9384 One of the raptors on display a great Owl, related to our Great Horned Owl but a bit smaller according to the presenter. I wish we could have stayed to see them fly, so majestic.
9396 This is the Beaulieu Abbey Cloister. The raptor array is in the near corner. The Domus, monks housing is the building to the left and the Cloister wall on the right was part of the wall of the Abbey Church. The cloister arches have all been filled in.
9415 The old car, I think it's a Austin with the docents portraying the Baron and his valet.
9412 The former Gatehose Carriage Gate, now the Lower Drawing Room complete with piano player performing early 1900s tunes. The vaults in the ceiling are very delicate. You can see the right side of one of the closed carriage arches on the left.
9457 Beaulieu Palace House as it stands today and was early last century. The window on the second floor at the right is the stained glass window of the former chapel, now the Upper Drawing Room.
July 20 – Turnover Day, Southampton. Today we are back in Southampton to disembark Norway cruisers and embark the crossers. Originally they told us that it was not possible to take shore excursions if the port was not part of a cruise but instead the day joining two separate cruises. When we returned to our room on the 18th we found an order from for excursions today. It said that it had to be turned in by 7pm on the 17th about 25 hours before we received it. On the chance that it was still good I went down to the shorex office early yesterday to drop it into the order box and discovered that they had opened early, probably because of the late delivery of the forms. I turned our order in and by that afternoon our tickets had been delivered to our cabin.
Also delivered to our cabin were our new room keys for the crossing. Holland America give you a key that's valid for all your back to back cruises when you embark, Cunard does not. HAL also lets you keep your old keys as a souvenir of your trip, Cunard does not. They collect your key as you disembark. That's why it was important that we have our new keys this morning. When we go off the ship on the excursion they will keep our cards and we need the new ones to get back on. HAL uses a Star system identify your position on the cruiser food chain, Cunard uses a more traditional color system, red at the bottom, silver, gold, platinum and the highest level diamond at the top. They mark your card with a colored stripe along one edge of the card. The cards we are turning in are gold and the new ones are platinum. Normally I wouldn't care about all that but the platinum level comes with some perks that I do care about. 20% off on laundry and dry cleaning (which reduces it from being extremely expensive down to only being expensive), 4 free hours of internet usage (which I am philosophically opposed to but will accept anyway), several other little perks (priority check in and embarkation, a complimentary wine tasting, etc) and the most important perk of all, a disembarkation Lounge.
For our cabin type Cunard has the most uncomfortable, least convenient disembarkation waiting areas every seen at sea. Every time we have sailed on the QM2 our area has been the upper level of the Royal Court, the ship's main showroom. Except for a small entry area, you have to negotiate stairs and then you are faced with balcony seating. That means more stairs, now going down, narrow aisles, almost no space between the rows of chairs and of course almost everyone disembarking has luggage with them as the ship advises you not to put your electronics, medications, valuables, passports, travel documents and anything else fragile or important in your checked luggage. This means that older people with mobility problems as well as everyone else have to negotiate theater seating while carrying this luggage. Rolling it is entirely out of the question with the stairs and the narrow gaps between the rows. This area is entirely unsuited for this purpose, but as they are the only area in which your number and color will be announced for disembarkation, it's where you have to go. The Disembarkation Lounge we can now use is in one of the bars or restaurants where the floor is flat and the furniture movable. Much more convenient for rolling your carry-on.
This problem is made worse by their proudly announced "Silent Disembarkation" system. (As though enduring a few announcements is beyond a person's ability endure.) How this works is you get a notice in your cabin about where and when to show up at your disembarkation waiting area. If everything goes as planned the system works fairly well but the problem with that is, things never go as planned. Often when your time to show up arrives you find that the people for two or three arrival times ahead of yours are still there and the place is totally packed. In a way this works out better because you have an excuse to park your luggage in the hallway and listen from there for your number. Of course when the earlier arrivers get called to leave the ship they have to negotiate their way through all the later arrivals to get out. It's really chaos. It's been that way from the start, we sailed on the QM2s first season on the first crossing back to England and it was that way then also.
HAL has a much better plan; you can stay in your cabin until called or go to one of the lounges of your choice and wait. It's up to you. The disembarkation announcements are made ship wide and you proceed to the gangway from wherever you feel most comfortable waiting. How much more civilized it that? The only price you pay for it is that you have to listen to the announcements for everyone leaving before you. An extremely small price to pay for so much additional comfort and so much less hassle.
The short version of the above is that now we can be comfortable in a nice convenient lounge waiting for our turn to leave the ship. I guess you have to be a Platinum member of the Cunard World Club to get the benefits all HAL passengers receive with regard to disembarkation.
Back to touring. We are heading to Beaulieu (pronounced Ba-lu' by the English. A French Canadian tried to tell the guide how it "should be" pronounced and the guide was totally unimpressed and unmoved. Ba-lu' it is by Jove!), a palace about 25 miles from Southampton. It's on the Treasure Houses of England list, which holds the ten most magnificent palaces, houses and castles in England. Plus it's the home of the National Motor Museum, England's storehouse of historic and interesting vehicles. They currently have an exhibition of Bond in Motion, 50 vehicles used in James Bond movies. We very nearly went here on our last visit to Southampton on the way to Hamburg but Windsor Castle won out. It's a good thing as Windsor isn't being offered this visit.
After a very pleasant drive on mostly small country roads with lots of sun we arrived at the grounds of Beaulieu. It's a fairly large area with the ruins of Baeulieu Abbey, the palace, the National Motor Museum and the parish church of the area that's in the former abbey refectory the abbey's only surviving building. We have three hours but there's a lot to see so we hopped on the small monorail the have and rode from the entrance area to the most distant part of the grounds, the Palace House. The abbey church is right next to the palace and we heard that there was a wedding there today so we wanted to see if we could duck in and see it before it closed.
The monorail dropped us off between the Victorian ornamental kitchen garden and the Victorian flower garden, both large areas and very pretty. We headed to the church only to find that it was already closed to the public. The trip was not a loss because we looked around the abbey ruins while we were there. As we were entering the abbey's outer gate a man with a heavy glove on his right hand came out of it. I asked if he'd been gamehawking already this morning. He seemed a bit surprised but smiled and said that he was presenting a raptor program in the abbey cloister today and he was just finishing bringing in his birds. We went in to take a look and found an array of birds in place in the cloisters.
After talking with the owner about the birds he had with him, an owl, several hawks, a kestrel, falcon and eagle, we headed into the abbey museum for a look. The museum has some nice displays showing abbey life and such. If we'd never been to an abbey it would have been a good introduction. The model of the abbey was interesting. It was large for England and the abbey church was a big one. I found out later that it was the largest Cistercian abbey in the country. It had a 10-12 foot high wall surrounding the abbey precincts. In this wall was the gate house that would figure greatly in the land's future.
The abbey began life in 1204 when King John, to assuage his guilt over having his men attack a monk, endowed a Cistercian order from France with the instructions to build an abbey with a church that would serve his family as a place of burial. The abbey and church were built but neither he nor none of his family was ever buried there. Just as well because in 1538 his successor, Henry VIII closed all the monasteries and destroyed all the buildings at this abbey but the living areas for the monks and the laypeople. That's why the refectory, the place where the monks ate and the Domus, the place where they lived, are still standing. The walls around the cloister are intact even though the south wall was also the wall of the church. Everything above the cloister wall level is gone. They have the foundations of all the buildings exposed so you can see how large they were. The church was very impressive for a remote abbey. The former refectory does make a nice church. I don't think may congregations have an 800 year old sanctuary to worship in. Nice!
Along with the land for the abbey the monks got 10,000 acres of boggy, unused land with a river bisecting the property. Over the centuries the monks dried the land and put it into cultivation and built barns and other utility buildings and also reclaimed land from the sea. The big advantage it has is that it's right in the middle of the New Forrest. I've often discussed the relative nature of the term New in Europe and it applies here. William the Conqueror, descendant of our old friend Gangerolf from Norway, created the New Forrest in 1079 as a hunting preserve for his private use.
When the abbey was dissolved Henry VIII sold the land to his good friend Thomas Wriothesley, the ancestor of the current owners of Beaulieu. Thomas was the right hand man of Thomas Cromwell the main architect of the dissolution of the monasteries. He purchased 8,000 of the abbey's acreage for 1,340₤ and change. He also acquired the monastic estates in nearby Hampshire which became his principal residence. He regarded Beaulieu as a source of income, not a home. They don't know much about the history of Palace House except that it was formerly the Gate House of the abbey precinct. It has been altered over the years and eventually became quite the grand home we see today.
One of the eventual Henry the 3rd Earl was a great patron of the arts who supported among others William Shakespeare. Shakespeare dedicated two of his poems to the Earl and his is probably the subject of some of the Bard's sonnets. Some of his plays may have been performed for the first time in the Domus of the estate. King James I, the man who supported the King James Version (Authorized Version for the British) of the Bible and his son Charles I were frequent visitors here mostly to hunt in the New Forrest. In fact, James' secretary wrote that it seemed like His Majesty was so well pleased with Beaulieu that he "seems to have a purpose to visit it often." Must have been nice even in the 1600s. Over the years new wings were added and that's where the Montagus live since they opened the older, more historic part of the palace to visitors in the 1950s. When they are out they allow the staff to conduct guided tours of many of their rooms.
The Palace House is a living museum. That is, they have docents that assume the roles of various members of the household from the Victorian Era. Earlier I saw an antique car His Lordship and his valet go by heading away from the palace. Inside the palace I encountered the butler and the downstairs maid. They were standing by to answer questions and direction around the house. In the lower drawing room they had a pianist playing songs of the era and a sign outside said that they would have sing-alongs at times during the day as well as plays reenacting scenes from palace life in that era.
A little family history. (Skip this if you find it boring but the whys and wherefores of royal lineage in England have always fascinated me. Do you know who trumps who, Dukes, Barons, Earls, Counts? Not to mention Viscounts, Baronets, etc.) Keep in mind that when two people with royal lineage marry they take the title of the higher ranking of the two lines. Originally the land belonged to the Earls of Southampton. In the middle 1600s Elizabeth, daughter of the 4th Earl of Southampton married Ralph the 1st Duke of Montague. This was the first time that family was in possession of the property. When a descendant, Elizabeth, married Henry, the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch that title was adopted since it was superior to the Montagu title in date of grant. It continued under that title until John Montagu-Douglass-Scott was granted the title of Baron, which is superior to Duke and the holding was changed to Baron of Montagu where it remains until today.
There are some great touches in the house. The lower drawing room served as a carriage entrance to the monastery with a large open archway, and some smaller ones, these were closed when the gatehouse was converted to a hunting lodge. The gothic half columns and arched roof have been preserved. The outer arch is a large window; the inner archway was also closed and has a large, finished stone fireplace. In the center of the built in mantle is a gothic niche with the combined coat of arms of the Scotts and the Stuart-Wartley family, the lineage before the Barony of Montague was bestowed on the family making it easy to date the origin of the fireplace.
Just outside the lower sitting room is the Dining Hall. It's set up with a long table at the center and a smaller round children's table at the end. There's another large fireplace in this room. Down a hall and around the corner is the kitchen. It's a large room with a prep table in the center. It has a built in stove/fireplaces and shelves all around for cookware and tools. There's a large wooden area on one wall with 12 bells on it, one for each of 12 rooms to which a servant might be summoned. Most of these are bedrooms, dressing rooms, the library or the front and back entrance. In the corner is a large walk in pantry with a cold room at the back. Next to it in an alcove is the dishwashing and drying area. Through a door is the shop but previously it was the staff room. They ate here and took their breaks. On the wall are another 35 bells. Twelve of these are duplicates of the ones in the kitchen and the rest are other rooms of the house like the Billiards Room, the Beekeepers Bed Room, the Corridor Bath Room, Day Nursery, etc. 'One More Bell to Answer.' Can you name the song, songwriter and performer who made those lyrics famous? Can you name the person who made the most popular cover of that song and the group she normally sang with? Didn't expect a quiz, did you? First person to email me the correct answer to all five questions will receive a wonderful prize. It's a genuine china mug, no wait, it's a mug made in China.
The Upper Drawing Room also has archways that have been closed in one of which is home to the rooms fireplace. This space was once a chapel for visitors who were not admitted to the abbey to worship in. The chapel's stained glass window is still there. There's some very nice furniture in this room. There's an Italian cabinet from the 1600s made of ebony wood with ivory scrimshaw style scenes from the Old Testament on the face of the drawers. Another cabinet made of oak with inlaid wood scenes on the drawer and door fronts. Looks old but I'm not sure when it was made.
The Ante Room just off the Upper Drawing Room has an unusual fireplace. It's directly under a large stained glass window. It's smaller than the others in the house and the smoke is collected by flues in the sides of the fire box and directed around the windows and upwards out of the house. I've never seen one quite like it. I've been saying that a lot on this trip, haven't I? If I were to title this trip it would probably be "The First Trip of Firsts in a Long Time." When you start any activity there is a flood of 'Firsts'. As you continue that activity they slow down and eventually nearly stop. Then all of a sudden when you least expect it, here they come again. That's this trip. There are Firsts of all types. First countries, first cities, first cultures, first languages, first foods, first encounters with historically significant people I should have known long ago and, most surprisingly, firsts in church architecture. Amazing!! Some firsts I don't really identify as such but I am so taken with the architectural Firsts that I have to comment.
In the center of the room is a piano done in what I call the "coffin style". It's pretty plain and squared up except for the required curve of a grand style piano. Attached to the sides of the main case are pall-bearer style ring handles. In examining them I could see that they didn't fold out as would be required if they were functional so these are strictly decorative adding more fuel to support my naming selection. If they had a use it would be different but they were a style choice not a utility choice. Built by the Broadwood Company in 1818 in a light but streaked with dark wood (In every piece there's the full range of natural oak colors combined. Maybe it's oak but I don't think so), it certainly doesn't look its age.
Back downstairs in the Entry Hall the current Baron has a display that's mainly a tribute to his father. He had a keen interest in early motoring including rallies. The case has several trophies he won in various domestic and foreign rallies. His medals from WWI are also in the display along with various citations and awards for civic and military activities. He's obviously very proud of his father.
In the Palace House shop we encountered a group of late teen early 20s girls from Spain. One spoke very good English and Diana couldn't resist the opportunity to talk to her about her travels and goals. She's very good at that.
When we'd finished touring the house we walked through the gardens back toward the entrance and the National Motor Museum. It was a pleasant walk on a very nice day.
I could have spent hours in the Motor Museum but I only had one hour before we have to leave so I had to keep moving. When you enter the museum building you are confronted with the oldest cars in the collection. A Benz (1884), a Daimler (1898), a Fiat (1899), a Pennington (1896), a Royal Enfield (1900), a Columbia (1901) and a Locomobile (1901). This initial group represents the different origins of motorized travel. The Benz, Fiat, Pennington, Enfield are internal combustion powered. The Locomobile is steam powered and the Columbia is powered by electricity. Only the Daimler is partly enclosed, the driver (as he did in a coach) sat in front out in the elements. Some of the others have collapsible rag tops.
The Daimler Constatt is a typical 'horseless carriage' in that it would look equally at home with a horse hitched to the front. The rest have a less carriage-like appearance. It looks like any of the enclosed Landau style coaches of the earlier era. Even the lamps on the front were carriage style lanterns. The driver's footrest was extended upwards about 12 inches. Since it would only go 16mph it's the safest vehicle of the bunch, especially for the passengers. Even the wheels are large, long spoke and wooden with the bigger diameter at the rear and the tires are thin and narrow like a carraige.
The Pennington Autocar is actually a reverse tricycle with the lone third tire in the back under the driver. It was steered by a set of bicycle style handlebars and the driver, positioned in the rear sat on a tractor style seat. It had sidesaddle type seats for 4, two facing to the side each way and a seat for one up front. Since that seat extended part of the passenger's body past the front tires I guess they served at the car's bumper. Considering that it could reach 40mph I'm pretty sure (read that as no way, no how) that the NTSB would have let that seat, or in fact the entire contraption see the light of day.
The Royal Enfield Quadracycle went a step beyond the Pennington, it has four tires. They share the attributes of driver at the rear and bicycle handlebar style steering. It looks more like a bicycle than the Pennington. It carried two passengers in a pedi-cab style seat, both sitting over the front axle. I guess they were the first 5mph bumper as a collision at even that speed would likely have killed them. This thing could go 30mph.
The Locomobile and the Columbia are both USA vehicles. The bodies of both look very much like carriages and they are both steered with a tiller instead of a wheel. Their running gear is more like a car's than the Daimler. Both have the same size tires front and back. The Columbia opting for wooden wagon-style wheels but with a much wider tire. The Locomobile opted for bicycle-style metal spoke wheels. Both were very quiet and smooth and since both types of motors had been around longer than gasoline motors they probably had a technological advantage at the beginning. The limited range of the Colombia's Electric's batteries and the need to fill the water reservoir of the steam powered Locomobile at frequent intervals combined with the advances in the internal combustion engine quickly made both types obsolete.
The Fiat 3.5hp is the most automobile like of the pack. It has a grille like front end, although the radiator for the water-cooled engine is suspended below the front axle between the tires, fenders, driver and passengers between the axles, although the passengers face the driver and ride backwards.
I've saved the oldest for last, the Benz Motorwagen. This is also a three wheeled vehicle but the single wheel is in the front like a normal tricycle. It has a rear mounted engine and is rear wheel drive. The engine and the axle are connected with a bicycle chain and gears. The one-cylinder gas engine has a huge flywheel to smooth out the ride between the alternate firings of the spark plug. I'm sure you all know that the 4-stroke engine only fires once for every 4 trips the piston makes, the first stroke, downward, pulls in the fuel/air mixture, the second stroke, upward, compresses it, the sparkplug fires and the third stroke, downward, provides the power and the fourth stroke, upward, expels the burnt mixture so the next stroke, downward, can pull in fresh gas/air mix to start the cycle over again. As you can see the piston moves for times only one of them is a power stroke. Without the heavy flywheel the surge every time the sparkplug fires would be very noticeable and not very pleasant. This is why, historically, engines have usually had even numbers of cylinders. The major exception is the Saab coupe of the 40-50s, it had a three cylinder engine but it really doesn't count because the Saab had a 2-stroke engine that requires you to mix the oil in with the gasoline like many outboard motors for boats used to do. The physics of a 2-stroke engine are very different from the 4-stroke and they run smoother with an odd number of cylinders.
My second favorite car in the collection is the 1909 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. It has a huge 6-cylindar engine, each one displacing over 1 liter, sitting under a very long hood behind the already iconic RR style grille/radiator assembly with Winged Victory atop as the cap. That part of the car is silver, the rest of the coachwork is white. It has large headlamps, a squeeze bulb horn, the bottom part of the windscreen was sloped backward (very aerodynamic) and front and rear red leather, bench seats. It's a beauty.
They have a Pope-Tribune 1904 5hp made in the USA on display that you can sit in to have your picture taken. There are also some driving dusters and coats as well as hats to wear. Diana got dressed up and I took her picture in it.
My favorite car is their 1937 Cord 810 Westchester. To my eye, this is the most beautiful car ever built in the USA, if not the world. There's an Auburn Roadster that looks almost as good. Speaking of Auburn, Errett Cord started that company as well as Cord, Duisenberg and Lycoming (most famous for its great aircraft engines). If they'd had a Duisenberg in the collection the RR might have been bumped down to third place.
They also had a collection of odd vehicles. Examples would be Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from the Ian Fleming children's books and movie, the 1972 Outspan Orange Car, a little round car that had a tendency to roll over if turned at any speed and the 1924 Daimler Bottle Lorry, a truck shaped like a ale bottle with fenders.
They also have a collection of world land speed record holders, the Bluebird, the Golden Arrow and the Sunbeam 1000hp, each of which held that record at one time or another.
The collection is very nice and well interpreted and displayed.
The Bond in Motion exhibit is 50 vehicles from James Bond movies and it was fun to see the ones I remember. I really stopped watching Bond films some time ago. I never missed Sean Connery as Bond, I stuck with it for Roger Moore but Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, I just couldn't take it anymore. They did recover when Daniel Craig took over and I've seen a couple of those but the image and voice of Connery has forever ruined me for most other Bonds.
I think my favorites were the Lotus Esprit Submarine from The Spy Who Loved Me and of course the one that started it all the Aston Martin DB5. The one they have here is from when Bond is reunited with the DB5 in GoldenEye but it's the same model car Sean Connery drove in Goldfinger and Thunderball. It is the Bond Car. It's back again with Daniel Craig in Skyfall. Iconic. Hard to believe that movie franchise has been going for over 50 years.
All too soon our time was up and we headed back to the ship for our Atlantic crossing. The bad news about the sunny day was that the bus air conditioner broke while we were at the museum making for a warm ride back to the port. Ah, the rigors of travel. I told one whiner to just pretend he was in a WWII submarine that was being depth charged.
