THREE CHEERS FOR UNTIDINESS! (AUTUMN 2025)

 ‘Wow!’ exclaimed our 12-year-old grand-daughter Lucy as she saw the shambles of more than 80 years of clutter hidden in our garage. She settled down to explore. We both agreed that every family home should have something similar—a museum of untidily stacked curios and unfamiliar objects to surprise and delight visitors, especially children.

Lucy’s reaction reminded me of how, as a child, the sister of a well known composer described her feelings as she explored the ‘rambling and dilapidated’ property at 31 Station Road in Budleigh Salterton.

Budleigh artist Joyce Dennys had suggested that the family move to the town at the outbreak of World War Two, and then seek a permanent home away from the London bombs. ‘The house was thrilling!’ the sister recalled in Anthony Meredith’s biography of her famous brother, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. 

‘I used to sneak about, taking everything in, and I went up to the attic once and it was full of assegais, masks and marvellous red-leather volumes full of paintings of butterflies and insects.’

Its owner, the elderly unmarried daughter of the novelist G. A. Henty, seen here in a photo of 1902, was remembered for being as strange as the stuff in her attic. ‘Miss Henty was an amazing personality, really quite mad,’ reads the biography. ‘Among her many eccentricities, for example, was a terror of getting bats in her wispy grey hair.’  Today, G.A. Henty’s books of adventure and historical fiction for children are viewed by many people with suspicion for what has been described as their racist and jingoistic content.












 

31 Station Road, also known as ‘Shandford’, has been in the news recently because of its closure and subsequent sale as a care home.  

Funds were used to build almshouses administered by the Shandford Trust. 

In 1939, ‘Shandford’ was what has been described as ‘a modest guest house’.

 

But my childhood was when we spoke with respect of the British Empire. Henty was simply echoing the imperialist theme expressed in that famous Victorian masterpiece ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, painted partly a few yards from Budleigh beach by his near-contemporary Sir John Everett Millais. In my innocence, I admired Millais’ work on the wall of my Gloucestershire village school, and read Henty’s novels enthusiastically.

Some of the books can still be found in the chaos of my study. I wonder what will happen to them, and what became of those assegais, masks and red leather volumes.

Miss Henty died on 22 July 1941. Her grave is in St Peter’s Burial Ground on Moor Lane in Budleigh.

‘Shandford’, pictured here before it was sold in 2020, was enlarged to become a care home in the 1950s, and was no doubt thoroughly decluttered.

Meg Peacocke in 2014. Photo: Michael Downes

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett died in New York on 24 December 2012, having settled in the US. But his sister, Margaret Ruth, known as Meg, is still alive, now in her nineties. She is a respected poet, writing as M.R. Peacocke.