Every Friday I send out an email that features photos from the Rupert Leach Collection, snaps taken from the personal View-Master reels of View-Master’s Director of Photography in the 1940s and 50s. These never-before-published images show alternative shots of some commercial View-Master reels and sometimes personal photos of Leach, his wife Poppy, and others.
We learned that maybe Rupert Leach was a bad speller a few weeks back when I couldn’t figure out Brixham vs Devon. Anyway, what’s important here is that sometimes we need to be fast and loose with clues when figuring out the history of these reels.
In this case the envelope read:
“Tich’s” and Lady Nicholson’s
Sir Harold and Lady Nicholson’s Chissinghurst Castle
which resulted in some baffled Googling on my part until I found one Sir Harold Nicolson; his wife, the fascinating Vita Sackville-West; and their residence, Sissinghurst Castle, which has a famous garden designed by the couple and open to the public to this day!
Let’s dig in!
The first photo on this reel is a view through windows to an outbuilding.
The second photo clearly shows Sissinghurst Castle. There’s a nice history on it here, which indicates it was decimated by war and whatnot:
Sir Harold Nicolson purchased Sissinghurst in 1930, and he rescued what remained of the castle and along with his wife, Vita Sackville-West, created the splendid gardens. Finally, in 1968, the property passed into the hands of the National Trust.
So, given that these photos were very likely taken in the mid-1950s, this reel includes some photos of the gardens when they were still a private sanctuary. There are, sadly, no photos of the residents.
I have to wonder if perhaps Leach himself sent personal View-Master reels to fancy folks like Leslie Williams and Harold Nicolson as a thank you for their hospitality? No clue, of course, but if you know drop it in the comments.
A lovely photo of flowering trees in front of the estate.
Another shot of Sissinghurst Castle.
This is a curious photo. It appears to be clear brightly colored plates in front of a window, which I’m sure made a warm glow inside. Whose collection? I’ll have to keep reading to find out but it was a private residence so it belonged to the family.
Fun fact? It could still be there today because the Nicolson descendants still live in the house even though they down own the grounds. It causes friction!
Portrait of the Homeowners
Now, all of this so far has been very fancy and British, but our homeowners and gardening enthusiasts, Harold and Vita, were so much more than fancy British gardeners. The had a very fascinating and spicy history, and I must share it! Their son, Nigel, wrote a book about his parents’ marriage from his mother’s own diaries called Portrait of a Marriage. It was turned into a mini-series in 1990 for the BBC.
Harold was a diplomat and writer. Vita was a prolific author. Between them they published more than 70 books!
They were famously devoted to each other and wrote almost every day when they were separated because of Nicolson's long diplomatic postings abroad or Vita's insatiable wanderlust. Eventually, he gave up diplomacy, partly so that they could live together in England.
They had what would be known today as an open marriage and both were bisexual. They openly discussed their romantic dalliances and their bisexuality with each other. Being prolific writers, they kept great notes and sent many letters all about their side piece shenanigans.
Most famously, Vita had affairs with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis. Check out the Paris Review’s look back at Vita’s fascinating libertine life. Here’s a completely bonkers excerpt (10/10 read the whole thing!):
While Harold went to Paris to, you know, write and sign the Treaty of Versailles, Vita and Violet sprinted to Monte Carlo, where Vita cross-dressed exclusively as a wounded war soldier named Julian, and wrote the first draft of her great novel of independence, Challenge. For four months, the women were so violently happy together, they became furious at each other’s husbands (“I treated her savagely, I made love to her, I had her, I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys”) and decided to elope, society and obligations be damned. Vita drafted a sort of last will and testament—as if Vita Sackville-West were legally dying, to be survived by Julian—and crossed the Strait of Dover by ferry to join Violet in Calais, France.
By this point, everybody knew everything. In accordance with the mutually encouraging nature of their partnership, Vita had confided in Harold every step of the way (“I am trying to be good, Hadji, but I want so dreadfully to be with her”). On Valentine’s Day, 1920, the husbands flew by two-seater plane from island to continent to retrieve their wives at a hotel in Amiens. In his later account of his parents’ crisis, Nigel endearingly wonders, “How did Denys happen to have a two-seater aeroplane? When had he learned to fly?”
Violet starved herself; Denys cried; Harold had just drawn the new national boundaries of modern Europe only to find himself in a private circus of irreconcilable conflict; and the episode’s finale came when Violet admitted that she’d had sex with her own husband, Denys, the night before fleeing to France. Vita couldn’t abide this lapse, and called it betrayal (one of Vita’s lowest moments of hypocrisy, as she had already borne Harold two sons). The exchange was so profoundly and symmetrically embarrassing that the quartet reacted by reverting to “normal life,” which once again recommended itself as at least a source of sanity. By 1923, Harold and Vita had resumed their “firm, elastic formula,” Violet had returned to Denys, and a new affair stood on Vita’s horizon—this time with a man, the writer Geoffrey Scott.
They seem super intense and exhausting! Exactly the kind of people I love to read about. Later Vita would start up her most famous dalliance, with Virginia Woolf. And more drama ensued:
Virginia documented the Sackville-West spectacle in her 1928 novel Orlando, which flings Vita from century to century and from sex to sex—now a young Elizabethan lad, now a lady ambassador to Constantinople—and concludes with an outright photograph of Vita at her house with her dogs. …
Virginia depicted Violet as a flighty Russian princess in Orlando, and Violet in turn wrote Broderie Anglaise, a cutting novel that belittled Virginia and Vita’s romance. In 1930, Vita published her own best-selling novel The Edwardians, a takedown of aristocratic society at large. It’s a masterpiece that nobody ever reads. The prose is cheeky, confident, formally irreverent, revelatory, and as evocative of time and mood as Woolf’s, but posterity saw fit to preserve only one midcentury woman writer whose name began with V.
Even though they were the kind of libertines to make even modern folks blush, the couple’s most famous legacy is surely their most wholesome: their garden.
Here’s an exhaustive video of the famous gardens if you’re interested. It has extremely chill vibes and gives you a setting for all the drama:
Whew! What a juicy adventure and a sublime place! Until next time…
If you made it this far you should smash that ❤️ button so I know you’re out there and following along. Thanks for reading, friends! And be sure to subscribe for new reels every week.