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Hidden Treasures of the National Trust 2025 episode 5
Transcript
00:00Every year, millions of us flock to the houses and gardens of the National Trust.
00:11Taking a step back in time to delve into our history.
00:15How they did it, you know, in them days, amazes me.
00:19Whether in the grandest residence...
00:21Visitors always say, oh, I could live here.
00:24Or a modest farmhouse.
00:26To open up the house when it's just you, it just tingles with excitement.
00:31But out of sight is a hidden world.
00:34I like to see all the secret looks and crannies behind the scenes.
00:37Where an army of dedicated experts...
00:40Oh, my word, look. I'm slightly lost for words.
00:43...and devoted volunteers...
00:46Quite intimate with it, really. Can I say that?
00:48...are battling to save treasured objects.
00:51Look at that.
00:53It's history, isn't it? You've been putting history together.
00:56...making new discoveries...
00:58Mmm! This might be it.
01:00Quite genuinely excited.
01:02...that tell the history of us all.
01:05These objects have stories to tell, and their stories should be heard.
01:09This time, the remarkable homes of three men who changed the way we all live.
01:22The architect who devised a blueprint for modern living.
01:26Changing the architectural landscape of cities was bold.
01:30The Victorian literary celebrity who rewrote the way history is told.
01:36He invited the reader to imagine themselves witnessing the sights, the sounds, the smells.
01:42And the wealthy collector who wanted to bring art to the masses.
01:47I think I'm allowed favourites, but I think what I would say is my favourites change almost daily, depending, you know, if I've discovered something new.
01:55The leafy suburb of Hampstead, North London, with its many elegant Georgian terraces.
02:10Perhaps not the place you'd have expected to find a brick-and-glass manifesto for a new way of living.
02:17Especially in the 1930s.
02:20So, I'm very thankful because Willow is actually one of the easiest places to open up.
02:25Like, literally, I can open it up in about ten minutes.
02:29Tammy has been looking after Willow Road for just over a year.
02:35I hadn't seen the inside of Willow Road before I got the job, actually.
02:39So, I was just hoping that I would fall in love with it.
02:41And it completely took me by surprise, I think.
02:46It's when you walk in that you suddenly go, oh, my God, this is really cool.
02:50Number two, Willow Road, was designed by, and for nearly 50 years home to, architect Erno Goldfinger.
03:02I'm going to say this a lot, this is one of my favourite books of the collection.
03:10These are these incredible 360 drawers, basically, that Erno designed himself.
03:15His idea was that you shouldn't ever have to scrounge for things at the back of the drawer.
03:21Erno Goldfinger's radical spatial thinking stretched far beyond his desk.
03:29He created some of the UK's most controversial modernist buildings.
03:35He's an architect who firmly believes that the tall building is inevitably the home of the future.
03:40Born in Budapest, Goldfinger studied in Paris under architect Auguste Perret,
03:52a pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete.
03:56So, we've got the study in here, and this is Auguste Perret's hat.
04:02So, Perret was very influential in Erno's later designs,
04:05and I really love that he's just kept his hat on his study wall.
04:09In 1936, Goldfinger and his wife Ursula acquired the Willow Road plot in Hampstead.
04:19But his dramatic plans set him on a collision course with the locals.
04:25There was quite strong resistance to the design.
04:30It was so different to what had gone before.
04:34After two years of public opposition,
04:37work on Numbers 1, 2 and 3 Willow Road began.
04:43Of course, we're talking about the 1930s era of people just starting to own motor cars.
04:48So, Willow Road, of course, looks quite futuristic, perhaps ahead of its time.
04:53While Numbers 1 and 3 were built to help finance the project,
04:59Number 2, the largest, was designed by Goldfinger to be his own family home.
05:05I love that he lived here with Ursula for his three children.
05:11And you can really see that in the house, all these very little sign features just to make it more comfortable.
05:17Central to Goldfinger's vision of modern living was his collection of avant-garde art, including several kinetic pieces, such as this 1959 work by Marcel Duchamp.
05:34Kind of being able to switch between moving and not moving, that's part of the artwork, I think.
05:40But there's one ingenious piece of Goldfinger's kinetic art collection, which is no longer as moving as it once was.
05:50You can't get the sense of what it's supposed to be because it's currently not working.
06:01In the hope of getting this modern artwork functioning just as it did in Goldfinger's day, Tammy's called in sculpture conservator, Melvin.
06:11I went to art school, I studied sculpture at art school, and as a conservator, a lot of what we actually do is about looking at things.
06:19and understanding things, and understanding materials.
06:25The joy is just spending a long period of time with something, trying to work out how things work.
06:30Right, let's have a look.
06:32Are you okay?
06:34Oh wow, look at this.
06:36Have you ever seen this actually working?
06:38I've never seen it working.
06:39Because I've heard people say that when it does work, it does clatter a bit.
06:42No.
06:43And the bits rub into one another.
06:46Straight off the roll.
06:47Straight off the roll.
06:48Okay.
06:49Oh, fantastic.
06:50This is amazing.
06:51Oh my gosh.
06:53Seeing the DeMarco, like you look at it, and when it's not turned on, it doesn't really look like much.
06:59It's just this strange black box with a teak edge to it, with some things that look like large washers on the front.
07:06So I can imagine the actual fact that it moves is its beauty.
07:12It's quite interesting, the fact this is a saw from Meccano from the 1960s he's made it from.
07:17Fine.
07:18So we can put one on the top.
07:19To get DeMarco's Meccano masterpiece moving again, first port of call is the conservation studio.
07:28Logically, I know it will be absolutely fine, but I think when you work with a collection every single day, you get very personally attached to it.
07:37And so there will always be an element where you feel a little bit nervous, sort of giving it to someone else and sort of just hoping that, you know, it will be well taken care of.
07:46The first challenge is to delicately disassemble this artwork's cog and chain mechanism.
07:56You want to sort of connect the motor and flick the switch and everything runs nicely, but it's never that easy.
08:02The man behind this unusual piece of art is Hugo DeMarco, who specialised in creating illusionary movement.
08:10I think DeMarco is definitely underrated, and I think that Golfinger probably liked him because he's so original.
08:18I'm a bit scared that sort of there could be something wrong with the motor, with the electrics, so what I want to do is take the back off, take the motor out so it's not connected to all the gears and the cogs,
08:30and just wind slowly the mechanism, because I don't want to just start it up and it all starts sort of, you know, destroying itself, basically.
08:38I don't do many mechanical sculptures, they're quite rare.
08:43So, yeah, it is kind of worrying, because you don't want to damage it.
08:50The clever intricacies of DeMarco's work clearly appealed to the technologically minded Goldfinger.
08:57Soon after moving into number two Willow Road, he and Ursula found themselves at the centre of a group of Hampstead's progressive thinkers and writers,
09:10who would regularly congregate at the house.
09:12Someone who remembers those parties is Erno's granddaughter, Pippa.
09:23This is a photo of me with Erno.
09:26Erno.
09:27I'm 17.
09:28He would have been about 80, I guess.
09:36Erno had a lot of friends.
09:39And the parties would have like, are they called coupes of champagne and smoked salmon?
09:45And there'd be all sorts of people, different ages, different nationalities.
09:50And the conversation was very broad.
09:52It was about politics and art and history.
09:58And as a child, it just felt very self-sophisticated, actually.
10:03And fun and very kind of warm and convivial.
10:06Not all revolutionaries in the 1930s operated from modernist party pads like Goldfinger's.
10:2170 miles away, in the rolling hills of Warwickshire,
10:26a wealthy art collector was on his own radical mission,
10:30making high art available to all.
10:37Here we have a photograph of, well, the man behind Upton, really.
10:41This is Walter Samuel, second by Count Burstead.
10:44It was his kind of vision for Upton, really, to create this lovely balance
10:49between an art gallery and a country house.
10:52So what we see today, really, is the result of his vision.
10:56Walter Samuel bought and redesigned the 80-room Upton House in 1927
11:03to showcase what was to become one of the finest private art collections in England.
11:10So we've got some works by Hogarth.
11:13Portraits by artists such as Romney.
11:17Reynolds.
11:20We've got Hieronymus Bosch.
11:24Hans Memling.
11:26We have Prevost.
11:28So you can see our El Greco just here.
11:31Canalesse just upstairs.
11:36Upton is one of the top houses within the National Trust for Old Master oil paintings.
11:43And it's one of the most significant collections of Old Master art in the country, full stop.
11:48I think I'm allowed favourites, but I think what I would say is my favourites change almost daily, depending, you know, if I've discovered something new.
12:00Upton is home to nearly 200 artworks by 124 artists.
12:06And displayed in pride of place is one of Walter Samuel's most cherished paintings.
12:15And here we have the Tintoretto.
12:24Tintoretto is one of the giants of Western art.
12:26He's one of the Venetian Renaissance masters who really pushed the art form forward of his use of colour, his use of compositions, perspective and architecture.
12:37This 480 year old painting depicts a biblical parable about the wise being spiritually prepared, while the foolish are not.
12:49The moral of the story is you have to prepare your soul for heaven before you die.
12:53And the way Tintoretto depicts it, it's almost like a wedding party.
12:57So there's dancing and there's food and there's music.
13:01So it's a very jolly time.
13:03And then if you're left out of the party, you're sort of wandering around the dark streets at night.
13:08And it's a very rare thing to see such an important work of art in a private home.
13:12This would have been a really bold picture in terms of its colour.
13:19But you can see that over time, layers of varnish have yellowed.
13:23So lots of visitors walk past.
13:26And we hope actually in future, this will be the one that people stop and look at.
13:32Actually, some of our volunteers joke they'd like to take, you know, a day cloth to it, because compared to the rest, it looks so dark.
13:39Walter Samuel's fortune came from oil.
13:48His father and uncle set up the Shell Transport and Trading Company in 1897.
13:56By 1920, Shell was one of the largest oil producers in the world.
14:01But Walter had progressive views on sharing his good fortune with others.
14:11He played a really unique role in the cultural world, in cultural philanthropy.
14:17He was very committed to great art being available for everyone.
14:20He was chairman of trustees of the National Gallery and the Whitechapel Gallery.
14:28Lots of his own works from Upton were quite often exhibited, so that they could be seen by the general public.
14:34To view Tintoretto's virgins in their purest state.
14:44If you guys can maybe just slay down a tiny, tiny bit of it, just...
14:49Michelle's drawn up a major conservation plan.
14:52First, they're winging their way to a high-tech imaging centre in London.
15:02Here it is.
15:04Here, technical art historian Jillene Nadolny will analyse the Tintoretto.
15:11We're going to take an X-ray first, because an X-ray will help us look at the condition of the painting.
15:16The X-ray will help Jillene discover what lies behind the surface layers of paint and varnish.
15:31OK, so here's our X-ray.
15:34Lots of cool stuff.
15:36Now, this is sort of interesting, actually.
15:39We've got a paint loss here and here,
15:41which means that some past conservator has gone in and retouched those.
15:47Someone else with a keen interest in these unusual results
15:51is Senior National Paintings Conservator Rebecca Helen.
15:56I mean, this is really fascinating, because it's had a life, hasn't it?
16:03It's a really exciting discovery.
16:04And so the next stage is to do some very serious technical examination
16:10to understand why we've got these dark black lines.
16:14Before they can conserve the painting,
16:17the team must unravel the mystery behind these unusual marks.
16:20Walter Samuel bequeathed his art collection to the National Trust to ensure that it remained accessible to as many as possible.
16:37Our art and culture today are hugely influenced by the legacies of what survives of people collecting and being real connoisseurs in the past.
16:46But with much to see beyond its art collection, including 12 acres of gardens once overseen by Walter's wife Dorothy,
17:01Upton House isn't just for those interested in preserving the past.
17:06Our bestsellers are jams and curds, National Trust's staple, fudge and rugs.
17:16Have you tried all these? What do you recommend?
17:21Yes, it's an absolute responsibility to try everything.
17:25The cherry curd is my favourite.
17:28In a chocolate cake with fresh cream, you can't beat it.
17:32What I find fascinating is that people come in to the shop to buy these.
17:36Yes.
17:37And then go home.
17:38Come and buy jam and go.
17:39Yeah, buy jam.
17:43While our appetite for National Trust jams may never change,
17:49some of the buildings it preserves were once home to genuine innovators.
17:54Many of the people who owned these houses were quite often trendsetting what's going to be in taste for the next few years.
18:02Rather than following what other people are doing, you are setting the scene.
18:05In southwest London stands the home of a Victorian writer and thinker world famous in his day for his radical ideas.
18:17Someone who put the once unfashionable enclave of Chelsea on the map.
18:23Back then, Chelsea was very different. These buildings were here from 1708, but Chelsea was a lot more rough and tumble.
18:32Workmen, carts, barges tying off on the Thames before the embankment was there.
18:37So it was smelly, loud and noisy and wasn't nearly as a millionaire's row as it is today.
18:46The words of the man who lived in this five-storey terraced house helped to shape the way Victorians viewed the world.
18:55Welcome to Carlisle's house.
18:5824 Cheney Row, Chelsea became the place to be for the great and good of London.
19:04But the man they all crave to meet is known by few today.
19:12Historian and literary giant Thomas Carlisle.
19:19Thomas Carlisle was a household name in Victorian society.
19:24He really was the A-list celebrity of his day.
19:27He couldn't leave his house without people coming to kind of watch him walk and get a newspaper.
19:32It's always experimenting which lights how to do it.
19:38Just to kind of drive the point home, you know, you imagine today athletes getting endorsements for products.
19:44It was the same way with Thomas Carlisle. His face and his name appears on brands of tobacco.
19:49And his wife, Jane Carlisle, as a matter of fact, later on, she appeared in Guinness advertisements.
19:56I think that's truly a marker of how successful and famous you've become when your face appears on those.
20:02Very funny if I broke it on that one.
20:13Originally from Austin, Texas, visitor experience officer Baxter has been helping look after Carlisle's house for nearly two years.
20:21There are no houses like this in Austin, Texas.
20:26The oldest structure, I think, in my hometown was built in 1840.
20:32And it's the oldest by a lot.
20:34So, you know, we really don't have anything quite like this.
20:38But when you walk through that front door, it's like you're going back in time 200 years to a home that's kind of frozen in amber.
20:46Thomas Carlisle was born in Scotland, the son of a stonemason.
20:54He first found fame in the 1830s through his pioneering style of writing.
21:03This is the Attic Study.
21:05So, this is the writing desk where Thomas did most of his work.
21:08You can see the ink stains. It's so cool.
21:11I think it's really cool.
21:12Carlisle was fast-tracked into the Victorian literati with his three-volume tome, The French Revolution, A History, published in 1837.
21:26It's a massive bestseller, huge international hit, and it revolutionizes, if you'll pardon the pun, the way history is written.
21:37He invited the reader to imagine themselves in the streets of Paris, witnessing and experiencing these events, the sights, the sounds, the smells.
21:47This now is very common, something that we're used to today.
21:53But Thomas Carlisle was a trailblazer in this regard.
21:58And he made history electric and alive for a huge mass of readers who had never experienced it that way before.
22:05As Carlisle's fame grew, he also became known for his letters, lectures and radical ideas on philosophy, politics and society.
22:18Soon, Cheney Rowe was hosting salons for the big hitters of the Victorian Literary League.
22:24Carlisle was nicknamed the Sage of Chelsea. He was friends with Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Emerson, Alfred Tennyson, these incredible literary figures that we know today came to Carlisle to get his opinion on their work.
22:45Their house becomes this like magnet to the intellectuals, the artists, you know, Frederick Chopin came and visited and played on their piano in the corner.
22:57Now, a new arrival at the house has revealed even more about the A-list company that Thomas and Jane were keeping.
23:10A letter from William Makepeace Thackeray, whose novel Vanity Fair famously satirized British high society of the time.
23:20At Carlisle's house, we have a new acquisition that we're really excited about.
23:30It's William Makepeace Thackeray seemingly inviting Jane to some kind of social function, an event, a dinner, something along those lines.
23:40I wish you would come to tea afterwards. I have only asked two or three select ladies.
23:47This is a tremendous thing to have because it says so much about the literary elite, the types of people who were friends and colleagues with Thomas and Jane.
23:58I am always yours affectionately, W.M. Thackeray.
24:04P.S. I offer to do things handsome and to send you back in the flyer.
24:09Type of carriage, presumably.
24:11I like that little sweeten the deal a little bit at the end there.
24:14What Thackeray doesn't reveal is why he was so keen for the Carlisles to visit.
24:21Tantalizingly, the note has a date, June the 10th, but no year.
24:28We want to use as many context clues as possible so we can figure out what was the event in question.
24:34It's like a historical mystery, who was there, what happened at this dinner.
24:43Solving this riddle could help provide more clues to Thomas and Jane's literary lifestyle.
24:50Carlisle's house is filled with the trappings of a lifetime of writing.
25:07This is probably relatable to today for a lot of people working on creative projects.
25:11Thomas Carlisle liked to surround himself with images of the characters who were featuring in his histories.
25:20And he would get engravings of these people and he would hang them up on his walls.
25:24We've got Goethe and Schiller.
25:26There's Frederick the Great. He appears a lot of times.
25:28And so he would kind of put a collage on big boards around him so he can picture them better when he's writing about them.
25:34He thought that that was helpful to his creative process.
25:41Tucked away in a corner of his attic writing room is his very own work from home attire.
25:53One of the things we keep a close eye on is the camel hair coat.
25:58Thomas Carlisle used it as a dressing gown.
26:01He appears nearly all the time in the house to keep him warm while he was writing.
26:11It's a wonderful item that helps us tell the story of Thomas.
26:18But it's been in a case laid flat for a number of years where it's not very easy to see.
26:26Hoping to breathe new life into the camel coat.
26:29Today, collections and house officer Lydia will be setting it free from its glass enclosure.
26:36I feel like the house got this atmosphere to it.
26:40It's quite sort of spooky in a way to begin with until you get to sort of know the house a bit better.
26:46But I think it's quite homely as well.
26:50You can sort of imagine them living here.
26:52This camel hair coat is over 150 years old.
27:03We can see areas of wear which could potentially be historic moth damage.
27:08We're not too sure.
27:09But it looks like we've got another hole here.
27:12Moth holes might be the straw that breaks this camel's back.
27:19There are concerns the coat may not be in good enough condition to go on display.
27:24So Lydia is preparing it for some specialist attention.
27:28It's always a tense day when something goes off site.
27:33If you can try and keep it flat.
27:36Carlisle's house is very skinny and narrow.
27:38So you have the added complication of manoeuvring a big box down lots and lots and lots of stairs.
27:46The camel hair coat, it's definitely been nibbled in the past.
27:50Which hopefully the conservation studio will be able to shed light on.
27:55Carlisle's coat is going to the Trust's textile conservation studio in Blickling, Norfolk.
28:05It's here that the Trust's most precious and important garments and fabrics are given a new lease of life.
28:14Textile conservator Terry has the job of repairing this moth chewed mantle.
28:20I'm just going to check first for any moth larvae or the frass, which is actually the poo of the larvae.
28:30Terry's worked at the textile studio for 10 years now.
28:34I grew up in Derbyshire and I've got Holdwick Hall on the doorstep, which is just one of the most amazing properties that is absolutely full of textiles as well.
28:44And I was a National Trust member.
28:47I actually joined when I was at uni doing fashion design and I used the houses as inspiration for quite a lot of projects.
28:52It looks like it's free from any clothes moth at present, which is really good news.
29:02While Terry works out a way to repair the historic moth damage to Carlisle's coat, at his house, Ellie and Lydia are keeping an eye on anything else that may be on the menu for uninvited guests.
29:17We're in Jane's bedroom, which is one of the hotspots for bugs in this house because of the amount of textiles we have in here.
29:27To control moth numbers, along with regular vacuuming, the team set out traps.
29:34Yeah, you can see we've got a moth on this one.
29:37We check these every quarter and record the numbers of moths we're finding in particular areas or through the house.
29:46Oh, we have one, two, three, four clothes moths in this trap.
29:54Ellie and Lydia will continue to monitor moth numbers in these rooms.
29:58If they increase, they may have a problem on their hands.
30:04So we have quite a few more on there.
30:06Going over ten, that's when you want to start worrying about how many you've got pootling land in your house.
30:12Lying in a thousand acres of some of Kent's oldest woodlands, Knoll is one of the National Trust's grandest houses.
30:26Set within a converted medieval barn in the grounds is the Royal Oak Foundation Conservation Studio.
30:38Where the Trust's treasured artworks are tended to.
30:43Including Tintoretto's wise and foolish virgins, who are now ready for their close-up.
30:51There it is, how exciting.
30:52Senior Paintings Conservator Sarah is investigating the mysterious marks revealed by the X-rays.
31:01So, I'm now looking at the painting and where we've got these quite dark lines on the figure's dress and also in the background.
31:12Tells me that there's some areas of quite recent restoration paint.
31:16To see the marks with the naked eye, Sarah will first have to remove this paint.
31:24I'm noting as well remains of what appears to be a darker, older varnish as well.
31:31And that can often be really quite difficult to remove.
31:36To lift these layers of varnish off, Sarah starts with a small test patch in a corner of the painting, using a mild solvent.
31:47It's looking really good to me.
31:52Obviously, I need to test a lot of other areas of the painting to check that they're all going to respond okay to my solvents and cleaning method.
32:00During this stage, we're trying out different sorts of cleaning materials, trying to understand the different layers of dark varnish and overpaint that is there.
32:21You do have to be careful. Whatever you use to clean a varnish off with doesn't affect the original paint layers.
32:34You do have to be careful.
32:39Walter Samuel acquired the Tintoretto in 1939, at a time when the world's attention was turning to war.
32:49A descendant of Jewish immigrants, he was acutely aware of the persecution Jews were suffering at the hands of the Nazis.
32:58He could not stand idly by.
33:00The family's motto was deeds not words, and I think, I think, Lord Bastard very much demonstrated that.
33:11To raise funds for Jews escaping the Nazis, Walter donated a painting by the 18th century portrait artist, Sir Thomas Lawrence.
33:20It sold at a special charity auction for 252 guineas, the equivalent of over 14,000 pounds today.
33:32The advance guard of the first 5,000 Jewish and non-Aryan child refugees from Germany to be provided with a temporary home here, while arrangements are made...
33:39Walter Samuel went on to help raise vast sums, much of which was spent on transporting children to safety, in an evacuation that became known as the Kinder Transport.
33:53In this box, we've got a lot of receipts for monies that were collected by Viscount Bearstead, and they collected millions, the millions that were necessary.
34:05Brenda has been volunteering at Upton House for the last 22 years.
34:10I came to Upton in many ways to escape from wall-to-wall rugby.
34:16My husband, he was addicted to watching matches, so even in the middle of summer, he'd be watching the Australians or the South Africans, and I just thought I'd head off for a National Trust property.
34:27And I said, I think I'd quite like to volunteer.
34:30So, I think within a week, I had a badge, and I was in the long gallery, and became completely obsessed.
34:39It's just a wonderful place to volunteer.
34:44The House Archives revealed that Walter personally loaned £60,000 for the cause, nearly £3.5 million today.
34:54I think it was obviously, of course, very close to his heart.
34:59And in the end, they managed to get 10,000 children out.
35:03And the youngsters tuck in as if they hadn't a care in the world.
35:08It's kind of mind-blowing when you look back. There you are.
35:12As the war in Europe escalated, Walter wasn't just focused on saving lives.
35:25He was also determined to safeguard our cultural heritage.
35:29Arranging for many of Upton's artworks to be taken to the disused Manod Slape Quarry in North Wales, alongside National Collections.
35:39In all of those philanthropic acts, whether it be cultural philanthropy or facilitating the kindertransport, he was very much about action.
35:48In the studio, Sarah's actions have removed the layers of old varnish from the Tintoretto, giving her a clearer perspective on those mysterious marks.
36:08She's called in Rebecca and Michelle to share her thoughts.
36:16Now that I've cleaned the painting, we've now got these very obvious forms of missing paint coming down these areas of the painting.
36:26And this is another version of the same painting from around the same time.
36:30But these figures, they're holding these scrolls.
36:37Yeah.
36:39In this version of the painting from the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, Tintoretto used scrolls to illustrate the parable of the foolish and unprepared virgins being barred from heaven.
36:50And it appears the marks on Upton House's painting were once the same type of artistic device.
36:58These would have directly linked this painting to the biblical parable.
37:04So she's saying something like, let me in, and he's saying something like, I don't know you.
37:10And it makes much more sense as a parable.
37:12Exactly.
37:14It wasn't uncommon for much of the history of European ore painting to paint more than one version at once.
37:21But the big question is why the scrolls were removed, who removed them and when.
37:26So is there any indication whether Tintoretto changed his mind?
37:30Or do we think it was someone later?
37:32That's a difficult question to answer.
37:36Okay.
37:37The problem is that this presents us with a little bit of dilemma when it comes to the in-painting stage.
37:44The conservation teams must decide whether to recreate the scrolls or paint in the damaged areas where they once were.
37:54These decisions are, they're quite hard to make because there isn't a right or wrong answer.
37:59People will have different opinions on what's the best thing to do in that situation.
38:13In his workshop in the East End of London, sculpture conservator Melvin is getting hands-on with Erno Goldfinger's inventively kinetic artwork by Argentinian artist Hugo DeMarco.
38:26Now I've not got the motor connected, I can actually turn it so you can actually see what happens when the motor's actually in play.
38:34It feels quite smooth. There, there's a little bit of resistance somewhere.
38:39When it's actually going round, they hit one another.
38:42There you go.
38:44That's what happens.
38:46The biggest problem I have as a conservator is you want to look after the purity of the object.
38:50So you don't really want to undo anything the artist has done.
38:55What you want to do is just like work with what he's done, find out if there's any problems with it, and then just sort of correct it and tweak it.
39:02OK.
39:05That's the cog off.
39:07Ah, right, OK.
39:09Now that's something I didn't bank on.
39:11There's bearings on the inside.
39:13I might explain why we're having slight problems.
39:16Maybe the bearings are worn, we might need to replace them.
39:19The risk of dismantling anything like this is the fact that you'll never get back together again.
39:23So the most important thing I find is you take it apart, lay it all out systematically.
39:29With the back of the cog mechanism fully removed, Melvin gets a clearer idea of what may be causing this artwork to slip its discs.
39:40Just there's a really tiny ball bearing inside here.
39:43And you can see that there is quite a bit of movement.
39:46So what I might just do is just put filling around the edge of the wood just to make it sit tighter so it sits true.
39:51To make sure the bearings fit as snugly as DiMarco intended, Melvin secures them with epoxy resin.
40:08So now they're glued in, we just wait for the glue to go off and I can start assembling the parts.
40:14This striking kinetic artwork fitted in perfectly with Goldfinger's modernist design at Willow Road.
40:23But there's a rumour that a London neighbour wasn't quite so enamoured with the house's radical aesthetic.
40:30And took an unusual form of revenge.
40:35There's an old member dropped by, sir, same handicap as yours. I wondered if you'd rather play with him.
40:40Will you see?
40:41Mr Bond?
40:42Yes?
40:43This is Mr Goldfinger.
40:44Mr Goldfinger.
40:48In the film adaptation of Ian Fleming's seventh James Bond novel, Bond stages a chance meeting with the villain Goldfinger, portrayed by Gert Fruber as a sinister megalomaniac.
41:01But is there any truth in the story that Fleming deliberately named this Bond villain after Erno Goldfinger?
41:10So, the Fleming story.
41:11Yes, this is the one that we get quite a lot at Willow Road, that Ian Fleming was very much against the building of Willow Road as a local Hampstead residence.
41:25But I don't think that's actually true.
41:28It's this famous scene where Sean Connery plays a cool-headed Bond sparring with Auric Goldfinger over a game of golf, which may indicate how Fleming got the inspiration for his character's surname.
41:46What's your game, Mr Bond?
41:47Essentially what we think the story was is that Ursula Goldfinger's cousin went for golf with Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming basically went with Goldfinger, that's a great name, and decided to use it in his book.
42:00But for Erno, there was little doubt about the source of inspiration for this Bond character.
42:07Goldfinger wasn't very happy about it, basically. Being the name of a villain, he didn't really see the humour in it.
42:14It got quite heated, and eventually they managed to settle with Ian Fleming paying Goldfinger's legal fees and sending him six free copies of the book.
42:29I don't think Ian Fleming quite knew what he was getting into with Goldfinger.
42:32There was no clearer display of Goldfinger's strength of will than his towering, brutalist buildings, which began looming over London after the Second World War.
42:46I'm sad to say that war and destruction is an opportunity, but of course it was, and Goldfinger was thinking very much not just about providing mass housing, but about thinking about how people live together, particularly living vertically.
43:00Changing the way people lived, and the architectural landscape of Britain, didn't go down well in all quarters at that time.
43:08Some people think that living in tall flats raises a whole new set of problems.
43:17By the 1990s, a decade after his death, Goldfinger's controversial London high-rises, Balfron and Trellick Towers, were granted protected status as Grade One listed buildings.
43:31It's very funny now to see the buildings that were most derided are now the most celebrated of his buildings.
43:42And it's nice to see that a younger generation are sort of appreciating them.
43:48But I kind of wish I could reach back in time and tell him that.
43:51Over a century earlier, historian Thomas Carlyle was riding high on his fame.
44:05And he and his wife Jane were being invited to all the best dinner parties.
44:11The volume of their personal correspondence is colossal, but there are gaps to our knowledge of the personal lives of Thomas and Jane.
44:21The team investigating William Makepeace Thackeray's mystery event have extended their own special invitation.
44:36Good morning, Professor Campbell.
44:38You must be back.
44:39I am indeed. Nice to meet you. Come on in.
44:41Please.
44:43Carlisle expert Professor Ian Campbell has spent over 60 years studying their correspondence.
44:50I first came here as a PhD student in 1965.
44:55And it was wonderful to walk down the street we'd read about so much and ring the row bell and find ourselves in Cheney Row.
45:05Along with the letter, the donor also gave the team some leads on the mysterious dinner.
45:11Which curator Eleanor has been following up.
45:16We really want to establish what event it's talking about.
45:20What is the party that they're being invited to.
45:23Although there's no mention of the year, two clues are the month and the address.
45:29We've been able to verify that Thackeray was at 13 Yonge Street on the 10th of June, only for a few years.
45:39We also know from the memoirs of Thackeray's daughter, Anna Ritchie, that on the 12th of June in the year 1850, two days after that letter is dated, he held a kind of VIP event.
45:51If you were making a case for dating the letter, you cannot get much closer than this.
45:58It's a strong case.
46:00Anna's memoirs go on to reveal who was at this dinner.
46:04The most notable persons who ever came into our old bow window drawing room in Yonge Street is a guest never to be forgotten by me.
46:12Miss Bronte.
46:13Charlotte Bronte was one of the hottest new writing talents of the time.
46:21Her debut novel, Jane Eyre, had just been a bestseller.
46:26And this event was set to be her introduction to London literati.
46:32And so it was an opportunity for Jane and Thomas to get their first look at this woman who was the talk of the town.
46:41But it was spectacularly unsuccessful.
46:47They had a terrible time.
46:49According to Anna Thackeray's memoirs, Miss Bronte failed to dazzle as expected.
46:57It was a gloomy and a silent evening.
47:01Everyone waited for the brilliant conversation, which never began at all.
47:05I think it's fascinating we cannot ask for much more than we've got here.
47:11There's always something new to discover at historical places like this.
47:15And to have the evidence that one of the two or three ladies that Thackeray refers to in the letter was Charlotte Bronte is a very exciting feeling.
47:23At the Knoll studio, Sarah's also been wrestling with a conundrum, Tintoretto's scrubbed out scrolls.
47:40We just don't know for absolute sure that it wasn't Tintoretto himself that actually scraped out the scrolls.
47:48So we can't say with absolute certainty that they were always meant to be in there.
47:53As well as that, we have to consider that Lord Bierstadt, when he collected this painting, he understood it without these scrolls in place.
48:00So our ultimate decision is to make it look like the scrolls had never been there.
48:07To fill in the area where the scrolls were means precisely matching the handiwork of an old master, stroke by delicate stroke.
48:18I mean, this is the first Tintoretto that I've worked on, and so it's quite exciting for me.
48:25You know, he's a really great artist and it is one of Tintoretto's masterpieces.
48:30You get up close and you see that real fluidity of brush strokes, but you have to employ a little bit of artifice to simulate that, you know,
48:39I can't just, you know, put a big stroke on like Tintoretto did, so I have to kind of simulate with very small tiny dots how that brush stroke actually looks from a distance.
48:55I'm very careful always to use reversible materials, and we will document carefully that the scrolls were there,
49:02and we will try and find some way of communicating this to people so that people that come and research this painting in the future understand that they were once in place.
49:12But the challenges now are you've got to join up the surrounding areas in a way that is authentic and honest and fit in terms of the context of the rest of the painting.
49:32At the Blickling Textile Studio, Terry's also aiming to disguise something, the moth holes in Carlisle's coat.
49:42And she's come up with an unusual technique.
49:46Because it's made out of camel hair, anything that we found, so linen, cotton, different types of wool, just looked too flat.
49:53And an idea came about that actually why don't we try and do a felted patch to replicate the texture.
50:00So it's just a case literally of felting the fibres down to the linen patch, trying not to stab myself.
50:10Terry's hoping these patches will match the thickness and texture of the camel hair around each moth hole.
50:18When I'm working on it, I think about him and how he might have felt.
50:23And I think the paintings of him in this garment, you know, it was, I think, a garment that he relaxed in, which is, you know, it's lovely to work with.
50:31OK, so I'm happy with that colour and I've got it in the right, right area.
50:45So now it's just about securing these areas of loose fibres so that they don't fray or don't become unravelled more.
50:52Thomas Carlyle was a style setter and a literary thinker, but his legacy is controversial.
51:06In 1849, he published a pamphlet stating that the British economy would benefit from reinstating slavery.
51:14This caused a firestorm at a time when slavery had already been outlawed in the British Empire for years.
51:24Within his circle of friends, people were furious about this.
51:29Charles Darwin said that his views on slavery were revolting.
51:33Carlyle also published texts which contained antisemitism.
51:42He leans into these often really horrible stereotypes and tropes about people and he embellishes them.
51:51One way that we try to tackle that at the Carlyle's house is to make sure that we're thinking about how the objects that we have in the house can help us to tell these stories better
52:00and more openly.
52:04But even then, to the end of his days, he was lauded as this giant of literature and intellectualism.
52:17In his East London studio, Melvin has now come full circle with his repairs to Erno Goldfinger's kinetic artwork.
52:26The epoxy resin to hold the bearings in place has set.
52:34In theory, the metal discs should now rotate perfectly.
52:43The only thing to do is flick the switch and see if it's all going round nicely.
52:50Which is always a worrying part, let's see.
52:59Right, just slide it round.
53:02And have a look at this side.
53:05Okay.
53:06So far, so good.
53:07I was really surprised when I actually turned it on and it was working, it was working beautifully.
53:21I mean, it was an absolute joy.
53:22But it's going to be interesting seeing it hung on the wall at Willow Road.
53:28I'm really looking forward to having it back.
53:31I'm a little bit nervous because I know it's quite a complicated piece.
53:36Okay, this is where I missed the marker and dropped it on the floor.
53:42Erno Goldfinger's granddaughter, Pippa, has also returned to the house.
53:47I'm really looking forward to seeing the DeMarco working again.
53:51Hi there.
53:53Hi Mel.
53:54I remember it well from my childhood.
53:56And there we go.
54:00Wow.
54:02It is so mysterious.
54:04They look like they're just floating, don't they?
54:07It looks really, really good.
54:10I kind of could never work out as a little kid how those circles just moved around and seemed not to be attached to anything.
54:20Yeah, it feels very calming to look at.
54:23It looks so extraordinary.
54:31My grandfather, like a lot of kind of modernists and forward thinkers of the 20th century, had a fascination in how things worked and in new technologies as well.
54:44So the DeMarco is a great example of a work of art that's also a mechanism.
54:51And he'd be really pleased to see it in its restored condition.
55:00And in Chelsea, the repaired camel hair coat belonging to controversial figure Thomas Carlyle is now ready for display.
55:10And then it asks you to come back up here and hold that side.
55:15It's really lovely to see the items go back home, if you like, back where they belong.
55:21That is like the cherry on the cake, really, the finishing bit of the job and you can say, oh, there it is, it's done.
55:27It does look very nice.
55:28Yeah, the repairs are so discreet.
55:30Now that it's on the mannequin really gives a sense of Carlyle as a person and the coat that he lived in for such a long time really brings him as a character to life.
55:44In Warwickshire, the 16th century Tintoretto is about to be unveiled.
55:59Kind of like seeing an old friend again, actually.
56:02So, yeah, it's a, it's a big day.
56:09Oh, wow.
56:13The colours have come back to life in all of the detail.
56:17One of Walter Samuel's favourite paintings is finally back at Upton, with the wise and foolish virgins missing scrolls now carefully concealed, as they were in the 1930s.
56:37Can you all remember what it looked like before?
56:39Yes, very much so.
56:40The idea of seeing it now is, um, it's quite emotional.
56:46Aw.
56:49And hopefully, the house volunteers will now no longer be tempted to give this masterpiece a good going over with their jay cloths.
57:01Hi.
57:04Oh, my goodness.
57:05What a transformation.
57:09Absolutely stunning.
57:35When they come back, um, it's like a homecoming.
57:37a homecoming but this is especially good in that it's come back in such fantastic fantastic
57:44condition i'm absolutely stunned to see it wonderful
58:00next time two grand houses at a time of dramatic transformation
58:06once we do it we can't undo it oh don't say that a mythical menagerie gets a new lease of life
58:13gender is very fluid in the ceiling and a priceless religious artwork takes to the skies
58:22it's all happening it's history isn't it you're putting history together
58:35so