Exhibition: The History of Walton Hall

Owners of Walton Hall: The Harleys

Primrose Harley (1908-1978)

Primrose Harley was the younger daughter of Dr Vaughan Harley and his wife Mary. She was born on 19 April 1906 at 25 Harley Street in London. The date had been known as ‘Primrose Day’ since the death of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli on 19 April 1881. Primroses were his favourite flower, and the day was marked every year until the 1920s. Disraeli had been a great friend of Mary Harley’s parents and his nephew’s wife was Primrose’s godmother. A mulberry tree was planted close to Walton Hall to commemorate Primrose Harley’s birth. The tree, now well over 100 years old, is still standing today on the Mulberry Lawn on the University campus and a photograph of it taken in 2022 can be viewed here.

 

The first image on this page is of Primrose on her pony in the grounds of Walton Hall. She is aged about 14 and is photographed with her father's chaffeur William Bayford. The photograph was featured in The Open University staff magazine Open House in December 1986.

 

Primrose became an artist and a gardener. She attended the Chelsea School of Art and also spent time studying in Paris. Following the death of her father in 1923 she began to paint professionally and moved to 5 Seaforth Place in London. She shared a studio in London with Mary Packenham, sister of Lord Longford and aunt to Lady Antonia Fraser. Primrose staged some exhibitions of her work including one at the Cooling Galleries, London, in 1934 when she was favourably reviewed as follows: “In another room at the same galleries is a very different display of versatility. Miss Primrose Harley is a young artist equally at home with oil, watercolour, engravings, dry-points, etchings, silverpoints, and pen and ink, and it is indeed a relief to find such genuine and excellent work… Her three pen and ink drawings of travellers on the Volga boat have a confident simplicity of line that many a better known artist might envy.”

 

On 21 December 1936, at the age of 30, Primrose married Major John Alfred Codrington (1898-1991) who had spent three years serving with the Coldstream Guards in India. The second photograph on this page shows the couple on their wedding day at the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks, London. It was published in the Bystander newspaper. “There were Christmas trees and great bunches of scarlet flowers in the Guard’s Chapel, decoration for the wedding ceremony there… The bridesmaids carried scarlet flowers as well, and the ceremony altogether was very gay and Christmassy. The bride looked attractive in an unusually simple, straight gown of soft ivory satin, and instead of a prayer book or the regulation bouquet, she carried a long branch of lovely prunus blossom.” (From ‘The Evening News’ 22 Dec 1936). 

 

In 1986, former maid at Walton Hall, May Jordan recalled attending the event: “My husband and I and young son received an invitation to the wedding… The staff from five households attended – we received return rail tickets to Euston; then taken to the bridegroom’s home to view the wedding presents, then onto the Mess at Wellington Barracks for a four-course Christmas dinner before going onto the Guards Chapel for the wedding – a memorable day.”

 

Primrose and her new husband moved to Onslow Square in South Kensington. Both keen gardeners, they created a garden there together, but the marriage ended in divorce only six years later in 1942. After his marriage John Codrington worked in the Intelligence Services and in later life he became a professional garden designer.

 

During WWII Primrose volunteered to work as a war artist, designing and painting camouflage, painting murals for rescue centres, hospitals, and schools, and—in her spare time—drawing and painting the ruins of bombed city churches. Her work went largely unrecorded. After the war she continued to create murals including ones commissioned for the British European Airways offices at Dorland House in Lower Regent Street in 1948. The murals in the main booking hall, depicted Mediterranean and tropical climates, and maps portraying the routes operated by British European Airways. Unfortunately the murals no longer exist. The only surviving mural by Primrose Harley surrounds the Chancel window on the interior east wall of St Michael’s Church at Walton Hall. According to information recorded when the Church was restored in the 1970s, the mural was created in remembrance of Cecil Diccon Earle - her sister’s eldest stepson - who was killed in an army training accident in Italy in 1945. You can see a photograph of the mural as it looks today here.

 

On 19 December 1952 Primrose Codrington married the American landscape architect and writer Lanning Roper (1912–1983). The couple lived at Park House, Onslow Square in London and created one of the most famous gardens of its day, seen by thousands of visitors through the National Gardens Scheme which had been first introduced in 1926. The third photograph on this page shows Primrose tending her garden. It was taken in the mid-1950s and included in a book about Lanning Roper written by Jane Brown and published in 1987. Following her marriage to Lanning, Primrose continued to paint, mainly studies of flowers in oil and watercolours of gardens and plants. They spent the winter months in Claviers in France where she enjoyed painting landscapes and still lifes. Her work has been described as… “mainly of the quality and in the manner of British Romantics such as John Nash and Edward Bawden”.

 

Primrose and Lanning separated after ten years and finally divorced in 1968. Primrose died of cancer on 22 April 1978 aged 72 at her home in Cadogan Square, London and was buried at Walton where a memorial to her was also erected on the wall of St Michael’s Church. She left an estate of £468,382 (worth over £2million today) and bequeathed substantial donations to the Friends of Hammersmith Hospital, the Sir Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children, the National Art Collections Fund, and other charities.