Читать книгу Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes - Страница 18

Around the same time as Isabella was falling in love with Nicholas Taylor, her father, Evelyn, was reorganising his life. Evelyn decided that the time had come to retire after 35 years of farming. He resolved to sell up and move permanently to London. With a family history of over 600 years as landowners, it was a controversial decision, and his friend Major Ormerod and some other Cheshire landowners were dismayed. They let him know that they felt he was letting the collective side down.

But, practically, of course, Evelyn’s reasons made sense. Evelyn was 65 and, with one leg, life in the country was increasingly becoming a struggle for him and Rona. He told the Major that moving to London would enable him to see more of his daughters, but the decision to sell was also bound up with his failure to produce a son and heir. Had Johnny survived, Evelyn’s attitude to the future of Doddington Park would have been very different.

However, when the crunch came, even bottom-line obsessed Evelyn could not bear to cut the ties to Doddington completely. His land agent advised him to retain the profitable farming business and get shot of the big house itself, a liability that was ruinously expensive to maintain. Evelyn, contrary as ever, did the opposite, selling the farmland, the farm units, the 1950s cottages that he had built and the hideous pink house that Isabella had grown up in, for £1.3 million to Malcolm Harrison, who had a successful haulage business in north Staffordshire.

Evelyn retained the Hall, the lake, the castle, the woods he had planted in the 1950s, and 20 Arts and Crafts cottages in the park. The way Doddington was disposed of was an extraordinary decision by Evelyn and a rare example of Evelyn allowing his heart to rule his head. Without a farm to support it, the Hall, boarded up since the school had left, would never be able to pay its way. Evelyn would certainly never be able to afford to live in it again – a fact he implicitly acknowledged by keeping a small black-and-white home for himself and Rona on the estate.

In a bizarre twist of fate, Harrison got into financial difficulties in the early 1990s, and, after Evelyn died, Rona bought back the land from Harrison. She runs the estate as a commercial farm today, spending weekends in Cheshire, and is engaged in a project to restore the Hall, which is still boarded up although the exterior is open for viewing by the public.

Issie’s friend Hugo Guinness told her how lucky she was because now she would be inheriting money instead of property, but for Issie the sale was a cause of great sadness, as the land that she had known and walked over was no longer her family’s. Another root had been cut.