Gladstone & the Good Life – Hawarden, North Wales

Let’s visit Hawarden in north Wales, where the legacy of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone endures through the efforts of his descendants

“Books are delightful society,” said Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. “If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”

His words capture how it feels to arrive at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, north Wales, where the warmest of welcomes awaits visitors. There is a special, almost monastic, feeling to the place, with the hush of an Oxbridge quad, with not quite the oppressive weight of expectation one feels in the colleges of those cities.

Which is not to say Gladstone, a founding figure of the Liberal Party, was not a heavyweight. “Every working-class house in Britain had a memento of him,” says Charlie Gladstone, his great-great-grandson. “He was a prime minister you could be genuinely proud of. Things were different then – the world didn’t have votes for women and slavery still existed – but, in terms of his fight for the common person, he was a proper champion.” Library assistant Gary Butler explains: “When talking about Gladstone, it’s fair to make comparisons like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. He was a member of parliament for 62 years, he served as prime minister four times and is known for introducing secret ballots for voting, as well as education for all and was a supporter of Irish Home Rule, although that didn’t quite get through during his time.” Gladstone was also a classical scholar and a voracious reader, devouring around 22,000 books in his lifetime which amounts to around 300 books a year (almost one a day). Peter Francis, warden of Gladstone’s Library, explains: “The heart of the library is Gladstone’s own collection. Many of his books contain his annotations, some of which are extremely detailed.”

These jottings share glimpses into the inner workings of the great man. (A particularly appealing example is a small cross in the margin of a biography of his arch-rival Disraeli with the words: “untrue, untrue, untrue”.)

“Towards the end of his life Gladstone was thinking about what to do with his books,” says Butler, or, as his daughter Mary Drew put it, “Often pondering how to bring together readers who had no books and books who had no readers.” His answer was to create a library in Hawarden, the village where he lived: “A country home for the purposes of study and research, for the pursuit of divine learning, a centre of religious life.”

Hawarden (pronounced “Harden”), which developed as a mining village, is, at first glance, an unassuming, picturesque spot, but its location near the cities of Manchester and Liverpool made Gladstone think there might be plenty of “readers who had no books” nearby who might benefit from its location.

Today, Charlie Gladstone and his wife, Caroline, have similarly focused their considerable energy on projects that encourage creativity, learning and sharing ideas, including two festivals in Hawarden, the Good Life Experience and Gladfest. Their various ventures have turned the pretty village into a popular tourist and foodie destination that has been voted twice by readers of The Times one of the best places to live in the UK.

Family ties

The Gladstones’ longest established business is Pedlars, which sells stylish vintage items, with a shop and café in Notting Hill and what is known as Pedlars Towers in Hawarden. However more recent projects have included the award-winning Hawarden Estate Farm Shop and the successful refurbishment of the Glynne Arms in the centre of the village, which takes its name from the family of Catherine Glynne, Gladstone’s wife, and recalls Charlie’s ancestors throughout its décor.

Another success has been the Good Life Experience, a festival focusing on music, food, crafts and the great outdoors that has just celebrated its third year, which Charlie and Caroline run with musician and presenter Cerys Matthews and her husband in the grounds of their home, Hawarden Castle. “I had always wanted to do a festival,” says Charlie, who worked in the music industry in the 1990s and discovered the Charlatans. “And I had been toying with the notion of the Good Life – it somehow became relevant after the crash in 2008. A lot of the old rubbish like luxury handbags or whatever began to feel a bit tired and making your own things and growing your own food came back into fashion.”

At the right sort of time, Charlie bumped into Steve “Abbo” Abbot, husband of Cerys Matthews, and the two couples took on the challenge of creating their own festival. As well as music, “there’s an enormous range of craftspeople”, explains Charlie. “Coracle-makers, potters, axe-throwers. Lots of British crafts and British food.”

By anyone’s standards, running several different businesses at once is no small feat. Where does Charlie’s drive come from: is it innate or does it come from having to look after what he has inherited?

“Part of it is innate,” he replies. “My most famous ancestor was properly energetic, but I think part of it,” he stops to think. “What is in me is a very strong sense of duty and that manifests itself in trying to better the place.” He smiles. “But there’s also an element of trying to prove that I’m not just a gadfly.”

You don’t have to spend very long with Charlie Gladstone to realise that he is not, in anyway, a gadfly. Sensitive and warm, he is absolutely brimming with enthusiasm and ideas. “What we have got which is really exciting – as well as not massively long lives – is an amazing blank canvas. I’m very proud of our estate, and it is really well run, but someone else does that… What l can do is make a difference with this,” he gestures to the farm shop behind us and the fields beyond it, where tents for the festival are starting to go up.

A Temple of Peace

Our next stop is what Gladstone called his Temple of Peace, his study in Hawarden Castle, the 18th-century house which belonged previously to the family of his wife, Catherine Glynne. The room, which was his personal haven and the inspiration for Gladstone’s Library, has been carefully preserved within what still serves as a family home, down to his stationery wrapped in brown paper in the cupboard.

“I’m not a Gladstone scholar, but people say they always understand something special about him that they wouldn’t have understood if they hadn’t come here,” says Charlie, as he opens up the room. (Scholars can visit the study in the house by appointment only.)

“These are the books he chose to leave there,” he says gesturing to the tomes on the shelves. “The rest went to Gladstone’s Library.” The latter began with the statesman’s own collection of 32,000 books, as well as £40,000 he bequeathed to the project (around £3 or £4 million in today’s money).

The first incarnation of the building comprised two large iron rooms, with six or seven smaller rooms acting as studies, which was known as the Tin Tabernacle or Iron Library. The magnificent Gothic pile was completed in 1902 with a residential element comprising 26 bedrooms.

“He took all the books up there himself in wheelbarrows,” explains Charlie. Gladstone, it must be said, was over 80 at the time and did, indeed, take on much of the manual labour involved in the transfer of the books to their new home three-quarters of a mile away, helped only by his valet and one of his daughters.

The four-time prime minister was not one to shirk from manual labour. “He loved chopping down trees,” says Charlie. “We’ve got a big thing on axes in the festival. There were so many people coming to Hawarden, to the woods, to collect chips from the trees he cut down, that they would lay on special trains.

“There would be hundreds and hundreds of people coming every day just to watch him chop down a tree.”

So he was into the Good Life too? “Yes, but he was incredibly religious, so it was probably more puritanism than anything else.

“The world was different then but he was an enormously energetic man who did a huge amount of good and who saved lots of people from unbelievable oppression.” He muses; “The challenge is how do we keep him relevant in the current world?”

One easy answer is to travel in the great man’s footsteps and experience the Good Life in Hawarden.

Discover Hawarden

Visit

Hawarden Old Castle is well worth a visit, standing in the grounds of the Gladstones’ family home, (New) Hawarden Castle, which are open during the Good Life Experience. The walled city of Chester, just a short drive away, is one of the quaintest in Britain.

Eat and drink

Surrounded by fertile farming country, Hawarden is a foodie haven. Rated one of the best 50 gastropubs in the UK, the Glynne Arms has been completely refurbished by the Gladstones. (Look out for the little nook that was once the village post office and the crossed axes over the fireplace, where the head of a heifer that injured Gladstone used to sit before it was stolen by a high-spirited drinker.) The café at Hawarden Estate Farm Shop also does a wide range of delicious locally sourced food and a fine cuppa.

Sleep

The finest residential and only prime ministerial library in the UK, Gladstone’s Library is something special. Tours take place daily or you can soak up the atmosphere at literary festivals, Gladfest or Hearth. Or even stay in one of the very reasonably priced 26 rooms and write your bestseller. In the pipeline is a development called the Forum, for debates, lectures and events, a new exhibition space and six-bedroom study centre called Writers’ Block.