The Titanic cruise line baron who revitalised the fortunes of an entire village sold through the pages of Country Life
Melanie Bryan tells the story of James Ismay whose countryside labour of love featured in Country Life multiple times.
Its not often that you can say someone was very, very lucky to have contracted severe pneumonia, by James Ismay was just that.
For had James not developed the pernicious lung infection, he would have joined his older brother, Joseph Bruce Ismay, on the maiden trans-Atlantic voyage of the family’s White Star Line-owned steam liner, Titanic.
The two brothers had been made partners of the prominent passenger and shipping company in 1891; their father, Thomas, retired a year later.
They ran the successful Liverpool-based business for a decade before life took a tragic turn. In 1901, James's wife, Lady Margaret Ismay, died, aged 32, from a blood clot. James was devastated and embarked on a punishing round-the-world voyage before relinquishing his post.
Inside the May 21, 1904, issue of Country Life there was an advert for a 2,612-acre estate in Dorset. Iwerne Minster lingered on the market for three years before, in December 1907, it was announced that it had been bought in its entirety by James Ismay.
The sale included a 23-bedroom mansion and the majority of the neighbouring village, including excellent farming and sporting land.
James poured his business acumen, knowledge of the land and great fortune into the estate, and went about turning it all into the perfect model village and farm (complete with bacon factory, dairy and its own electricity generator) with the help of an architect called John Francis Doyle — the co-designer of his father's Dawpool estate.
Country Life visited in 1910, and the writer was astounded by the amount of work that had already been achieved.
Ismay’s desire to look after his animals was strong, but his attention to the needs of his tenants was stronger. He believed that a contented workforce was a hard-working workforce, and so set about installing the villagers' cottages with all of the necessary modern conveniences.
He also built a pub and a village shop, and provided new facilities for the village's wheelwrights, bricklayers, plumbers, painters, carpenters and joiners, among others.
The Talbot Inn in Iwerne Minster, from a 1910 article in Country Life.
On Valentine’s Day, 1914, the magazine published a brief article updating readers on progress at the estate. It talked of James's new and well-catered-for flock of Hampshire Down sheep
James Ismay’s daughters with some Hampshire Down lambs.
Country Life returned firstly towards the end of the First World War — which did little to dampen James's efforts — and secondly in 1921.
During the way, he gave each home a pig, and constructed a secure compound for Germans prisoners of war to live in, in exchange for work on his land. And each prisoner was given a small plot of land in which to grow their own vegetables.
Doyle's modern farming complex.
The magazine paid a final visit to the farm in 1929, reporting that the philanthropic landowner had stuck to his principles of quality and fairness (once he'd found a market for his produce, he didn't change course if his accounts showed that a certain sector might provide a higher, short term financial yield).
Unfortunately, James died in 1930, aged 63. The village went back on the market and reverted to a more conventional existence, and his home was converted in a school.
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