Publication Account
Date 1996
Event ID 1016386
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1016386
Built in 1809, this castellated mansion is in a simple, severe style of Georgian Gothic, possibly designed by John Paterson of Edinburgh. The main block is of three storeys with a larger central bay tower with a Doric portico at its base. This last was added in 1829 when the house was bought by John Gladstone, who had made a fortune from supplying corn to the growing industrial communities of south-east Lancashire. In common with several other north-east landowners he later owned slave sugar plantations in the West Indies and invested in the new railways. He was created a baronet in 1846.
From 1830 to 1851 Fasque was the home of his younger son, WE Gladstone, and the house is full of memorabilia of the fout-times Prime Minister. However, it is as a superbly organised machine for servicing the hunting and shooting proclivities of Sir John's eldest son and grandson between 1830 and 1914 that Fasque is best viewed. (The latter gentleman and seven of his friends once shot more than 3000 pheasants in one day in 1905.) The house illuminates in extraordinary detail the logistics of life in a wealthy Victorian country house, both above and below stairs. This is partly because nothing was ever thrown out, or so it would seem, by any of the six generations of Gladstones that have lived here.
Much of the ground floor is given over to an efficiently laid-out suite of rooms for the (minimum of) fifteen indoor servants to work in. As well as the gloomy servants' hall, where the middle-rank servants ate, there are a kitchen, vegetable scullery, scullery with larder off, still rooms, a housekeeper's room and the butler's pantry. These rooms are still furnished with a daunting array of equipment: armies of coal scuttles and candle-holders, platoons of bed pans, and waves of water-carriers, all of which the staff had to carry to the guests' rooms. The kitchen is particularly impressive, with a spread of shining copper pans all along one wall.
Above stairs, the interiors generally display a sense of comfortable elegance. The entrance hall is particularly pleasing being bright and deep, with a gleaming, glass- scraped floor leading back to a superb double staircase. This is cantilevered into the wall and has low risers and deep treads so that the visitor appears to soar effortlessly upwards rather than merely ascend. The upper landing is lit from an oval cupola above.
The most interesting rooms are the Business Room, the successor of the Laird's room in earlier great houses, which is arranged as a late Victorian estate owner's room with an excellent four seater 'rent desk'; the bathroom, which contains Sir John's grandiose canopied bath with shower, spray, wave, plunge, cold and hot taps; Sir Thomas's bedroom with a wardrobe that looks like a tomb; and the Library, the collecting of books for which was largely the responsibility of the young WE Gladstone, and which boasts above the shelves a series of inspirational busts of some of the writers represented below. The bedroom of Mr Gladstone's sister, the confined and depressive Helen, is dark and oppressive.
All this solid comfort was funded from the investments made by the Founder and from the income of the improved farms of the estate's tenants. The nearby Episcopal chapel of 1847 is in an early English style by James Henderson: it was for the family, their servants and tenants.
Information from ‘Exploring Scotland’s Heritage: Aberdeen and North-East Scotland’, (1996).
