Macmillans Hosts To 5000 Visitors

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28890, 9 May 1959, Page 10

Macmillans Hosts To 5000 Visitors

[From the London correspondent of "The Press.”)

LONDON, April 21

Birch Grove, in the Sussex village of Chelwood Gate, the country home of the Prime Minister (Mr Macmillan) is an hour and a half’s drive from Westminster, and last week-end, when the Prime Minister left London for a day off, he was followed by thousands who noted that Lady Dorothy Macmillan had declared Sunday “open day” at her Birch Grove garden. Every spring, because of its great show of daffodils, the garden is a big attraction to visitors.

Hundreds of cars besieged the quiet little village, and an estimated 5000 people flocked through the gates of the Macmillan home at a shilling .each.

They milled through the garden all afternoon, over the terraces, round the symmetrical beds ablaze with polyanthus, through the formal rose garden, down into the rockery which encircles the swimming pool and off along the wilder walks that stretch away from the house, through the acres of daffodils which are the great feature of Rirch Grove at this time of the year, along avenues of elms that are just coming into leaf and under the standards of pines and birches on the hillsides. They prowled the farmyard and roamed through the’ nursery for trees and shrubs and the orchard at the back of the house.

Lady Dorothy Macmillan hurried to and fro looking after her many helpers, including her

13 grand-children, discovered that they had run out of tickets and learned from the police that hundreds of cars had not even been able to reach Birch Grove. Visitors who paid an extra shilling toured the ground floor of the Prime Minister’s house, inspected the Oriental cabinets., his collection of seventeenth century Dutch paintings and the Gainsborough landscape hanging in the front hall and peered into a library and a sitting room where shelves were also laden with books. The carpets had been taken up in the hall and to prevent the crowds surging into the rooms themselves barricades of chairs had been put up in the doorways. Travel souvenirs had been laid out in the “front room.” One of the grandchildren watched over the shotgun Mr. Khrushchev gave to Mr Macmillan, gifts from India and Pakistan, the famous white lambswool hat, and kept a musical sputnik wound up. Among the books on a marbletopped hall table two had been rather pointedly placed in the front as if recently examined: “War and Peace” and “Dr. Zhivago.” Another item from Russia was the elk’s head, another gift from Mr Khrushchev. It now hangs over a sink in the back porch menacing, on the other wall, a houndstooth check tweed cap and the head of a deer shot 34 years ago on the Island of Arran.