The drawing room
On the south side of the house is the drawing room, the the social centre of the house. Known as the ‘Red Room’ in Mary Potter’s time it has hardly changed since Stephen Bagnall’s visit in 1966: he recalled that “the room was reverse ‘L’ shaped, the long stroke running from the door by which we had entered, with two Georgian sash windows on our left, to the fireplace with a huge couch in front of it and enormous, deep, triangular Wedgwood blue-upholstered chairs on either side of it…the short arm branching off to the right, with a door at the end of it. There was a huge blazing fire… Apart from another couch, further back, there was little other furniture in the room, which was low ceilinged and carpeted wall to wall and had, on its walls, a number of large abstract paintings”.
The place of the room as the domestic centre of the house is brought to life in the recollections of the novelist Susan Hill who visited in 1971, while writing a novel, Strange Meeting, inspired by the War Requiem:
“In the drawing room there was Peter, sitting in a corner reading the East Anglian Daily Times, and he leapt up and was terribly nice straight away, making me feel completely at home. There was a little daschund they had called Gilda, running about the place, and I sat down on the sofa and the dog jumped up and put its paw in my lap, and Peter said ‘My goodness, you are honoured, she doesn’t do that normally.’ …Suddenly there were footsteps, and the door opened, and in bounded Britten.
It was like somebody on the run. He came leaping in. I think he’d just run down the stairs and bounded into the room. And he was immediately so charming that I didn’t feel in the least overawed.
He offered me a drink, and he and Peter had an argument about whether the sherry was really dry, and Peter said it was, and Ben said he wasn’t at all sure; if I were him I wouldn’t take Peter’s word for it, and if it wasn’t very nice I was to give it back...“What struck me was the obvious, natural domestic affection between Ben and Peter, just like a husband and wife."
The room is notable for its cork wallpaper, chosen by Pears to replace an ivy patterned wallpaper which had in turn replaced the Tuscan red look it had during the Potters’ residence. Also in this room is the piano from Britten’s composition studio, and a piano bench made for and signed by the Hungarian twins Zoltan and Gabor Jeney who premiered the Gemini Variations at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival. This work, for flute, violin, and piano 4-hands was written especially for these gifted twins, ‘engaging little chaps’, as Britten described them, who had impressed Britten and Pears with their virtuosity and versatility during a visit to Budapest in 1964.
Other features include distinctive blue rugs made for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and a set of recorders presented by the Dolmetsch family.
Paintings in the drawing room include John Piper’s Clymping Beach, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s portrait of Horace Brodsky, Vanessa Bell’s Canal Scene: Venice and Henry Lamb’s Bivouac.
Above the fireplace is Lamb’s 1945 portrait of Britten, a favourite of Pears’s, commissioned by Mary Behrend, who also commissioned the Second String Quartet; Pears bought the portrait from Mary’s son George in 1977.
![Henry Lamb [Portrait of Benjamin Britten] (detail)](/resources/images/drawingBrittenHands150.jpg)
Beyond the drawing room is a small drinks room, the main feature of which is a series of “Beware of the dog” signs in a multitude of languages. These used to be on the front gate: Britten commented to one visitor: “It’s a joke that has got rather out of hand. The sign in Russian was painted on by Rostropovich himself so that’s really rather precious. And the Nepalese one presented a difficulty because there is no Nepalese word for dog – it means dragons or lions or tigers”.