Robert Aickman: Worton Court

Worton Court c.1945

One of the highlights of Robert Aickman’s autobiography, The Attempted Rescue, is is his evocation of Worton Court, a historic William-and-Mary house that stood in Isleworth, Middlesex, and which was at one time the home of his great uncle, Harry Heldmann. During his childhood, Aickman stayed at Worton Court with his mother for ‘frequent periods’, and it provided to be a model for him of how he believed life should be lived. He wrote:

The idea that my Great-Uncle’s ménage would represent a splendour which later in my own lifetime would be unattempted even by a prominent chairman of companies, would have seemed inconceivable, pessimist though I already was. I am glad to have known Versailles in its greatness . . .

 Aickman described, over many pages, Worton Court’s four reception rooms, with the library, billiard room and study, the ten bedrooms, hallways, corridors, and wine cellars, noting also that there were servants’ quarters (which he was not allowed to enter). He described the fascinating furniture, textiles, pictures and ornaments (including ‘a complete suit of black Japanese armour’). Additionally, there were extensive gardens. His great uncle’s behaviour at meal times was described as ‘patrician’ and the young Aickman determined ‘to soar’ to the same state when older. He recounted his great uncle’s many achievements, and described his forceful personality, summed up in the portrait:

The animals barked around him as he strode, a white-haired Dionysus.

 

 

Alice and Harry Heldman

 

Aickman seems to have been under the impression that there was a large family fortune and an impressive social standing that was lost following the death of his great uncle, and then his great aunt. However, unknown to Aickman, Worton Court was only ever leased by Harry Heldmann, a self-made man who worked in the City of London. At great uncle Harry’s death in 1932, he did leave a large amount of money in his will, but this was dispersed through subsequent generations. Despite his complaints, it also resulted in a small legacy for Aickman himself. Great Aunt Alice, Harry’s sister, continued to live in the house until her death in 1938.

 

 

Worton Court Sale Particulars

 

 

Cutting from Middlesex Chronicle, 25th February 1939

 

The 1939 particulars of the sale of contents of Worton Court corroborate Aickman’s account of the lavish style in which the Heldmanns lived. Sadly, the estate was sold to a property speculator just before the war began, and the house stood empty and derelict for several years before being pulled down. When I started to research Aickman’s biography I discovered that I had just missed buying a set of photographs of Worton Court from an online auction. Intriguingly, one had written on the back:

 

 

Some say it was a prison. 

But on the floor was a sheet of music with the title “Home Sweet Home”

 The photographs seem to have been taken in April 1940 by Herbert Jones, but the provenance of the inscription is impossible to research. It is interesting that Aickman also suggested that everything was not necessarily unalloyed happiness at Worton Court. In The Attempted Rescue, Aickman has the fascinating tendency to undermine and even attack that which he claims to have loved. Writing about a ‘dim daguerreotype’ of his great grand­father that he salvaged from Worton Court, he wrote:

 

I do not care to forget the past, indefinite though it was, and mostly, at the time, very unpleas­ant.

making the reader question whether his feelings should really be called ‘nostalgia’, that is, a sentimental longing for the past. However, one must remember that he complained that the Inland Waterways Association was a:

. . . quest for happiness in a world where happiness is impossible.

Aickman’s nostalgia was knowingly romantic. The ‘dim daguerreotype’ is meant to have included a painting of flowers which Aickman attributed to a Great Aunt, and this was bought by him at the Worton Court sale in 1938:

I often gaze at it [the portrait of flowers], recalling a past I never knew, of which, indeed, I might even claim to have been consciously deprived. . . . It stood, when I was young, in the ornate Worton Court Drawing Room, to the left of the first door through to the Dining Room, on a moulding which ran round the room (including the Dining Room door) about three feet from the floor.

which sounds very much like nostalgia, as does the fact that on the mantelpiece of his various homes Aickman always gave pride of place to an Ormolu clock with match­ing urn garnitures that also came from Wor­ton Court. Throughout his life it had an almost hurried, though impercep­tible tick, and would strike the hours (and half hour) with a slow, solemn and quiet authority.

   When Aickman’s Great Aunt Alice died, his father apparently instructed him to go to Worton Court to ‘take charge’. Although the servants were in a ‘vague’ panic, he viewed Alice’s body in her ‘congested, dark-green, necromantic room’, before going downstairs where he ‘rallied the servants with mysterious success’.

   Aickman seems to have spent time at Worton Court at this time, suggesting that he was given certain duties, although his mother’s sister, Aunt (Madge) Shaw actually moved in to oversee the breaking up of the Heldmann estate,

  

. . . and the great, dark house became almost gay for the months that the formalities lasted. Nothing in any of our times had so become the old place as the leaving of it. One’s mind was at last free to see how beautiful it was; and with the extra beauty of tragedy added, for demolition and destruction could hardly be avoided.

   Aickman spent time in the surroundings to which he aspired, and he is known to have invited both Audrey Linley and Edith Taylor (‘Eve’) there to dinner on occasion, although the house was presumably being emptied and prepared for sale. Aunt Shaw would have been letting the servants go, and the contents were being by the auctioneers in preparation for the sale.

   Aickman wrote to Edith Taylor on 3rd December 1939, with reference to her visit to Worton Court shortly before:

Sweet one,
   The room where you dined is empty; and the garden where I am so very glad you walked that night, is overgrown and the long pergola is fallen. The windows are broken, the glass in the really magnificent library bookcases is likewise, three enormous boards announce Luxury Houses in this Delightful Old Garden, and four such houses of an almost incredible, quite monumental nastiness have duly appeared in the meadow in front of the house. . . .
   I am filled with distaste for the sheer staleness of a people which will pay £795 (the price exacted) for houses of such utter nastiness; people to whom this Delightful Old Garden seems a delightful place of residence. . . .
   When I see you again I will give you a dead rose. Plucked, I could say, from the garden, which an age ago was my family’s, but is now the roosting dump of men and women without souls (necessarily in that they live in such a place). I could say it, but it would not be true. There were no roses blooming; and if they had been, I should have forgotten to pluck one.

Aickman was a morbid romantic. He knew that the past was not just irrecoverable, but had likely never been as he enjoyed imagining it. He aspired to the impossible, knowing that it could never be gained, and he seems to have found perverse comfort in this. It enabled him to attack the present day for not being how he fantasised the past.

He noted that Worton Court was finally pulled down after the war:

The past is condensed into the name of one of the new suburban roads. It has been called Heldmann Close. It is a cul-de-sac.

   This is reported with obvious sadness at the passing of greatness, testifying to the crass philistinism of the present, but it is possible to also detect a relish in this justifying of his innate pessimism.

 

Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2022

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Heather Smith, and Artellus, Ltd.

All photos, unless otherwise stated, are copyright Estate of Robert Aickman/British Library/R.B. Russell, and are not to be reproduced without permission and acknowledgement.