Short on names, tall on tales

Two or three years ago, I was invited with my rather posh then girlfriend to a grand party up in Yorkshire somewhere, and we were billeted for the night with a fellow guest who lived nearby. Our host was one Sir Tatton Sykes, Bt — known around those parts, as ‘Sir Satin Tights’ — an immensely dapper and personable toff, who showed not a flicker of dismay at our dishevelled clothes and overnight luggage scrunched up into old Woolworths bags.

His ancestral pile was really something, too. It seemed to be filled with four-poster beds, cooked breakfasts, servants, eccentrically decorated private chapels and enormous cast-iron Victorian bathtubs with gurgling pipes and weird metal columns instead of plugs. That house was Sledmere, and this book, by nice Sir Satin’s younger brother Christopher, is its history. Around family histories there is often a whiff of the vanity project, and having no special interest in country houses or the aristocracy, I was bracing myself for something badly written, dull and snobbish. I was quite wrong.

The Big House is a complete cracker. Pretty much everything you could want from an aristocratic family history is here: gout, horse-racing, adultery, love-children, lun- atics, military derring-do, ruinous bets, drunken butlers, oriental explorations, pathological meanness, public-school human rights violations, the odd dope-fiend, and an admiration of pigs worthy of Lord Emsworth himself.

Sledmere was built midway through the 18th century by the author’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather — a prosperous Hull merchant named Richard Sykes — on the site of an old Tudor grange on an unpromising bit of land in the Yorkshire wolds. It became, as each inheritor followed his own bent, a lovely area of landscaped parkland, a repository of objets d’art, a stud farm, and the home of a library containing a Gutenberg Bible. The history of the Sykes clan, as they migrated from trade to gentry, moved in and out, too, of the wider history of the country.