At Snowshill, Gloucestershire — home of eccentric architect, artist-craftsman and poet Charles Wade — JLM Morton muses on frivolity.
On frivolity
at Snowshill, Gloucestershire
Every single clock at Snowshill Manor tells a different time, every corner of every room giving the illusion of existing on a different timeline. Or, the illusion of multiple timelines existing simultaneously. I suppose that if you could peer into the owner Charles Wade’s imagination, you might see his vision for the world as a kind of pentimento, a painting in which earlier images, forms or strokes exist under the image we see now; layer upon layer of human ingenuity and invention, intricate beauty and a version of humanity that is somehow its best expression.
Charles Wade was an English architect, artist-craftsman and poet of mixed-race descent who bought Snowshill Manor, a Cotswold house, in 1919. He donated the house, gardens and their contents to the National Trust thirty-two years later in 1951. His grandmother, Mary Jones, was a free black woman who married Solomon Abraham Wade, a white dry goods merchant and beneficiary of compensation from abolition. He purchased the first of several plantations in St. Kitts in 1850, after which the family moved to Kent, England. Solomon gifted Wade’s father the money to buy further sugar estates in St. Kitts in 1879, a business which Wade went on to inherit in 1911, making him independently wealthy.
Charles Wade qualified as an architect but was called up in the first world war and served as a sapper. Combat engineers, sappers constructed trenches and fortifications, cleared mines, dug tunnels and built roads. As a way of escaping the atrocities of the Western Front, Wade turned to painting and drawing. A talented artist and illustrator in his own right, he was said to paint vast imaginary gardens and restore whole landscapes and buildings again in his mind after they’d been decimated by war.
About 3.3 million soldiers died on the Western Front, site of some of the most brutal and costly battles of World War I, including the battles of the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele. The very architecture of war alone — the trenches, including those that would have been planned or constructed by Wade — were in part responsible for around a third of soldier deaths. Witnessing the horror and destruction of the battlefields was an experience which must have profoundly shaped Wade’s character. Records show that he saw an advert for the dilapidated manor house at Snowshill in a copy of Country Life when he was in the trenches himself. Visiting today, the house has the feeling of belonging to someone who’s seen devastation and, as a consequence, chose a very different way of being in the world.
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We visit in August during the drought when the fields are scorched and bleached to their very bones. I have come with my daughters, trying to find things to fill the time in the holidays before an actual holiday, something to fit in between juggling freelance work and childcare. They are tweens now, poised between childhood and a fuller teenage independence — they’ve outgrown holiday clubs and, though I love spending time with them, it’s getting harder and harder to find things for them to do together that they enjoy and I have this lurching feeling that we’re mindlessly killing time. Dragging out the days with activities that are just something-to-do, instead of seizing the days and yielding to the utterly unreasonable social pressure to make memories.
Whoever said that the years are short, the days are long was not wrong.
We have a picnic on a bench in the orchard, a hastily put together lunch of cheap crisps, cereal bars and bits picked up on route. My youngest gasps, half-joking, half not,
‘Sushi! We must be rich!’
I feel guilty about the tiny plastic fish that’s filled with soy sauce and think about it going into landfill or, worse, ending up in the sea like some ghost double of an IRL sardine. Such waste. We watch the sheep grazing in the field beyond the orchard and the red kite circling overhead, its chestnut body glinting with every direct turn towards the sun. After we’ve eaten, dusky purple clusters of plums lure me to the tree by the fence. I touch them to see if the skins give with ripeness, but the kids have already plucked one each and are making hmmmn sounds about their deliciousness. I bite into the one that’s offered to me. It’s sharply and retchingly sour and astringent, a drying kind of bitterness on my tongue. A damson. The kids both bend double with laughter.
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A kleptomaniac who spent his days prancing about the Manor in costumes and playing with objects he’d bought in English house clearances and auctions, Charles Wade seems to me to have been gloriously and wildly eccentric. Yes, the acquisition of private property and the accumulation of wealth through nefarious means has enabled this eccentricity, but there’s something interesting going on here. The volunteer on the door tells us proudly that there are no labels to explain the contents of the house. It’s up to us to interpret it how we like, which is just as well, because the volunteer in the first room can’t remember anything she wants to tell us about the collection and keeps scratching her forehead and sighing.
There are a few costumes on display from the collection — a jester’s cape, a beefeater outfit, a dress made of the first copperplate printed fabric that heralded the birth of fast fashion. Cabinets of curiosity are stuffed with trinkets — a test tube of emerald beetles, another of iridescent moths, carved ivory puzzle balls, a fan, a collection of hat pins, a tin chicken on wheels, a laughing buddha, a glass tiger. The kids pull me on by the wrist to look at this, look at that! On the top floor there is an entire room full of bicycles and carts. Penny farthings hang from the ceiling. There are boneshakers and all manner of lethal-looking contraptions and a volunteer leaning forward to tell us about them as we pass briskly by. There is a glass case full of dolls whose eyes follow us around, half a carriage attached to a wall, rooms full of samurai armour (26 sets in all), musical instruments, swords, clocks. It soon becomes bewildering.
‘Over consumption,’ declares my youngest.
On the wall above the long pendulum of a clock, ‘THE LIFE OF TIME IS MOTION’ is inscribed on a beam. Charles bought his first acquisitions with his pocket money as a child — among them, three small bone-carved shrines of St Michael.
St Michael, patron saint of soldiers, defender of truth and justice.
Opponent of evil.
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On the way to Snowshill we stopped at dad’s gravestone and pushed back the weeds, found a trowel we recognised and must have left there when we last came. The girls asked me if they ever knew dad. No, I said, he ran out of time. But he would have loved them very much. We cleared the weeds away from the granite, rubbed the dirt out from the lettering and left a small bunch of scabious and sow thistle on the stone.
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Wade’s collection tells of a life of smoke and mirrors. A dramatized life of fantasy and play, the pursuit of every interest. But what was behind it? ‘Let nothing perish’ was the motto Wade chose for his own coat of arms. A gesture of expansive generosity perhaps, but it’s hard not to wonder what ghosts haunted him, what it was that motivated him to gather so much stuff.
The place feels and smells like it needs a good clean; it has the air of an oily wooden spoon languishing in a deep drawer that hasn’t been washed for years. Wade’s own quarters were not in the house but in a small cottage in the manor garden, consisting of a bedroom and a bathroom which he’d fitted out with a flush toilet and hot running water.
The kids squawk at the desiccated woodlice piled up in the plughole of the bathroom sink. A thick blanket of dust drapes the furniture, the objects, the beams in the ceiling. Outside the pond is covered in algae — the kids comment on that too, ‘like bro, you could at least give that a clean.’
I notice the gardens, by contrast, are cared for, the colours of the high summer dahlias and gladioli orchestrated in deep purples and pinks, petunias and verbena tumble from pots that flank the stone steps. The gardener must have been in just this morning, leaving little fresh clippings of grass in the gap between path and lawn. I decide that it’s these very imperfections that make Snowshill such a fascinating place. The messiness of it. The celebration of fun and humour, the open-door policy of friendliness, the realism of its chaos somehow seems gently pitched against austerity, against doom, against sober order and moronic convention. A glimpse of a spirit that might hold something we need to know now.
*
The last time we visited Snowshill was with my mother-in-law. We wanted to take her on a day out that would be accessible but out of the ordinary. I remember getting her a mobility scooter from the National Trust reception desk and we cruised the smooth tarmac paths down from the carpark to the manor. Prompted by the birth of our first-born daughter and some gentle encouragement, my partner had reconnected with his mum after years out of touch. None of us knew that she was dying at the time and would have only a few months left to live, but we were aware of making the most of our time together — of making up for lost time. It would be the last visit she ever made to our home.
We were a little awkward, finding conversation difficult and stilted at times, not the free and easy talk we had hoped for. But there was a sense we were prepared to accept that getting to know each other would take time. The kids were tiny; there were years ahead. Reason enough to make the effort.
I think about that reservedness, this stiff inaccessibility as I weave again through the dark corridors and garden rooms of Snowshill — passed off as politeness, it seems to be at the heart of so many family dynamics and so many social interactions too.
What are we all so scared of?
I wonder if Wade recognised and understood this awkwardness, saw it as a kind of failure of the human spirit, a waste of time indeed. There are black and white photographs dotted around of Wade and his house guests posed in fancy dress. Word of his collection spread among writers and artists in the early twentieth century, and he welcomed several famous figures to Snowshill, including J B Priestley, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf. The photos picture scenes of easygoing, frivolous pleasure and a willingness to overstep social boundaries and received norms. Wade seemed to be able to bypass discomfort and stiff convention by using costume and theatre to orchestrate relations. Was that a further denial of reality, a masking — or, by using disguise, did he offer an invitation to his guests to be even more themselves?
Frivolity is defined in the dictionary as ‘lack of seriousness; silly, funny’ and we all know, don’t we, that frivolity is often enabled by the kind of ease that comes with privilege… but Wade shows us that this world of play can be subversive, a radical reimagining of how we spend the time of our lives, a reframing of imaginative plenty as a kind of pleasure that’s a powerful antidote to the apocalypse we find ourselves living through in this year of wars, this year of the unconscionable maiming and killing of children, this year of climate disasters and relentless systemic inequality.
I come away from Snowshill feeling something different about life, about the ways frivolity has been dismissed — most likely because it’s ‘unproductive’ — (yawn) and the ways in which abundance (of creativity, connection, generosity, play) can be not only the reality of our daily lives but the guiding principle.
We take the path down from the flower gardens to the vegetable patch where purple beans are growing in trellises. There are courgettes, rainbow chard, pears and apples. The kids see a tree laden with mirabelle plums at a turn in the path, whole branches sagging with untouched fruit.
They jump up to grab the plums, reaching for the red ones, the sweetest fruits, letting the juice run down their chins and arms, giggling and running on and away when new visitors appear on the path behind us.
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Image: Charles Wade on the back steps at Snowshill in carriageman’s boots, oversized for protection on the road.
JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and arts producer. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, The Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere. Her prose writing has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and extracts from her nonfiction ‘Tenderfoot’ have been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and she is twice a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her debut poetry collection ‘Red Handed’, was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society Book of the Year (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Her second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026 and her debut nonfiction in 2027. Find her online here.