Wreckers Raze Historic House

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 810, 2 November 1929, Page 34

Wreckers Raze Historic House

Old United States Embassy in London SADNESS AND TRAGEDY Tragedy is stalking through the empty halls of Dorchester House, one of the few remaining bits of Americana in London representative of the stately Edwardian era. It is the tragedy of the housewrecker and the sadness of lavender and old lace rudely disturbed. A hotel is to be erected on the site. The famous marble balustrades, caressed by the-piuk and white fingers of the loveliest women in the Empire in the days when Dorchester House was the American Embassy, presided over by Joseph H. Choate and Whitelaw Reid, are smudged with the hands of toiling workmen. The other day, in a room where Titians, Murilos, Velasquez, and Tintorettos used to look down on the political dinner parties and the royal receptions that the Whitelaw Reid’s gave from 1906 until King Edward's death, the hammer of the auctioneer sounded, realising a few guineas for objects of art which cost thousands. The great marble staircase, trodden by the feet of princes and kings, diplomats and society beauties, was sold in three sections. It brought only £250, although in 1851, when the mansion was built, it cost £30,000. Whitelaw Reid was not in Dorchester House many months before the Balfour Government fell. It was a time of intense political excitement in England and Park Lane, on which Dorchester House is situated, was in the centre of it. King Edward came frequently. When Theodore Roosevelt c.ame over as special ambassador at the time of his Majesty’s death, he and Mrs. Roosevelt and three of their children stopped in Dorchester House. Joseph H. Choate, the immediate predecessor of Mr. Reid, loved to browse through the old books of Dorchester House library. Other browsers included Alfred Austin. Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling. Andrew Carnegie, William J. Bryan, and Alma Tadema. The mansion, with its 40 bedrooms.

was built by Robert Stayner Holford, i who was born seven years before Waterloo, and made a fortune out of shares in the New River Company and from bullion buried by a relative on j the Isle of Wight in the days when Napoleon was threatening invasion. Holford called in Lewis Vulliamy, the architect; Alfred Stevens, the sculptor; Aglinatti, the painter; and

Sir Coutts Lindsay, the man of art. Their combined genius created Dorchester House, which covered 80,000 square feet of ground.