Recent History of the Mount Edgcumbe Country Park
by Dr Malcolm Cross
The wars of the 20th century were distressingly unkind to the Edgcumbe family and the estate they had built up over five centuries. Immediately after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, things were more or less as they had always been. A combination of a huge landed estate - mostly in Cornwall - totalling more than 20,000 acres, when combined with highly profitable mining activities for the metal ores that sustained the Industrial Revolution, brought in an income that served to sustain a leisured life for the family. They were able to enjoy an enviable existence in an enlarged house set within one of the most beautiful landscapes in Western Europe. Inevitably perhaps, after the zenith of creativity that had characterised the 18th century, the following era was less spectacular. It focused more on lifestyle, entertaining interesting visitors and in performing good works for the local community, often linked to the local chapter of the masonic movement. There were also the minor royal sinecures to enjoy, but all this was about to change.
the Second World War (1939-45) brought three further disasters that undermined the estate still further.
The Great War itself brought little disruption but at its close in 1918 the taxes that were imposed to pay for wartime debt forced many landowners to question the wisdom of retaining large estates. Even before the economic slump of the inter-war years, the 5th Earl, Piers Edgcumbe disposed of scores of farms and properties throughout Cornwall., mostly in the period 1918-19. The Second World War (1939-45) brought three further disasters that undermined the estate still further. The most obvious was the destruction of the house itself on 21st March 1941 when an incendiary bomb dropped by the Luftwaffe as part of the ‘Five Night Blitz’ on Plymouth and the dockyard left the house a smouldering ruin with little above ground save for the shells of the four hexagonal corner towers.
Mount Edgcumbe House in ruins. An image from the Earl’s Collection © Mount Edgcumbe House
The second setback was that when Piers Edgcumbe died in 1944 he left no surviving male heir. He had married Edith Villiers daughter of the 5th Earl of Clarendon in May 1911 when he was 46 and she 33. The couple had one son, born on 2 June 1915, who was stillborn and there were no other known pregnancies. His wife predeceased him and in the war years Piers Edgcumbe, aware of a major disjuncture in the family, disposed of more properties including the lease of their house in London and all its contents. When the 6th Earl, the 5th Earl’s cousin Kenelm Edgcumbe, took over, the estate was in very poor shape. Not only was the house a total ruin but the estate itself was run down and its income and reserves severely depleted.
Kenelm Edgcumbe (pictured) was 70 years old when he inherited the estate and he and his wife Lilian, a children’s author, were still grieving over the loss of their only son on the 27th May 1940, another Piers, aged 25 and on active military service as an officer (see Note 1). Kenelm was born and partly educated in Vienna as the son of Richard Edgcumbe posted to Austria as a senior military officer. His father was a literary figure and lover of Italian culture but Kenelm’s career was as an electrical engineer, running with a partner his own engineering company and in later life serving as President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. It is safe to say that he would have known very little indeed about the history of the estate he inherited and almost all the papers relating to repairing this deficit had disappeared in the flames that engulfed the house.
This was an unpromising beginning but it has to be said that Earl and Countess set about their responsibilities with the very best of intentions. One of their first moves was to transfer the family’s old seat at Cotehele to the National Trust as a memorial to their son. This they succeeded in doing while at the same time persuading the government to agree for the first time to offset the taxes that were imposed on the estate following the 5th Earl’s death four years earlier.
Cotehele. Image © Trans Quility 2016
The rubble that was all that remained of the Mount Edgcumbe house was the next major challenge. An approach to the National Trust in 1948 was unsuccessful. Unlike in many allied countries, in the UK war reparations were not extracted from Germany but nonetheless the War Damages Act of 1941 and the War Damages Commission that followed was a route for some (see Note 2). Although the details are still somewhat unclear, it appears that little or no cash was forthcoming down this route for Mount Edgcumbe and the family is reputed to have paid £100,000 (in excess of £3m in 2026) from their own resources. On the other hand the Commission working in partnership with the Ancient Monuments Department (a precursor of Historic England) were responsible for commissioning architect Adrian Gilbert Scott to design a partial rebuild of the old house and that work was carried out between 1958 and 1960/61 using modern steel frame construction methods within the existing walls where serviceable. Curiously, the design is a Georgian-style pastiche whereas the original had evolved over a long period towards a Gothic appearance. None of the extension work carried out in the early 19th century was included in the rebuild and crucially the central elevated section above the saloon was also excluded giving the building a truncated appearance. The delightful conservatory on the south-eastern corner was also omitted.
Image from the Earl’s Collection showing the extended house and conservatory c. 1880 © Mount Edgcumbe House
The 6th Earl died in 1965 at the age of 91 and the title and estate passed to Edward Piers Edgcumbe (1903-1982), Kenelm’s cousin twice removed and a sheep farmer from Parnell near Auckland in New Zealand. Although born in New Zealand, the 7th Earl had been in the UK in the immediate post war years but like his cousin would have known little about the estate or its achievements. He was, however, invited to join his cousin at Mount Edgcumbe and did do so with his wife Effie in 1963. At 62 and with no heir when he inherited the estate, the 7th Earl as a farmer swiftly turned his attention to the best way of retaining the farmland but disposing of the parkland. The result was the approach to Plymouth City Council in the late 1960s to explore a possible sale to that body. The resultant negotiations were protracted and lasted more than three years with the eventual decision to share the cost of the agreed purchase price (£155,000) on a half and half basis with Cornwall Council. This proposal was not without resistance from a number of Cornish councillors deeming the negotiation by the city ‘achieving over the counter something which many would be invader had been unable to gain by force of arms’ (West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 2 October 1969).
The house after reconstruction © M. Corber 2023
The critical issue, aside from the issue of ownership, was that from the outset the goal of the acquisition was to enhance recreational facilities, particularly for residents of Plymouth. The proposals secured the right of the 7th Earl to occupy the newly refurbished house during his lifetime and that indeed is what came to pass. Three-quarters of the funds needed to complete the purchase, which was finally achieved in 1971, came from the Countryside Commission set up in 1968 (meaning that each council had to find under £20k for the purchase). The Countryside Commission of 1968 derives from the post-war perception that the non-availability of open spaces was potentially a danger to social stability because so many families were being bottled up in high rise apartments with little access to the outdoors. The calming and health giving benefits of low cost access to recreational areas was thought particularly relevant for men returning from the services. An unstated but clear assumption was that some men returning would be alarmed to find that their womenfolk had coped perfectly well without them. This is clear from the 1966 white paper Leisure in the Countryside, itself a product of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, which advocated free access to country parks to ‘make it easier for town dwellers to enjoy their leisure in the open, without travelling too far’. More than 250 country parks were established through this process although many have subsequently been sold or redeveloped.
‘free access to country parks to ‘make it easier for town dwellers to enjoy their leisure in the open, without travelling too far’
By using funds from the Countryside Commission, which ceased to exist in 1999 when it was merged with the Rural Development Commission to form the Countryside Agency which has in turn evolved into Natural England, two outcomes were inevitable. One was a focus on the natural world, rather than anything to do with history or heritage, and a second was the principle of free access regardless of the costs of maintenance. Considerable strides were made in clearing the neglect to the landscape in the immediate aftermath of the completion of the purchase of 865 acres of parkland in mid-1971 and by the first of July of that year 600 acres were available for the public to enjoy.
Meanwhile, in the years immediately thereafter, there was a national reawakening of interest in Britain’s heritage and landscape history, culminating in the National Heritage Act of April 1984. It was this act that created the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. Surveys were carried out in many places to determine which landscapes were worthy of this protection and, where appropriate, the grade that should be attached to them. A presentation was made in 1984 by Mavis Batey of the Gardens History Society to the Joint Committee of councillors from the two authorities that managed the new park. Not only was this the first serious reflection on a remarkable historic legacy but it also left a reader in no doubt that the parkland deserved the highest possible protection. Mount Edgcumbe was listed as a Grade I landscape in June 1987 on the new register to stress its exceptional historical importance over and above the 56 listed structures and five scheduled monuments that the parkland also contained. The Joint Committee responded with some enthusiasm to this new challenge and in a later meeting agreed to undertake many of the proposals for repair and restoration contained in the Batey Report.
. . no doubt that the parkland deserved the highest possible protection.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons much of this initial enthusiasm began to dissipate in the years thereafter and by 1996, there was another change of direction; this time towards regarding the costs of maintaining the landscape as unsustainable and in favour of commercial developments to enable it to pay its own way. Mount Edgcumbe was by no means alone in experiencing these pressures. In most similar cases, however, the solution was perceived as developing a focus to take advantage of public willingness to contribute where they could benefit not just from access to beautiful spaces but also to understand and enjoy the stories associated with how they had evolved. The National Trust is the obvious example with just under 26m visitors to its properties in 2024 -25. The Trust has a portfolio which includes 192 historic houses, and a budget of £221m in conservation work alone from a total income of £766m. What has happened at Mount Edgcumbe is quite different. Partly because of the constraints imposed by the terms of the legislation, partly by the form that the commercialisation policy has taken and partly by the lack of awareness of the historical context, the landscape has suffered from a crippling shortage of financial support culminating in the cessation of regular maintenance payments from the two councils in 2022-23.
Notes
1) Piers Edgcumbe died with a fellow officer when their armoured car received a direct hit from a German 88mm shell at Esquelbecq near Dunkirk. He was buried in the village cemetery as an unknown officer but after many years research he was correctly identified and given an appropriate headstone.
2) By 1964, when most payments ceased, more than 4m claims covering 3.5m properties had been settled at a cost of £1.3bn (approximately £35bn in 2025.