Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country house once had storks perched on its chimneys

In this Age of Wilful Ignorance, the only general agreement seems to be that the intellectual ability of our elected politicians is at an all-time low. But when the duplicitous and incompetent meet at the Prime Minister of the day’s official country house to make cunning plans, do they realise it was once the home of a major collection of birds kept by a previous inhabitant and that free-flying storks rested on its chimneys?

Keeping birds spanned all strata of Victorian and Edwardian society. The super-rich had large aviaries containing exotic birds or lakes housing exotic waterfowl, often of species that even today are often difficult to see in the wild, let alone catch and bring back alive during a long sea passage. The poor, on the other hand, had their singing canary or linnet in a cage.

Chequers or Checkers Court was handed to the nation in 1921. In the late 19th until the early 20th Century, the house was owned by the Astley family, descended from the Plantagenet kings of England.

The Reverend Hubert Delaval Astley (1860-1925) had a large collection of birds in later life at his house at Brinsop Court in Herefordshire. However, he makes it clear that he began in Chequers, then occupied by his brother. Indeed he had a photograph of ‘my beautiful old home’ as the frontispiece to his book, My Birds in Freedom & Captivity (Dent, London, 1900), an exemplar of sickly Victorian literature.

Chequers - from Astley's book. Subseqent alterations to the house can be
seen by comparing this to a modern photograph

Astley, who served as President of the Avicultural Society which then served the posher end of bird keeping, wrote:

I could not resist introducing as a frontispiece my beautiful old home in Buckinghamshire, of which my mother was heiress (now belonging to my brother, Mr Frankland-Russell Astley, a house restored in the reign of Queen Elizabeth—who there for a time incarcerated Lady Mary, the sister of Lady Jane Grey—and where once Lady Russell, one of the daughters of Oliver Cromwell, presided as mistress. On its chimneys many a stork has, of late years, rested; and in its grounds many another of my birds has walked and flown.

Hubert Astley with his Trumpeters at Brinsop Court

Casey Albert Wood (from here)

Astley’s birds featured in a paper published in 1926 written by a Canadian ophthalmologist who had visited the well-known aviculturists in England. He was there to see what could be learned from their methods of housing and caring for exotic birds that could be applied by bird keepers in North America. That meant he toured a number stately and upper middle-class homes. Casey Albert Wood (1856-1942) had served with the U.S. Army in the First World War and was well known for his work on the comparative anatomy of the avian eye and as a clinician. He described the accommodation for birds at Brinsop Court as well as those belonging to: a Captain Waud of Falcon Close, Woolton Hill in Hampshire; the Duchess of Wellington at Ewhurst Park, Hampshire; Mr Shore-Baily at Westbury, Wiltshire; the Marquess of Tavistock at Warblington, Hampshire; Alfred Ezra at Foxwarren Park, Surrey; Herbert Whitley of Paignton, Devon (later Paignton Zoo); Miss Ethel Chawner at Forest Bank, Hampshire; the late Mrs Dalton-Burgess (Clifton, Bristol) who is described as having the ‘largest, private indoor aviary in England’.

Wood illustrated his article with photographs of Hubert Astley and of Brinsop Court. These photographs were also used for a paper in a French magazine on Astley’s collection by Jean Delacour.

Wood CA. 1926. Lessons in aviculture from English aviaries. Condor 28, 3-30.