Chapter IX / Osterley Walk
The National Trust
Walk to the Stables Cafe and take a seat. This building is the only remnant of Gresham’s Osterley manor.
We are now in 1895.
The National Trust was established as a way to preserve and promote English heritage and was very much in line with ideas of Englishness and nationalism that was prevalent in that time.48 As the Executive Committee noted in its Interim Report 1896,
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“England, without the places of historic interest or natural beauty that are continuously being threatened, would be a poorer country and less likely to attract and hold the affections of her sons who, far away, are colonising the waste places of the Earth.”49
The Trust began collecting estates and tenements usually acquired from or gifted by British aristocrats, along with the various spoils that the owners had appropriated from countries abroad.
In 1909, a steamship was built by the Orient Steam Navigation Company or the Orient line as one of its five passenger lines sailing between Britain and Australia. This was the fourth and final ship named after Osterley Park - at the time the family seat of the 7th Earl of Jersey (Victor Albert Child-Villiers) who had previously served as a governor in New South Wales. Much later, the Orient Line was merged into the Peninsular and Oriental Company, or the P&O, an entity that was instrumental to the expansion of the British empire and was involved in the East India Company’s infamous opium trade between China and India.50
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In 1923, the 8th Earl of Jersey would sell Child & Co. to Glyn, Mills & Co., which would later be subsumed into the Royal Bank of Scotland and much later, into the Natwest Group Holdings.51 During the Second World War, the offices of Child & Co. functioned from the Stables building that you are now at.
In 1949, the 9th Earl of Jersey offered Osterley Park to the public and the estate eventually came under the care of the National Trust.52 Both Child & Co. and Osterley Park - fruits of the Child family’s political influence and labour at the EIC, and heirlooms of the Child-Villiers family - were now no longer in their possession.
Get up and walk towards the lake. Play the next audio.
Image: S.S. OSTERLEY. c.1911. Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive—Gift of Leonard A. Lauder
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014.4291). Public Domain.
48 Hall, Melanie. “The Politics of Collecting: The Early Aspirations of the National Trust, 1883-1913.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 345–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679263. pg 345-346.
49 Ibid. pg. 352.
50 Armstrong, Allan. 2022. “P&O and Life Under Empire 2.” Bella Caledonia, 2022. https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2022/03/27/po-and-life-under-empire-2/
51 “Child & Co”. Natwest Group Heritage Hub. Accessed June 08, 2024. https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/companies/child-and-co.html
52 “The Child-Jersey archive 773433”. National Trust Collections. Accessed September 5, 2024. https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/773433