East Butterleigh House is a remote, white-painted Victorian farmhouse in a Devon hamlet; the de la Pastures moved here in around 1895 and lived here at least part of the time until around 1900. Violet Powell suggests that they spent their summers here (The Life of a Provincial Lady, p4) and Betty de la Pasture’s professional and social life certainly indicates that they would have spent part of the year in London. In 1897 alone, she published a novel (Deborah of Tod’s, set partly in Devon), performed in various charity entertainments in London, and was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
East Butterleigh is still a tiny place, three miles north-west of the market town Cullompton, about half-way to Tiverton as the crow flies. When the de la Pastures lived here, there was a farm nearby and a few other houses, but little else in the way of infrastructure or resources. Perhaps it was a pleasant rural retreat from their more hectic life in London, although I do wonder how they found and retained servants. The main village of Butterleigh is nearer, with a church and a school, although the Catholic de la Pastures would have needed to make the (horse-drawn) three-mile journey to Tiverton to attend Mass. And of course, the two de la Pasture girls were educated at home.
The house is rather elegant, long and low with bay windows and a deep front garden that sets it back from the narrow lane. There is a slate roof and a glazed porch at the end of a long, sloping path. Even before the modern extension noted on its Historic England listing entry, it must have been a large house for a family of four. The garden looks out southwards over wooded hills, and in the distance are the hills on the other side of the Culm valley, where E. M. Delafield eventually settled at Croyle, near Kentisbeare. If the two sisters remembered their previous home in Brighton at all, this must have been a real contrast: no sea, no bustling streets, very little traffic. It must have appealed to the young EMD, since she and Paul Dashwood chose this part of Devon for their home. Violet Powell relates a happy Delafield memory of her mother reading The Pilgrim’s Progress to her in a meadow at East Butterleigh.
Delafield sets quite a few of her novels in Devon - the Provincial Lady lives in a house very like Croyle - but perhaps the house most likely to be East Butterleigh House is Rock Place, in No One Now Will Know (Macmillan, 1941):
Rock Place was a converted farm — a fairly large house, built of cob and washed pink, slate-roofed, with a garden in front sloping downhill, and a cobbled yard adjoining, and separated from the garden by a row of outhouses, also of cob and pink-painted, and an iron gate. The outhouses were smothered in wistaria and Virginia creeper, and the gate flanked by a huge flowering magnolia […] The porch was a small, glass-roofed verandah, with a clematis growing over one side of it and a yellow rose over the other. (pp35-36)
Apart from the pink paint, this is an exact description of the house as it looks in modern photographs, even to the climbing plants growing under the porch. In the next chapter, Delafield gives us a detailed account of the inside of this house and its furnishings - I’ve edited out some of the extensive descriptions of the furniture:
The double drawing-room at Rock Place was a long low room with a dividing archway and two bay windows, one in either half of the room. In the front room stood a number of large armchairs, covered in faded chintz […] two or three walnut-wood chairs […] a walnut-wood writing desk of the date of Queen Anne […] and a little table with a velvet embroidered cover on which stood several photographs in silver frames, a clock of Florentine mosaic, two trumpet-shaped silver vases, and an ostrich-egg propped up on a green-plush stand. The mantelpiece was of mottled yellow marble […] When lit, the lamp smelt very slightly of oil, but it burned with a clear, soft light behind its polished chimney-glass. The curtains were of heavy yellow brocade, much faded and tied with tasselled yellow cords. The wallpaper, also yellow, had, unaccountably, scarcely faded at all although the room faced south, and still, after sixteen years, blazed a valiant buttercup-colour of a design so involved, comprising so many garlands, sprays, petals, birds, leaves, knots and tendrils, that the human eye could never hope to disentangle it. […] All the walls were adorned with pictures, some large and some small, symmetrically arranged, and framed in gilt […] Sunshine poured into the room through the bay windows, and a label tied to each blind-cord bore the request, in very faded ink: Please draw this blind half-way down when the sun is coming in. The sun was always coming in, but no-one ever drew the blinds half-way down. (pp44-46)
In contrast to the warm and sunny drawing-room, Delafield also describes the chilly bathroom with its oil-cloth and over-large bathtub, and the large nursery with discarded toys, children’s books, and pictures including ‘Bubbles’, a portrait of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and a representation of the Infant Samuel, who also makes a brief appearance in The Provincial Lady in War-time (Macmillan, 1940):
September 1st, 1939. […] Vicky undertakes to put flowers in each [evacuee’s] room before nightfall, and informs me that picture of Infant Samuel on the wall is definitely old-fashioned and must go. Feel sentimental about this and inclined to be slightly hurt, until she touchingly adds that, as a matter of fact, she would like to have it in her own room — to which we accordingly remove it. (p4)
The description of Rock Place is very affectionate — Callie, the protagonist of this part of the novel, is extremely happy there. Childhood is often a sad time for Delafield’s younger characters and in her contribution to the volume Little Innocents (Cobden-Sanderson, 1932, pp101-104) she ironically describes her childhood as “tragic”, but East Butterleigh seems to have been a pleasant place to spend her early years.
Photograph of East Butterleigh House copyright Roger Cornfoot, used under the Creative Commons 2.0 licence.