The Master’s Jamaican house is in a tragic state
A century and a half ago, when my great-great-grandfather was one of the richest men in America, he owned a house in New York City on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street.
I am writing this from that very address right now. Sadly, the Brandreth mansion is long gone and my achieving forebear’s Manhattan home (he had others, of course) has been replaced by a handsome hotel, the Peninsula.
I’m in my room on the tenth floor, eating the ingeniously crafted miniature chocolate model of the Empire State Building that’s been kindly left on my pillow as part of the turn-down service.
I’m reflecting on what might have been had my father’s grandfather – who was sent back to England in the 1880s to manage the European end of the Brandreth empire – not frittered away our share of the family fortune by finding God and building chapels across North Wales and north-west England.
Of course, the business might have withered on the vine anyway. My great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Brandreth (1809-80), amassed his millions by making and manufacturing Brandreth’s V U Pills, a medicine that was successfully sold across the world for more than a century – not only because it was an effective purgative, but also because Dr Brandreth (as he styled himself) promised his patients that his pills were a universal cure-all.
Dyspepsia? Take a Brandreth pill. Heart murmurs? Take a Brandreth pill. Want a baby? Take a Brandreth pill. Don’t want a baby? Take a Brandreth pill.
Dr B (a New York state senator and one of the founders of the original Bank of America, incidentally) was a friend of the great showman P T Barnum, who devoted an admiring chapter of his book The Humbugs of the World to Brandreth. It’s to Barnum that some attribute the famous line ‘There’s one born every minute...’ Barnum and Brandreth were soul brothers.
Fortunes come; fortunes go. Even the Barnum & Bailey circus isn’t what it used to be.
‘Nothing lasts,’ as Celia Johnson reminds us in the brilliant 1945 wartime weepie Brief Encounter, ‘Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.’
The film’s screenplay was written by Noël Coward. Before coming to New York, I went to Jamaica and thought I’d mark his recent 125th birthday by visiting his Jamaican home, Firefly. I have been many times before.
The house, built in 1956, is simple, the setting idyllic. The great man is buried in the garden and memorialised in a fine statue of him sitting in an armchair looking out over the Caribbean.
Noël Coward left his home to the Jamaican people, but I am not sure they are very interested. It is officially listed as a National Heritage Site, but this time I couldn’t visit it because my taxi driver said the track up to the house is now unpassable. There isn’t the money to repair the road.
Wikipedia will tell you ‘the building has been transformed into a writer’s house museum’. Not so. Or, at least, not yet. It’s boarded up at the moment and, inside, in a very sorry state of repair.
Chris Blackwell, 87, the founder of Island Records, who owns Ian Fleming’s home, Goldeneye, nearby and has transformed the Fleming estate into a de luxe resort, told me he would like to help by making Firefly a place for his guests to go for cocktails and even high-end sleepovers. But I am not sure that’s a flyer or likely to happen any time soon.
I’d love to see Firefly as a writers’ retreat. If I still had Dr Brandreth’s millions, I’d make it happen.
The last time I was in Manhattan was in 2001, a few weeks before the horror of 9/11. I went to visit the great Walter Cronkite (1916- 2009), the celebrated CBS news anchor.
He was often called ‘the most trusted man in America’, remembered for his wartime news reports from London, for breaking the news of the assassination of John F Kennedy and for his coverage of the first moon landings. (Cronkite reckoned the moon landings the most significant event of the 20th century.)
Cronkite had interviewed every American president since Franklin D Roosevelt and told me that, without any doubt, Jimmy Carter was the most gifted and intelligent man ever to occupy the White House – yet one of the least fitted to do so because he was no politician and couldn’t manage Capitol Hill.
Cronkite and his wife, Betsy, took me and my wife, Michèle, to dinner in one of his favourite places: the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of one of the Twin Towers – destroyed not long after, on 9/11.
When I telephoned Walter from London in the days following the attack, he said, ‘I’m on the other side of the city talking to you and the apartment windows are closed, but the smell of burning is everywhere.’
Today, a different smell permeates Manhattan. Since cannabis was legalised in the city in 2021, the pungent odour of marijuana is everywhere.
Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now
