Kelly - Holland House: a History of Londons Most Celebrated Salon

O NE of the last great balls in London in the summer of 1939 took place at Holland House. George VI and Queen Elizabeth were among the guests, and the queue of cars to the gates on Kensington High Street stretched back to Hyde Park Corner. It was a magnificent finale. War was looming and a few weeks later the then owner, the sixth Earl of Ilchester, removed the most valuable paintings, books and furniture, as well as the priceless collection of family manuscripts, to his country home at Melbury in Dorset. We can only be thankful for his foresight. On 27 September 1940 Holland House was largely destroyed by enemy bombs.

Lord Ilchester wrote two books based on family papers about the history of Holland House, The Home of the Hollands, 16051820 and Chronicles of Holland House, 18201900 . He also edited the journals and Spanish journals of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, her letters to her son, Henry Edward Fox, and Henry Foxs own journals as a young man, each in their way reflecting the excitement of the years when Holland House was the centre of Whig politics. A devoted guardian of the family archive, Ilchester was determined that the vast collection of Holland House papers, with their far-reaching coverage of political and family history, should not leave Britain, and after his death in 1959 they were acquired, as he had wished, by the British Library. The Holland House paintings, books and furniture together with busts of Fox and others which were rescued from the fire are still at Melbury and I am enormously grateful to Charlotte Townshend, granddaughter of the seventh Earl of Ilchester, for her kindness in showing them to me. They brought the third Lord Hollands circle to life in a way that nothing else could have done.

I am very grateful, too, to the staff of the British Library, the Kensington Central Library, the London Library, the National Portrait Gallery and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; to Francis Russell for making my visit to Melbury possible and for sharing his knowledge of its treasures; to Theodore Wilson Harris for allowing me to quote from his novel Da Silva da Silvas Cultivated Wilderness , and to Tim Cribb for introducing me to it; to Peter Cochran for allowing me to quote from his transcription of Hobhouses comments in Doris Langley Moores copy of Moores Life of Byron , now in the collection of Jack Wasserman; to my agent and former publisher, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson; to my editors Lester Crook, Joanna Godfrey and Nadine El-Hadi at I.B.Tauris, and Alex Billington and Alex Middleton at Tetragon; to friends and relations for their help and encouragement: Henry Anglesey, Marina Camrose, Raymond Carr, Rosanna and Anthony Gardner, Mark Girouard, Rachel Grigg, Erskine Guinness, Nicholas Kelly, Anthony Malcolmson, Chip Martin, Douglas Matthews, Mollie and John Julius Norwich, Valerie Pakenham, Antonia Pinter, Mehreen Saigol, the late Christine Sutherland, Hugh Thomas, John Train, Katharine Wakefield and Frances Wilson; and last but certainly not least to my husband Laurence Kelly for his constant interest and support.