History of Castle Drogo

Making millions with a cup of tea

Julius Drew (1856–1931), whose name originally had no final “e”, came from a family of tea merchants. He started his career dealing in expensive China tea. However, the employment of cheap labour on large-scale British-owned plantations in India resulted in a cheaper product and he saw a chance to win new markets.  

In 1883, he and a business partner set up the Home and Colonial Stores, a chain of grocery shops in London, Birmingham and Leeds that sold Indian tea to the growing urban working classes. The shops were an instant success and he retired at 33, having made a fortune. 

In 1890 he married Frances Richardson, who had grown up among the cotton mills of Lancashire. They started their married life in Kent before buying the sumptuous Wadhurst Hall in East Sussex from the de Murietta brothers, Spanish bankers who had been forced by bankruptcy to sell the house and its contents. 

The Drews and their five children were happy at Wadhurst Hall. There was good fishing and shooting and it was convenient for London and their friends. For Julius, however, it wasn’t enough. He wanted an ancestral home and, ideally, a family pedigree to go with it.  

A genealogist working for his brother produced some doubtful family connections. One was with the distinguished Drewe family of Broadhembury, whose vacant land the brothers acquired in 1901. The other was with a Norman baron called Drogo, the Latin form of Drewe. The 12th-century baron, who held a village on the Teign, was known as Drogo de Teign and the village became known as Drewsteignton. 

Building a place in history

Julius Drew already knew Drewsteignton because his first cousin was rector of the parish church. He decided that this was the place to build his family seat. In 1910 the rector legally sold him the glebe land on which Castle Drogo now stands and over the next few years Drew bought enough adjoining land to create a large Dartmoor estate. 

Perhaps the link with Drogo persuaded him to build a baronial castle. To achieve this he commissioned Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), the young architect who had remodelled Lindisfarne Castle for the publisher Edward Hudson in 1901 and Lambay Castle for Cecil and Maude Baring in 1908. 

Lutyens had a thriving practice among the wealthy middle classes and was at a turning point in his career. He would soon be heavily involved in the project to build a new administrative capital for the British government in India, then still part of the British Empire. Over the 20 years it took to build Castle Drogo, he worked simultaneously on the new Viceroy’s house in New Delhi (now Rashtrapati Bhavan).  

Stylistically, Castle Drogo is a clever blend of a wide range of English architectural styles but here and there may be faint suggestions of India.  

A challenge for the ages

From the start it was an extremely ambitious scheme and over time the designs were heavily modified. Julius Drewe, having by now changed his name by deed poll, insisted that the castle should be built of solid granite, with massive walls, six feet (1.8 m) thick in places.  

It needed a huge workforce of about 100 men on site at any one time and 40 more to work in the quarries, sand and gravel pits. The building contractor, Lewis Bearne of Newton Abbot, dealt directly with Drewe’s agent, John Walker, who oversaw the project. 

The outbreak of the First World War three years after building began had a profound effect. Many of the workmen went off to fight. Work slowed down until it finally came to a halt in January 1917.  

Later that year, the Drewes’ eldest son, Adrian, was killed in action and Julius’ enthusiasm for the project died with him. He shortly afterwards suffered a slight stroke that left him partially incapacitated for the rest of his life. When the chapel was completed in 1930, the wooden cross from Adrian’s grave in Flanders was placed there (NT 904247).  

When their second son, Basil, returned from the war the work was resumed. The building had already been significantly reduced in size at an early stage, but high post-war taxation and soaring building costs led to further modifications. Lutyens’ plans for elaborate gardens on the east side of the building were never executed but he worked with the garden designer, George Dillistone, to lay some out to the north. 

And an interior to match

Lutyens designed the utilitarian furniture for the kitchen and service areas but other furniture came from Wadhurst Hall. It included some fine antiques with Spanish and other treasures acquired from the de Murietta brothers, including the rare Char de Triomphe tapestry that was made in the Gobelins factory for Louis XIV (NT 904075).  

The collections at Castle Drogo also include items the Drewes may have picked up on their travels including natural history items, representations of animals and people from China and India and a collection of netsuke and okimono. 

The final chapters

The build had been in progress since 1911. The family moved in for Christmas 1926, but it still wasn’t finished and by that time Julius was in very poor health. From the very beginning, rain found its way through the solid granite walls and the flat roof leaked, so Julius continued to spend winters at his house in Torquay where he died in 1931. 

Frances Drewe remained at the castle with her unmarried daughter, Mary. During the Second World War the two women set up a residential war nursery there for children under five. Upon the death of Basil Drewe in 1974, his son Anthony and the family gave Castle Drogo, the garden and much of the estate to the National Trust. 

In 2021, the National Trust completed a £15.5m project to tackle historic leaks in the fabric and to keep it dry for future generation.

Further reading

• Brown, Jane, Lutyens and the Edwardians, an English architect and his clients, 1996, Harmondsworth, Viking Press.
• Cherry, Bridget and Pevsner, Nikolaus, Devon, The Buildings of England, 1999, Penguin Books, London. 
• National Trust, Castle Drogo, 2021, Swindon, Acorn Press.
• Stamp, Gavin, Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses from the archives of Country Life, 2002, London, Aurum Press.