This is a format which I have shamelessly stolen from Osbert Lancaster's Scene Changes: Great Houses of Fiction Revisited. It's really an excellent book that's worth seeking out, though I think it may be out of print now.
Bly Castle, halfway between Colchester and Harwichin the county of Essex, is these days a grim shadow of a grim shadow. The construction of the M120 in the years 1988-89 cut Bly from its lake and a large proportion of the remains of the park, but the decline of the house began a very long time prior to the construction of the motorway.
Indeed, in 1909, only eleven years after Henry James’ visit to the house, the building was severely damaged in a fire caused by a lightning strike to one of James’ “incongruous crenellated structures” – the North Tower. The house was little used even before the fire, and the damage was such that the remains were offered for sale and purchased by Amundsen, the housebreaker. His firm dismantled a great number of large houses at the beginning of the century, most notably demolishing Carfax Abbey for roadstone. Amundsen stripped Bly of its decorative woodwork (which was by Krate and excellent) for resale and took a good deal of the better stonework for his own house, Rubb Hall.
Amundsen sold the remains of Bly, which by this time consisted of little more than cellars and the shell of the South Tower, to a Captain Shout, who commissioned the renowned mediaevalist architect Gryke Westmoor to transform the ruin into a modern home. Westmoor did not often disappoint, and incorporated the South Tower into an ambitious scheme that included a moat and a new crenulated tower that would be over one hundred feet tall. The new tower was to be linked to the old by an aisled baronial hall complete with a minstrels’ gallery and a colossal fireplace which, it was specified by Captain Shout, “must be sufficiently commodious to permit the roasting of the largest ox”. Behind the main house there was to be an extensive service wing, and the house was to contain all the most modern conveniences such as safety elevators, a hot water system and electric lighting.
The building was completed early in 1914, and later that year Captain Shout’s vessel, the Belgium, had the pleasure of earning the dubious distinction of being only the third ship to be sunk by a torpedo. Captain Shout went down with the Belgium, reputedly singing He Who Would Valiant Be in his luscious baritone right up until the point that the waters closed over his head. There then ensued a long legal wrangle over who the house should be passed to, a wrangle which was prolonged by the fact that most of Captain Shout’s relatives were single military men and kept being killed just as the legal tangle appeared about to be unravelled. The building was presently passed, late in 1919, to Hazel Chambers, a distant Lancastrian relative of Captain Shout’s half-brother’s father. She founded a school in the building, but it closed in 1931, doubtless in part due to the unwise decision by the teaching staff to cause the children to study The Turn of the Screw, a decision which led to a whole series of unfortunate legends to grow up around the building. The school closed ostensibly as a result of the building’s damage by subsidence, but local people insist that the unpleasant miasma that childish imagination had thrown around the place had as much to do with the closure as the building’s inadequate foundations.
Following the closure of the school, Bly and its park was sold to a consortium of local farmers, builders and other men describing themselves as businessmen, collectively known as The Forty Thieves, who harvested the woods and put the parkland under the plough. The house was once again stripped of any component of value and now stands as a Grade II listed ruin, bleakly distracting the drivers on the M120. Local legend states that whenever there is to be a fatal accident on the motorway the black silhouette of Peter Quint is seen on the stump of the South Tower as a kind of melodramatic portent of doom.
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