‘Self-preservation being the first law of nature, we should assume [that] man would be easily persuaded to the adoption of precautions which promise a defence against contagion; but when he is bent only on the gratification of his appetites, reflection is lost; that divine gift, Reason, is overwhelmed; and he blindly rushes on, regardless of the consequences!’
Authored anonymously in 1810 ‘by a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London’, this 170-page handbook was a popular attempt to demystify and distill what was then considered best practice in the prevention of an all too common affliction of the man about town.
’Imminent and extensive as the dangers are which environ those who incur the hazard of venereal infection, the mischief has been seriously aggravated by the preposterous assumption of a complete acquaintance with the treatment and cure of this disorder, by individuals not of the medical profession.’
Whilst loath to promote any of the wide array of quack remedies then available (‘many of [which] have had a prodigious sale’), the sceptical author did feel duty-bound to make one honourable exception.
’The reputation of all these nostrums has been ephemeral, unless I exclude one, Sir Samuel Hannay’s Specific, which, I presume, has some claims to its pretensions, from having remained in vogue upwards of thirty years. Many have reported to me, that they had used this Wash more than twenty years, with unvaried success.’
Hannay’s concoction would sustain a pre-eminence in the marketplace for decades in spite of the fact that his patent application in 1774 was ‘one of the very few examples of a patent that was refused the [Lord Chancellor’s] Great Seal’, having been rejected ‘on the grounds of public decency’.
However, though the ‘unrivalled reputation’ (↑) of his wonder potion endured long after the untimely death of ‘the former eminent chemist’ (in 1790, not yet fifty years old), personal and business debts well in excess of £100,000 were revealed upon Hannay’s demise. Indeed, just about the only tangible asset of substance was his estate on the south-west coast of Scotland complete with its gleaming, not-quite-finished Georgian mansion.
But to characterise Kirkdale – ‘with a length of 172ft, one of Robert Adam’s largest classical houses’1 – as The House That VD Built would be neither entirely fair nor accurate. For Sir Samuel Hannay was a highly active City figure, maintaining ‘the London end of a business partnership that embraced three brothers busy making fortunes in India during the 1770s and ‘80s’.2
Alas, in the wake of Samuel’s death in 1790 became it soon became evident that ‘he had dissipated his own fortune [and] the very considerable sum left to him by his brother, Col. Alexander Hannay’.3 A regional commanding officer in the East India Company army, Colonel Hannay would later be in the crosshairs of leading parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s prosecution of the regime of Indian Governor-General Warren Hastings. Having previously been in debt, it was claimed, Colonel Hannay had ‘returned to Calcutta in possession of a fortune, “like a leech full of blood”’.
But, again, to describe Kirkdale as The House That Colonial Exploitation Built would be neither entirely fair nor accurate. With a queue of impatient creditors, ‘the lands and estate which belonged to the late Sir Samuel Hannay’ were in fact advertised for sale in 1796. But the Hannays would manage to retain possession of Kirkdale which, in the twentieth century, would be complimented by a second estate acquired by marriage, nearby Cardoness House, a few miles further east along ‘one of the most beautiful coastal roads in Britain’.4 And though post-war pragmatism wrought significant changes, Hannays remain in situ at both properties, continuing a Galloway heritage of close on 500 years.
*
While Kirkdale has for centuries been the seat of the chief of Clan Hannay, the annual gathering of its worldwide diaspora centres upon a crumbling ruin on the opposite side of Wigtown Bay. Late sixteenth-century Sorbie Tower (left) is now the object of a clan-driven restoration mission being promoted by the present Chief, yet the line from which he descends had actually decamped from Sorbie years before the first stones of this structure were laid.
Alexander Hannay purchased lands at Kirkdale in 1532 which were to pass from father to son for the next three hundred years. Details of the family’s original lairdly dwelling have proved elusive but both it and its Georgian replacement were included in the 1796 sale particulars of Sir Samuel Hannay’s estate: ‘To be sold .. the new mansion house; also at a little distance, but concealed by the wood, the former mansion house, which is in very good repair and fit to accommodate any Gentleman’s family.’5
Still standing ‘elegant and aloof’6, the fleeting sight of Kirkdale House afforded to modern-day travellers along the A75, between Creetown and Gatehouse of Fleet, is unlikely to excite rhapsodic observations akin to those of writer Robert Heron who passed this way in 1792. ‘The house of Kirkdale, among the most advantageously situate in Scotland, rises to the eye with a sort of magic effect, [having] the air of the palace of an Arabian Tale,’ he suggested, his enthusiasm tempered only by the prospect of what might have been.
‘The adjacent fields [are] bare, uninclosed and unadorned,’ he noted, ‘for, since the House was built, circumstances have arisen, to retard the completion of the noble plan.’ Indeed they had.
Kirkdale House was but the latest trapping of a man seemingly determined to ensure that his name should amount to rather more than just a byword for genital hygiene. In 1783 Samuel Hannay’s petition to the Lord Provost for an old Hannay baronetcy, long in abeyance, to be revived in his favour was successful (though, with other branches having stronger claims, ‘how Samuel managed to achieve his title is difficult to understand’).3 And the following year he would be returned as one of two MPs representing the far-flung Cornish constituency of Camelford, a ‘rotten borough’ the oldest inhabitant of which, it was reported in 1796, could not recall ‘to have ever seen the face of any one of its Members’.
The other half of Camelford’s double act during Sir Samuel’s time was James Macpherson, the pair having seen colonial service in West Florida in the 1760s. ‘The ‘Macpherson mafia’ were [also] Anglo-Indian players at the same time as the Hannays’ but with his prospering druggist enterprise in London Samuel would be the only one of the sons of William Hannay (d.1759) not to venture east in the 1770s.7
In 2011 Bonhams auction house in London sold ‘an important Mughal inscribed emerald mounted in a diamond-set gold bangle’ (r) for £90,000. Having passed ‘by descent’, this spectacular jewel had comprised part of the ‘substantial personal fortune’ amassed by Col. Alexander Hannay in his role as an East India Company tax enforcer on behalf of the nawab of Oudh, in north-east India. Whether this wealth had been acquired by ‘firmness and knowledge of business on his part’ or through opportunistic embezzlement, and precisely who had benefited, would be very publicly debated during Burke’s prosecution of Warren Hastings (an affronted Sir Samuel seemingly itching for redress). But ‘it is obvious that Hannay must have collected sums in excess of the stipulated revenue’.8
Many ‘Scots went to India to improve their financial position’, such funds flooding back to Britain proving a timely boon for the Adam brothers, Robert and James, whose hitherto predominantly England-based architecture business was, by 1780, in some difficulty. Thereafter most of their clients would be wealthy compatriots north of the border.9 For James Macpherson, London agent of the nabob of Arcot, came Balavil (sold out of the family in 2015) while Hannay family fund manager Sir Samuel would commission designs for Kirkdale House…
… ‘externally the most complete of their late classical houses, executed more or less exactly as planned’.10 More accurately, exactly as plan B, for Robert Adam had also prepared a more ambitious scheme for the estate (above) which would never be realised.
This included a larger, more nuanced main house spanning 198 feet, a highly picturesque stable court (r) and a bridge ‘planned as a neo-Egyptian extravaganza complete with swags and sphinxes’.6 What transpired in respect of the first and last elements (also possibly the farm buildings) were crisp, austere structures in ashlar granite devoid of decorative embellishment.
The south-facing rear of the principal block (left), with its central canted bay, ‘affords fine views over Wigtown Bay with the Isle of Man in the distance’.1 On either flank, ‘narrow three-bay balustraded links join to square, pyramid-roofed pavilions each of two low storeys.’11 The only major external alteration is on the entrance front [see] where ‘the porte-cochere has been converted into a porch’ (↓).1
Unfortunately, as Kirkdale House was going up so were Sir Samuel’s debts, a weakness for gambling reputedly accounting for much of the financial damage. Having entered into an investment partnership with Hannay, James Macpherson presciently tiptoed away from this association in 1788, ‘passing on his share of the business to another ‘eastern friend’, his cousin Allan Macpherson’ – who soon faced ruin when Samuel Hannay’s insolvency was revealed after his death two years later.7 Insult would be added to financial injury for Macpherson as firstly the Scottish Court of Session…
… and then the House of Lords (1801) subsequently upheld the claim of another substantial creditor as being both legitimate and superior, namely that of Samuel’s own brother, Ramsay. An independent eastern merchant, Ramsay Hannay had sent back nearly £50,000 of his fortune to be managed by Samuel who ‘had granted him a bond secured by all of Sir Samuel’s lands in Scotland’. Macpherson and his fellow creditors unsuccessfully ‘objected that the bond gave Ramsay a fraudulent preference’. (Scots law also came to the aid of the widowed Lady Hannay, granting her a portion of the lands as of right though denying her claim to the old mansion which was still standing at Kirkdale).
Faced with a tangled and uncertain inheritance, Sir Samuel’s son and heir (r), also Sir Samuel, took up a military career, service with the Life Guards taking him to the Continent where peril was sometimes less a matter of duty than of honour. For in September 1801 newspapers carried reports of his return from Hamburg, Hannay and a fellow officer having travelled there specifically to fight a duel following an altercation in London’s Bond Street.12
In the wake the speedy unravelling of Britain’s truce with France in 1803 Samuel Hannay soon found himself a prisoner-of-war alongside his brother-in-law, Capt. Thomas Rainsford. (Jane Hannay, facing family hostility towards her relationship with her brother’s Life Guards colleague, had eloped with Thomas, the couple apparently being disowned thereafter. In a later reversal of fortunes, Thomas Rainsford would find himself superintending the exile of Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, he and his wife dying there ‘within months of each other in 1817’.)13
Sir Samuel died unmarried in 1841, Kirkdale now passing to his spinster sister, Mary, ‘by virtue of a deed of entail made by Ramsay Hannay’. At her demise nine years later Mary’s nephew, William Rainsford, became the fourth consecutive childless owner of Kirkdale, adding the Hannay name to his own as would, in due course, his brother Major Frederick Rainsford Hannay in 1856. The last-named died in 1884 and it would be during the custodianship of Frederick’s eldest son, Ramsay, that calamity would befall the house that Samuel Hannay built.
‘On Thursday forenoon the large mansion house of Kirkdale was totally destroyed by fire,’ exaggerated one newspaper report in May 1893. More accurately, while the interior structure of the main block was indeed lost, ‘the paintings and most of the furniture were saved’, a fact which possibly did little to ease the mortification of a certain Mr. Charlesworth, however. For, whilst Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay was by now the father of a sizable brood, at the time of the blaze Kirkdale House was in fact let to and occupied by this unfortunate individual.14
The Edinburgh firm of Kinnear & Peddie were engaged for the rebuilding, replacing Adams’ central staircase and enclosed gallery in a ‘neo-Jacobean manner, not an entirely happy counterpoint to the exterior’.11 Four years earlier this same practice had been responsible for the full-blown ‘Baronial-isation’ of a hitherto relatively modest house just a few miles to the east of Kirkdale.
Cardoness House was the seat of Sir William Maxwell, 4th Bt., and at the time of his daughter Dorothea’s 1910 marriage to the eldest son of Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay, it was destined to pass to her only brother. But unmarried 30-year-old William fell at Gallipoli…
… the Cardoness Estate consequently being inherited by his sister at around the same time that Kirkdale was being handed over to her husband by his father. With two country piles on his hands, in the straitened years post-World War II Kirkdale House – ‘beautifully situated, in excellent order, fourteen bedrooms, large walled garden, shooting over 4,800 acres’ – was made available to let.15 But following Col. Rainsford-Hannay’s death in 1959 his only surviving child, Ramsay, determined to take a pragmatic grip of his inheritance.
‘With great foresight,’ remarked one press obituary, ‘he knocked down two thirds of one house and converted the other into apartments.’ Cardoness House was ‘savagely reduced in size’, being essentially shorn of its Baronial character (a reminder of which endures in the shape of the entrance lodge, right).11
Meanwhile, in 1967 Kirkdale House would be divided into eight separate rental / leasehold flats which continue to be periodically available (save for one). Further, as noted in that 2004 obituary, Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay ‘used the potential of beaches on the Solway coast to start a successful caravan park, which he realised provided a way for his family to continue their long association with the area.’
‘Some 100 acres of coastal parkland and policies out of the Cardoness Estate’s 2,000 acres have been set aside as a caravan park of distinction,’ while the Kirkdale Estate’s own two miles of ‘private foreshore’ (right) includes holiday cottages and the ancient oak woodland of Ravenshall SSSI (home to, amongst other things, a ‘rare cave-dwelling woodlouse‘). Today these enterprises are managed – in combination with traditional estate activities – by the grandsons of Ramsay Rainsford-Hannay, their father…
… clan chief Dr. David Hannay, being now retired from an academic career in the field of healthcare. Having on occasion asserted ‘the benefits of sex education’ it is perhaps ironic that Dr. Hannay’s dubiously qualified ancestor should have prospered in no small part thanks to ‘the general ignorance, even among the superior classes of society, of the possibility of escaping infection by venereal poison’. The magic formula of Sir Samuel Hannay’s eponymous prophylactic may be lost to us but, happily, his splendid erection, Kirkdale House, still stands proud…
[Category A listing][Kirkdale Estate]
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