A special message from The King for Stand Up To Cancer 🧡

Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne

Mad World by Paula Byrne
Evelyn Waugh's fans will find much to admire in this account of the troubled family who inspired Brideshead Revisited, says Selina Hastings
Selina Hastings
The Observer, Sunday 16 August 2009
One of the first to see a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was his old friend Nancy Mitford. "A great English classic in my humble opinion," she told him, a view now shared by millions of readers worldwide. Since its publication in 1945, a vast amount has been written about the novel and about the striking similarities between two families, the fictional Flytes and the real-life Lygons. The parallels seem almost infinite – between Lord Beauchamp and Lord Marchmain, Hugh Lygon and Sebastian, and the two great houses, magnificent Brideshead and Madresfield, the Lygons' moated manor house in Worcestershire.
Paula Byrne is the latest to explore the people and the story that inspired the book and she does so with acuity and panache. Her stated aim is to portray Waugh through his friendship with the Lygons, and in the process reveal some substantial new information about the high-society scandal that in 1931 electrified the country. The very grand Lord Beauchamp, Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire, Lord Steward of the Household, Lord President of the Council, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and father of seven children, was outed as a practising homosexual and forced into exile abroad by his crazy brother-in-law, Bendor, Duke of Westminster. ("Dear Bugger-in-Law, You got what you deserved," wrote Westminster, triumphantly, after Beauchamp's disgrace.) Lady Beauchamp, horrified, fled the house never to return, leaving Madresfield, fully staffed, at the disposal of five of the children, with only a governess to keep an eye on them. And it was here one evening, shortly after their father's departure, that Evelyn Waugh arrived for the first time to stay.

Evelyn had been at Oxford with Hugh Lygon, the middle son, with whom, according to one not wholly reliable source, he had conducted an affair. Certainly, he had been bewitched by gentle, charming Hughie, many of whose characteristics – girlish beauty, floppy blond locks, the ubiquitous teddy bear – famously reappear in the portrayal of Sebastian, with whom Charles Ryder is so infatuated in the novel. Yet for all his charm, Hughie was rather a dull dog, and hopelessly alcoholic, and it was with Hugh's sisters that Waugh formed a far more fruitful friendship, especially with Lady Mary and Lady Dorothy, or Maimie and Coote as they were more informally known. His letters to the girls – comic, tender, playfully obscene – are some of the most delightful he ever wrote.

Byrne understands very well the powerful enchantment that Madresfield, or "Mad" as the girls called it, cast over Waugh. The beauty of the place, the limit-less freedom, the traditions of centuries juxtaposed with childish high spirits and silliness, all proved irresistible to the penniless young man from Golders Green. Byrne entertainingly summarises his career up to this point – the childhood, the schooldays, the melancholia and debauchery of Oxford, the schoolmastering and the first published works – and layers in with this the story of the Lygons, of Lord Beauchamp's early life, and of those of his wife and children. Inevitably, the grander family suffers by comparison; they are none of them half so fascinating as Waugh and it is only when the novelist walks on that the stage properly lights up. Byrne shows remarkable perception in her interpretation not only of Waugh's relationship with the Lygons, but of theirs with each other. The girls in particular remained fiercely loyal to their father, taking turns to accompany him on his eternal circuit of grand hotels, in Paris and Venice, in New York and in Australia, where in happier times he had presided as governor of New South Wales.

Most poignant is the story of Maimie, one of the most beautiful debutantes of her generation, once even considered as a future royal bride, who ended up drunk, lonely and fat after a miserable marriage to a penniless Russian prince. It is Waugh's friendship with Maimie that leads Byrne to one of her most interesting insights. Discussing Waugh's failure in depicting the sexual relationship between Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte, she says: "The irony is that the relationship between Charles and Julia would have been more successfully portrayed if it had been closer to that in real life between Evelyn and Maimie: a deep friendship, not a love affair. But Waugh's hand was forced … [by] the structure of the novel."

Essentially, what Mad World provides is a lively introduction to Waugh and to Brideshead, and to the rarefied social world in which much of the novel is set. To this is added a small amount of new material, to which, understandably, much emphasis is given. There is, too, a good deal of trumpeting of the superiority of the author's critical sensibilities to those of her predecessors, many a blithe dismissal of those poor old dinosaurs, authors of "biographical doorstoppers", which nobody wants to read nowadays.

As one of those dinosaurs, I have to concede that Byrne has a point: such big books are currently out of fashion, although I am delighted to see this has not prevented her from making copious use of their contents. Of her own discoveries, two are particularly intriguing: the information that Waugh was confirmed in Rome in 1932, and the physical details of what Lord Beauchamp actually did with all those handsome footmen behind the green baize door.

Much as I admire Mad World, I do have some reservations: source notes, disgracefully, are almost non-existent and the index is virtually useless. The author's assertion that Noël Coward was a Roman Catholic would have earned her a vigorous finger-wagging from "the Master" for claiming anything so "veddy, veddy silly". And she might like to know that Waugh's jokey habit of substituting the words "lascivious beast" for "priest" in his letters to the Lygons derives from the following limerick:

There was a young lady of Devon
Who was had in a garden by seven
Itinerant priests,
The lascivious beasts,
And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

• Selina Hastings' books include Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Her new book, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, is published by John Murray in September

Evelyn Waugh's mad world
A warm study brings to life the real Brideshead family
By Philip Womack in The Telegraph
6:30AM BST 14 Aug 2009

Brideshead Revisited must surely rank as one of the best-loved novels of the 20th century. Aloysius the teddy bear, Sebastian Flyte being sick through Charles Ryder’s window, Anthony Blanche declaiming TS Eliot through a megaphone – these images offer us a glimpse into an Arcadia we can never hope to enter. Evelyn Waugh believed the novel to be his masterpiece – only later did he come to disapprove of its sentimentality.
People have always tried to pinpoint the “sources” for Waugh’s characters. While acknowledging that Waugh’s supreme artistry lay in his ability to create originals out of composites, Paula Byrne has written a highly accomplished book about the family that came to inspire the Flytes of Brideshead: the Lygons (pronounced Liggon) of Madresfield. It was the family with whom Waugh fell in love, one that had more than its share of tragedy as well as laughter.
Byrne is excellent at sketching in the early lives of Waugh and the Lygons, switching between the two milieux with ease. She shows convincingly that Waugh had a tendency to fall for whole families – first the homely Flemings, then the dashing Plunket Greenes and finally the waiflike Lygons. While Waugh grew up in the comfort of suburbia, the Lygons had a childhood of unimaginable luxury at Madresfield. One of three houses lived in by the Earl Beauchamp and his Countess, Madresfield had its own private railway station and the family and its entourage would shuttle between houses in their own train.
It was rumoured that their footmen’s fingers were covered with diamonds. (Footmen, unfortunately, were to become the downfall of the Lygons.) It was not a perfect idyll, though. The Countess’s idea of parenting was savage: when one of her daughters was stung by a jellyfish, she responded by pelting her with a bucketful. The Earl, on the other hand, was devoted to his children.
Waugh was largely unhappy at Lancing (the school to which he was sent after his brother Alec had published a scandalous novel, The Loom of Youth, about homosexual affairs at Sherborne), finding refuge in japes and pranks and in adoring a heroic schoolmaster. At Oxford, rather like his alter ego Charles Ryder in Brideshead, he consorted with clever, middle-class types, all the time yearning for something essential that he felt was eluding him. Eventually, through the aesthete Harold Acton (who really did declaim Eliot and Sitwell into Christ Church meadows), he was inducted into the Hypocrites Club, a collection of heavy drinkers led by Lord Elmley – the Earl Beauchamp’s elder son – and his brother, the ethereal Hugh Lygon.
Hugh Lygon is the most tragic figure in this book. His sisters always said he suffered from second-son syndrome, and perhaps they were right. He was the favourite of his father, and had been popular at Eton. Owing to his beauty he was always given female parts in plays – even appearing as Helen of Troy in a production of Dr Faustus. It was this fragility that drew Waugh to Hugh – he wanted to protect him. The Hypocrites’ lives were full of day-long lunches, outrageous clothes, plovers’ eggs and strenuous homosexual activity – there wasn’t much else to do, after all. Waugh had affairs with at least two men – delicately beautiful, hard-drinking, self-destructive boys – and almost certainly slept with Hugh.
Hugh Lygon probably formed the basis for Sebastian Flyte: hating himself and his homosexuality, though charming to a point. Among these revellers and rebels Waugh had finally found the love and acceptance he had been looking for, although he “was still the outsider looking in, glimpsing rather than actually passing through the low door in the wall that opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden”. He was the boy from Golders Green among the golden aristocrats, partly in awe, partly in disgust. Though firm friends with Elmley and Hugh, Waugh was never invited to Madresfield.
Waugh left Oxford in comparative disgrace, without a degree, and returned to London where he sponged off his brother, spending most of his time in nightclubs. He wrote a novel, fell in love, taught at a dull Welsh school and attempted suicide; the kinds of things, in fact, that rootless, imaginative young men do when they leave university. His second novel,Vile Bodies, was a satire of the world into which he had been plunged: it is pleasing to note that its most amusing scene, in which Agatha Runcible unwittingly gatecrashes 10 Downing Street, has its origins in fact. Two Lygon sisters, on finding they had left their latch key at home after a party, had gone to their friend Stanley Baldwin, who happened to be the prime minister, for rescue.
The catastrophe for the Lygons was the Earl Beauchamp. Devoted to public service and a man of deep culture, he had “a persistent weakness for footmen”. When interviewing them he would squeeze their buttocks and emit the same noise that grooms do when inspecting horses. His children would warn their good-looking male friends to lock their bedroom doors at night; Lady Christabel Aberconway, on arriving at the Beauchamps’ London house for tea, found the flamboyant actor Ernest Thesiger naked from the waist up and adorned with ropes of pearls. Scandal was inevitable: the Earl was brought down by his wife’s brother, the obscenely wealthy Duke of Westminster, who, when he had succeeded in hounding him out of the country, wrote: “Dear Bugger-in-law, You got what you deserved, Yours, Westminster”. Beauchamp was to become the inspiration for the exiled Lord Marchmain, Sebastian’s father.
After the Earl’s exile, Waugh spent many months staying at Madresfield, known by its young inhabitants as “Mad”. And it was a mad world – there was no one to keep an eye on the young people, as the Countess was in Cheshire. It was the libertarian Arcadia for which Waugh had always longed. It didn’t last long. The war changed everything: Hugh Lygon became an alcoholic and died young; the Lygon sisters made unsuitable marriages (one to an impoverished Russian prince; another, at the age of 70, to a notorious homosexual). Waugh remained fiercely loyal to them.
Byrne has written a marvellous book, warm, witty, and enormously readable. She shows intelligently that as the Lygons had an enormous effect on Waugh, so the Flytes do on Charles Ryder. There’s no point looking for direct correspondences. She notes that “all Waugh’s fictional people and places are subtle transformations, not direct portrayals, of ‘reality’” – the true gift of the artist. The epitaph to Brideshead still stands: “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they”. It’s a mad world, my masters, and this book is a calm pool of sanity among the tumult of massed humanity.
Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead
by Paula Byrne
367pp, Harper Press, £25

A photo cutout of the Lygon family: from left, Coote, Maimie, Lettice, Sibell, Lady Beauchamp, Boom, Elmley, Hugh, and Dickie. Photograph by Nic Barlow.

1957: Sunday in Paris | INA Archive

The Dukes Who Own The United Kingdom (Documentary)

Quintessentially British | The English Culture

Why the British Looked So Elegant in the 1960s

A Five-Piece Shooting Suit

The roughneck daredevils who built the Empire State Building

 

The Empire State Building was built by Starrett Brothers and Eken, developed by Empire State Inc. (led by John J. Raskob & Al Smith), with Homer Gage Balcom as structural engineer, and involved thousands of diverse workers, including many Mohawk ironworkers, with their heroic efforts noted by contemporary press like the New York Times, describing them as "daredevils".

 

Key Players & Facts:

Developers: Empire State Inc. (Raskob, Al Smith).

Main Contractors: Starrett Brothers and Eken.

Architects: Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (not in snippets, but implied in the history).

Workforce: Diverse, including Irish, Italian immigrants, and Mohawk ironworkers.

Noteworthy Quote: C.G. Poore for the New York Times described the ironworkers as "strolling on the thin edge of nothingness".

 

‘It would take 11 seconds to hit the ground’: the roughneck daredevils who built the Empire State Building

 

They wrestled steel beams, hung off giant hooks and tossed red hot rivets – all while ‘strolling on the thin edge of nothingness’. Now the 3,000 unsung heroes who raised the famous skyscraper are finally being celebrated

 

Catherine Slessor

Mon 1 Dec 2025 15.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/01/empire-state-building-lewis-hine-glenn-kurtz-new-york

 

Poised on a steel cable a quarter of a mile above Manhattan, a weather-beaten man in work dungarees reaches up to tighten a bolt. Below, though you hardly dare to look down, lies the Hudson River, the sprawling cityscape of New York and the US itself, rolling out on to the far horizon. If you fell from this rarefied spot, it would take about 11 seconds to hit the ground.

 

Captured by photographer Lewis Hine, The Sky Boy, as the image became known, encapsulated the daring and vigour of the men who built the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest structure at 102 storeys and 1,250ft (381m) high. Like astronauts, they were going to places no man had gone before, testing the limits of human endurance, giving physical form to ideals of American puissance, “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground”, according to John Jakob Raskob, then one of the country’s richest men, who helped bankroll the building.

 

Like astronauts, they were going to places no man had gone before

 

Known for his empathic studies of workers, artisans and immigrants, Hine was hired to document the development of the Empire State Building during its breakneck 13-month construction period from 1930-31. Along with formal portraits of individual workers, he recorded men animatedly performing their jobs: drilling foundations, wrestling with pipes and cables, laying bricks and navigating precipitous steel beams as the colossal skyscraper took shape above Manhattan.

 

Today, visitors to the Empire State can take selfies with bronze sculptures of old-timey construction fellows, wreathed in a confected soundscape of “ironworkers and masons shouting over the din of machinery, moving steel beams into position, and tossing hot rivets into place”. This genuinely heroic feat of construction has long been commodified into yet another visitor experience.

 

History valorises the ambitious, affluent men who commissioned the Empire State, including Alfred Smith, a former governor of New York and Democratic presidential candidate. It also valorises its architects, Messrs Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, who alighted on a distinctive art deco style, with prefabricated parts designed to be duplicated accurately in quantity and then brought to site and put together in a similar manner to a car assembly line.

 

The men in dungarees raised the steel frame as others – carpenters, glaziers, stonemasons – followed

 

Yet the men who assembled those parts – 3,000 workers toiled on site each day – are largely unknown and unsung. Even The Sky Boy – for all his romantic allure “lifted like Lindbergh in ecstatic solitude”, as one commentator rhapsodised – remains unidentified. The man in dungarees was simply part of a gang of structural ironworkers, who raised the building’s steel frame, leading the way upward as other tradesmen – carpenters, glaziers, tilers and stonemasons – followed in their wake.

 

A tight-knit fraternity of Scandinavians, Irish-Americans and Kahnawà:ke Mohawks, the ironworkers were self-proclaimed “roughnecks”, undisputed kings of constructional derring-do. As the New York Times writer CG Poore put it at the time, they spent their days “strolling on the thin edge of nothingness”.

 

Fleshing out the men behind the myth, a new book called Men at Work throws light on the lives and opinions of a small fraction of this forgotten workforce. “My father’s office was in the Empire State Building, so I grew up visiting it,” says the author Glenn Kurtz. Familiar with Hine’s images, his interest was further piqued by a small plaque tucked into a corner of the opulent main lobby, bearing the names of 32 men who had been singled out for “craftsmanship awards” for their work on the building.

 

 “Hine’s portraits play such an important role in the mythology surrounding not only the Empire State Building, but also 1930s America in general,” says Kurtz. “I was astonished to learn that no one had ever inquired about the men pictured.”

 

Bringing them into focus was no easy task. Construction workers frequently led itinerant lives, to escape “the coarse grain of official attention”. Employment records from the era were rarely preserved, and the private lives of ordinary people remained largely undocumented. This made it hard to properly record the number of people who died during the building’s creation. Although the official figure is five, Kurtz believes at least eight people perished: seven construction workers (one of which was judged a suicide) and one passerby, Elizabeth Eager, who was hit by a falling plank.

 

Delving into census data, immigration and union records, contemporary newspaper accounts and the personal recollections of their descendants, Kurtz illuminates Hine’s images in new ways, conjuring backstories of men who, as he puts it, “until now, have been used solely as the embodiments of generalities and abstract ideals”.

 

Take Victor “Frenchy” Gosselin, whose specialist skill was as a “connector”, catching a suspended beam and moving it into place to be attached to the building’s steel frame. A rare conjunction of personal details and exhilarating photos elevated Gosselin beyond the usual anonymity of the “devil-may-care cowboy of the skies”. Hine shot him nonchalantly straddling a hoisting ball in shorts and work boots, à la Miley Cyrus, an image that featured on a US Postal Service stamp in 2013.

 

Kurtz elaborates on the trajectory of Gosselin’s life and sudden death aged 46 in a car accident, leaving a widow and two young sons. “Distinguishing Victor Gosselin, the man, from the figure in Hine’s iconic photograph does not make him any less heroic,” he argues. “Instead, it allows us to see the photograph more fully, and it roots Gosselin’s genuine heroism in a real life, tragically short and mostly unknown, rather than in a fantasy.”

 

There are other no less compelling histories. Vladimir Kozloff, born in Russia, who throughout the 1930s served as secretary for the House Wreckers Union, and was active in winning protections for workers in this highly perilous profession. Or Matthew McKean, a carpenter who emigrated from Scotland, leaving behind his wife and two children. Or terrazzo craftsman Ferruccio Mariutto, who at the time of his stint on the Empire State had been in the US only two years. Like many workers, he died relatively young, just before his 64th birthday, probably of mesothelioma related to asbestos exposure.

 

Kurtz saves his most controversial speculation until last: that the unknown Sky Boy was a man called Dick McCarthy, a second-generation American, grandson of Irish immigrants, living in Brooklyn, who died in 1983. Although Hine never left any clues in his notes, comparison of images of McCarthy and the Sky Boy point up a tantalising physical resemblance.

 

“Considering the worldwide fame of this photo, it’s astonishing we do not know the name of the man,” says Kurtz. “His use as a symbol almost precludes attention to him as an actual person. We may never know the truth, but I’d say I have 50% confidence in my conjecture.”

 

Narratives of architecture tend to disregard the human cost of construction. History is made by the few, not the many. “The lives and experience of actual workers are marginalised,” says Kurtz. “They are too ‘ordinary’ to be interesting. Yet their skill, their training, and the specific conditions of their workplaces, are all profoundly important to architectural history. They are how every building gets built.”

 

Men at Work: The Untold Story of the Empire State Building and the Craftsmen Who Built It by Glenn Kurtz (Seven Stories Press, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

How LIFE in the UK Changed DECADE by DECADE: 1950 - 1980 😲

Fackham Hall | Official Green Band Trailer | Bleecker Street / Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

Review

Fackham Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

 

Period drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie

 

Adrian Horton

Fri 5 Dec 2025 23.28 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/05/fackham-hall-movie-review

 

Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback. This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun.

 

The latest of these goofy parodies, which premieres on the beyond-parody day that Fifa awarded Donald Trump an inaugural peace prize and Netflix announced its plan to buy Warner Bros, is Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey spoof that pokes at the very pokeable pretensions of gilded British period dramas. (Yes, Fackham rhymes with a crass kiss-off to the aristocracy.) Co-written by British Irish comedian and TV presenter Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O’Hanlon, Fackham Hall has plenty of material to work with – the historical soap’s grand finale just premiered in September, 15 years after Julian Fellowes’s series started going upstairs-downstairs with ludicrous portent – and wastes none of it. From ludicrous start (servants rolling joints for the household and responding to calls from the “masturbatorium”) to ludicrous finish (someone manages to marry a second cousin rather than a first!), this enjoyable silver-spoon romp packs all of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits ranging from the puerile to the genuinely funny, proving that there may yet be more to wring from eat-the-rich satire.

 

 

Like Downton, Fackham Hall is a pastiche of very self-important rich people and very obsequious servants, of effete masculinity and feminine gamesmanship. What is life as a British aristocrat, if not to drink tea and scheme others’ marriages? Having lost their four sons in four separate tragic accidents, the feckless Lord Davenport (an enjoyably affected Damian Lewis) and his anti-reading wife, Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston), are left to focus on their daughters. Poppy (Emma Laird), the younger sister, has accomplished the family goal of finding the right first cousin to marry, lest the manor drift out of family control. But when Poppy bails on a future of know-nothing conversation with cousin Archibald (a perfectly smarmy Tom Felton) for a simpleton, the family’s hopes land on the unmarried Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) – at 23, a “dried-up husk of a woman”, according to her mother – whose belief in such things as female autonomy leads her to detest Archibald.

 

Carr fares much better joking about the suffocating expectations on early 20th-century women often mined for self-serious drama – poor Rose just wants to read books (the scandal!) in but One Shade of Grey – than joking about women, as in his disastrous recent standup. The trope of respectable, enviable femininity are the stars here, and often make for the best punching bags; when plucky pickpocket Eric Noone (the dashing Ben Radcliffe), hand-selected from his London orphanage by a mysterious stranger to deliver a letter to Fackham, collides into Rose, he is inevitably sidetracked by an “incredibly beautiful woman with a kind of carefree essence that makes men grateful to be alive!”

 

As befitting an intentionally ridiculous spoof, the plot is secondary to the bits, which Carr keeps delivering at an amiably humorous clip, with a solid three guffaws in the mix. There is a murder, and an incompetent investigation. The forbidden romance between Noone (pronounced “no one”) and Rose, played by Radcliffe and McKenzie as just the right balance of bumbling and beguiling, imperils the aristocrats’ best-laid plans. Genre skewering, pratfalls and spoof-staple wordplay abound. (“I’m here for the murder,” says the investigator (Tom Goodman-Hill). “I’m afraid someone’s already done it! But come in anyway,” says the butler.)

 

It’s all in lighthearted fun, though that itself has limitations. The dialed-up silliness of a spoof can wear quickly, and the mileage on this particular variety runs out somewhere between sketch and feature. At a certain point, you might wish to return to the world of (very slight) reason. But you have to respect a sincere commitment to the artform – if we’re going to amuse ourselves to death, might as well laugh at it.

 

Fackham Hall is out in US cinemas now, in the UK on 12 December and in Australia on 19 February

 

The Crown - 10 Royal Secrets Netflix Never Told You

Hollywood, Royalty & the Art of the Perfect Cocktail - Paul Feig & Nick ...

Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible

 

Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible

 

President Trump’s ever-growing vision has caused tension with contractors. His architect has taken a step back as the president personally manages the project.

 

Luke Broadwater

By Luke Broadwater

Luke Broadwater is a White House correspondent. He reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-white-house-ballroom.html?searchResultPosition=2

Published Nov. 29, 2025

Updated Nov. 30, 2025

 

As President Trump took a stroll on the White House roof in August, generating headlines and questions about what he was up to, the man walking beside him was little noticed.

 

Wearing his signature bow tie, James McCrery, a classical architect who runs a small Washington firm known for its work building Catholic churches, was discussing how to execute Mr. Trump’s vision for a ballroom on the White House grounds.

 

Mr. McCrery’s work has been embraced by conservatives who believe federal buildings should be designed with an eye toward the grandeur of ancient Greek and Roman structures. He often talks of how his design work is carried out in service of God and the church, according to people who have worked with him.

 

It might have seemed an odd pairing: a man who designs cathedrals working for a man who once built casinos, and is now president of the United States.

 

But McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.

 

It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.

 

That’s when things got tricky.

 

In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.

 

The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.

 

The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)

 

In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.

 

A White House official acknowledged that there had been disagreements between Mr. Trump and Mr. McCrery, a dynamic first reported by the Washington Post.

 

Through a representative, Mr. McCrery declined requests for an interview.

 

This account of Mr. Trump’s personal drive to undertake one of the most significant renovations in the history of the White House is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the project, most of whom asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations, along with the president’s own statements and planning documents released by the White House.

 

A Builder’s Dream

For Mr. Trump, who was a builder for years in New York City and who often brags about his talents in real estate and construction, the White House renovation is a dream project.

 

Mr. Trump has marveled that he does not need to follow the kind of permitting requirements that he faced back in New York. He doesn’t need approvals from anyone, he has told those around him, and can begin any project at the White House as quickly as he likes.

 

“‘You’re the president of the United States, you can do anything you want,’” Mr. Trump has said he’s been told.

 

Mr. Trump has wanted to build a ballroom at the White House for years. During the Obama administration, he pitched the idea of constructing a $100 million version of his Mar-a-Lago ballroom. But Obama associates never followed up on his offer, a slight that has stayed with Mr. Trump.

 

The ballroom Mr. Trump is planning now is more than four times as large as the 20,000-square-foot one at Mar-a-Lago.

 

Aware of potential resistance to the project, Mr. Trump has pushed to remove any obstacle that could slow down his vision.

 

He has installed his former personal lawyer as the chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, which is supposed to review plans for the project. That lawyer, Will Scharf, has said there was no need to review Mr. Trump’s plans before he ordered the demolition of the East Wing.

 

Mr. Trump has also fired the entire board of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that was established by Congress to advise the president on urban planning and historical preservation.

 

Mr. Trump’s unilateral approach has raised concerns from the Society of Architectural Historians, which urged that “such a significant change to a historic building of this import should follow a rigorous and deliberate design and review process.”

 

Mr. Trump is aware of the criticism that his ballroom plans are too large. He told a group of donors to the project last month that he didn’t want the new ballroom to “dwarf anything.” But at the same event, in discussing related plans to construct a Triumphal Arch, Mr. Trump showed small, medium and large options.

 

“I happen to think the large looks by far the best,” he said.

 

Deep in the Details

The contractors working on Mr. Trump’s ballroom — including McCrery Architects, Clark Construction and AECOM — did not go through the traditional government bidding process. Instead, Mr. Trump has been personally selecting each contractor and handling the details of the contracts, including how much the firm will be paid, people with knowledge of the situation said.

 

Mr. Trump selected Mr. McCrery after the architect made his presentation personally in the Oval Office, emphasizing a design that would be in keeping with the existing White House. (The building’s original designer, James Hoban, was also a church architect.)

 

The president has also said that the firm excavating the site initially told him the work would cost $3.2 million, but that he pressured the company to accept just $2 million.

 

The short timetable for the project, which the president has said he wants to be completed before 2029, has led to some embarrassing mistakes.

 

The various plans released so far, including a rushed model made by a contractor, have included windows that collide into each other and a staircase to nowhere.

 

Richard W. Longstreth, an architectural historian and a professor at George Washington University, noted that the public had yet to see a final design of the building. He said the ballroom project's success would depend a lot on its execution.

 

“I have nothing against the contemporary use of classical architecture, if it’s done well,” he said. “And there are people who can do it very well, and others who cannot.”

 

The president initially considered ways to preserve the East Wing, the traditional offices of the first lady and the entrance to the White House for millions of Americans on official tours.

 

McCrery Architects provided options to build the ballroom as an addition to the East Wing or construct the new facility over it. But Mr. Trump rejected those plans.

 

Under the latest designs, the offices of the first lady would be on the ground floor of the proposed ballroom, with a main visitor entrance from the East Portico.

 

“We started with a much smaller building, and then I realized, we have the land, let’s do it right,” Mr. Trump said recently to donors, during an event to raise money for the ballroom project. “And so we built a larger building that can really hold just about any function that we want.”

 

Many have embraced the idea of Mr. Trump’s new ballroom as a benefit to the complex, pointing out problems with hosting large events in tents on White House grounds.

 

Joseph Malchow, who is on the board of the National Civic Art Society with Mr. McCrery, said Mr. Trump was leading an effort to restore “classical American architecture.”

 

Mr. Trump has said taxpayers are not on the hook for the ballroom, whose costs have risen by 50 percent, from $200 million to $300 million. The president has said he already raised $350 million from donors, including from major tech and crypto companies, and that businesses pledged to donate all of the steel and air conditioning.

 

But that payment method means going around Congress to fund the project, cutting legislators out of having any say over its direction.

 

“The White House is one of the great buildings in this country. It’s the so-called people’s palace,” said Richard Guy Wilson, professor emeritus of architectural history at the University of Virginia. “This new ballroom that’s going up, it’s gigantic, and unfortunately, it’s going to sort of dominate.”

 

‘An Important Designer’

The ballroom project is Mr. Trump’s latest push to remake the White House in his own image.

 

He has added gold moldings and gold decorations throughout the Oval Office, and gold ornaments to the Cabinet Room.

 

He removed a photo of Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and secretary of state, and replaced it with an image of his own face colored with the American flag. He added marble floors and a chandelier to the Palm Room.

 

He paved over the Rose Garden grass to add a patio. Along the West Wing colonnade, he added gold-framed photos of every American president except his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he depicted as an autopen.

 

Mr. Longstreth noted that many of Mr. Trump’s changes could be undone by future presidents. “A lot of that is reversible,” he said. “And presidents have often come in and changed the decoration to a considerable degree.”

 

Still, Mr. Trump is showing no signs of stopping. He recently gutted the bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom, posting two dozen photos on social media of the renovation. And he has informally discussed undertaking more projects at the White House, including more work on the West Wing.

 

A White House official said that a large-scale renovation of the West Wing was not currently under consideration, but that Mr. Trump would be making more changes.

 

Speaking of the design plans for the new ballroom, Mr. Trump has said that he likes to see different proposals, but that he ultimately has the final say.

 

“I consider myself an important designer,” Mr. Trump has said.

 

A correction was made on Nov. 29, 2025: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the federal agency whose board members were fired by President Trump. It was the Commission of Fine Arts, not the Fine Arts Council.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

 

Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.

Jeeves will be away ... for a period of 10 days.

A Tour of our new shop

REMEMBERING 2016 / Message from Jeeves / Revista DOZE. / 2016.

 Revista DOZE , published an article / profile , kindly giving me the opportunity to express my views and definitions around aesthetics, style , the principles of my garderobe and its connection with the decor of my interiors, the fundamental differences between the Gentleman and the Dandy, enfin, my aesthetic philosophy of Life and its role in the great mystery of Existence.

Greetings Jeeves / António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho / Architectural Historian
PHOTOS: Michael Floor.

Posh British English | How to do a Perfect RP Accent!

Real-Life Downton Abbey | Mary Berry's Country House Secrets Episode 1 |...

Shades of Tartan and Tweed. (2)

 

How The British Upper Class Live | Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over

Secrets of the Manor House - Part 1/4

Secrets of the Manor House: Recap and Review

January 22, 2012 by Vic

https://janeaustensworld.com/2012/01/22/secrets-of-the-manor-house-recap-and-review/

 

This Sunday, PBS will air on most stations an hour presentation of  Secrets of the Manor House, a documentary narrated by Samuel West, that explains how society was transformed in the years leading up to World War One. Expert historians, such as Lawrence James and Dr. Elisabeth Kehoe, discuss what life was like in these houses, explain the hierarchy of the British establishment, and provide historical and social context for viewers. For American viewers of Downton Abbey, this special couldn’t have come at a better time.

 

The British manor house represented a world of privilege, grace, dignity and power.

 

For their services for the King in war, soldiers were awarded lands and titles. The aristocracy rose from a warrior class.

 

This world was inhabited by an elite class of people who were descended from a line of professional fighting men, whose titles and land were bestowed on them by a grateful king.

 

Manderston House, Berwickshire.

For over a thousand years, aristocrats viewed themselves as a race apart, their power and wealth predicated on titles, landed wealth, and political standing.

 

Vast landed estates were their domain, where a strict hierarchy of class was followed above stairs as well as below it. In 1912, 1 ½ million servants tended to the needs of their masters. As many as 100 would be employed as butler, housekeeper, house maids, kitchen maids, footmen, valets, cooks, grooms, chauffeurs, forestry men, and agricultural workers. Tradition kept everyone in line, and deference and obedience to your betters were expected (and given).

 

 

22 staff were required to run Manderston House, which employed 100 servants, many of whom worked in the gardens, fields, and forests.

 

As a new century began, the divide between rich and poor was tremendous. While the rich threw more extravagant parties and lived lavish lives, the poor were doomed to live lives of servitude and hard work.

 

Manderston House in Berwickshire represents the excesses of its time. The great house consists of 109 rooms, and employed 98 servants just before the outbreak of World War One. Twenty two servants worked inside the house to tend to Lord Palmer and his family. Every room inside the house interconnected.

 

The curtains and drapes, woven with gold and silver thread, were made in Paris in 1904 and cost the equivalent of 1.5 million dollars. Manderston House itself was renovated at the turn of the century for 20 million dollars in today’s money. This was during an era when scullery maids earned the equivalent of $50 per year.

 

The servant hall boasted 56 bells, each of a different size that produced a unique ring tone. Servants were expected to memorize the sound for the areas that were under their responsibility.

 

Scullery maids were placed at the bottom of the servant hierarchy. They rose before dawn to start the kitchen fires and put water on to boil. Their job was to scrub the pots, pans and dishes, and floors, and even wait on other servants.

 

Life was not a bed of roses for the working class and the gulf between the rich and poor could not have been wider than during the turn of the 21st century.

 

Thoroughbred horses lived better than the working classes.

 

While the servants slept in the attic or basement, thoroughbred horses were housed in expensively designed stable blocks. As many as 16 grooms worked in the stables, for no expense was spared in tending to their needs.

 

The stables at Manderston House required 16 grooms to feed, care for, and exercise the horses.

 

As men and women worked long hours, as much as 17-18 hours per day, the rich during the Edwardian era lived extravagant, indulgent lives of relaxation and pleasure, attending endless rounds of balls, shooting parties, race meetings, and dinner parties.

 

Up to the moment that war was declared, the upper classes lived as if their privileged lives would never change.

 

The Edwardian era marked the last great gasp of manor house living with its opportunities of providing endless pleasure. For the working class and poor, the inequities within the system became more and more apparent. The landed rich possessed over one half of the land. Their power was rooted in owning land, for people who lived on the land paid rent. The landed gentry also received income from investments,  rich mineral deposits on their land, timber, vegetables grown in their fields, and animals shipped to market.

 

The lord of the manor and his steward can be seen walking among the farm laborers, many of whom were women.

 

The need to keep country estates intact and perpetuate a family’s power was so important that the eldest son inherited everything – the estate, title, all the houses, jewels, furnishings, and art. The laws of primogeniture ensured that country estates would not be whittled away over succeeding generations. In order to consolidate power, everything (or as much as possible) was preserved. Entailment, a law that went back to the 13th century, ensured that portions of an estate could not be sold off.

 

The system was rigged to favor the rich. Only men who owned land could vote, and hereditary peers were automatically given a seat in the House of Lords. By inviting powerful guests to their country estates, they could lobby for their special interests across a dinner table, at a shoot, or at a men’s club.

 

Thoroughbred horses were valued for their breeding and valor, traits that aristocrats identified with.

 

The Industrial Revolution brought about changes in agricultural practices and inventions that presaged the decline of aristocratic wealth. Agricultural revenues, the basis on which landed wealth in the UK was founded, were in decline. Due to better transportation and refrigeration, grain transported from Australia and the U.S. became cheaper to purchase. Individuals were able to build wealth in other ways – as bankers and financiers. While the landed gentry could still tap resources from their lands and expand into the colonies, the empire too began to crumble with the rise of nationalism and nation states.

 

The servant hierarchy echoed the distinctions of class upstairs. The chef worked at the end of the table on the left, while the lowest ranking kitchen maids chopped vegetables at the far right. The kitchen staff worked 17 hours a day and rarely left the kitchen.

 

Contrasted with the opulent life above stairs was an endless life of drudgery below stairs. On a large estate that entertained visitors, over 100 meals were prepared daily. Servants rose at dawn and had to stay up until the last guest went to bed. Kitchen maids, who made the equivalent of 28 dollars per year, rarely strayed outside the kitchen.

 

 Steep back stairs that servants used. Out of sight/out of mind.

 

One bath required 45 gallons of water, which had to be hauled by hand up steep, narrow stairs. At times, a dozen guests might take baths on the same day. House maids worked quietly and unseen all over the manor house. The were expected to move from room to room using their own staircases and corridors. Underground tunnels allowed servants to move unseen crossing courtyards.

 

Maids and footmen lived in their own quarters in the attic or basement. Men were separated from the women and were expected to use different stairs. Discipline was strict. Servants could be dismissed without notice for the most minor infraction.

 

Footmen tended to be young, tall, and good looking.

 

Footmen, whose livery cost more than their yearly salary, were status symbols. Chosen for their height and looks, they were the only servants allowed to assist the butler at dinner table. These men were the only servants allowed upstairs.

 

Green baize doors separated the servants quarters from the master's domain.

 

Green baize doors were special doors that marked the end of the servants quarters and hid the smells of cooking and noises of the servants from the family.

 

The Jerome sisters were (l to r) Jennie, Clara, and Leonie

 

As revenues from agriculture dwindled, the upper classes searched for a new infusion of capital.This they found in the American heiress, whose fathers had built up their wealth from trade and transportation. Free from the laws of primogeniture, these wealthy capitalists distributed their wealth among their children, sharing it equally among sons and daughters. The ‘Buccaneers,’ as early American heiresses were called, infused the British estates with wealth. ‘Cash for titles’ brought 60 million dollars into the British upper class system via 100 transatlantic marriages.

 

Transatlantic passages worked both ways, even as American heiresses crossed over to the U.K.,  millions of British workers emigrated to America looking for a better life. The sinking of the Titanic, just two years before the outbreak of World War One, underscored the pervasive issue of class.

 

Most likely this lifeboat from the Titanic was filled with upper class women and children. Only 1 in 3 people survived.

 

The different social strata were housed according to rank, and it was hard to ignore that a large percentage of first class women and children survived, while the majority of third and second class passengers died.

 

Labor strikes became common all over the world, including the U.K.

 

Society changed as the working class became more assertive and went on strikes. The Suffragette movement gained momentum. Prime Minister David Lloyd George was a proponent of reform, even as the aristocracy tried to carry on as before.

 

Lloyd George campaigned for progressive causes.

 

Inventions revolutionized the work place. Electricity, telephones, the type writer, and other labor-saving devices threatened jobs in service. A big house could be run with fewer staff, and by the 1920s a manor house that required 100 servants needed only 30-40.

 

Change is ever present. The last typewriter factory shut its doors in April, 2011.

 

Women who would otherwise have gone into service were lured into secretarial jobs, which had been revolutionized by the telephone and typewriter.

 

The manor house set enjoyed one last season in the summer of 1914, just before war began. Many of the young men who attended those parties would not return from France. Few expected that this war would last for six months, much less four years. Officers lost their lives by a greater percentage than ordinary soldiers, and the casualty lists were filled with the names of aristocratic men and the upper class.

 

Over 35 million soldiers and civilians died in World War 1

 

Common soldiers who had died by the millions had been unable to vote. Such inequities did not go unnoticed. Social discontent, noticeable before the war, resulted in reform – the many changes ushered in modern Britain.