CHAPTER SEVEN
The Last Years
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y 1929 it had become necessary for the Rackhams to leave Houghton House, partly because Mrs Rackham’s health was now too precarious for her to be able to cope with servant problems in the old-fashioned farmhouse, and partly because Rackham had reluctantly decided that he was no longer justified in keeping up two establishments, and believed that he would not need to do so if he lived nearer London. In fact, however, he did not dispose of 6, Primrose Hill Studios until 1938, a year before his death.He now built a house in an attractive situation on the Common at Limpsfield, Surrey, close to the golf course on which he often played. Stilegate was comfortable, easy to run; the garden was delightful; but neither Rackham nor his family were entirely happy there. Rackham naturally missed the surroundings he had loved at Houghton – the rambling old house with its barns and outhouses, the winding Arun, the wooded hills, the Amberley quarry, the beech tree with its knobbly, twisted roots, the magnificent elm, the Elizabethan cottages facing his garden wall – all preserved, here and there, for those who can recognize them, in his drawings of the nineteen-twenties.
Limpsfield had a suburban conventionality that Rackham grew to dislike. His new neighbours, friendly enough, were mostly wealthy129
