Visitor Book
A Visitor Book for Belton, started by the 6th Baron Brownlow, Peregrine Cust (Perry) and his wife Katherine (Kitty), runs from 7th December 1927 to 1st December 1952. The two married on 18th October 1927. Kitty died 27th November 1952, a few weeks after their silver wedding anniversary. The book records the guests who reflected the culture & politics of the 1930s as well as Belton's use in peace & World War II.
Click buttons below for a list of either visitors names, or names, biographies and images. Alternatively, visit the dedicated web site. All will open in a new tab.
A quick way to see who visited Belton House as a guest
A table that allows filtering by the guest's name
Visitor Book Pages: images are the copyright of the National Trust. They are provided for educational and research purposes only. Reproduction without permission is prohibited
Our original web site
Lord Brownlow and Kitty (née Kinloch). On honeymoon at Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera 1927.
Background
According to Perry writing in the book, Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) the famous American stage and screen actress gave them the Visitor Book as a wedding present. She achieved fame in Britain (1922–1931) in several stage productions. One was The Green Hat at the Adelphi Theatre in 1924, where she appeared with Perry's cousin, Barbara Druce/Dillon, an actress. This may have led to the friendship between the Brownlows and Tallulah. She returned to the States in 1931 and has not signed in the book.
Perry closed the book on 18th October 1952 when the Belton tenants gave the Brownlows a new visitors book on the occasion of their Silver Wedding. However following Kitty's death, guests continued to use it to record their attendance at her funeral.
This Visitor Book was transcribed and guests researched by the Belton Research Group. The results were archived with the National Trust at Belton in July 2020. The Visitor Book website provides those results. The copyrighted photographs of each page investigated are not included. Please contact Belton House if you wish to see the source document.
Themes include family, fashion, social history, aviation, arts, literature, film, and the start of television. Spanning WWII, entries reflect politics and war. Guests ranged from fascists like Mosley along with their sympathisers, to those placed on the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. - for arrest by the Gestapo and SS following successful Nazi invasion.
Visitors had connections with MI5, MI6, Bletchley Park, SOE, SAS, OSS and two unwittingly with an Abwehr agent. Guest research reveals use of the Billiard Room as a bomb & gas proof air raid shelter. The Ride stored gun barrels for BMARCo. Lord & Lady Brownlow aided Austrian Jews rendered stateless by Hitler’s Anschluss of 1938. One of those émigrés, Kurt Gottlieb, lies in Belton’s churchyard.
Sheila Loughborough, one of the bright young things on the visitors list. Married 'girlfriend' to the future George VI.
Statistics
The visitor book contains 1,725 entries comprising names, addresses, comments, and annotations by the Brownlows. During the 24-year period covered by the visitor book, Belton hosted an average of 6 guests each month many of whom would have stayed overnight.
Seventy-six visitors remain unidentified out of 612 names. This is either due to undecipherable signatures or names unconnectable to the Brownlows. Additionally, excluded are guests who we know visited Belton, but did not sign, such as Captain Clark Gable, the actor, on 18th July 1943 (Grantham Journal 23 July 1943). Likewise, guests attending for Edward Cust’s christening did not sign.
This confirms the visitor book to be an incomplete record of Belton's many invitees.
Some visitors wrote an arrival and departure date (964), some just arrival, others neither. Where no date was written, the closest previous written date was assigned and a stay of one day allocated. This permitted analysis of visitor numbers by month and year for all entries. Multiple arrivals on the same date were not unusual, e.g. on Sunday 9th November 1930, 15 visitors arrived. Sixty-one percent of visitors came more than once. Eighteen visitors changed their name over time due to either marital status or ennoblement. An example is Ursula Manners, then Marreco, back to Manners and finally D’Abo.
Figure 1, left shows those who came 10 or more times (frequency alongside blue bar). Fourteen of these 40 guests were family members. Hugh Seely, later Baron Sherwood was not family, but came most often, 57 times. The second most frequent visitor was St John Hutchinson, a barrister specialising in criminal law.
924 visitors wrote an arrival and departure date, i.e. who stayed overnight or longer. Most came on a Friday or Saturday (figure 2). The median stay was 2 nights or 3 days including day of arrival and departure. One third stayed one night. One quarter stayed 4 nights or longer. The longest sojourn was by Lord Brownlow’s sister, Sarah Hoos and her daughter Henrietta for 295 days.
Figure 3 illustrates that the months leading up to Xmas and the New Year then the Spring had the most visits.
Figure 4 gives the visitor arrivals by year and key events. 1939 was the busiest year.
In WWII, Kitty moved to Ellesmere, one of the Brownlow estates. Perry lived partly in London at 88 St Jame's St, London involved with war work. The children, Caroline and Edward Cust are believed to have been evacuated to the U.S.A. Caroline had returned by 1944.
Troops from the Parachute Regiment lodged in Belton's Stables prior to Operation Market Garden. One is buried locally, believed death from drowning. Montgomery is seen inspecting the troops.
Header image from NT 434700 title page