This year, with Ed, Tres and Mandy, I visited The Red House, the Aldeburgh home in Suffolk of the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. I have always felt a certain attachment to them having in my youth shared a table with Mr Pears on the train coming home to Ipswich. I remember being impressed that he travelled second class. I should not have been surprised as they were socialists.
It took me a long time to get round to visiting The Red House but it was hearing about the embroiderer John Craske and discovering that Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears had some of his work which goaded me into action. John is a fascinating character. If you would like to know more about him you should read Julia Blackburn’s book Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske .
But here is a little bit about him. He was born in Sheringham in Norfolk and was a fisherman until he became seriously ill. He started to paint and then moved on to making embroideries of boats and seascapes which he sewed from his bed. He died in 1917. You can see many examples of his work if you search for him on the internet.
I discovered that the embroideries of John Craske were amongst many attractions of The Red House. Not only do you get the sense of a personal, comfortable home unchanged despite the absence of its former occupants but it is also full of fabulous art of the mid C20th as well as some earlier works. Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten were great collectors and champions of contemporary artists. Amongst the artists represented are Mary Potter, John Piper, Duncan Grant, David Hockney and Max Ernst and in the library some very challenging works by Sousa.
If you take the guided tour around the house , upstairs and down, you get an intimate picture of these 2 great men’s life together in a relationship which for most of its duration was still illegal. You see where they worked, where they slept and where Benjamin Britten was nursed in the last days of his life in 1976. A Suffolk boy, born in Lowestoft, he and Peter Pears brought to Suffolk the renowned Snape Maltings concert hall which is now the home of the Britten-Pears Foundation.
The Red House is closed to the public in the winter but reopens in the Spring. I would thoroughly recommend a visit. For visiting and other details visit the brittenpears.org website.
sue