Having been home to the Isham family for over 400 years, this stunning Hall has a history brimming with colourful characters and surprising stories
Sir Gyles Isham, acclaimed 1930s Hollywood actor, returned to his beloved Northamptonshire seat in 1946 after nearly five years fighting in the Middle East. He described himself as a ‘Desert Rat’ – for he had served as one of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in World War II, who’d triumphed in the Western Desert campaign.
It must have been a rather odd homecoming. In the intervening years, his invalid father had died, and Sir Gyles had succeeded to title and estate. Yet 146 Period Living that was far from the only difference he encountered as he neared the beautiful country house his family had called home for nearly 400 years.
Perhaps alarm bells began to ring as he approached: the fields surrounding it were no longer familiar swathes from his childhood; instead, he found their contours scarred by ugly Nissan huts. As he got closer still, there were Lamport’s gardens – loved and cared for by successive generations – now, to his horror, swamped by neglect.
Worse was to come. As the door to the house swung open, it revealed perhaps the greatest sacrilege of all: the once-elegant entrance hall had been redecorated in startling orange by Italian POWs, ‘whom for some period I had been facing on the battlefields,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I will not disguise from you the sense of shock I felt…’
Startling reality
Poor Sir Gyles received little warning of what to expect on his return. ‘While he was away, an estate secretary had been busy sending letters back and forth,’ explains Eleanor Carter of Lamport Hall Preservation Trust. ‘In those letters, the secretary writes things like: “We’ve put some boarding in front of the large Van Dyck, with a little door in so we can check the condition…” In other words: “It’s okay! We’ve got it in hand.”
‘Maybe the secretary was trying to soften the blow, but it was evident that things weren’t in hand at all. The Hall was very dilapidated,’ Eleanor adds.
A desultory £4,000 in government compensation barely scratched the surface, but Sir Gyles was a resourceful man, fit for extraordinary times.
While he might have described himself as a Desert Rat, his friends were more fulsome. In his autobiography, Sir John Gielgud – actor and theatre director – called Sir Gyles thoughtful, dignified, gracious, scholarly and ‘profoundly loveable’ – a sentiment echoed locally, too. There are tenant farmers and estate gardeners who knew him and who all say the same thing: here was a man without airs and graces, and who was totally approachable.
‘We had a recent visit from one of his cousins from Ireland,’ Eleanor says. ‘She told us that when she stayed at Lamport, Gyles brought in her breakfast tray. She’d get out of be
