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Knight's strange war of the roses

February 17 2003
By Tim Harris

The name "Sir Tatton Sykes" has a ring of distinction to it, and around Sledmere in Yorkshire, it has indeed been distinguished for quite some time. The name has been used by several generations of the Sykes family, right down to the current Sir Tatton Sykes, 8th Baronet Sledmere, who still inhabits the ancestral home.

The Sykes family has been major landholders around Sledmere for centuries, and made improvements in the agriculture of the district. The Sir Tatton of interest here, born in 1826, was in many ways typical of the landed gentry of his time: proprietorial and quite comfortably off. Apart from the income from the estate, extra profits came from the breeding of thoroughbred horses, and Sledmere remains an eminent thoroughbred stud. A 19th century Sledmere champion was actually named Sir Tatton Sykes, presumably out of family pride.

With privilege and breeding on his side, Sir Tatton lived the life of an English gentleman. He travelled extensively, and exceeded the general orbit of his class by venturing as far as Japan and Mexico. His experience of the world did not stand in the way of his commitment to Victorian piety, as he provided endowments for the building of several churches in Yorkshire.

His background notwithstanding, Sir Tatton Sykes was not quite the textbook Victorian squire. He would be largely unknown today to anyone other than racing, church and local historians, if not for the fact that Sir Tatton Sykes was a gentleman of peculiar likes and dislikes.

On inheriting Sledmere in 1863, one of Sir Tatton's first moves was to have the lawns and gardens on his personal domain ploughed up. Sir Tatton disliked flowers. He saw them as nasty, untidy things, and had them banned from the nearby village. If he happened to spot any blooms that escaped the prohibition, he would deal with them with a blow of his walking stick. "If you wish to grow flowers, grow cauliflowers," he told a tenant who persisted in having a bit of colour about the place.

Sledmere tenants had to put up with more from Sir Tatton than his summary execution of rogue flowers, as their domestic lives were affected by another of his dislikes. For reasons known only to himself, he had an aversion to the use of front doors, and frontal entry was forbidden at Sledmere. To reinforce the message, Sir Tatton had houses built with false front doors.

If any member of the Sykes family who was to be buried at Sledmere expected a memorial over their resting place, Sir Tatton would have none of it while he was master. His dislike of headstones condemned his relatives to unmarked graves.

A man who disliked flowers, gravestones and front doors had to like something. Sir Tatton liked milk pudding, thinking it the best food for his sensitive stomach. He liked it so much that he travelled with his chef, to ensure that he would not be without

He also liked maintaining a constant temperature, and went to extraordinary ends to do so. Sir Tatton would leave the house wearing a series of colour-coded overcoats, designed to fit over each other in the correct sequence. As the outside temperature dictated, he would remove coats and leave them where they fell. Local children received a reward of a shilling for each coat collected and returned. In addition to the overcoats, the pursuit of the right temperature involved the wearing of two pairs of trousers, and sometimes demanded the removal of shoes and socks and placing the feet out a window.

The last episode of Sir Tatton Sykes' life was like something out of Fawlty Towers. He died at the Metropole Hotel, London, in 1913, leaving the manager agonising about the effect a corpse might have on the living guests.

His solution was to have the late Sir Tatton discreetly removed inside a hollowed out sofa. Sir Tatton's heir found disguising the deceased as upholstery undignified, and insisted that "However my father leaves this hotel, he shall leave it like a gentleman". Eventually, something more fitting to his station was devised.



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