eclectic mix of papers, photographs, letters and objects, which spill out when you open them. I was always fascinated by these as a child and spent many happy hours rifling through seemingly endless repositories of treasures. In the attics there were wooden chests filled with minerals, cupboards full of old glass bottles, huge leather trunks overflowing with old clothes, and ancient suitcases containing loose negatives and faded photographs. I particularly loved the large partners’ desk in the middle of the Library, whose multitude of drawers revealed, when opened, all kinds of curiosities: old coins, medals, bills, pieces of chandelier, seals, bits of broken china, etchings, ancient letters and the charred foot of an early Sykes martyr.

      These early explorations awoke in me a passion for the history of the house, which was further fuelled by the discovery of a remarkable collection of photographs, some loose and scattered about in various chests, others in photograph albums. Most of these were kept in a cupboard in the Music Room, and chronicled the comings and goings of the family since the early 1850s. I became fascinated by these images of my ancestors, the earliest of which is a splendid portrait of my Great, Great Grandfather, Sir Tatton Sykes, who was born in 1772. It was taken in 1853 and he is sitting in a high-backed chair, his left arm resting on a table. His thick white hair is swept back from his forehead, and his strong features bear the ghost of a smile. His clothes are curious, for he is not dressed in the fashion of the time, but wears a long-skirted high-collared frock coat with a white neck-cloth and frilled shirt, together with breeches and mahogany-topped boots, the manner of dress of an eighteenth-century squire. He is undoubtedly a ‘character’ and I find it impossible not to like him.

      But what of the first builder of Sledmere, my Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Uncle Richard Sykes, a man who died ninety years earlier, in an age when there were no photographers to record his image? The house is crammed with family portraits. They line the reception rooms, the passages, the back stairs and the bedrooms; full-lengths, half-lengths, heads and shoulders in oils, pastels and watercolour, of relatives both close and obscure. They are objects of such familiarity that until now I had never really looked at them properly. Richard Sykes hangs in the best bedroom in the house, the Red Room, at the top of the stone staircase on the right. He is just to the left of the door, and his portrait shows him to have been a well-fed looking gentleman. He is wearing a long black velvet jacket with a frilly lace shirt and cuffs and breeches with diamond buckles, and is seated at a desk surrounded by books. He has a prominent down-pointed nose, a pinkish complexion and he looks … well, thoroughly pleased with himself.

      He had every reason to be. The eldest of six children, he was rich from the success of his family’s various mercantile ventures in Hull. He had status, having been appointed High Sheriff