Scenes from the life of a Mansion guide
By Marjorie Carter (1930 - 2025)
Soon after moving to Suffolk in 1983, I discovered the wonderful Christchurch Mansion and thereafter, whenever I happened to be in Ipswich, I endeavoured to find time to spend in wandering around the House and imagining how it might have been in former times.
Several years later, Rae Wright, a friend who was at that time a Mansion Guide, knowing that I was looking for interesting voluntary work, suggested that I might care to apply for training as a Guide. I assumed, as probably many aspiring Guides have done, that it would mostly consist of standing around looking helpful and slightly unapproachable, like many National Trust guides I had observed in various stately homes. How wrong could I be!
Five of us had applied at the same time: Joan, Erica, Robert, Sarah and myself, and Mary Halliwell was persuaded to take us on for training. So every Wednesday afternoon for several months we presented ourselves at the Mansion to absorb the 'core story' of the House and its former occupants, to look in depth at its rooms and occasionally to have outings into the Town to learn a little of some of the historic events which affected the lives of those former owners. From time to time, the afternoon's training was devoted to one of us being asked to reveal how much - or how little - we knew, and eventually, the following Spring, we were launched on to the unsuspecting world of casual visitors with half an hour to spare who might be interested in being shown some of the treasures of this very special House.
Sometimes, we have been invited to assist the Curators and other Museums staff in matters far removed from our usual voluntary work. One morning several of us found ourselves polishing the copper cauldrons and saucepans from the kitchen, under the tutelage of Carrie Willis. (That will teach us to mention that the pots and pans could do with a clean!) Following repairs to the Mansion roof, some of us spent one grubby but enjoyable summer acting as porters in the attics, sorting out cupboards re-discovering treasures, and unwrapping paintings returned from safe-keeping elsewhere so that they could be properly catalogued by the curators. There were also days in the basement of the Art School, making a workable catalogue of the Fine Arts books, temporarily housed in that rather damp environment.
Visitors to the Mansion are many and various, and occasionally we would have to find ways of dealing with unexpected or amusing incidents. It was not unknown for generous members of the public sometimes to express their gratitude for a tour by trying to press a tip into our hands. This always presents an opportunity for us to explain about the work of the Friends, and to draw attention to the collection chest in the Great Hall. On one occasion, however, it was not coins but a packet of biscuits which was pressed into my reluctant hands. The young man had apparently taken advantage of a 2-for-1 offer in a local supermarket, decided be didn't need the spare packet and thought I'd be a grateful recipient. Well, the biscuits clearly couldn't be inserted into the collection chest, and the Guides would certainly be grateful for an addition to their refreshment resources, so I really had no choice but to accept them. A more disconcerting incident occurred at the end of a short tour I had been conducting, when a middle-aged American lady in the party burst into tears, hugged me and said I reminded her of her grandmother! This certainly wasn't the sort of situation that had been discussed in our training session ....
The Guides continue to meet on Wednesday afternoons, once a month during the Summer season and usually fortnightly in the winter. Often we hardly come across each other during 'working hours' unless we're sharing a particularly large group of visitors, so it is a good opportunity to catch up and exchange news and information. It's also a convenient time to continue our training sessions, particularly for newer Guides, although the seasoned Guides are always glad to remind themselves of places and things they once knew so well. Sometimes a Guide will give us all the benefit of his/her research into a particular aspect of the House or its collections, and occasionally an expert in a particular field may be invited to talk to us - for the price of a cup of tea and a biscuit or slice of cake. We are always trying to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the families who once owned the Mansion: the Withypolls, the Devereux and the Fonnereaus.
Questions always abound: why, for instance, didn't Thomas Fonnereau and his long-time partner, Elizabeth Rose, get married? And why is it impossible to find a portrait of Leicester Devereux, 6th Viscount Hereford, who married Elizabeth Withypoll and thereby inherited the Christchurch and Sudbourne Estates? Those three families sometimes seem as close to us as our own relations: we know so much and yet so little about them.
(Sic)