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| Owner: |
Ernest Hartley |
| Model: |
Cream 4-oven |
| Vintage: |
c 1930 |
| Location: |
Yorkshire |
| Snapshot: |
In the early 1930s, Ernest Hartley built Akroyd House, inspired by the architectural designs of Charles Voysey. His granddaughter, Tessa Goldsmith, remembers the place with huge fondness. It was, she says, an exciting, large, mysterious place “with dark corridors hung with large paintings, a billiard room and stone fireplaces with high carved mantle-shelves”. The kitchen and AGA were central to domestic life. “It was a warm, friendly comfortable room, where children weren’t in the way. On the whole side of the warm yellow kitchen was the AGA, with its hod of coke standing ready. Grown-ups were always inquiring about the AGA. Until I understood that the AGA was a thing, I imagined it to be some kind of a spirit hidden in the dark places of the house,” says Tessa. The AGA heated the airing cupboard, stacked full of “lovely-smelling” freshly laundered sheets, and warmed the towel rails in the bathroom. In the early mornings, Tessa and her younger sister, Joanne, would come down to hot toast, made by Nellie the house-maid, who would “put slices of bread inside a flat wire mesh cage, under one of the cream-coloured lids with curious handles of spiralled wire”. The children warmed their cold fingers “by curling them round the shiny rail where the tea-towels hung, or – daringly – by touching the black enamel around the lids.” Tessa’s grandmother cooked joints of meat, biscuits and Haver cakes, which were “looped over the clothes rack before being hoisted high over the AGA to dry.” |
| Finest Hour: |
This AGA was truly the heart of the home and a huge part of Tessa’s childhood memories. “Without the AGA, in summer or winter, the house lost its heart.”
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