Ashcombe, The Story of a Fifteen Year Lease

Cecil Beaton's account of his time at Ashcombe

Author

Cecil Beaton, foreword by Hugo Vickers

Publisher

Dovecote Press, Wimborne, 1999

Ashcombe, The Story of a Fifteen Year Lease

Printing Details

First thus. Paperback. 23.5 × 15.5cm, 124pp.

Ashcombe, a house on the Wiltshire / Dorset border was derelict when Cecil Beaton first saw it in 1930, the surviving fragment of a once grand eighteenth century country house set house amidst rolling downland. Over the next fifteen years Beaton transformed Ashcombe into a rural idyll, and few other memoirs of the period so vividly evoke the gilded slightly edgy flavour of the 1930s. Through Ashcombe's doors flowed artists, dukes, aesthetes, exiles, film stars, writers, eccentrics. Yet the house was also Beaton's wartime refuge from his growing success as a photographer and the backdrop to a doomed affair. Nowhere is the spirit that runs through the book more obvious than in the 24 pages of photographs, virtually all of which were taken by Cecil Beaton.