Trent Park is an 800 acre swath of open land that sits at the end of the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground at the terminal station of Cockfosters.  In 1777 George III gave the site to Sir Richard Jebb, his favorite doctor, to thank him for saving his brother’s life.  It had other owners until, in 1909, Sir Edward Sassoon bought it, along with its large, centrally positioned mansion.  In 1912 his son, Sir Philip Sassoon, inherited the place and turned it into something akin to what we have seen in the film as the house and grounds of The Great Gatsby.  The difference being that Sassoon was real. 

Reading from the back cover of Damian Collins’ book Charmed Life, Sassoon was a famed athlete, politician and patron of the arts.  Around him, gathered a social set that would inspire Brideshead Revisited.  At his frequent parties,  Winston Churchill would argue with George Bernard Shaw while Noel Coward and Lawrence of Arabia mingled with flamingos and Rex Whistler painted murals.

These dining chairs come from that house. 

In 1962, I began teaching at Trent Park.  By then, it had “changed hands” and housed a constituent college of London University.  It was a couple of years later and I had just left The Mansion after the ritual of mid-morning coffee.  Walking up the path with me was John, my workshop assistant.  Ahead of us were four or five workmen struggling to carry an enormous slab of wood.  My question to John was, “what is that and where are they going?” 

John was an old Trent Park hand and he knew the scuttlebutt, all the scuttlebutt.  The narrative went something like, “that is from the kitchens in the basement of the house which have long stood empty and I expect they’ll burn it.”  My immediate response was, “could you please have them take it into my workshop instead?”  John took off and the slab was in the shop when I got there. 

From memory of what it took to carry the piece, I would say it was the better part of six feet long and two feet six inches wide.  The alarming dimension was its thickness of nine inches or more.  I well remember looking at the thing with awe and trying to imagine what duty it had served in that august kitchen.  The state of the surface attested to some severe usage.  Apart from chopping areas at one end there was a circular patch, a large hollow, about an inch and a half deep where maids had rested their very hot, heavy ironing implements in the service of housekeeping duties.  Through the grime and the distress, it wasn’t possible to be sure of the species.  With chisel and mallet removing chunks here and there proved it was ash.  The destruction rendered to determine that was inconsequential since the pile of waste in order to get to clean, usable material was awesome.  The large core of sound material taken out of its shell of grime was a beautiful creamy white, straight grained sample of English Ash with no cracks or knots. 

The chair was already designed waiting for material to transform it from drawing to dining room.  Each chair has seventeen pieces of wood.  The yield was one piece short of four chairs.  A rail under the upholstered seat was the spot filled with a piece of mahogany. 

The chairs went into service with two small boys growing up and learning table manners in a house which was a social gathering spot.  Not to compare it with the Sassoon legacy but to explain that there came a point when I had had my fill of cleaning the frames and re-upholstering the seats.  As well, the original creamy white color of the wood was oxidized beyond recall.   

Sometime in the mid-nineties, I decided to ebonize them.  Ash is a good candidate for such treatment.  Now, like any surface treatment, it’s wearing, but wearing gracefully.  Technically, the chairs are sound, as sound as they were the day they left my workshop at Trent Park.