“Demi-Semi-Royal Progress”

Abstract

With the increasing London social and editorial activity of 1918, the Galsworthys’ flat in Adelphi Terrace House, with only one bedroom, was too small for guests, entertaining or the separate bedrooms they began to prefer. They learned that Grove Lodge, a house they had looked at but found too expensive just before they married, was again vacant. It was the smallest of three clustered houses overlooking Hampstead Heath at the top of Holly Bush Hill. The houses had been built in the eighteenth century, parts of them probably earlier, and Grove Lodge was a kind of pendant lower on the hill to the central and elegant structure called Admiral’s House. Constable lived at Grove Lodge for a time in the early 1820s, then referred to as Lower Terrace, painting a view over the heath called House at Hampstead now in the National Gallery and a picture of the Admiral’s House now in the Tate. Grove Lodge had been a rectory in the late nineteenth century. The Admiral’s House, in Galsworthy’s time, was owned by Sir John Fortescue, described by Galsworthy when he once invited Charles Scribner to dinner with him as “the King’s Librarian and author of the History of the British Army and of the first year of the War”.¹