Gadabout – Stephen Gadd's blog

I’m working for Grange Park Opera at present, and was intrigued by the history of the buildings, (outlined on the English Heritage web site and on Wikipedia) and so paid a visit to the Hampshire County Record Office in Winchester.

There I found sale particulars relating to the sales of the main house in 1787, in 1932, and again in 1964, which together tell something of the building’s development and decline.

The 1787 sale predates the substantial alterations undertaken by William Wilkins, which involved the encasing of what was a relatively modest brick structure in an ostentatious Greek-style shell. At the same time, the lowest storey of the building was buried to create an earthen platform for the Greek structures. This storey is now used by performers at the opera house, who would not recognise this 1787 description of their quarters:

The description of the Conservatory (later to become a ballroom and then a picture gallery before conversion into the opera theatre) also makes interesting reading:

The house was bought from the Baring family in 1932 by Lewis Charles Wallach,  a “millionaire industrialist, anxious to cut a figure in public life… specifically to house his collection of paintings and objets d’art. ” [Country Life, Vol.151 1972]. On Wallach’s death in 1964, the house was bought back by John Baring, 7th Baron Ashburton, at which time the sale particulars declared that the main house had “not been occupied for many years”.

Yet the buildings remain photogenic. Here they were used in the filming of “Eugene Onegin” in 1998, with Ralph Fiennes in the title role.

In the panorama below, you can see the scaffolding being used on the south side of the theatre during the initial phase of renovation of the conservatory windows, which had been bricked up to create Wallach’s art gallery in the 1930s.

The scaffolding was down and the windows were revealed in time for this year’s opera festival.

Written in response to the excellent article by David Cormack, ‘Wir welken und sterben dahinnen’: Carrie Pringle and the Solo Flowermaidens of 1882 [Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 146, No. 1890 (Spring, 2005), pp. 16-31]

This article caught my attention because:

• Carrie Pringle was one of the original flowermaidens in Wagner’s Parsifal, and is said to have been his last lover, and
• My wife, Claire Rutter, also an opera singer of some note, had a grandfather whose middle name (from his mother) was Pringle, and
• Both Carrie Pringle and Claire’s grandfather were in the same part of Brighton, England in the late 1920′s.

Well, I’ve established that this is entirely coincidental, but along the way have made some interesting discoveries about Carrie Pringle’s family, and found some evidence that she continued to perform after settling in England. These findings answer questions raised by David Cormack, and previously by Stewart Spencer, who in 2005 lacked some of the invaluable resources which have since come online.

Cormack is correct to assume some Dutch family connection. Carrie’s great-grandfather, John Pringle, served in the Scots Brigade of the British Army’s Dutch Service. While stationed at Venlo in Holland, his wife (Mary Hope) gave birth in 1782 to Volkier Rudolph Pringle. He was the last of their 9 children, dropped at various points around Holland since 1761. (They are listed along with John’s other descendants at the bottom of this page).

Rudolph and his brother Colin, like their father, were also military men. When Hanover was overrun by Napoleon’s troops in 1803, they joined the exodus of soldiers from continental Europe to England, and took commissions in the King’s German Legion.

Rudolph resigned from the Army just a few weeks before the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, whereas Colin by this time was a Major, and is quoted in written accounts of the battle. Colin Pringle had married well in 1813 (to a lawyer’s daughter), retired to Dunkerque on an army pension, and died in 1857 leaving the bulk of his not inconsiderable estate to Rudolph and to his spinster niece Mary Home (daughter of their sister, Margaret). Alone, the cash sum inherited by Rudolph amounted to the modern equivalent of about £125,000.

Yet this was not the main source of Carrie’s family’s wealth. Rudolph had been able to take early retirement thanks to his marriage in 1809 to Caroline Townley, who brought with her a dowry equivalent now to a little under a quarter of a million pounds. More on the illustrious Townleys in a moment.

Basil Pringle, Carrie’s father, was the 5th of six sons born to Rudolph and Caroline. I haven’t established how many of them survived to adulthood, or beyond 1870 when they might have expected to inherit a share of Rudolph’s wealth.

The cutting here from the Neue Wiener Musik-Zeitung in 1856 (before his marriage) illustrates that Basil’s violin-playing was notable. But given their lifestyle it seems very likely that Basil and his wife were the beneficiaries of some valuable annuity already settled on them by Rudolph. In 1862, “landowner Basil Pringle” was a solo violinist at a concert given by Anton Bruckner’s Liedertafel “Frohsinn” in Linz, which suggests that Pringle was by then a serious but not professional musician.

Basil died shortly after the family moved to London, but in the 1886 & 1887 Post Office Directories is listed at their home address, 32 Eardley Crescent as a “Professor of Music”. His wife, Isabella, remained at that address, listed as a music teacher, until 1895.

Caroline Townley was the daughter of dynamic parents. Her mother, Mary Gosling, was an accomplished artist with, unusually for a woman in that period, architectural skills which she was allowed to put into practice. Her husband, James Townley, amassed some wealth as a successful lawyer, ending his days as Proctor of the Arches Court, and this wealth was put to work along with Mary’s skills, in property development. Townley House, designed by Mary Townley, was occupied by Princess Victoria on childhood holidays, and still stands here in Ramsgate, looking rather more elegant than it does in this drawing.

Caroline’s grandfather, another James Townley, was a clergyman and professionally successful playwright.

I’ve been unable, as yet, to establish the origins of Carrie’s mother, the pianist Isabella Latinovics de Borsód. It may be entirely coincidental that Ludwig Bösendorfer, son of the piano-factory founder, married a widow (or divorcee) named Henriette Latinovics de Borsód. More on the family of that name can be found here, suggesting that funding may well have reached the Pringles from this side of the family too – I shall update this post if solicited information arrives from the owner of that web site.

Carrie Pringle’s singing was already noteworthy at the age of 17: a visitor to Gotha in 1876 wrote of ’Carry Pringle’s magnificent singing‘. But nothing among the  few newspaper clippings I have found suggests that her post-Bayreuth career reached any greater heights than her appearance in the premiere of Parsifal, indeed this seems, sadly, to be her only selling point.

The Morning Post, London, 21 Jun 1889