Hallmark of a life in service

Nor do most men of his age climb the stairs with such vigour, pointing out the repairs he’s carried out on them over decades, even if a touch of stiffness is creeping in, the legacy of a lifetime climbing ladders for the annual marathon of decorating or repairing chimneys.

“This place keeps me fit,” says Keith. “They’ve changed the locks, but I keep getting back in.”

They wouldn’t want to keep him out. He’s been at Burton Agnes Hall longer than many of the artworks that make it such a draw for visitors, and is, in his way, one of the house’s treasures, a cheerful eyewitness to seven decades of life at one of Yorkshire’s architectural gems, and still as smitten by it as the day he arrived. “I don’t do history, because I was useless at school and I never took in all the kings and queens. I do 68 years of history here, and that’s the bit the people like to hear.”

He’s got much to tell them. This is the 69th year since he arrived as a 14-year-old apprentice joiner worried about meeting the resident ghost everybody knew about, and he’s still here a couple of days a week during the opening season, showing people round and sharing both his memories and passion for his surroundings.

The hall has shaped his whole life, and he has helped to shape its fortunes. The stairs he climbs, he fixed; the locks he unlocks he installed; the panelling he displays he cleaned and restored; the furniture he admires, he spent countless hours ridding of woodworm. He was here every working day until he finally retired at 76, the third generation of his family to be responsible for the upkeep of the hall, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and uncle, testament to the extraordinary loyalty that great houses inspire in those who work in them.

Every room has a story, a fund of memories, fond recollection of good humour and hard work, of how the floorboards were replaced here, or the woodwork preserved and polished with linseed oil there. The hall is the first thing Keith sees every morning when he opens the curtains of his house on the estate and its story over the past seven decades is inextricably woven together with his own.

His tenure at Burton Agnes mirrors the period when comprehensive restoration transformed the hall from a gloomy and crumbling pile into what writer and past chairman of English Heritage Simon Jenkins termed “the perfect English house”, going on to rank it alongside the likes of Windsor, Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace in his top 20 stately homes.

Life in rural East Yorkshire as Keith knew it in that far-off autumn of 1942 when he became apprentice to his grandfather is all but unrecognisable to the 50,000-plus visitors who come to Burton Agnes every year to tour the house and grounds, or attend its arts festivals. Then, the manicured lawns were given over to growing potatoes to supplement meagre wartime food supplies, and jobs to be done included replacing the windows blown out by stray Luftwaffe bombs intended for Hull.

There were wooden wheels with steel rims to be made for the horse-drawn farm carts, and coffins to take the dead of the village on their final journeys, along with essential items like wheelbarrows and wood food safes with zinc linings to keep the flies off. Later, mains water and electricity needed to be installed at cottages on the estate.

The centre of that bygone rural life was Burton Agnes Hall, five miles inland from Bridlington, built between 1595 and 1610. The various branches of the family that still live there had been on the site since 1170, and their Norman manor house still stands. Naturally, its key-holder is Keith, who took a hand in its restoration, and used to clamber onto its roof every year to clear the autumn leaves away.

The hall was a daunting place for a boy brought up on a Wolds farm at North Frodingham, not least because of the resident ghost of Katherine Griffith, who died in 1620, but nevertheless continued to put in appearances until her grave was opened and her skull severed and brought into the house, where it remains, encased somewhere in the brickwork.

“It was terrifying,” said Keith. “I knew about the ghost, so the staff would take me upstairs where the servants lived, and into these dark corridors and leave you there.”

His arrival coincided with Burton Agnes passing into the ownership of Marcus Wickham-Boynton, who was responsible for the restoration of the hall over successive decades until his death in 1989, ploughing the earnings from a vast estate in Kenya into both the fabric of the building and the artworks that fill it.

Work got underway in earnest when he returned from war service in 1946, and it was desperately needed. “Marcus decided something had to be done. The furniture was so badly woodwormed that we had to take it out to the woods and burn it. There were chairs you couldn’t sit on because they would just have turned to dust. Everything was in a state. A lot of the furniture was filthy. The carpets were rotten. I took some curtains down and dropped them on the floor, and just swept them up with a dustpan and brush.”

Exquisite wood panellings that had been painted over were cleaned and restored, and gradually the decay was swept away. Keith was kept busy, especially after he took over as joiner from his uncle in 1961.

Wickham-Boynton kept the pressure on. “He kept a really good standard,” said Keith. “He was always in a bit of a hurry and wanted everything doing yesterday. He wanted two new chandeliers and said, ‘We’ve just had it redecorated, so no exploratory holes and no dirty fingermarks’.”

Some things could not be hurried; the restoration of the elaborately plastered barrel ceiling in the Long Gallery eventually took from 1951 until 1974, and it still fills Keith with awe every time he sees it. “It’s beautiful, just beautiful. I never tire of looking at it.”

A trickle of visitors began arriving when Burton Agnes was opened to the public in 1949, some by train in those pre-Dr Beeching days when the village still had a line, and some from the area around, curious to see what life was like in the great house.

“It was two hours a day, two shillings a day, two days a week. The old retired station master was the guide, and he used to let them in, lock them in and then let them out at the end. There were quite a few local people, and then we kept getting more and more and we started staying open longer and longer. A house like this needs people to come.”

It needed people like Keith as well, who lived on the estate. “I lodged with my uncle at the joiner’s shop until I got married in 1959. After 22 years, she ran off with my best mate. I didn’t half miss him.”

Change was on the way at the hall, too, which in 1977 was passed into the hands of a charitable trust. It remains, though, a family home, the estate passing to Wickham-Boynton’s young cousin, Simon Cunliffe-Lister in 1989.

He was then only 12, and until he came of age, it was under the guardianship of his mother, Susan, daughter of the former Deputy Prime Minister, the late Viscount Whitelaw.

It was Mrs Cunliffe-Lister who suggested Keith took on a new role at the age of 76. “I said I was going to retire, and she said, ‘Don’t leave us, Keith. Come and be a guide’.”

Burton Agnes remains a family home, to Mr Cunliffe-Lister, his wife, Olivia, and their children, Islay and Joss. “It is a home, and that’s what makes the difference,” says Keith. “It’s lived in.”

He’ll be on hand again this year for the visitors, sharing all he’s seen and done, as much in love with it now as he was at 14.

“Bound to be in love with it when you’ve worked here all your life,” he says. “Nobody leaves. They just dry up and blow away.”

• Details about opening times and events at Burton Agnes Hall can be found at www.burtonagnes.com