Lemmons, also known as Gladsmuir and Gladsmuir House, was the home of the English novelists Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) and Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) on the south side of Hadley Common, Barnet, on the border of north London and Hertfordshire, England.Keulks, Gavin (2003). Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950. University of Wisconsin Press, p. 135.
The couple bought the Georgian villa, built around 1830, for £48,000 at auction in 1968, along with its eight acres of land, and lived there until 1976. The house had been registered as a Grade II listed building in 1949 under the name Gladsmuir, previously known as Gladsmuir House.Leader Zachary (2006). The Life of Kingsley Amis. Jonathan Cape, pp. 607, 617. Howard restored an earlier name, Lemmons; the next owners changed it back to Gladsmuir.Howard, Elizabeth Jane (2011) . Slipstream. Pan Macmillan, p. 374. For the change back to Gladsmuir, see Norrie, Ian (1993). Barnet in old photographs. A. Sutton, p. 113.
Howard and Amis lived at Lemmons with Howard's mother and brother, two artist friends, and Amis's three children, including the novelist Martin Amis. Several of the family's novels were written at Lemmons: Kingsley's The Green Man (1969) and The Alteration (1976); Howard's Odd Girl Out (1972) and Mr. Wrong (1975); and Martin's The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975).Leader 2006, pp. 614, 633, 645.
The poet Cecil Day-Lewis stayed at Lemmons in the spring of 1972, when he was dying of cancer, accompanied by his wife, Jill Balcon, and their children, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tamasin Day-Lewis.Sansom, Ian (3 April 2010). "Great dynasties of the world: The Day-Lewises". The Guardian. He wrote his last poem in the house, "At Lemmons", and died there shortly afterwards.Stanford, Peter (2007). C Day-Lewis: A Life. Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 318. Ian Sansom writes that, for the brief period that the Amises, Howards, Day-Lewises and others were in residence, Lemmons became "the most brilliantly creative household in Britain".
History of the house 16th–19th century
The land and an earlier house were owned by Henry Bellamy in 1584. The Quilter family owned the land from 1736 to 1909; it consisted of 23 acres in 1778. The present house was built around 1830. A Major Charles Hemery appears to have lived in the house in or around 1881.Clarke, William Spencer (1881). The Suburban Homes of London, p. 31; Burke, Bernard; Burke, Ashworth Peter (1910). A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage and Baronetage, the Privy Council, Knightage and Companionage. Harrison, p. 2162.
The writer Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, rented a house on Hadley Common from January 1836 until the early summer of 1838, possibly Gladsmuir, shortly after the death of her husband and one of her sons. According to Robert Bradford's biography of Martin Amis, Jane Howard discovered the Trollope connection from the house's papers and maintained that Frances Trollope had purchased it, although a purchase seems unlikely given the Trollope family's finances.Bradford, Robert (2012). Martin Amis: The Biography. Pegasus, p. 94. Frances Trollope and four of her children moved to Hadley Common from Belgium, where they had fled to escape debtors' prison in England. When Trollope's husband (the debtor) died, the threat of prison receded."Frances Trollope", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her daughter Emily had tuberculosis, and her doctor advised that winter in England would benefit her.
Trollope described the property as "her pretty cottage" and a "pleasant house with a good garden on the common at Hadley, near Barnet". R. H. Super writes that Trollope invited eight guests to stay with her one Christmas, in addition to her family, so referring to it as a cottage was somewhat misleading.Super, R. H. (1991). The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope. University of Michigan Press, pp. 31–34. The move did not, in the end, help Emily, who died in February 1836. She was buried in the nearby churchyard at the Church of St Mary the Virgin. Anthony Trollope later placed one of his characters in The Bertrams (1859) in a dull country house in Hadley.Super 1991, p. 32; Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams, 1859.
20th century Jane Howard found that the house had previously been called Lemmons, and decided to restore that name.Howard 2011, p. 374. It was known as Gladsmuir when they bought it—from Gladsmuir Heath, the former name of Hadley Common, site of the Battle of Barnet in 1471 during the Wars of the Roses.Cussans, John Edwin (1879). History of Hertfordshire. Chatto, p. 221. The house had been registered under that name as a Grade II listed building in 1949, previously known as Gladsmuir House, with an address in Hadley Wood Road. As of 2014 the address was listed as Hadley Common.
Made of red brick with a stucco trim, the house has five bays, two storeys, sash windows, and a central Doric porch with fluted columns and entablature with triglyphs. There is a later extension and a detached housekeeper's cottage, Gladsmuir Cottage. The panelled double doors lead to two internal staircases and over 20 rooms, including eight bedrooms, three reception rooms and a large kitchen. One room contains late-18th-century medallions.Amis, Martin (2000). Experience: A Memoir. Miramax, p. 184.
In the three-acre garden, when Jane and Kingsley lived there, there was an old barn that was itself a listed building, a conservatory, a gravel drive, three descending lawns, a rose garden, cedar trees, a mulberry tree (where Lucy Snowe, their cat, was buried), and a weathervane dating to 1775. At the end of the garden, through a five-bar gate, there lay a five-acre meadow that also belonged to the property and had been let out to two local women for their horses.For the weathervane, Cherry and Pevsner 1998, p. 186; for the rest, Amis 2000, pp. 183–184, and Howard 2002, p. 372, 407.
Lemmons household Residents
Amis and Howard married in 1965 after meeting two years earlier at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, which she had helped to organize. She had been married twice: in 1947 she had left her first husband, Peter Scott, with whom she had a daughter, and in 1963 she divorced her second, Jim Douglas-Henry.Howard 2011, pp. 219, 332–338, 348.Brown, Andrew (9 November 2002). "Loves and letters", The Guardian. Kingsley was still married to his first wife, Hilly Bardwell, when he and Jane began an affair.Amis 2000, pp. 31–33. The couple first lived together in an Edwardian house at 108 Maida Vale, London, W2. They bought Lemmons at auction for £48,000 in 1968, and lived there from 28 November that year.Howard 2011, pp. 364, 372, 374. Kingsley wrote to the poet Philip Larkin in April 1969: "This is a bloody great mansion, in the depths of the country though only 15 miles from the centre, and with lots of room for you to come and spend the night."Leader, Zachary (2000). The Letters of Kingsley Amis. HarperCollins, p. 714.
The core household consisted of Jane and Kingsley; Jane's mother, Katherine ("Kit"), a former ballerina, who died in the house in 1972; one of Jane's brothers, Colin Howard ("Monkey"); and artists Sargy Mann and Terry Raybauld.Keulks 2003, p. 135. The housekeeper, Lilly Uniacke, lived in Gladsmuir Cottage.Leader 2006, p. 609; Howard 2011, p. 375. Kingsley's children, Philip, Martin and Sally Amis, lived in the house from time to time, mostly outside term time, or at weekends in the case of Philip and Martin; the children were 17, 16 and 12 when Kingsley and Jane married.Leader 2006, pp. 630, 668.
It was Jane who encouraged Martin to start reading, beginning with Jane Austen,Stout, Mira (4 February 1990). "Martin Amis: Down London's Mean Streets", The New York Times. and who "salvaged" his education, for which he said he owed her an "unknowable debt".Amis 2000, p. 121. After 12 months at Sussex Tutors (a Brighton crammer) in 1967–1968, he passed six O-levels and 3 A-levels, and won an exhibition to Exeter College, Oxford,Amis 2000, pp. 13–14 (for Sussex Tutors), 126 (for the exhibition), 173 (for Exeter). graduating in 1971 with a congratulatory first in English.Walsh, John (21 March 2014). "Martin Amis: Novelist has lost none of his force in pronouncing on the way we live", The Independent. Martin lived at Lemmons until Christmas 1971, after which he started work at The Times Literary Supplement and moved to central London, visiting his father and Jane at weekends. He shared a maisonette in or near Pont Street, SW1, with a friend, Rob Henderson,Bradford 2012, p. 87. who was the basis of Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers (1973), Gregory Riding in Success (1978), and Kenrik in The Pregnant Widow (2011).Bilmes, Alex (4 April 2011). "Martin Amis is not a jerk" , GQ, p. 3. Also see Harry de Quetteville, "Martin Amis: me and my 'terrible twin', The Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2009. When they ran out of money, Martin found himself a "dust-furred bed-sit in Earls Court".Amis 2000, p. 25. He described Lemmons in Experience (2000):
The house on Hadley Common was a citadel of riotous solvency—not just at Christmas but every weekend. There was a great sense of in-depth back-up, a cellar, a barrel of malt whisky, a walk-in larder: proof against snowstorm or shutdown. I think it was that Christmas morning , that all four Amises, with breakfast trays on their laps, watched Journey to the Centre of the Earth—then the visit to the pub, then the day-long, the week-long lunch. And with Kingsley the hub of all humour and high spirits, like an engine of comedy ... I felt so secure in that house—and, clearly, so insecure elsewhere—that I always experienced a caress of apprehension as I climbed into the car on Sunday night, any Sunday night, and headed back to the motorway and Monday, to the flat or the flatlet, the street, the job, the tramp dread, the outside world.Amis 2000, p. 53.
Novels Kingsley wrote ten books at Lemmons, in his wood-panelled study on the ground floor, including The Green Man (1969), What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (1970), Girl, 20 (1971), The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), Ending Up (1974), The Alteration (1976), and part of Harold's Years (1977).Leader 2006, pp. 614, 633, 642–643, 645. For the wood-panelled study, p. 620; for the ground floor, Bradford 2012, p. 88. Jane finished Something in Disguise (1969), Odd Girl Out (1972), and Mr. Wrong (1975), although she spent most of her time looking after the house.Keulks 2003, p. 136.
Martin wrote his first two novels, The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975), in his bedroom above Kingsley's study.Amis 2000, p. 363; Bradford 2012, p. 104. The first draft of The Rachel Papers was started in July 1970 and finished in September 1972; it won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974, which Kingsley had won in 1955 for Lucky Jim (1954).Bradford 2012, p. 104.
Guests
Alexandra "Gully" Wells, step-daughter of the philosopher A. J. Ayer and Martin's girlfriend for about 10 years from 1969, said of Lemmons that "a more hospitable household would be impossible to imagine".For their relationship, Amis 2000, p. 245; for the quote, Bradford 2012, p. 90. Tamasin Day-Lewis wrote:
Lemmons was full of impossibly glamorous older people and a core commune of writers, painters and inventors; even the dogs and cats shared a communal basket, and there were always stray writers and publishers whose marriages were unravelling. The drink flowed as freely as an open artery at family dinners.Day-Lewis, Tamasin (17 February 2010). "Tamasin Day-Lewis: Am I the 'leggy temptress' in Martin Amis's new novel?". The Daily Telegraph.