Penrhyn Castle

In the 15th century, the Penrhyn estate was the centre of a large landholding developed by Gwilym ap Griffith. The land had originally been granted to his ancestor Ednyfed Fychan, Seneschal to Llywelyn the Great.[1] Despite losing his lands temporarily during the Glyndŵr Rising, ap Griffith regained them by 1406 and began the construction of a fortified manor house and adjoining chapel at Penrhyn, which became his family's main home.[1]

Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn of the first creation

The fortunes of the Pennant family were begun in the late-17th century by a former soldier, Gifford Pennant. Settling in Jamaica, he built up one of the largest estates on the island, eventually comprising four or five slave plantations for the cultivation of sugar cane. His son, Edward, rose to become Chief Justice of Jamaica and by the beginning of the late 18th century the family had accumulated sufficient funds to return to England, invest their profits in the development of their English and Welsh estates, and manage their West Indian properties as absentee landlords.[2]

Edward's grandson, Richard Pennant (1737–1808), acquired the Penrhyn estate in the 18th century, in part from his father, John Pennant, a Liverpool merchant, and in part from his wife, Ann Susannah Pennant, the only child of Hugh Warburton, an army officer.[3] Richard expended his sugar profits on the creation and subsequent development of his North Wales estate, centred on Penrhyn. Recognising the potential for the industrialisation of slate production, he greatly expanded the activities of his main slate mine, Penrhyn Quarry, and invested heavily in the development of the transportation infrastructure necessary for the export of his slate products.[4] A major road-building operation culminated in the creation of Port Penrhyn on the North-Wales coast as the fulcrum of his operations that saw the Bethesda quarries become the world's largest producer of slate by the early 19th century.[5] The profits from sugar and slate enabled Pennant to commission Samuel Wyatt to rebuild the medieval house as a "castellated Gothic" castle.[6]

Richard Pennant was elected Member of Parliament for Liverpool and sat for the city until elevated to the Irish peerage as 1st Baron Penrhyn in 1783. Between 1780 and 1790 he made over thirty speeches defending the slave trade against abolitionist attacks,[7] and became so influential that he was made chairman of the West India Committee, an informal alliance of some 50 MPs dedicated to opposing abolition.[8]

George Hay Dawkins-Pennant

George Hay Dawkins-Pennant (1764–1840) inherited the Penrhyn Estate on Richard Pennant's death in 1808.[9] He continued the approach adopted by his second cousin: developing the Penrhyn Quarry; opposing the abolition of slavery; serving in Parliament; and building at Penrhyn.[10] Dawkins-Pennant's ambitions for his castle, however, far exceeded those of Richard Pennant for his - the building that Thomas Hopper created for him between 1820 and 1837 is one of the largest castles in Britain.[11] The cost of the construction of this vast house is uncertain, and difficult to quantify as many of the materials came from the family's own forests and quarries and much of the labour from their industrial workforce. Cadw's estimation suggests the castle cost the Pennant family around £150,000, equivalent to some £50m in current values.[12][lower-alpha 1]

The German aristocrat and traveller Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau recorded his visit to Penrhyn in his memoirs, Tour of a German Prince, published in 1831.[14] He noted the ingenious design of the bell pulls; "a pendulum is attached to each which continues to vibrate for ten minutes after the sound has ceased, to remind the sluggish of their duty."[14] He was even more impressed by the scale of Dawkins-Pennant's ambition; reflecting that castle building, which in the time of William the Conqueror could only be carried out by "mighty" kings, was by the early 19th century, "executed, as a plaything, — only with increased size, magnificence and expense, — by a simple country-gentleman, whose father very likely sold cheeses."[15]

Edward Douglas-Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn of the second creation

The eldest of Dawkins-Pennant's two daughters, Juliana, married an aristocratic Grenadier Guardsman, Edward Gordon Douglas (1800–1886), who, on inheriting the estate in 1840, adopted the hyphenated surname of Douglas-Pennant. Edward, the grandson of the 14th Earl of Morton, was created the 1st Baron Penrhyn (second creation) in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1866. In accordance with his father-in-law's wishes, he assembled a major collection of pictures for the castle. He was succeeded by his son, George Douglas-Pennant, 2nd Baron Penrhyn, in 1886.[16] He was, in turn, succeeded by his son, Edward Douglas-Pennant, 3rd Baron Penrhyn, who lost his eldest son, and two half-brothers, as casualties in World War I.[17]

Hugh Douglas-Pennant, 4th Baron Penrhyn, who inherited the title and estates in 1927, died in June 1949, when the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who, following family tradition, adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and 40,000 acres (160 km²) of land were accepted by the treasury in lieu of death duties and ownership was transferred to the National Trust.[18]

The National Trust has held custodianship of Penrhyn Castle since its transfer by the government in 1951. It has worked to conserve the house and its setting, and develop its attraction to visitors. In 2019/2020 Penrhyn received 139,614 such visitors, an increase over the two previous years (118,833 and 109,395).[19][20] In the 21st century, the Trust has sought to develop its understanding and coverage of the links between the house and colonialism and slavery (see below).[21][22][23] The Trust's 2022 Penrhyn Castle website records: "we are accelerating plans to reinterpret the stories of the painful and challenging histories attached to Penrhyn Castle. This will take time as we want to ensure that changes we make are sustained and underpinned by high quality research."[24][lower-alpha 2] A large collection of Douglas-Pennant family papers is held by Bangor University and was catalogued between 2015 and 2017.[26]

For much of the 20th century, conservation bodies such as the Trust largely ignored the issues of slavery and colonialism in relation to their properties.[28] This position began to change at the very end of the century. In 1995, Alaistair Hennesey published a pioneering article on Penrhyn and slavery in History Today. Of Penrhyn, Hennesey wrote, "there is no building which illustrates so graphically the role which slave plantation profits played in the growth of British economic power."[29] In 2009 the Trust organised a symposium, Slavery and the British Country House, in conjunction with English Heritage and the University of the West of England, which was held at the London School of Economics. At the conference Nicholas Draper (inaugural director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery),[30] discussed the records of the Slave Compensation Commission and their value as a research tool for exploring links between the slave trade and the country house.[31]

The slave ship Lady Penrhyn

In 2020, the Trust published its Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery.[32] The appendix to the report recorded that George Hay Dawkins-Pennant was compensated under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 for being deprived of 764 slaves, being paid £14,683 17s 2d.[33] The report itself provoked a strong reaction. The Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs challenged the Trust's priorities;[34] writing in a joint letter to The Daily Telegraph, "History must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit 'snowflake' preoccupations. A clique of powerful, privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image."[35] The columnist Charles Moore decried the report and stimulated criticism across a range of British media outlets.[36][37][38] A complaint against the Trust's report was lodged with the Charity Commission.[39][lower-alpha 4]

Olivette Otele, Professor of Colonial History and the Memory of Slavery at the University of Bristol, explored the dominant narrative presented at Penrhyn after a visit in 2016. She examined the prevalent history of the Pennants as social, industrial and agrarian improvers and noted the absence of discussion of the slave-owning origins of their wealth.[41] In 2020, the naming of a road in Barry as Ffordd Penrhyn provoked protests over the perceived links with Penrhyn Castle, "the capital of slavery in Wales."[42][43][lower-alpha 5]

Although it had already begun consideration of the links between its properties and the British colonial heritage, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, including the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, led the Trust to acknowledge that these protests had given their efforts a greater impetus. Writing at the time of the interim report's publication, Dr Katie Donnington wrote of the Trust's approach, "Is it scones and tea and a bit of Jane Austen-type fantasy? Does it do critical social history? Or is it a place of escapism where there is a resistance to being confronted with the unsettling realities of empire, race and slavery?"[44]

The Great Strike of 1900–1903 at the Penrhyn Quarry was the longest labour dispute in British history,[46] and left a legacy of lasting bitterness.[47] Its origins lay in earlier instances of industrial unrest relating to the refusal of Lord Penrhyn and his agent to recognise the North Wales Quarrymen's Union.[48] In 2018 local Plaid Cymru councillors accused the Trust of failing to fully recognise the contribution of slate workers to the castle's history.[49]

The 120th anniversary of the strike saw the opening of a commemorative trail, Slate and Strikes in Bethesda. The BBC reported that some inhabitants of the town still declined to visit Penrhyn Castle and resentment against the Douglas-Pennants remained into the 21st-century.[50][51]

The donjon modelled on the keep at Hedingham Castle in Essex

Penrhyn is among the most admired of the numerous mock castles built in the United Kingdom in the 19th century;[64] Christopher Hussey called it, "the outstanding instance of Norman revival."[65] The castle is a picturesque composition that stretches over 450 ft (137 m) from a tall donjon, or keep, containing the family rooms, through the main block built around the earlier house, to the service wing and the stables. Simon Jenkins draws comparisons with Windsor, Arundel and Eastnor.[4] Haslam, Orbach and Voelcker, in their 2009 volume Gwynedd in the Pevsner Buildings of Wales series, describe it as "one of the most enormous houses in Britain" and note its "wholeheartedly Romanesque" style.[11] Coflein records that Hopper and Dawkins-Pennant selected the Neo-Norman, or Romanesque Revival style, as opposed to the increasing fashionable Gothic Revival.[66] Pevsner describes the castle as "a serious work of architecture", noting the "dauntingly fine masonry" construction.[11]

Hopper designed all the principal interiors in a rich but restrained Norman style, with much fine plasterwork and wood and stone carving.[67] The castle also has some specially designed Norman-style furniture, including a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria when she visited in 1859.[lower-alpha 7] The diarist Charles Greville recorded his impressions after a visit in 1841: "a vast pile of a building, and certainly very grand, but altogether, though there are some fine things and some good rooms in the house, the most gloomy place I ever saw, and I would not live there if they made me a present of the castle".[69] Some modern critics have been similarly unimpressed; in his study The Architecture of Wales: From the First to the Twenty-First Centuries, John B. Hilling describes the castle as "nightmarishly oppressive, a most uninviting place to live".[70]

Thomas Hopper (1776–1856) made his reputation as architect to the Prince Regent for whom Hopper designed a conservatory in the Gothic style at Carlton House. He was a versatile architect, whose dictum, "it is an architect's business to understand all styles, and to be prejudiced in favour of none", saw him build in the Neo-Norman style, at Penrhyn and at Gosford Castle in Ireland; the cottage orné style at Craven Cottage; Tudor Revival at Margam Castle; Palladianism at Amesbury Abbey; and Jacobethan at Llanover House.[71] Penrhyn Castle is generally considered to be his best work.[12]

The castle is arranged in three main parts: the donjon, modelled on Hedingham Castle in Essex, which contained accommodation for the Pennant family;[lower-alpha 8] the central block which contains the state rooms; and the service wing and stables. The castle runs on a north–south axis. The scale is immense, its seventy roofs cover an area of over an acre,[12] and its length, at 440 ft (134 m), which makes it impossible to be viewed in its entirety, disguises variations in the plan caused by the Pennants' desire to incorporate, rather than demolish, elements both of the original medieval house, and Wyatt's earlier castle.[11] The main building material is local rubble, lined internally with brick and externally with limestone ashlar. The masonry is of exceptional quality.[12] The main entrance to the castle is by way of a long drive which transverses the length of the castle before doubling back and passing through a gatehouse into a cour d'honneur in front of the central block.[73]

The Grand Hall

The house is entered through a low entrance gallery.[74] This leads into the Grand Hall, which Pevsner considers "a strikingly inventive piece of architecture".[75] Of double height, it resembles the nave or transept of a church.[76] The ceiling forms a triforium supported by compound columns.[12] The hall acts as a junction, to the left entry is to the keep and the family apartments, to the right, the service wing, and ahead stand the state apartments of the main block. A 20th century critic described it as, "about as homely as a railway terminus, admirably suited to house an exhibition of locomotives, or outsize dinosaurs."[76] The stained glass is by Thomas Willement.[12]

Mark Purcell, in his 2019 study, The Country House Library, describes the library at Penrhyn as "not just gargantuan, but exotically and astonishingly opulent."[77] The room is very large and bisected by four, flattened arches. These are plaster, as is the ceiling, but grained and polished to appear as wood.[78] Their decoration, and the design of the arches, draws on that found at the genuinely Norman Church of St Peter at Tickencote in Rutland.[78] The room contains a billiard table constructed entirely of slate and a range of bookcases and furniture designed by Hopper.[78] Haslam, Orbach and Voelcker consider the library the precursor for a long subsequent history of "masculine rooms [for] millionaires".[75] The room still contains the basis of a "good gentleman's library", despite sales of some of the most important and valuable books in the 1950s.[79]

The Drawing Room is the reconstructed Great hall of the medieval house, which Samuel Wyatt had previously incorporated into his late 18th-century remodelling.[12] It follows the library in its vaulting and panelling but the decorative style is lighter and more feminine, reflecting its use as a domain for the female members of the Pennant household.[80] Much of the furniture is again by Hopper. The room has large gilt mirrors at either end. The author Catherine Sinclair, who visited in the 1830s, described one as "the largest mirror ever made in this country".[80][lower-alpha 9]

The Ebony Room is named for its ebony panelling and furniture,[81] although much is in fact ebonised rather than real.[82]

A view up to the lantern at the apex of the Grand Staircase

These two rooms served a range of purposes. Their primary function as rooms for consumption alternated depending on whether the Pennants were receiving guests; the larger and more formal Dining Room was used when they were, the Breakfast Room when the family was alone at the castle.[83] Their secondary function was to serve as picture galleries for much of the large collection of paintings assembled by Edward Douglas-Pennant; the other main reception rooms offering little space for picture hanging due to their design and decoration.[84]

Cadw considers the Grand Staircase, "in many ways the greatest architectural achievement at Penrhyn."[12] It took over ten years to construct,[12] rises the full height of the house culminating in a lantern, its only illumination, and is built of a variety of grey stones decorated with "an orgy of fantastic carving".[85] Haslam, Orbach and Voelcker think it Hopper's tour de force and see parallels with the contemporaneous approach in Gothic Literature, "antiquarian and anarchic, intended to play on the emotions as novels and poems were doing in words."[86]

The State Bedroom

The keep provided accommodation for the family, and important guests, arranged as a series of suites on each of its four main floors. In one of these is the slate bed, intended to accommodate Queen Victoria on her visit in 1859, but within which she refused to sleep.[87] Many of the rooms are carpeted with high-quality Axminster Carpets[88] and with walls papered in handmade Chinese wallpaper.[89]

Even by the standards of large, highly variegated, 19th-century country houses, Penrhyn is exceptionally well provided for through its range of service buildings. Rooms within the house include a butler's pantry, a servants' hall, offices for the estate manager and the housekeeper, and the kitchen, with separate still room, pantry and pastry room. Many functions are allocated their own towers, all designed by Hopper to reinforce the impression of a multi-turreted castle. These include the ice tower, the dung tower and the housemaids' tower. The stables are similarly designed to present the appearance of a fortress gatehouse.[12] On the wider estate are located an extensive Home Farm[75] and a range of gate lodges. Not all of these structures have appealed to architectural critics. Mowl and Earnshaw, in their study of lodges and gatehouses Trumpet at a Distant Gate, are particularly dismissive of Hopper's Grand Lodge, and of Hopper more generally. The lodge is condemned as "misapplied historicism"[90] while Hopper himself is censured as a model for the then-coming generation of Victorian architects, his career demonstrating how to "gain a whole world of rich commissions by eclectic dexterity, and still lose his own soul."[91][lower-alpha 10]

The castellated entrance to the stables

The castle is a Grade I listed building. Its Cadw listing designation describes it as "one of the most important country houses in Wales; a superb example of the relatively short-lived Norman Revival of the early 19th century and generally regarded as the masterpiece of its architect, Thomas Hopper."[12] Other listed structures within the estate, all of which are Grade II with the exception of the Grand Lodge which is designated Grade II*, include: the Grand Lodge itself,[92] the Port Lodge and its walls,[93][94] the Tal-y-bont Lodge,[95] the walls to the flower garden,[96] the relocated remnants of the original medieval chapel,[97] a bothy[98] and its walled garden,[99] an estate house,[100] the estate manager's house,[101] the estate kennels,[102] nine buildings at the home farm,[103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110] and the wall surrounding the park.[111]

Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum in the former stables

The Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum is a narrow gauge railway museum. The Pennant's slate quarry at Bethesda was closely associated with the development of industrial narrow-gauge railways, and in particular the Penrhyn Quarry Railway (PQR), one of the earliest industrial railways in the world. In 1951 a museum of railway relics was created in the stable block. The first locomotive donated was Charles, one of the three remaining steam locomotives working on the PQR. A number of other historically significant British narrow-gauge locomotives and other artefacts have since been added to the collection.[81]

In 2014, Welsh National Opera used Penrhyn as the location for their filming of Claude Debussy's opera La chute de la maison Usher, based on Edgar Allan Poe's story The Fall of the House of Usher.[117] It has also be used as a television filming location.[118][119] A parkrun takes place in the grounds of the castle each Saturday morning, starting and finishing at the castle gates. The fee to enter the castle grounds is waived for runners.[120]