The Door-Keeper at Borwick Hall

Shortly before the First World War Borwick Hall in North Lancashire acquired a wealthy and controversial new tenant — a man who had publicly compared the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan to a circus elephant and who, in turn,  was accused by Sir Edward Elgar of embodying “the shady side of music criticism”.

John Alexander Fuller-Maitland was the music critic of The Times.  He first stumbled across Borwick Hall in 1910. “It was love at first sight”, he wrote later. “When we turned the corner and saw the house, I knew that I had never been so attracted by any building in my life.”

Fuller-Maitland had arrived at the Hall not a moment too soon. It was in a sorry state. The main rooms, which had once hosted the future Charles II, had been uninhabited for more than 50 years. Some outer walls had actually fallen down. But locals were still guiding visitors around the site for threepence a time and Fuller-Maitland was so impressed after his tour that he decided — almost on the spot — that he would retire from his job on The Times and move north with his wife, Marianne.

The owners of the Hall, the Marton family of Capernwray, are said to have agreed a lease of £50 a year — on condition that he repaired the fabric. It wasn’t much of a bargain for Fuller-Maitland. One estimate suggested restoration cost him an additional £1,000 a year for the next quarter of a century.

The villagers of Borwick had acquired a fascinating new neighbour. Fuller-Maitland himself took an active part in village affairs, becoming choir master at St Mary’s church and funding music lessons for promising local musicians.

Moving into a tiny North Lancashire village was a change in life-style for the Fuller-Maitlands. In London they’d been at the centre of a vibrant, cosmopolitan scene. He’d known nearly everyone — from William Gladstone to Isadora Duncan. An only child, he inherited a family fortune derived from banking and business. He briefly toyed with the idea of a career in the law before devoting himself to music. He trained as a pianist. But it was as a writer and critic that he made his name. He edited the influential ‘Grove Dictionary of Music’. He wrote books about Brahms and Schumann. He led a revival of interest in Purcell. And with his cousin, Lucy Broadwood, he published an important collection of English folk songs which continues to be used today.

In Borwick he stood out like an orchid in a potato patch. But Fuller-Maitland was no sensitive exotic. He was a hard-nosed, opinionated cultural commentator who had been embroiled for years in the cut and thrust of music criticism. 

Much of the controversy that surrounded him stemmed from his passionate advocacy of what became known as the English Musical Renaissance. Fuller-Maitland held that music in England had reached a low-point in the first half of the nineteenth century. He believed that hopes for a national musical revival rested on composers such as Hubert Parry and Charles Villers Stanford who, he maintained, had begun to evolve a distinctly national style, free from foreign musical influences. He saw his role as a guardian or “doorkeeper” of English music.

Not everyone was convinced by Fuller-Maitland’s views. Some complained that the chosen champions of his renaissance were all upper-middle class, academically trained musicians with links to the Royal College of Music: people, in short, rather like him. He was said to under-value and even disparage the country’s most popular composers. He thought Arthur Sullivan squandered his talents on popular entertainments, while he described the music of Edward Elgar, whose father ran a music shop in Worcester, as “provincial”.

Matters came to a head when Sir Arthur Sullivan died in 1901. While the nation mourned the death of its favourite musical son, Fuller-Maitland penned an extraordinarily critical obituary, comparing Sullivan’s popularity to that of ‘Jumbo’, the celebrated elephant who had attracted vast queues at London Zoo.

“‘Jumboism’” wrote Fuller-Maitland “Is more and more the characteristic defect of the English race and any voice that is raised against the Jumbo of the moment …is certain to incur the wrath of those who are working up the ‘boom’, whatever it may be.”

Fuller-Maitland was implying, says the music historian Meirion Hughes, that just like ‘Jumbo’, the composer was over-hyped and lumbering and “that to admire Sullivan was a lapse of taste, a ‘defect’ of the English ‘race’.”

Many in the music world were shocked and angered. In a furious riposte Sullivan’s friend, Edward Elgar, referred to the obituary as “this foul unforgettable episode”. And without publicly naming Fuller-Maitland, he inveighed against “the shady side of musical criticism”.

Fuller-Maitland found himself in more hot water when he went on to mock “the utmost banality” of some of Sullivan’s music. 

“That the man who wrote the concerted pieces of the Mikado, the exquisitely ingenious quartet of vocal variations in The Gondoliers, or the mock-Greek chorus in the Grand Duke, would have brought himself to be acknowledged as the composer of such songs as “Will he Come?”, “Let me Dream Again”, or another in which the complaint that “the gravy’s cold” seems to be iterated and reiterated…is hardly credible,” he wrote in his book ‘English Music in the Nineteenth Century.’

The only problem was that Sullivan had never written “the gravy’s cold”. The lyric in the popular song “My Dearest Heart” actually read:

“The grave is cruel, the grave is cold, 

But on the other side is the city of gold.”

It’s hard to believe that the misquotation was accidental. It was probably a joke. If so it misfired, and persuaded many that his criticism of Sullivan’s more popular work was based purely on snobbery. Fuller-Maitland survived the brouhaha. He stayed on at The Times for several years after Elgar’s denunciation, only tendering his resignation to the editor after paying his threepence and falling in love with Borwick Hall. He was 54 when he gave up full-time journalism. At Borwick he continued to write books including his autobiography “Doorkeeper of Music”. More importantly for local historians, he collaborated with J Rawlinson Ford of Yealand to produce an edited version of John Lucas’s eighteenth century history of Warton Parish (1931). 

He died at Borwick Hall in 1936, five years after Marianne. The couple had no children and everything they owned went under the hammer in a week-long sale. Among the silverware and mahogany furniture were three grand pianos, a German pipe organ and an impressive art collection including a contemporary portrait of Charles II and two Turner watercolours.

Fuller-Maitland’s tenancy was the last time Borwick Hall acted as a private home. He can take credit for saving the structure of this wonderful building. Within four years of his death it housed elements of the 21st Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. After the War it became a country club. Later it was taken over by Lancashire County Council for use as an outdoor education centre, the role it still performs today.