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

passing through the port. He had been twice elected Mayor of Hull and had built up a fortune to leave to his son Richard, an equally successful merchant, who in 1704 further consolidated the family’s position by marrying Mary Kirkby, the sister of the Merchant Prince and co-heiress to Sledmere. It was a classic case of trade marrying into land, a formula which was to be behind the building of many of the most important houses in Britain.

      Though Richard must have visited Sledmere there is no record of him ever having lived there. It was his eldest son and namesake, born in 1706, who was destined to be the first Sykes to move out of Hull to the country, though not until, like his father and grandfather before him, he had made his name in his native city. The family had recently built a new house in Hull High Street on a site which they had acquired in 1725 and which extended to the river. It is described as having been ‘a fine strong structure, built a little way back, with iron palings in the front. You ascended to the street door by a flight of marble steps.’ It also had a ‘coach house and stables belonging to it with substantial cut stone doorways … reached by a short passage on the opposite side of the street’.¹⁰

      From here young Richard had immersed himself in the family business. With a fleet of seven ships, two of which were named The Richard and The Sykes, he carried on and expanded the family’s considerable trade with the ports of Scandinavia and the Baltic, exporting mostly large quantities of woollen cloth and importing iron. Swedish iron, which was high-grade, malleable iron, produced under stringent controls from the finest ores, was then regarded as the best in the world. It was considered the only iron fit for steelmaking. A number of firms built up a very great business on the basis of trading in this commodity, of which Sykes & Son became the largest. Richard was made Sheriff of Hull in 1740, and in 1745, when the Young Pretender was leading his rebel army on a gradual procession south, he was appointed Captain of a regiment of volunteers, composed of the chief Merchants of Hull, the purpose of which was ‘to take up arms on His Majesty’s behalf for the common defence of the Town of Kingston upon Hull’. These orders were signed the month after the Battle of Prestonpans, the same month that the Pretender was marching upon Derby and when such a panic prevailed throughout the northern counties that even the Archbishop of York, Dr Herring, thought it his duty to muster and levy troops, to attend Reviews and to urge all country gentlemen to take up arms in defence of the Protestant Religion. In the event of the triumph of the Pretender, Richard Sykes’s signature on such a document would certainly have pointed him out as being worthy of ruinous fines and penalties, and possibly have cost him his head.

      These civil troubles were long passed when Richard rode out to his uncle’s house on that October day. He had made his fortune and his reputation, and he was ready for a change. It is quite clear that improvement of his new property was on Richard Sykes’s mind from the very beginning. He was married to Jane Hobman, the daughter of Hesketh Hobman, another important Hull merchant whose family had extensive interests in Danzig, and if he were to bring a wife to live in such a desolate spot, especially one who was used to living in some luxury in their Hull mansion, then he would have to make it worthy of her. No picture exists of the house, which was described variously as a ‘manor house’ and a ‘hall house’, and was probably a gabled Tudor building, which she would certainly have considered old-fashioned. The surrounding landscape was largely treeless, with the exception of the odd orchard and the occasional hedgerow in the vicinity of the village, and so Richard decided to concentrate on planting first.

      Landscape gardening was all the rage at the time, largely due to the influence of a local man, William Kent, whose family came from Bridlington. The son of a coachman, he had as a young man spent a number of years painting and studying art in Italy, where he had fallen under the spell of the works of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, whose depictions of the Italian landscape showed a nature that had been improved or ‘methodised’. On his return to England in 1716, under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington, he worked as a painter and architect, and passed on to fashionable society his enthusiasm for all things Italian. He became the oracle on matters of taste and his influence was soon widely felt when he took up designing gardens in 1730. ‘He leaped the fence,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament.’¹¹

      Richard’s designs were, to begin with, on a relatively modest scale, being confined to the planting of an Avenue radiating out from the house on either side of the Mere. To assist him in carrying out this scheme he employed a firm of nurserymen from Pontefract called Perfects, which had its origins in the local industry of liquorice growing. John Perfect, an ex-mayor of Pontefract and ‘a Person well known in the North for his Skill in Nurseries and Planting of all Kinds’,¹² had worked on designs for the gardens at another Yorkshire house, Nostell Priory, as well as supplying plants to Harewood and other mansions in the neighbourhood. There was another factor that might have played its part in swinging him the job and that was, as Richard commented to a neighbour in December, 1749, ‘Mr Perfect likes this Air very well.’¹³

      Mr Perfect soon found his employer to be an impatient man, wanting his Avenue to be planted and then appear as if by magic. Richard was annoyed when the first consignment of trees turned out to be too small, Perfect having miscalculated the depth of the soil where they were to be planted, and he immediately ordered much larger ones. ‘I have planted some Beeches sixteen feet high,’ he wrote on 2 February 1750, ‘which I Expect will answer at the end of my Avenue, and the firrs will be larger than we first talked of as we find the soil much better than expected.’¹⁴ He delighted in the planting of his trees and in the period 1749–1750 is known to have planted 20,000 Beech, Sycamore, Wych Elm and Chestnut.¹⁵ The completed Avenue, a great and almost triangular belt of trees, enclosed a hundred acres of parkland. At its southern end the focal point was a gap in the peripheral belt in which a gate was set. At the northern end there was the Mere and the House, which Richard intended to rebuild.

      Though his wife was the catalyst for all this work, scarcely had the project begun when tragedy struck. In the autumn of 1750, Jane fell ill. In spite of being sent by Richard to one of the best physicians in London, Dr James Munro, a man of ‘great Experience and knowledge’,¹⁶ she did not improve. In June of the following year, Jane’s brother, Randolph Hobman, wrote to Richard from Danzig, thanking him for a melancholy gift, ‘the Wearing Apparel which you was pleased to be ordered to be distributed between my Wife and Sister here’. He added ‘My Wife … assures me as long as it may please God to spare her life, she will wear those things in a most grateful acknowledgement of your Brotherly Love … as also in a continual remembrance of my most dear beloved Sister deceased.’¹⁷ Jane was forty-seven years old and she died childless.

      After her death, Richard immersed himself in the building of his new house and on 17 June 1751 recorded the starting date with one short line written in his pocket book: ‘Laid the first Stone of the new house at Sledmere.’¹⁸ As to the actual position of the house, a contemporary witness, one Richard Kirkby, stated that ‘Richard Sykes … built the present Mansion house at Sledmire near the Plot of Ground where the Old House stood.’¹⁹ Richard himself made virtually no mention of the building of the house in his letters, apart from the occasional order for materials. ‘Please to send first a sample of two sizes of your Mortice Brass Joints for Doors,’ he wrote to Richard Pardoe & Son, on 9 June, 1752, ‘as also of iron, and your lowest prices of each sort with Screws proper for Screwing them fast, and the price of them. As the Doors are eight feet high, I have some thoughts of having three Joints to a door.’²⁰ Others have him asking for