This Sunday marks forty years of Malmsey House. Forty years since Mum & Peter first made the short move from their Ardmore flat in Vicarage Road to Church Road in leafy Leigh Woods.
Malmsey House started life as the extensive back garden of The White House, one of a pair of substantial and prominent Arts & Crafts Grade II listed semi-detached family homes (the other being Grange Fell) overlooking the Ashton Court Estate and dating back to 1901.
The rear grounds originally extended all the way to Church Road but in the early to mid-1980s a development opportunity was spotted and the boundary line was sold off, enough land for two new detached houses to be built, leaving The White House and Grange Fell with frontages and access to Abbots Leigh Road only. It was quite a loss but these grand villas have retained significant private grounds and it was no doubt a lucrative split and infill.
The builder who acquired the land was Peter Davis and he immediately got to work building Malmsey House and Chakas Kraal, which work was completed in 1984/5.
He and his wife Eileen then sold Chakas Kraal and lived themselves in Malmsey House, as had always been the plan. But it appears the Davis’s hit financial troubles and in the summer of ’86 after only living there for a year they abruptly put Malmsey House on the market.
Cue Mum & Peter. They had watched the two houses being built on daily walks around the block from Ardmore, and even nosed around the foundations and building work as the houses quickly took shape. Now suddenly there was an opportunity.
13 Ardmore had been Mum & Peter’s first home together when Mum moved to Bristol in September 1994, and Mum had put her stamp on it, but Ardmore could not fully escape its origins as Peter’s legacy bachelor accommodation from when he first landed back in Bristol (from Hong Kong) to take up his post at Société Générale in the Autumn of 1982.
In any event Mum & Peter needed more space and a garden and specifically Mum hankered after a clothes line and a cat.
Malmsey was the just the job, delivering that indoor and outdoor space barely 300 metres away.
The asking price was £140,000 and Mum & Peter did not hang around. They offered the full asking price in August 1986 and moved in on 1 November 1986, with the Davis’s exiting Bristol sharply and seemingly disappearing overseas.
Malmsey House and Chakas Kraal are both Potton houses, timber-frame premium kit homes much loved by small builders and self-builders alike for the ease and speed of construction, flat-pack style.
Potton is still going strong today and then as now the company is known for the rustic look mimicking English country homes. They are big on internal timber posts and beams and brickwork facades and deeply recessed inglenook fireplaces.
The Potton style is also very much against standard rooflines in favour of gables and prominent dormer windows and intersecting roof pitches.
Malmsey ticks all those boxes and is most definitely a Potton, specifically the Gransden, which back in the eighties was Potton’s four bed family house occupying the middle ground in the Heritage range.
So far so all very clear.
But why those house names?
Well I cannot be totally sure but they appear to be two completely unrelated historical references.
Chakas Kraal is a well-known sugar estate in KwaZulu-Natal in the eastern province of South Africa and gave it name to a narrow gauge steam locomotive (Chakas Kraal No. 6) built to serve the sugar cane industry. The loco was repatriated to the UK in 1981 from Natal where and now operates at the Toddington Narrow Gauge Railway (also known as the North Gloucestershire Railway), which runs alongside the main heritage line at Toddington Station in Gloucestershire.
As for Malmsey House it is named after Malmsey, the strong sweet, rich Greek and Portuguese fortified wine.
Malmsey’s primary fame stems from a dramatic event in 1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence (the brother of King Edward IV and King Richard III), was private ordered to be executed in the Tower of London. According to enduring historical tradition and immortalised by William Shakespeare in Richard III, he chose to be drowned inside a butt of Malmsey wine.
There’s just one issue, however. The slate house sign out the front as erected by the Davis’s back in 1985 states “Malmsy House”, (without an “e”). And that’s also the name on the title deeds.
But Royal Mail is having none of that: its computer says it’s Malmsey House.
Peter thinks the Davis’s made an error and it was always actually meant to be Malmsey with an “e”.
Or maybe it was deliberate as there is scant room for an “e” on the slate house sign. And Malmsey without an “e” was a common historic variation, albeit obsolete today.
Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary treats Malmsey as the standard, correct spelling for the sweet Madeira wine and it is the only way to avoid to dread red squiggly in Microsoft Word.
So being the compliant sort I’ve tended to run with Malmsey.
But Peter himself persevered with Malmsy, as did Mum, and over the years their letterhead has always been Malmsy.
So maybe a future project for me would be to take on the Royal Mail’s database and campaign for the e’s removal. But that would mean I’d have to switch to Malmsy myself and put up with typo alerts forevermore. So for now well…..you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Leaving aside troublesome spelling variants I can be clear that there has been a lot of work done over the last 40 years.
The conservatory was added in 1991 followed by the single storey side extension in 1994. And at some later point Mum got her wishes when the living flame gas fire in the inglenook was replaced with a much loved wood burning stove.
But the biggest project has undoubtedly been the garden. This was very much a blank canvas back in 1986, just turf shoved on top of builders rubble and that was that, no topsoil, no landscaping, nothing.
It’s been quite a project involving a huge amount of work and landscaping over the years and Peter is perhaps most proud of the pond area, as framed by the rockery, a splendid outcrop now faithfully guarded by the scarlet ibis mosaic.
So tonight on our Friday Night Dinner with Peter we toast all these efforts and raise a glass to Malmsey’s anniversary, and of course to Mum, forever the mistress of Malmsey, the lady of the house.
The clothes line may have been stowed for the winter but Millie is still with us, an old lady herself and the sixth in line of much loved moggies, following in the paws of Tommy, Hushon, Freddie, Evie and Archie xxx.
