Hello and welcome to the National Trust podcast. In the last episode, we travelled to Bexley Heath to Red House. Once the home to the famous designer William Morris. In this mini episode, we'll be discovering the secret creations hidden there.
I am Robynn Finney and I am the House and Gardens Manager at the National Trust, Red House. So we are currently standing in William and Jane Morris's bedroom at Red House.
Oh my word, this is extraordinary. I mean, I feel like I've walked in to the corner of a medieval chapel in a parish church somewhere in, in England. What is this? It's some medieval fakery, tomfoolery and fun. What is it?
Well, in a way all of the decoration in the house is to some extent medieval fakery. But yeah you would be definitely right to put a church analogy on this. We are looking at a very exciting discovery that was discovered in 2013 behind a wardrobe. In this room there had always been a wardrobe covering this wall, 1950s wardrobe. What you could see behind one of the shelves were one figure. So there was definitely one figure there.
So we thought we remove the wardrobe. We'll take this opportunity to do some investigation thinking that we would just be uncovering it and finding one figure. And the conservators worked through January and February because that's when we're closed, it's absolutely freezing in this house, painstaking work. What we found as the work went on, figure after figure. So we've ended up with five figures on this wall. But at this point, you have got big blobs of poly filler in it.
You've got wallpaper still coming up. We found this text at the bottom of it. And I mean, you try and read it now, I'm sure you can't read what it says. But you know, this is kind of social media in action and how our visitors and supporters really feed into our knowledge. Former House Manager James Breslin, took a photo of the text. He put it on social media. Overnight somebody from America had got back and said that's from Genesis. So obviously, our curatorial team then looked into it.
Absolutely right. And suddenly it all made sense. So we are looking at the story of Genesis painted on the wall of William and Jane's bedroom. "
Now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden? We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. But God did say, you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it."
So from left to right, you have got Adam, you have got a tree with a serpent around it and you have Eve recoiling from the serpent. You then have a man holding an ark in the middle, Noah, Rachel and Jacob. And can you just see his little ladder coming up in the corner there? So suddenly it makes sense! It's Genesis! Yes, you're absolutely right. And then we could understand the wall painting a lot better. "
She took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together."
It may not be the most obvious choice to have on the wall of your bedroom. But that is what we've got. But we'd always been kind of why Genesis? Why Genesis in your bedroom? So the brand new piece of research that has helped us piece together why we have Genesis in the bedroom is our curator Tessa Wild has discovered in an Arthurian story of Sir Degrevant that a very in depth description of his bedroom. "
Her bed was of azure, With tester and celure, With a bright bordure Compassed full clean And all a story, as it was, Of Yodyne and Amadus; Perrye in ilka place, And poppinjays of green. The scutcheons of many a knight, Of gold and Cyprus was in dight; Broad Bezants and bright, And true -loves between. "
And inside Sir Degrevant's Bedroom is a hanging with the characters from Genesis on it. So the thinking now is that the idea and the decoration of the bedroom was that you were actually stepping into a scene from Sir Degrevant and from an Arthurian legend. You have areas where the the figures stop quite briefly or where a tree looks very skinny. It's designed to look like draping fabric. So the fabric goes up and then it would have been pinned up and pinned.
So you will see folds in the fabric where the the people or the trees kind of fold inwards. It's had wallpaper on it, it has had poly filler in it. It has had a wardrobe in front of it. So we can't read those lines and that fluidity in the fabric as they would have then. But- so everything's reversible. It was then touched up with watercolour, which is why we have this room blacked out just to help visitors be able to read it slightly better because it had been so damaged.
Thanks for listening to this mini episode of the National Trust podcast. If you've been enjoying the series so far, please give us a rating or a review on Apple podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe to the series to hear next month's episode where Alan Power will be your guide through the peaceful, exotic and playful garden of Glendurgan in Cornwall. Until then from me, James Grasby. Goodbye.