Nos. 85–87 (consec.) Pall Mall:
Cumberland House
Formerly York House. Occupied part of the site of the
Royal Automobile Club
York House was built for Edward Augustus,
Duke of York and Albany (1739–67), younger
brother of George III. It was renamed Cumberland House when it passed to his brother, the Duke
of Cumberland, and was later numbered 86. The
two adjoining houses, one on the west and the
other on the east, which were subsequently added
to Cumberland House, were numbered 85 and 87
respectively (Plates 50a, 209, 210,
211, 212, 213, 214, 215,
216, 217, 218, 219, 220).
In 1760 the Duke of York purchased the lease
of three houses with a total frontage of 80 feet on
the south side of Pall Mall; the most easterly of
the three had been occupied by the Cocoa Tree
chocolate house until 1756 (see page 461). (ref. 161)
They were demolished in 1761 (ref. 34) and on their site
a 'town residence' with a courtyard facing Pall
Mall was erected for the Duke to the designs of
'Brettingham, Archt.' (ref. 162)
(fn. a) This was Matthew
Brettingham, senior (1699–1769), who was
probably assisted by his son of the same name
(1725–1803). (ref. 108) The senior Brettingham's notebook records that in 1760 he and his son and a
clerk made a journey into Oxfordshire to negotiate for the purchase of the three old houses on
behalf of the Duke of York. He appears to have
conducted all the legal business for the Duke, but
apart from 'Making Several Plans' the notebook
records nothing of the erection of York House, (ref. 163)
which was completed by 1763. (ref. 34) Contemporary
writers described it variously as 'elegant and substantial', (ref. 164) 'lofty and regular' (ref. 165) and 'void of any
architectoric Excellence'. (ref. 166)
The Duke of York died in 1767, leaving York
House to his brother, the Duke of Gloucester. (ref. 167)
The ratebooks show, however, that the next
occupant of the house was another brother, Henry
Frederick, Duke of Cumberland (1745–90,
nephew of the victor of the Battle of Culloden
Moor), who took up residence in 1768, (ref. 34) and to
whom the Duke of Gloucester assigned the Crown
lease in 1772. (ref. 161)
Between his marriage in 1771 and his death in
1790, the Duke of Cumberland altered and redecorated the house. His intention was to enlarge
the courtyard fronting Pall Mall by the removal of
the adjoining houses on either side, which projected considerably beyond Cumberland House,
and to rebuild them as slightly projecting wings
(Plate 211b). He had inherited the house on the
west from the Duke of York, whose treasurer had
purchased it in 1761. (ref. 161) It was pulled down and
rebuilt further back shortly after 1773. The
house on the east side was purchased by the
Duke in 1788 but his intention to rebuild it to
match the west wing was not realized until after
his death. (ref. 168) Robert Adam was engaged to prepare
schemes for refurbishing in 1780–2 and 1785–8;
these are described below.
After the Duke's death in 1790 the Duchess of
Cumberland continued to occupy the house until
1793. Lady Elizabeth Luttrell lived in the west
wing in 1793 but otherwise it appears to have stood
empty between 1793 and 1801. (ref. 34) At the time of
the Duke's death the house was heavily encumbered and in 1800 the Duchess conveyed her lease
to the mortgagees, Messrs. Brick, Chambers and
Hobbs, bankers. (ref. 169)
(fn. b) In January 1801 they sold
the house to Francis Gould of King Street, Portman Square, for £20,000. (ref. 150) Gould was acting on
behalf of the Union Club (ref. 171) which occupied the
central portion and the west wing from 1801 to
1806. The old house on the east was occupied by
a Colonel Dewar between 1802 and 1804. (ref. 34)
In 1806 the lease of all three sections of the
house was acquired by the Board of Ordnance, (ref. 172)
which from 1807 occupied the central part. In
1809 the eastern wing was rebuilt and from 1811
the Board occupied both this and the western
wing. (ref. 34) In 1855 the duties of the Board were
vested in the Secretary of State for War, and
the War Office continued to use the whole of the
house until shortly before its demolition in the
early years of the twentieth century.
A survey of the premises made in 1842 shows
that the two wings were used as official residences,
No. 85 then being occupied by Sir Frederick
Trench, secretary to the Master General, and
No. 87 by R. Byham, secretary to the Board. The
central portion was 'furnished and fitted up in a
costly manner' and was occupied by the Board and
'superior officers'. (ref. 172) The height of both wings
was raised in 1851, and the stone balustrades were
re-erected on top of them (Plate 209). (ref. 173)
In 1864 permission was given to erect in the
courtyard of Cumberland House a statue of Sidney
Herbert, Baron Herbert of Lea, the former
Secretary of State for War who died in 186l. (ref. 174)
The statue was erected by public subscription in
1867. The sculptor was J. H. Foley and the
founders Messrs. H. Prince and Co. A description of the statue is to be found in The Builder for
8 June 1867, page 413. In 1906 the statue was
removed to the present War Office (ref. 150) and has
since been re-erected in Waterloo Place.
Cumberland House was vacated by the War
Office staff in 1906, (ref. 129) and the eastern half was
demolished in 1908 for the erection of the Royal
Automobile Club. (ref. 149) The western half was occupied between 1907 and 1910 by the Office of
Woods, Forests and Land Revenues (ref. 175) and was
pulled down in 1911–12 for the Royal Automobile Club extension. (ref. 176) Lord Carrington acquired
the iron railings, stone curbs and carriage gates in
front of Cumberland House, (ref. 177) and some of the
internal fittings, together with others from the
rest of the old War Office buildings, were re-used
in buildings maintained by the Office of Works.
Architectural description
The two plans, cross-section and north elevation
of 'the Duke of York's Palace in Pall Mall', published in volume IV of Vitruvius Britannicus
(ref. 162)
(Plates 210a, 210b, 212a), show that the house erected
in 1761–3 was a typical Matthew Brettingham
design, highly competent but perhaps rather dull.
The building was set back some 50 feet from the
front building line of Pall Mall, to provide a
generous forecourt, and the ground-floor plan
shows an almost square block measuring 80 feet
from east to west, and 73 feet north to south. The
symmetrical rectangular rooms were arranged
round a central oblong stair hall, two rooms on
the east, one north and south, and two on the west
with a service stair, an ante-room, and a watercloset between them. This arrangement was repeated on the first or principal floor, but with
one large room in place of the middle and west
rooms on the south front. The cross-section,
which omits the basement, shows that there were
three storeys, the third being lower on the north
front to admit a garret within the roof. A library
is shown in the third storey of the south front.
The Pall Mall front (Plate 210b) was markedly
similar to Norfolk House and No. 5 St. James's
Square, being a simple Palladian composition
carried out in brick with stone dressings. The
ground-storey windows, three on either side of the
doorway, were each dressed with a moulded architrave and cornice, the doorway being similar but
having a pulvino-frieze and consoles to support its
cornice. A plain pedestal underlined the upper
stage of the front, with blind balustrades below the
seven windows of the principal storey, each of these
being dressed with a moulded architrave, pulvinofrieze and an angular pediment, the central window being slightly emphasized by the addition of
shaped jambs, with consoles to support the pediment. The seven windows of the chamber storey
were square and completely framed with moulded
architraves, and the front—which was quoined at
each end with long-and-short stones—was finished
with a modillioned cornice and an open balustrade.
The low roof was unbroken by dormers, those
lighting the garrets being on the inside slope.
To judge from photographs (ref. 160) and the section
in Vitruvius Britannicus, the interior was finished
by Brettingham in the conservative Palladian
taste, looking back to Holkham rather than to his
recently built Norfolk House, with its elaborate
display of Rococo ornament within a Palladian
framework. The oblong entrance hall (Plate
213a), closely resembling those of Norfolk House
and No. 5 St. James's Square, had plain walls
below a Doric entablature, with alternate metopes
of paterae and bucrania, and a plain ceiling. The
long south wall contained three arches, the middle
one opening to the stair hall, the others framing
niches. Generally, the rooms had wooden pedestal
dadoes and plain walls, probably hung with figured
silks, velvets or wallpapers to provide a rich background for paintings and glasses, the symmetrically
placed doorcases of carved woodwork, either pedimented or cornice-headed, the enriched architraves
and panelled shutters of the windows, and the fine
marble chimneypieces (Plate 217b, 217c). All the
rooms on the principal (first) floor were finished
with entablatures and ceilings of modelled plasterwork.
In the first (north-east) drawing-room, the
entablature had an anthemion frieze and an enriched cornice with dentils and modillions. The
ceiling was modelled with a moulded band (its wide
soffit ornamented with formal flowers and acanthus buds) enclosing a large oval panel containing
an acanthus-boss within a chain of four garlands
linked by ribbon-knots. The oval was enclosed,
together with spandrel panels of foliage arabesques,
in an oblong frame formed by an enriched architrave, eared at each corner (Plate 217a).
The entablature in the second (south-east)
drawing-room had a frieze of interlacing foliagescrolls, and a dentilled cornice surrounding a
simple compartmented ceiling in the style of Inigo
Jones, with garlanded ribs forming a central oval
bordered by long and short oblongs (Plate 214b).
By far the most splendid ceiling was that in the
large third (south-west) drawing-room, with
richly decorated ribs (their soffits modelled with
acanthus-scrolls) interlacing to form a geometrical
pattern of compartments, a central circle enclosed
by an octagon and flanked by two squares predominating over the surrounding hexagons,
oblongs and smaller squares. The entablature had
a richly modelled frieze of griffins, vases and
candelabra, and a modillioned cornice (Plate 216).
In the state bed-chamber (an almost square
room in the north-west angle) a deep quadrant
cove patterned with graduated octagonal coffers
surrounded a flat centre modelled with foliage
ornaments, framed in a circular panel and four
spandrels (Plate 215b). The adjoining ante-room
had a simple compartmented ceiling where a large
central oblong, with re-entrant angles, was bordered with L-shaped and square panels (Plate
215a).
Perhaps the richest of Brettingham's interiors
was the large south-east room on the ground floor,
the music-room (Plate 213b), where the walls
were decorated with shaped panels, some containing pendant medallions and crossed palm branches,
the others having inset oval looking-glasses in rich
frames, appearing to hang by ribbons from musical
trophies. Smaller panels above the doorcases contained ribboned foliage-festoons and paterae, and
the walls were finished with an enriched modillioned cornice. The ceiling was divided by wide
ribs into a pattern of compartments, with a large
central oval flanked by semi-circles, the design
being very similar to the Kent-Desgodetz ceiling
in the state bed-chamber at Holkham.
In the lofty oblong stair hall, the walls of the
first stage formed a plain background to the rich
wrought-iron balustrade of the staircase and
gallery landing. The upper stage, underlined with
a pedestal, was panelled in plaster with an arrangement of tall and narrow plain panels flanking an
enriched frame—eared at each corner and crested
with foliage-scrolls—on each wall but the north,
where there was a pedimented doorway. An
upper range of small panels contained wreaths or
portrait medallions with crossed palm branches.
This stage finished with an entablature having a
frieze decoration of bay-garlands festooned between paterae, and an enriched modillioned cornice (Plate 214a). A plain quadrant cove rose to a
rich band framing the opening to the lantern stage,
which had a lunette window in each face.
The Adam alterations
Among the Adam drawings in Sir John Soane's
Museum there are some fifty-five items relating to
Cumberland House, dated from 1780 to 1788,
but many of them are for unexecuted work. (ref. 178) In
1780–1 the two smaller ground-floor rooms on the
south front were replaced by the 'Great Diningroom' designed by Adam (Plate 211b). This
was an oblong room with five windows in its south
wall, each end window lighting a bay divided from
the body of the room by a three-bay colonnade
screen. Photographs show that the ceiling was
carried out in full accordance with the Adam
drawing (Plate 218b, 218d), which was a geometrical
design with a large circular panel enclosed by a
square and flanked by narrow oblong panels filled
with a repeating pattern. Oval medallions and
pendants broke the moulding enclosing the circular panel composed of fan ornament and husk
festoons, which was intended to frame a painted
medallion. At the same time, Brettingham's ceiling in the adjoining music-room was Adamized by
providing fields for painted medallions in the oval
and semi-circular compartments, the oval medallion being fringed with husk festoons and pendant
musical trophies. The breaks in the side compartments were linked by wide bands of acanthus scrollwork, and musical trophies were placed in the
double-spandrel panels (Plate 218a, 218c).
It is probable, but by no means certain, that the
west wing of the house was rebuilt shortly after
1773 to an Adam design. (The east wing which
matched the west was built in 1809.) The exterior, designed to accord with Brettingham's
front, might well have been Adam's work, and
the 'triumphal arch' frontispiece, decorating the
exposed side wall of Christie's premises, certainly
was (Plate 50a). The east and west 'lodges', threebay Doric pavilions flanking the forecourt, were
Adam, added probably about 1785, (ref. 179) and to give
a more monumental appearance to Brettingham's
front Adam suggested his stock device of dressing
the three middle bays with an engaged Ionic
portico, crowned with an angular pediment and
raised above an arcaded ground storey, but even
the drawing for this is unfinished (Plates 209,
210c, 211).
Around 1785 Robert Adam prepared some
elaborate schemes for remodelling and redecorating most of the remaining Brettingham rooms,
including the refurbished music-room. On the
principal floor he proposed to open up the two
east rooms, forming a screened ante by erecting a
three-bay colonnade across the entrance end of the
north-east room (Plate 220b). The large southwest drawing-room was to have been magnificently
redecorated, the walls divided into panels of rich
arabesque and painted medallions, and its great
length reduced by the formation of a segmental
apse at each end (Plate 219). The ante-chamber
to the state bed-chamber was to have been transformed into an oval boudoir, with four semidomed apses containing sofas (Plate 220c).
Although much time and thought must have gone
into the preparation of these schemes, nothing
materialized.