Even the lions ate well at The Elms!

Yesterday was the main event of our trip to the US, the wedding of Peter, our son's best friend from the age of one. A good day was enjoyed culminating in a session of bag pipe playing!

Today we have been back to Newport to visit The Elms, yet another of the holiday "cottages" built by the industrial giants of the late nineteenth century.

The Elms was the summer residence, the season being July 4 to the end of August,  of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Julius Berwind of Philadelphia and New York. Mr. Berwind made his vast fortune in the coal industry. In 1898, the Berwinds engaged Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer to design a house modeled after the mid-18th century French chateau d'Asnieres (c.1750) outside Paris. 

It is amazing how much money you can make from the hard labour of thousands of miners, who were consistently denied the right to form a trade union. Oh, and there was no personal income tax to pay in those days!

This is one of many splendid statues and fountains in the landscaped gardens. This one, a dominant bronze  lion feeding a peacock to her cubs somehow symbolises the extraordinary lifestyle of those fabulously rich families fed by the poverty and labour of the masses.