Man whose life is a little less ordinary

May 27 2008 by Karen Dent, The Journal

From the Army to the wine trade and chartered surveying, via lecturing, painting and publishing, Hugh Cantlie tells Karen Dent about the restoration of Belford Hall and a life packed with adventure.

FOR someone who is 76, Hugh Cantlie shows no signs of slowing down. He had just returned from Malta and was about to drive to Scotland after speaking to The Journal from his apartment at Belford Hall, the building which brought him to the region and from where he runs his publishing company Cheviot Books.

“If you did slow down, what are you going to do with yourself?” he muses.

“I went to Jersey and I was looking at the back of this deckchair. This hand went down and there was a vodka bottle and a glass behind the deckchair, and I said ‘Who on earth is that?’ And they said he was the chairman of some multinational company who has just retired and because he’s been working all his life, he’s got absolutely no hobbies or interests, so he’s just taken to the bottle. So, one’s got to keep one’s brain going.”

Cantlie, who was born in China, spent five years living in Germany and speaks fluent German and French, has packed more into his lifetime than most. He didn’t become his own boss until the age of 50, and although now retired from chartered surveying – the career that has taken up most of his time – he writes and publishes a guide book, takes commissions to paint houses and lectures on artists and architects.

His base is Belford Hall, an imposing Palladian-style building built in 1756 by James Paine for Abraham Dixon.

“Dixon ran out of money and couldn’t complete it to Paine’s designs which had wings,” says Cantlie. “But when he sold it on to the Clarks in 1818 they managed to complete his design.

“By this time [John] Dobson was called in to do it, he put on the wings and switched the main entrance from the south to the north. It says a lot for Dobson that someone coming up the drive would not know there had been a change of architect.”

Despite its proud past, the building was in a sorry state when Cantlie arrived. He had previously helped to save London’s Billingsgate Market from the bulldozers and worked on its restoration. As surveyor to the Monuments and Historic Buildings Trust, he came to Northumberland to look at the hall for the Northern Heritage Trust (now the North East Civic Trust).

“It looked not as bad as it really was – that’s always the problem. The roof was still there – sort of – the plasterwork was still there – sort of – and the floors were missing in the majority of cases,” he said.

“But of course, when you start going into it, the plasterwork was riddled with dry rot, the entire roof had to be rebuilt and re-tiled, and practically every bit of plaster in the entire building had to be stripped off. It was a major job – it cost £1.75m then – God knows what it would cost now.”

The restoration began in 1983 and took three years to complete. The hall was divided into flats and apartments and Cantlie, annoyed by the attitude of some of the builders working on the job, was the first to buy one.

“We were having a site meeting one late December night and I’d been telling the contractors to rebuild two of the walls at their cost because it wasn’t done properly, and somebody at the back said: ‘Well, nobody wants to buy any of the flats anyway’.

“And I said: ‘Well, I’ve got news for you, I’m buying the West Lodge,’ before I could stop myself. Having said I would buy the West Lodge, well I obviously had to buy it!”

It was this “mistake” that gave him a foothold in the region but a flying visit to Newcastle had kick-started his passion for restoration in the first place.

“I came up to Newcastle to look at a modern office block in Sandyford Lane with a colleague of mine, around 1972. We were walking back to the station and we saw the old Liberal Club in Pilgrim Street with the door wide open and looking absolutely desolate,” he said.

“So we walked in and had a look and we thought this is a shame, this is in a lovely position, right in the middle of Newcastle, going to waste.” Arriving back in London, he contacted the building’s owners, who were not interested in restoring it. But the incident had sparked an interest in Cantlie.

Surveying was Cantlie’s third career. Prior to that, he spent two years selling sparkling wine, which he says taught him a number of useful business lessons: “One was not to be frightened of banging on a strange door, and two, to try to sum up the wine buyer’s character – was he a hard sell or a soft sell? If you got it wrong, you’d had it.”

But his original ambition was simply to be a soldier, like his father who served in the Second World War after bringing the family home from China. Before the war, Cantlie’s father worked as the technical adviser to China’s ministry of railways but the family was forced to flee from the Japanese invasion in 1937.

“We came back via the trans-Siberian railway and arrived in Harwich with a suitcase each,” he remembers.

His parents bought a house in Sussex and brought their Chinese staff Chang and Amah and their children to the UK to work for them.

“They duly arrived in 1939, just before the war. As a result of that, they were ‘aliens’, and the police came to say Chang and Amah had been seen signalling to U-boats in the Channel,” said Cantlie.

“But my mother said they had been cooking dinner for us. It made no difference as far as the authorities were concerned they were aliens, which meant either they went into a prison camp within 24 hours or else we all had to move within 48 hours.

“My mother said we didn’t bring Chang and Amah and the children back to be put into prison, so we’re all going to move.”

The extended family ended up in a two-up, two-down house and its outbuildings, without electricity or running water, near Montgomery in Wales, where they spent the next two years.

“I remember my mother waking us up late at night and saying put on your dressing gown and come outside,” says Cantlie. “There was a great big orange glow on the far horizon and my mother said: ‘That is Coventry, burning’.”

Cantlie did indeed follow his father into the Army, training at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and serving with the Scots Guards for 12 years, rising to the rank of major. He served in Germany, Australia and Cyprus as well as the UK.

Then followed his brief sojourn selling wine. “I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was quite strenuous – selling German sparkling hock in England is not the easiest thing in the world.”

Tired of the constant travelling, he discussed his options with his wife and chose to re-train as a chartered surveyor.

“I deliberately stuck to the commercial side of surveying rather than residential, selling lovely houses in the country, which a lot of my friends were doing,” he said.

“There is certainly more demand on the commercial side but you really had to know what you were talking about. You couldn’t afford to make mistake. It was quite a different ball game because I was dealing with offices and advising on the structure of them.”

One of his proudest achievements was the completion of a 280,000sqft office block in Frankfurt, during the five years he spent living and working in Germany.

“That was a very big office block, and we let it when the property crisis was still biting deep,” he said.

Cantlie returned to the UK, and at the age of 50, set up as a freelance surveyor. “I thought, if I don’t do it now, I never will,” he said. “Once you’ve realised you’re going to work twice as hard, then it makes it more and more worthwhile.

“The other thing is, if a mistake is made, then it is entirely due to you. If you’re your own boss, you can’t blame anybody else.” For some time, he ran a parallel career lecturing on art and architecture to the National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS) meetings, and then further developed the eye for proportion and perspective first employed in surveying in his work as an artist. Cantlie produces paintings of houses on a commissioned basis and has also displayed his work in a number of exhibitions.

As a result of a weekend visit to friends north of the border, he was commissioned to write a series of articles on Scottish castles which became the book Ancestral Castles of Scotland in 1992.

“I used to go and see the owners after I’d done the homework and say is it true about this that and the other… and I remember one time in Ayrshire I said “is it true your great great grandfather had 27 illegitimate children?’ and he said ‘good heavens no, he had 35!’”

It sold 25,000 copies but Cantlie was less happy with the ways his second book Five Minutes Off the Motorway, written together with his brother, was handled by its publishers.

“We had a small advance, which didn’t quite cover the cost of petrol but they did give us some royalties,” he said. “Unfortunately because of the cover, it didn’t hardly sell any copies. I suggested the cover wasn’t very alluring and was told to mind my own business.”

Five Minutes Off the Motorway became Breaks near the Motorways, an annually updated guide which Cantlie now publishes through his own company Cheviot Books. The premise is simple: a guide showing alternatives to service stations for hungry motorists, within five minutes of a motorway junction. The author visits every pub and restaurant in the guide and also illustrates it with pen and wash drawings.

Northumberland has now been his permanent home for more than a decade and he says he has no regrets.

“I think the people are remarkably friendly, they are their own people,” he said. “They are not influenced by outside influences. Everybody has been extremely kind since I’ve arrived and I’ve adapted to them.”

Indeed, Cantlie has continued to adapt to make the best of his circumstances and his surroundings.

“We always have to be entrepreneurial otherwise we get stuck in our ways. I’ve always rather liked some- thing a little bit out of the ordinary.”

THE QUESTIONNAIRE

What car do you drive? Skoda Octavia. BMW 30S for fun

What's your favourite restaurant? Blacketts in Bamburgh

Who or what makes you laugh? Clever slapstick

What's your favourite book? The Trumpet Major by Thomas Hardy

What was the last album you bought? Chopin’s Preludes

What's your ideal job, other than the one you've got? Work with UNESCO

If you had a talking parrot, what's the first thing you would teach it to say? Please and thank you

What's your greatest fear? Fire

What's the best piece of business advice you have ever received? It takes longer to succeed by being honest

And the worst? No need to confirm in writing

What's your poison? Good wine

What newspapers do you read, other than The Journal? Daily Telegraph, The Spectator

How much was your first pay packet and what was it for? 25/6 a week as an Army recruit

How do you keep fit? Walking

What's your most irritating habit? Pretending not to be deaf

What's your biggest extravagance? Good shoes

Which historical or fictional character do you most identify with or admire? Sir John Vanbrugh

Which four famous people would you most like to dine with? First Duke of Marlborough, Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham 1153-95, Arthur Bryant and Madame de Pompadour

How would you like to be remembered? I tried to help other people

THE CV: HUGH CANTLIE

1950-62 – Scots Guards rising to the rank of major.

1950-2 – Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst but didn’t actually pass out because George VI died when he was due to.

1962-65 – Worked in the wine trade, travelling all over the UK.

1965 -68 – Qualified as a chartered surveyor.

1969-72 – Chartered surveyor with Hillier, Parker, May and Rowden, commercial estate agents in London.

1973-78 – Chartered surveyor with MEPC. Took over development projects in Germany in 1974. Spent the next five years there, based in Munich.

1978-80 – Returned to the UK, spent two years unemployed

1980-82 – Property managing agent for Westbourne Securities. Acquiring, managing and selling large blocks of flats

1982 – Started his first business – Cantlie’s property management agency, working as a freelance surveyor. Began his involvement with building conservation.

1980-87 – Surveyor for the Monuments and Historic Buildings Trust.

1983 – Oversaw the rescue and rebuilding of Belford Hall.

1980s – Started lecturing for NADFAS.

1991 – Began taking commissions for paintings.

1992 – Book Ancestral Castles of Scotland published.

1998 – Five Minutes Off the Motorway published.

2001 – Set up Cheviot Books to publish Breaks near Motorways.