Part 8: The Isle of Wight

Every summer we can rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight
If it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave.
[The Beatles, When I’m Sixty-Four]

Every time I think of the Isle of Wight I think of the Beatles and the phenomenal Isle of Wight Music Festival, the huge rock festival that took place in 1970 near Afton Down, near West Wight. (The 1970 show was notable both for being one of the last public performances by Jimi Hendrix and for the number of attendees reaching, by many estimates, 600,000.) But that shows my cultural age!

I click on Wikipedia and learn the basics:

The Isle of Wight is an English island and county in the English Chanel between three and five miles (8 km) from the south coast of England. It is situated south of the county of Hampshire and is separated from the mainland by the Solent. Popular since Victorian Times as a holiday resort, the Isle of Wight is known for its outstanding natural beauty and for its world-famous sailing based in Cowes. The Island has a rich history including its own brief status as a nominally independent kingdom in the fifteenth century. It was home to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Queen Victoria built her much loved summer residence and final home Osborne House at East Cowes.

We almost have to cancel our end-of-summer trip because of a problem with the car insurance. In fact, confirmation comes by phone from Geico only twenty minutes before our last possible chance at departure in order to make our ferry reservation! We race to Lymington in The New Forest and board the ferry only minutes before departure. (Curiously, neither Wight Link nor we notice that the reservation was actually for the previous Saturday! We had made a mistake in booking for the very busy August Bank Holiday weekend, and forgot to change the bookings when we moved our vacation to the US/Canadian Labour Day week-end.)

As we depart from Lymington at 7:15 p.m. I am impressed by the number of small pleasure craft. In fact, the channel is like an avenue of boats!

As we pass the marina, I wonder if I have ever seen so many sail boats in one place. (Maybe at Annapolis in Maryland, where we visited last year.)
The crossing is only 3 miles or 30 minutes, arriving at Yarmouth. We immediately head for Newport, where we have booked rooms at the Premier Inn on the Medina Quay.

The hotel is at the head of the Medina River, which opens onto the Solent, the part of the Channel between the island and England. After a hearty breakfast we drive to Havenstreet to ride the train on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. The Isle once had 54 miles of railroad but most of it was dismantled between 1952 and 1966. (Reminds me of how Canada has wiped out the local train services, too.)

The train ride is great fun for train enthusiasts like me, and like my grandson. Even the parents enjoy the clickity-clackity of the old cars as we travel from the station to Wooton, and then back, also going through Ashey and Smallbrook Junction. The scenery is beautiful. I particularly like this row of trees.

We leave the railway and drive a few miles to East Cowes to visit Osborne House, the beautiful home where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert spent long periods of time, raising their children. It was here that Victoria remained in seclusion following the death of her beloved Albert, and it was here where she died 22 January 1901, after nearly 64 years on the throne.

When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert first visited Osborne House in 1844, the Queen was looking for a retreat from Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, which she detested. She wrote:
It is hard to imagine a prettier spot—we have a charming beach quite to ourselves—we can walk anywhere without being followed or mobbed. I am delighted with the house, all over which we went. The rooms are small but very nice. With some few alterations and additions for the children it might be made an excellent house.
In the end, most of the original house was demolished. Much of the planning and creating of the new house fell on Albert, Queen Victoria referring to her husband as "Albert the creator."

It is a very warm day, so we opt to take a ride on the horse-drawn wagon, which eventually bring us around the carriage ring with the porte cochere, where visitors would alight from a carriage under cover.

Today, visitors enter through the household wing, guarded by two stone sculptures, one a hound, the other called The Calydonian Boar, here with Sammy. We are not permitted to take photos inside Osborne House, so let me recall some impressions: the Grand Corridor is stunning, in Italian Renaissance, designed to resemble a classical sculpture gallery, common in late 18th- and 19th-century homes. Most of the sculptures are by living British and European artists of the time, collected by Albert and added to by Victoria. (Sam is quite amused by the sculptural nudity!)

We see the Council Room, where the queen's privy council of ministers met several times every year. It is the most elaborately decorated room at Osborne, sumptuous in golds and reds, with the badge of the Order of the Garter on the ceiling. It was in this room that Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone in 1878. The queen wrote: "It is rather faint and one must hold the tube rather close to one's ear." But telephones were installed in 1885.

The private rooms lived in by the Royal Family were closed to the public for fifty years following Victoria's death, and they, and other parts of the house have continued to undergo conservation and restoration. A drawing room, dining room and billiard room are the three main areas for entertainment in the household area, richly and elaborately decorated. The drawing room is brilliant, with yellow damask curtains and matching furniture. It has pale blue ornate ceilings. The Billiard Room is magnificent.

Victoria and Albert had nine children, and they were very much a part of family life at Osborne House. It is great fun for Sam to see the Nursery (where children remained until they were six--like Sam is). It is through these children that the reigning monarchs of Britain, Spain, Norway, Sweden and Denmark trace their ancestry to Queen Victoria.

There is a fascinating indication of Victoria's grief over Albert's death, evident in his dressing and writing room: after he died, Victoria ordered that nothing was to be changed in this room, until she gave further instructions. Her chaplain reported that he was received by her in this room many times. He observed: "Hot water was actually brought to his dressing room at dressing-time 40 years after his death . . . I have again and again had talks to her there before dinner with the hot water actually steaming." Apparently, no one dared challenge her original instructions to leave things unchanged, and she never saw reason to alter those instructions!

The three floors of the Pavilion show us three of the key family rooms: the top or second floor is the Royal Nursery; the first floor, middle, is Queen Victoria's Sitting Room; the ground floor is the Drawing Room.

The Queen's Dressing Room has, just off it, the bath, shower and lavatory, discreetly disguised to look like wardrobes. Her bedroom was kept as a shrine only accessible to the family for many years, gates installed in the hallways to keep out others. This is the room in which Queen Victoria died. Above the bed is a bronze memorial plaque designed by Queen Alexandra. On the headboard is the posthumous portrait of Albert which the widowed queen displayed at each residence. There is also a pocket on the headboard for the prince's watch, which Sam thought looked like a place to keep the computer mouse!

Two views of the Upper Terrace as seen from the Nursery Sitting Room.

In 1876, Queen Victoria was made Empress of India. In 1890-1891, a new wing added to Osborne House for the family of the youngest princess, Beatrice (upon whom Victoria depended in the final years of her life) was designed to reflect the culture of the Indian sub-continent. We enter through a corridor of portraits of Indian maharajas into the breathtaking Durbar Room.

Immediately, I am reminded of my own heritage, my mother having been born in India. My grandfather, Dr. Leslie Eaton, and my grandmother, Minetta Vaughan Crandall, went to India in 1905 with his brother, Dr. Eugene Eaton, where they set up a dental practice in Madras. It was here that my mother, Ella Barbara and her sisters, Elizabeth and Isabella (who died there) and their brother Gerald, were born. The family stayed until 1920, and I grew up surrounded by stories and pictures of India's culture and furnishings they brought back to Canada.

Durbar Room is a gorgeous great hall with decor inspired by architectural designs of north India--a fusion of Islamic form and decorations from Hindu and Jain temples, described as being a "rather flamboyant version of the style." I am most impressed by the intricacy of the plaster and carton pierre walls and ceiling, especially the gigantic papier mache peacock.

There are hundreds of gifts to Victoria from all over India on display, which again remind me of family heirlooms from the Eaton family's years living there.

We exit Osborne House here, to the terrace gardens, with many wonderful sculptures.

Under the staircase we find a perfect spot for an official Grampy Portrait, against a statute reflecting his own physique.

A final view of Osborne House. Its Italianate design became known as the Osborne Style, and became famous throughout the British Empire, one of the most well known being Government House in Melborne, Australia.

Estates like this are HUGE: it will take 15-20 minutes to walk to the children's Swiss Cottage, so we opt to take the free bus. Prince Albert intended the cottage to be somewhere his children could learn the rudiments of housekeeping and cooking and entertain their parents. The kitchen area actually has small working stoves. Each child also had a garden and small wheelbarrow. The furnished cottage was given to the young princes and princesses on Queen Victoria's birthday in 1854. Built as a Swiss lodge, many aspects of the children's time here contained aspects of Albert's own disciplined regimen as a child. There are even German proverbs carved into the exterior, such as: You will carry your load more easily if you add patience to your burden.

Nearby is a small museum housing the children's wonderful collection of natural-history specimens: shells, stones, a few preserved animals and more. Quite fascinating, really, but I think of our own science fair projects: most of it was collected or done FOR the children, not by them.

Nearby is the miniature battle fort, complete with drawbridge and redoubts: The Victoria Fort and Albert Barracks. All children likely play in pretend forts, but how many get a real one, albeit tiny?

Although we never get down to the actual beach, we see Queen Victoria's bathing machine, which would have run into the sea on stone rails. Queen Victoria recorded her first experience of sea bathing on 30 July 1847:

Drove down to the beach with my maids and went into the bathing machine, where I undressed and bathed in the sea (for the first time in my life), a very nice bathing woman attending me. I thought it delightful till I put my head under the water, when I thought I should be stifled.

A view of the Swiss Cottage from the gardens, as we board the little bus and go back to the front gates of Osborne House, tired, hot and happy!

Then, with an expected ferry reservation for 5:30, we drive to see The Needles, on Alum Bay. We know there is a theme park of some sort, and we are expecting something tacky, like a carnival. Instead, we find a park that invites the family for a return visit. I take a photo of The Needles, a wonderful natural rock outcrop reminding me of Cape Split off Blomidon.

It was here, in 1897, at the Needles Battery, that Marconi set up the world's first radio station.

We rush into Yarmouth to catch the ferry only to be told they are running a couple of hours late. With three ferryloads of cars driving around and around, waiting, traffic soon gridlocks, and we end up waiting near the terminal on the highway for an hour. An SUV jumps the queue and a near fight ensues as one impatient traveller tries to pull the arrogant driver out of his car and take his keys! There is much yelling and swearing, and apparently the ferry workers make the line jumper go to the back of the queue. We just then start to move and get into the ferry loading lanes, still having to wait another hour! However, we keep smiling!

As the sun sets, we sail into Lymington Harbour following a spectacular summer's day and a wonderful visit to the Isle of Wight. We had hoped to see the New Forest ponies again, but it is too late, so we drive to Southampton, from where, tomorrow, I will go visit the historic docks at Portsmouth.