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In her biography of Repton the late Dorothy Stroud rightly regretted the loss of his Memoirs. ‘How entertaining … how revealing they might have been,’ she mused, ‘but the possibility of our enlightenment now seems unlikely.’ Happily, though, they (or at least the chapters from 1788 onwards) subsequently emerged in the saleroom and — hey, presto — here they are. For all architectural and horticultural enthusiasts this volume is therefore a major scoop, but there is much here as well to entertain the general reader.
Repton had a beady eye for the eccentricities of his clients. While accompanying one foul-mouthed MP on a walk in his park, he put 25 pebbles into his waistcoat pocket and threw away one on every oath uttered: ‘I found every pebble was gone in a quarter of an hour!’
Typically, another country house owner refused to pay him as he ‘never did anything in consequence of my advice’. William Wilberforce’s priggishness is perfectly captured by his assertion to Repton at a concert in Cambridge that his principles would not allow him to hear music at ‘theatres and operas’. Repton’s description of the bizarre decoration of the Hermitage at Louth, Lincs, which featured sheeps’ trotters, horses’ teeth, skeletons of mice and small birds and glittering snails’ trails might provide inspiration for Laurence Llewelyn Bowen.
Repton regales us with ghost stories and a jolly assortment of anecdotes, including one about him being chased by a bull. My favourite passage concerns a coach journey with a village schoolmaster in Derbyshire who goes into paroxysms of obeisance when the carriage stops to make way for a grand procession by Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam: ‘The poor man bolted up and stretching his long neck out of the front window, his hand and body were in perpetual motion, incessantly bowing with the most ludicrous gestures.’
Dear old Humph wasn’t averse to a bit of toadying himself. We are assured, for instance, that the Duke of Portland’s ‘sense of smelling was exquisite’. Compliments from ‘the Immortal Pitt’ and Lord North (strangely credited by the editors in a footnote as having had a ‘distinguished’ parliamentary career) are lovingly recorded. One can only wince on the old boy’s behalf as his assiduous sucking-up to the Prince of Wales (later George IV) at Brighton comes to naught.
Yet our hero is admirably philosophical about these setbacks and the difficulties that he encountered with such fractious contemporaries as Nash, Soane and those two exponents of the ‘Picturesque’, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. The acidulous diarist Lord Torrington complained that Repton was ‘of so many words he is not easily shaken off; he asserts so much, and assumes so much, as to make me irritable’, but I found this delicious, unknowing absurdity in his character to be rather endearing. His Memoirs, in short, are a wonderful ragbag of well-observed vignettes that tell us much more about late-Georgian England than many stout works of social history. Full marks to the publisher for producing such an elegant and delightful volume, worthy indeed of Repton’s own Red Books.
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