Qualla: Port Lympne Mansion

Port Lympne Mansion: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rex Whistler asked £800 to paint a single dining room. He turned the barrel-vaulted ceiling into a blue-and-white striped trompe-l'oeil tent, complete with real curtains in matching stripes and painted tent poles topped with gold tassels - and then he lifted the whole illusion above an imaginary first-floor balcony so the diners would seem to be looking down on a town full of favourite buildings. A Palladian Bridge. A Stowe pavilion. St Martin-in-the-Fields. A boy waiting for a paddle steamer with a coroneted B on his trunk, for the eternal schoolboy Lord Berners. It still survives. So does the rest of Port Lympne, where Sir Philip Sassoon, the impossibly wealthy Iraqi-Jewish-British MP for Hythe, threw the most fashionable house parties of the interwar years on a clifftop above the Romney Marsh.

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Port Lympne Mansion: The MP From Hythe

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sir Philip Sassoon, 3rd Baronet, GBE, CMG, bought the estate in 1913 with the proceeds of selling his late parents' home Shorncliffe Lodge in Sandgate. His mother was Aline Caroline de Rothschild; his father, Edward Albert Sassoon, was descended from a family of immensely wealthy...

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Port Lympne Mansion: Tilden's Imagination

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When work resumed after the war, Sassoon brought in Philip Tilden, the same architect who handled remodelling work for David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Tilden's stated brief was characteristic of his era: "no more of the modest weekend home, but rather the epitome of all...

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Port Lympne Mansion: Painters, Sculptors, and Brothel Jokes

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sassoon's friends were the most fashionable artists of the day, and most of them worked here. Glyn Philpot painted the friezes still on display. Josep Maria Sert - the Catalan artist who set the Ballets Russes for Diaghilev and decorated the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and Rockef...

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Port Lympne Mansion: August at Port Lympne

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

August was the month for entertaining. The guest list across the 1920s and 1930s reads like an index to interwar Britain. Charlie Chaplin and T. E. Lawrence. The future Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. The future George VI. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Lord Curzon, Sassoon's brother-in-la...

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Port Lympne Mansion: Czech Pilots, Elephant Dung, and the Aspinall Restoration

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sassoon died in 1939, just before the world he had built came apart. The house was bequeathed with its cars and planes to his cousin Hannah Gubbay. In 1942 the RAF commandeered Port Lympne for Free Czech troops, who according to one observer "wreaked havoc on that fastidious conn...

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