Big House

Product Description

The highly praised biography of an archetypal great house & the family who lived there for over 250 years. The Big House is the biography of a great country house & the lives of the Sykes family who lived there with varying fates for the next two hundred & fifty years. It is a fascinating social history set against the backdrop of a changing England with a highly individual pugnacious & self-determining cast including: Old Tat Sykes said to be one of the great sights of Yorkshire (the authors great-great-great-grandfather) who wore 18th-century dress to the day of his death at ninety-one in 1861. His son was similarly eccentric wearing eight coats that he discarded gradually throughout the day in order to keep his body temperature at a constant. He was forced to marry aged forty-eight eighteen-year-old Jessica Cavendish-Bentick -- a lively & highly intelligent woman who relieved the boredom of her marriage by acquiring a string of lovers writing novels & throwing extravagant parties (her nickname became Lady Satin Tights) all the while accumulating debts that ended in a scandalous court case. Their son Mark died suddenly whilst brokering the peace settlement at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I; Sledmere was destroyed by fire shortly afterwards. But the rebuilt Sledmere rose from the flames to resound again with colourful brilliant characters in the 1920s & 1930s including the authors grandmother Lily who had been a celebrated bohemian in Paris. The Big House is vividly written & meticulously researched using the Sykes own familys papers & photographs. In this splendid biography of place & time Christopher Simon Sykes has resuscitated the lives of his ancestors & their glorious home from the 18th- through to the 20th-century.