'They’re everywhere,’ William Herbert, the 18th Earl of Pembroke, says as he strides the 60 feet of his living room in Wilton House, near Salisbury, searching for Cecil Beatons. The faded black-and-white photograph he retrieves from behind the family snaps is of a group of twentysomethings picnicking on the Wiltshire Downs in 1931. It is one of several thousand photographs taken by Beaton during the halcyon period in his life when he lived nearby at Ashcombe, then later at Reddish. ‘We played; we laughed a lot; we fell in love… time stood still and care was a stranger,’ he wrote in his diary in the 1940s.
Cecil Beaton was an almost permanent fixture at Wilton during the 1920s and 30s heyday of the Bright Young Things, and for a long time afterwards. He enjoyed a remarkable friendship with the Pembroke family and a great love affair with the house that he described as ‘at every time of year, in all weathers, unfailing in its beauty’.
