Lord Berners in Faringdon, Oxfordshire

'FARINGDON FOLLY

'THIS 100FT HIGH TOWER WAS BUILT IN 1935 BY THE
14TH LORD BERNERS. IT IS THE LAST MAJOR FOLLY
TOWER TO HAVE BEEN BUILT IN BRITAIN AND WAS
ERECTED ON THE SITE OF A MEDIEVAL CASTLE AND A
CROMWELLIAN BATTERY.

'AFTER CARRYING OUT MAJOR RESTORATION WORKS TO
THE TOWER, MR. ROBERT HEBER PERCY IN 1982 SET
UP A FARINGDON FOLLY TRUST. THE PURPOSE
OF THE TRUST IS TO ENSURE THAT THE PUBLIC HAVE
USE OF, AND ENJOYMENT OF THE TOWER AND ITS
SURROUNDINGS.

'THIS PLAQUE WAS PROVIDED BY THE FARINGDON ENVIRONMENTAL TRUST 1989'

 

'Gerald Hugh
Tyrwhitt-Wilson
14th BARON BERNERS
1883–1950
Composer, Writer, Artist
Eccentric

 

lived at Faringdon House
1919–1950
and built this tower'

 

"PRAISE THE LORD / HE SELDOM WAS BORED"'

 

The rhyming couplet above is part of a short epitaph that Berners wrote for himself and seems typical of the image he wished to project. He was an accomplished composer and the writer of three volumes of autobiography and six novels, one of which – The Girls of Radcliff Hall (1932) – was a lesbian girls' school romp, a roman à clef in which young female representations of Berners, Cecil Beaton and Olive Messel appear. The title of the novel is of course a play on the name of the writer Radclyffe Hall, who published the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928.

Berners was wilfully eccentric. As a child he is said to have thrown his mother's dog from a window in the belief that it would learn to fly – the story being that he had heard that a dog learns to swim if immersed in water. Fortunately the dog survived, although I'm uncertain if the fantail doves he later dyed in bright colours were as lucky. He also had a pet giraffe and a horse with whom he had tea.

He was a great socialite and a friend of John Betjeman and Nancy Mitford, whose character Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love (1945) is based on Berners.

Berners delighted in the fact that he had no reason for building Folly Tower, apart perhaps from annoying his neighbours. He commissioned his friend Lord Wellesley to build a gothic tower, knowing – another story goes – that Wellesley hated this style. Building began when Berners was abroad, and returned to find most of it finished but built in a classical style. He insisted that the remaining section be completed in gothic style, which explains the rather odd mixture that is Folly Tower.

The tower was given as a birthday present to Berners' much younger boyfriend, the extroverted 'Mad Boy' Robert Heber-Percy (1911–87), who would have preferred a horse. In turn, two years before Heber-Percy's death, he gave the tower to the people.

 

A view from the Belvedere room near the top.

 

From the top of the tower, the surrounding woodland in the foreground and the town of Faringdon in the middleground.

 

An interior view from the steps, with a model blackbird.

 

There are several blackbirds in and around the tower and they allude to another writer. Henry James Pye (1745–1813) planted the outer circle of trees, the Scots pines, on Folly Hill. He is said by many to have been the worst ever Poet Laureate, even worse than Alfred Austin. One critic of the day mocked Pye's birthday poem to King George III, with its chirpy style, in what has come to be a well-known nursery rhyme about 'four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie'.