Location: Stocks House
Best known for a less-than-peaceful Oasis, this Georgian manor in Hertfordshire has also been home to a prime minister, a celebrated writer, a Catholic school and… the Bunny girls
It’s the Rolls-Royce in the swimming pool that everybody thinks of first. The props were all taken to have veiled meanings, although most were selected on the spur of the moment. The Roller actually did, however – it was a reference to John Lennon (who had owned a similar vehicle) – and you’d hope so too, after the trouble they went to putting it in there.
It is, of course, the cover of Be Here Now from 1997, the third Oasis album and the UK’s fastest selling LP, ever. But more stories lie hidden in the backdrop than dotted about the foreground. For this is Stocks House, a splendid Georgian edifice in the quaint and classically English village of Aldbury, Hertfordshire.
Bizarre history
Stocks House possesses such a rich and bizarre history that the Oasis album shoot – memorably described by photographer Michael Spencer Jones as, “Alice in Wonderland meets Apocalypse Now” – is merely one intriguing episode among many.
Built in 1773, Stocks – much like the British Empire whose wealth and grandeur it reflected – underwent a splendid 19th century and a chequered 20th. At one point it belonged to the second Earl Grey, prime minister from 1830 to 1834 and, apocryphally, the originator of the eponymous tea blend.
By the turn of the 20th century it was the dominion of Mary Augusta Ward, daughter of one very eminent family (the Arnolds), in-law of another (the Huxleys, including her nephew Aldous, the writer and LSD advocate) and a best-selling author in her own right (writing as Mrs Humphrey Ward).
St Trinians
At her death in 1920, Stocks stood as the epitome of the English gentry’s last, golden hurrah. Come the latter days of the Second World War, Stocks – like so many great country houses, now far too costly for a single owner – was converted into a Catholic girls’ school.
What St Trinian’s-style escapades went on there we can only guess at but it again served as a barometer for its times in 1972, when the house gave up encouraging girls to be good and took upon itself the new task of teaching them to be bad. It became the UK training camp for Playboy Bunnies.
Playboy empire
That, at least, was the story that permitted its new owner, Victor A Lownes III, to charge 90 per cent of its then £100,000 per annum running costs to the Playboy company. Lownes was the head of Playboy’s hugely lucrative British casino interests, and the only staffer aside from Hugh Hefner himself for whom the Bunny “no dating” rule was waived.
Lownes took full advantage of this at Stocks, where he hosted riotous parties attended by genuine A-listers (Jack Nicholson, various Beatles and Bonds, George Best), with panties hanging from the chandeliers, frolics in the giant Jacuzzi, and Bunny Girls allocated green dots that allowed access to the upstairs bedrooms.
For one bash in 1979, the printed RSVP slips read: “We are arriving by hot-air balloon or helicopter – please send us landing instructions.”
Private again
After Playboy’s gaming bubble burst in 1981, Stocks was run as a hotel and golf course until 2004. Then – in an era of individuals once more wielding vast personal wealth – it again proved a bellwether by returning to private hands. Specifically, those of horse-trainer Peter Harris, his daughter Alison and her husband, the jockey Walter Swinburn, who won the 1981 Derby on Shergar.
Alas for fans of Oasis, Playboy, Edwardian literature or Catholic girls, it is no longer a viable place of pilgrimage. For now, that is – Stocks may go both up and down.
Story by David Bennun
To subscribe to Sony Magazine, click here