Making a modern castle

Castle Drogo, Devon, part II A property of the National Trust, In the second of two articles, Clive Aslet looks at the challenges of building a 20th-century castle and the recent work of the National Trust to restore it

- Clive Aslet

THE construction of Castle Drogo was a task of daunting complexity. As we heard last week, Lutyens conceived a gargantuan modern castle for his client, Julius Drewe, on a remote and exposed site. The original plans were considerably reduced in ambition, but the project still required scores of masons, carpenters and labourers for 20 years. Considering that four of those coincided with the First World War, the miracle is that it was ever finished. In this, the hero of the piece is John Walker, Drewe’s agent on site, without whom Drogo would not have been built.

A Yorkshireman, Walker had previously been Clerk of Works at various country houses, including Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, which, from 1905, was being rebuilt after a fire. He appears at Drogo in 1912 and his work over the next 17 years can be followed through the copies of his letters kept in the castle. Each time Walker wrote to Drewe, Lutyens or a supplier, he put his freshly handwritten letter in a press that took a faint copy by a chemical reaction on very thin paper— a method that had been used since the mid- Victorian period and was being replaced, in the age of the typewriter, by carbon paper. The copies were later bound together in fat letter-books. There are about 6,000 letters.

Everything on the estate fell to Walker’s care, down to organising the celebrations at Drewsteignton for Adrian Drewe’s coming of age and, similarly, for the election of another Drewe son, Cedric, as an MP. The main focus of his energy, however, was the building work and an early task was recruiting masons at 8½d per hour for time worked (they had to pay their own railway fares and lodgings).