Oldway Mansion: Paignton’s Edwardian palace of parties and intrigue

England in 1910 was a land of contrasts. For the poor, life could be a miserable grind. The spectre of the workhouse still loomed over communities where workers were underpaid and children underfed. Child mortality was high and life expectancy low.

But at the other end of the scale there was unimaginable opulence – a truly golden Edwardian age of palaces and parties. Paignton’s Oldway Mansion is currently obscured by scaffolding and parts of it are propped up to stop them collapsing, but in 1910 everybody who was anybody wanted to be seen there.

Isaac Merritt Singer’s Oldway hosted the parties to which High Society wanted to be invited. Since the railway came to Paignton in 1859 the town had grown at a fast pace, and the new-fangled railway linked Oldway with its eager party-goers, who could arrive in style.

The ‘influencers’ of the day all came to Oldway, where the Singers entertained magnificently. An invitation to a weekend at Oldway was greatly coveted. To their credit, the Singers also looked after the locals, putting on circuses, pantomimes and Christmas parties for invited audiences of local children.

The Singers were considered ‘new money’, not only having made their fortune in industry, but also having made it on the other side of the pond.

Isaac was born in New York in 1811, and made his fortune after patenting and producing a new kind of sewing machine. Soon Singer’s revolutionary sewing machines – compact, cheap and easily available – were being sold all around the world, and Isaac Singer became a very rich man indeed.

In a colourful lifetime he fathered an estimated 24 children by at least four different partners, and had toured America as an actor before settling to engineering. At one stage in his turbulent love life he fled New York to live in France before coming to England.

He acquired the extensive Fernham Estate on the outskirts of Paignton, and is reputed to have stood in the open fields with local architect George Soudon Bridgeman, asking him: “Build me a big wig-wam.”

Bridgman was an apprentice to the great Frank Matcham, the Newton Abbot-born creator of many of the country’s finest theatres. The Tower Ballroom in Blackpool is a Frank Matcham theatre, and so is the London Coliseum. Isaac Singer spared no expense on Oldway, and brought in the finest materials from around the world to be used in its construction.

The foundation stone was laid in 1873 and construction took two years, but Isaac did not live to enjoy the fruits of the builders’ labours. He died in 1875, and his elaborate funeral saw 80 horse-drawn carriages forming a cortege in front of around 2,000 mourners. He was buried in Torquay Cemetery, where his marble tomb can still be seen.

Oldway passed into the hands of Paris Singer, who was born in the French capital in 1867. He was the 22nd of Isaac’s estimated 24 children. Paris Singer studied at the Newton Abbot Proprietary College at Wolborough, where fellow students included writer Arthur Quiller-Couch, explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett and journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson.

After studying at Cambridge, he married Australian-born Cecilia Graham, with whom he had five children.

Paris wanted alterations to make Oldway into his own lavish family home, and between 1904 and 1907 it was re-modelled to look like the Palais de Versailles close to the city of his birth.

The eastern elevation of the building was inspired by the Place de la Concorde in Paris while the interior featured a grand staircase made from marble and bronze. The ceiling above the staircase is decorated with an ornate painting based on an original design at Versailles, created for Louis XIV by the French painter and architect Charles Le Brun.

The first floor gallery is a reproduction of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and has a parquet wooden floor. The ballroom next door has gilt panelling and mirrors, and a sprung floor for dancing.

Outside, the mansion’s 17 acres of gardens were laid out in the Italian style by the renowned French landscape gardener Achille Duchêne. To the south of the mansion there is a grotto garden with a waterfall, a cave and a pond, all of which survive to this day.

Paris Singer is famed for the ‘tempestuous’ romance he had with famous dancer Isadora Duncan, whose career he helped.

The Californian-born dancer and choreographer had moved to London in 1898, performing in the lavish homes of the capital’s well-to-do families. She later toured Europe.

In 1910, at the height of Oldway’s Edwardian fame, she and Paris had a son, Patrick Augustus. Isadora Duncan died in 1927 while being carried as a passenger in a sports car near Nice on the French Riviera when her long, flowing silk scarf became tangled in the car’s rear wheel, breaking her neck.

During the First World War, from 1914 to 1918, Paris Singer built hospitals in England and France for the treatment of soldiers injured in the conflict, and he allowed Oldway to be used by the American Women’s War Relief Fund as a military hospital.

And after the war, the heyday of Oldway as a private home and a magnet for the rich and famous of the era was largely over.  By then the wealthy Singers were only using it as a holiday retreat, and in 1927 it became the home of the Torbay Country Club.

Members could play golf on a magnificent – if hilly – course stretching up across fields where the thousands of rooftops of Preston are now. Little Oldway, which is now a care home in the shadow of the mansion, served as the clubhouse.

There were tennis and squash courts and a swimming pool, as well as bars and lounges.

Between the wars the country club became famous. The American golfer Walter Hagen – winner of 11 professional ‘majors’ and ranked just behind Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus as an all-time great – drew enormous crowds for an exhibition match.

Tennis courts remain, as do the bowling greens which were created for the country club and are now used by hundreds of local players every summer.

Oldway was a significant social hub for the area, but it changed hands again at the end of the Second World War.

Paignton Council bought it for just £46,000 to use as local government offices and Lady Leeds, the granddaughter of Isaac Merritt Singer, performed the official opening in December 1946.

Up until Torbay Council left its offices there in 2013, Oldway provided working spaces for numerous council departments and meeting rooms for the local authority’s committees. It was also an elegant setting for marriages, though the first wedding had taken place there as long ago as July 1875, when one of Isaac Singer’s daughters was married at Oldway just nine days before her father’s death.

Paris Singer had gone back to Florida after the family’s gilded years at Oldway. The real estate collapse of 1926 forced his luxurious hotel business into receivership, and he was arrested in April 1928 on charges of real estate fraud which were later dismissed.

Publicly humiliated, Singer left Palm Beach for Europe, where he spent his final years living quietly on the French Riviera. He died in London in June 1932 and is buried alongside his father in the family tomb in Torquay Cemetery