Return to the St Claire Family House - A filming location for the Granada Sherlock Holmes 'Lasy Vampyre'
Some of you may have come across my write-up of my visit to Baddesley Clinton, the house which stood in for the fictional location of ‘Hurlstone’ in the Musgrave Ritual episode Granada’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. I had a lot of fun seeing how the property had changed (or not changed!) since the 80s, and how the writers and film crew had used and adapted the house.
Since I’ll take any excuse to learn about and visit more old and interesting buildings, I thought I’d see if there were other filming locations from the series in my local area which could get the same treatment.
The obvious candidate was Guy’s Cliffe House, which stands in for the home of the St Claire family in ‘The Last Vampire’.
[IMG: Title card reading The Last Vampyre in front of the image of a burning house]
There are a few reasons why this was an infinitely more difficult task than my Musgrave Ritual , though:
- Baddesley Clinton is a National Trust property: you pay your £15, pick up a guide book and off you go. Guy’s Cliffe House is a slightly dangerous derelict ruin which is privately owned, and used by the Freemasons as a masonic temple. There are occasional tours, but getting on one required finding the correct Facebook page, hoping the stars aligned and making votive sacrificed to the Old Gods. Well, sort of.
- I really like The Musgrave Ritual. I can watch Jeremy Brett grumpily swaddled in blankets and Edward Hardwicke making concerned puppy-dog eyes at him all day, so running the episode through a few times to take screenshots was a delight. The Last Vampyre, however, is probably my least favourite episodes of the entire series. Writer Jeremy Paul had to pull the script together in three weeks at the behest of executives, it’s overly long because they said it had to be feature length, and it’s so obvious that Jeremy Brett is unwell throughout the whole thing.
- Baddesley Clinton is the showstopping centrepiece of The Musgrave Ritual, around which a fun treasure hunt is set. You can tell that the creators actually incorporated multiple elements of the building into the story. Guy’s Cliffe doesn’t actually appear much in The Last Vampyre. The main scene where it does is honestly just very bizarre, it's a solid minute of Holmes looking at... himself? And squinting from the glare of the sun reflecting on glass? And messing around with a compass?
It doesn't make any more sense in-context, I promise.
- The relationship between Guys Cliffe House and The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes is… ummm… awkward. In We’ll get to that in a minute.
A History of the House
Guy’s Cliffe has folkloric ties to the legends of Sir Guy of Warwick, a legendary character once as well known as King Arthur, and there have been a number of different buildings there in the site’s history including a 15th century chapel and a Tudor timber framed house. The house which features in The Last Vampire was built in 1751 by politician Samuel Greatheed using money he generated from his ownership of plantation worked by enslaved people on Saint Kitts’ Island. So, perhaps we shouldn’t be TOO upset that it’s now a ruined husk.
[IMG: A painting of the fully intact house in the 1880s. It is surrounded by greenery and reflected in the nearby river. ]
The house and its estate were passed down to his descendants and was used as a hospital in WW1 and a school for evacuated children in WW2. When the money finally ran out in the 1940s, parts of the estate were sold off to different people and the house was passed from person to person without being used or maintained properly until the roof fell in sometime in the 60s.
[IMG The house today as a ruin. It has no roof and all of the windows have no glass in.]
Now, here’s the awkward bit regarding Granada Holmes. The filming that took place there kiiiiiind of… irrepairably damaged the house? Seeking funds for repair and upkeep, the owners allowed Granada to film there. The crew wanted to stage pyrotechnics in a partially ruined building so that they could make it look like it was being consumed by flames. The problem was that they didn’t realise that there were wooden beams hidden within some of the walls. When these caught light it caused the fire to spread through the site in an unintended way. In other words, the pretend fire became a real one.
To make things even worse, the pumps of the fire engines already on the site failed, and so local fire crews ended up being called in as a last desperate attempt to save the not-already-ruined parts of the house.
If you're wondering where Jeremy Brett himself was during all this chaos, the answer somehow endeared him to me even MORE, which I didn't think was possible:
"I was at home in the hotel. I'm not wild about fire at the best of times and I was worried because a nest of sparrowhawks - three babies - were in the ruins." - Jeremy Brett
It's interesting to compare photographs of the house before the fire, immediately after it, and following several years of expensive repairs.
[IMG Black and white photo of the house in the 1950s, fully intact]
[IMG The house just prior to filming. The roof has fallen in and parts of windows are missing]
[IMG The house immediately after the fire. The entire front of both side bay windows have gone, and much of the upper floor and roof]
[IMG The house today, following the repairs which were funded by Granada's insurance!]
You can see that the repairs were mostly designed to make the building stable, not put it back to looking as it did before the fire, and so some of the fine details and elegance have been lost. It's a real shame.
Exploring the House
All this may clue you into the fact that matching the show shot-for-shot is almost impossible now: some of the building was actively destroyed during filming, and most of the rest of it is dangerous to enter.
I could spot a few familiar things though. For example this shot...
But honestly, that's about it for the Sherlock Holmes connection. The rest of the site is utterly fascinating though, and it was actually really exciting to visit somewhere that isn't completely streamlined and visitor friendly. I promised not to post any of the masonic temple stuff online, but I think it's ok for me to share images of this old coach house hewn into a bare rockface which is now full of assorted tables and chairs...
... and this casket. Could it be that the house be home to vampires after all?!!
I'll leave you with this little video of me nosing around before the tour began to see what was down a mysterious underground passage.
