Of muck and brass

'The supply seemed inexhaustible – Lord Wraxall's forebears dug it out as if the goose would never stop dropping its golden droppings'

Not far from Bristol stands the immense Victorian Gothic pile called Tyntesfield House which was acquired in the summer by the National Trust after the owner, Lord Wraxall, died. It's a big place, unaltered over the years. A totally unknown treasure, according to all the reports. Secluded and forgotten... nobody knew it was there... when it is reopened by the National Trust, it will be the first time anyone has seen it for years and years ...

This is not quite true, however. My brother went there a couple of years ago. He actually met Lord Wraxall and had a chat with him. The thing is that my brother is very good at pursuing family history, and the Kingtons were an old Bristol family who once had a country house near Tyntesfield. In fact, the Kingtons sold it in Victorian times and Lord Wraxall's forebears bought it. They still have it, but in modern times it has been rented out to a prep school called, I think, The Downs.

"Yes, we bought it," Lord Wraxall told my brother. "Got the deed of purchase somewhere. Still ours all right."

"I wish now that I had asked him to photocopy the deed for me," my brother told me. "Not only would it have been nice to have a record of the last time the Kington family were wealthy, but it would have got me right inside Tyntesfield House. Of course, I didn't know then that Lord Wraxall was about to drop dead, and he didn't know either, or if he did, he didn't tell me."

Quite what the Kingtons were up to in Bristol, and where their prosperity came from (and went to), I have never been sure of, though my brother says that they had a shipping line to Australia at one point. But Lord Wraxall's source of money is in no doubt. He came from a family called Gibbs that made a fortune out of guano.

Guano is a nice word for bird shit. Guano occurs naturally wherever sea birds live. It contains wonderful fertilising qualities, and before the invention of artificial fertilisers 100 years ago, guano was the best fertiliser available. The most convenient sources are islands occupied solely by birds where, for hundreds of years, the birds have built up a deposit of droppings hundreds of feet deep. The best of these islands occur off the coast of Peru, where the warmth of the climate preserves the nitrates in the guano, and where the fish-eating birds provide unusually rich droppings.

How do I know all this? Well, I was once taken to Peru to do a Great Railway Journeys programme for the BBC, and as my interests in life range far beyond railways, yes, sir, I did some research into the guano trade, which, between 1840 and 1880, had made Peru's fortune, and Lord Wraxall's, too. The off-shore supply of guano must have seemed as inexhaustible as oil and coal and big game and cod have at other times in other places, and Lord Wraxall's forebears dug out the stuff as if the goose would never stop dropping its golden droppings.

Except, of course, that it wasn't any English gentleman doing the digging. That's the thing I remember most about my guano readings. The digging was done by indentured labour, which is another way of saying near-slaves. The guano islands were uninhabited. They had no vegetation. They were just bird-shit quarries. The only people who lived there were those who dug the bird shit. The work was vile and smelly and slimy and horrible, and the mostly Chinese workers who were forced to live there and do the digging had the most wretched lives imaginable.

So horrible was their existence, in fact, that they would often try to escape from the island, and, when that proved impossible, they would rush into the sea to try to commit suicide. However, the guano company was aware of this possibility, and actually posted armed guards around the island to stop the miserable Chinese workers from committing suicide by drowning.

That struck a chill into my heart when I first read it, and it has stuck with me ever since. And I am afraid that the bleeding-heart liberal in me will be aware, when I visit Tyntesfield House, of an image of people half a world away trying to commit suicide rather than help build Tyntesfield. I just hope that my brother doesn't ring me and say: "And guess whose shipping line helped to carry the stuff back to England?"...