Durtnell the Builder Hidden Histories: Britain's Oldest Family Businesses

This is a series about the hidden histories

of Britain's Oldest Family Businesses.

Few businesses last beyond two generations.

Against the odds, these families have survived in their trades

for more than three centuries.

This is the 188,933rd day

of Balsons at work.

They've come through 50 recessions,

the Industrial Revolution,

two World Wars and the rise of internet shopping.

Really things were very sad after the war.

There was no money. There was no money anywhere.

We'll meet the present-day head of each family

as they face a crossroads in their working life.

And we will follow them as they go on a journey

into the past of their business.

Jonah Toye! Fantastic! See, I was very worried about Jonah.

This programme is about the Durtnell family,

who have been builders since 1591,

during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Alex Durtnell has just taken over

at a difficult time in the construction industry.

Sometimes you just think it would be nice to have a day of good news.

It's just one knock after the other knock after the other knock.

And, it's... You think, crikey!

Over the last 400 years,

the Durtnells have worked in wood, brick, steel and glass.

They've built country estates and council estates,

town houses and cottages.

So, they learnt nothing from the Fire of London.

THEY LAUGH

This is a history of the homes we live in

told through the story of a family that has built them.

Rural Kent, the village of Brasted.

After 422 years, it's all change once again

at the top of R Durtnell and Sons,

Britain's oldest family building business.

38-year-old Alex Durtnell has recently taken over.

The company is currently working on 18 building projects...

Have you got the keys for Dad's office?

..including at schools, a cathedral

and luxury homes for those that can afford their expertise.

-Hi, Jeff.

-Hiya.

-How are you?

-All right. You're busy, aren't you?

Yeah, I'll ping you an e-mail and we'll get a date organised. OK.

He's replaced his father, who'd been running Durtnell's

since before Alex was born and who made it a thriving construction firm

which turns over about £50 million a year.

Right.

Alex has a tough act to follow.

This is my father's office.

We've bunged him over here to keep him out the way.

Unfortunately, he's still got a key to get in opposite,

but he's in here and so, yeah, so let's try...

Ah!

The book Alex is taking away from his father's office

is a history of the Durtnell family,

written 60 years ago by his late uncle, Cyril Durtnell.

You've got the family crest there, the original one,

so you've just got a real mixture of stuff.

You've got references, family trees,

the story of different names of houses etc.

So it's quite, it's quite in-depth.

Have you ever read this book?

Not cover to cover.

It's in that sort of typo that gives you a bit of a headache really.

Alex has spent all his adult life in the construction trade,

mostly working for his father at Durtnell's.

As he tries to come to grips with his new role

as head of the business,

Alex now wants to find out about its past.

We've got various ledgers that go back a while.

There's 1920... 1919 there.

I remember as a child, you know, going to London.

There was a lot of arm waving out the window,

"We built this and we built that."

And, sadly, there wasn't in-car TV's back then

so we actually had to listen to what dad was saying.

I thought, "God, how boring is that?"

Of course, now, I do the same thing with my children.

"We built that", or whatever, and we have a pride.

Just general owners, owners through the ages. Notice the facial hair.

It's more than their impressive beards that has inspired

Alex's new curiosity about the working lives of his forebears.

He wants to find out how it was for the previous Durtnells

who stood alone at the top.

It is a lonely job because you are representing the shareholders

and the family and so you have to be a step back from everyone else.

Hand on heart, I don't know the history of all these people,

but I think these guys probably have been through that themselves.

It would be interesting to know how they dealt with it.

Durtnell's has been based in Brasted longer than anyone can remember.

Alex has always been told his family has been building around here

since 1591 - in the time of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

And that, back then, the Durtnells were carpenter builders,

who didn't build in brick or stone,

but exclusively in wood.

But Alex has never seen proof of any of this.

So, following a lead in Uncle Cyril's book, he's come to London

to find evidence of his Elizabethan ancestors being carpenter builders.

We are going to Lambeth Palace,

the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury,

to see if there is anything there that can enlighten us

on past Durtnells and what they did in their careers.

Sort of give us a bit more information on

how the business started.

In Elizabethan England,

much of people's financial affairs was administered by the church.

If there was a Durtnell carpenter building business in Kent,

it would have been under the jurisdiction

of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

So, Alex is at Lambeth Palace to meet archivist Giles Mandelbrote.

-Hi, Giles. Nice to meet you.

-Hello.

Alex Durtnell. Good afternoon.

This volume contains the official record

of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Now, if we turn through to this leaf of parchment here,

we are now in the year 1608,

-and starting here...

-Oh, yeah!

..and going through to the top of the next page

is, in fact, your ancestor's will.

-Shall I just read you what it says?

-Yes, please.

In the name of God, Amen, I, Brian Darfnell, carpenter...

Carpenter?

-..saying carpenter, yes. So, it's very interesting.

-Mm.

So, where he says carpenter, I think that means that he's running

-a carpentry business.

-Yeah.

The will actually mentions lands which are being bequeathed.

And one would only go to the trouble of having this proved

in a superior court if there were significant goods or estate.

So, it does indicate that there is a certain amount of wealth.

It's interesting.

Alex has always been told his business was founded in 1591.

Brian's will is dated 17 years after that, in 1608.

Brian was only in his 50s when he died.

So, in 1591, he was in his 30s - at just the right age

to start up his own carpenter builder business.

Relieved, I suppose. It could have all been a sham.

You always think one day someone will say,

"Well, how do you know that? Prove it."

But to see that there's the Archbishop of Canterbury's records

confirming that he was a carpenter, a carpenter with a big "C",

ie, he probably ran a business of carpenters

but of a decent level, decent size, I suppose, is nice.

It backs up the start of the business.

Brian Durtnell worked in the late Elizabethan period.

After the defeat of the Spanish Armada,

England enjoyed stability and prosperity.

Kent, being close to London and known as the Garden of England,

was especially rich.

Many of those who did well here built themselves flashy,

decorative houses to display their wealth.

It was a golden age for wood-built houses, like Poundsbridge Manor,

completed in 1593, two years after the start of the Durtnell business.

And there is documentary evidence which suggests Poundsbridge

was the work of Brian Durtnell.

420 years later, Poundsbridge is still standing,

a short drive from where Alex's office is today.

With permission from the present owner,

Alex will be shown round Poundsbridge

by building historian David Brooks.

-Hi, David.

-Good morning, Alex.

-Nice to meet you, how are you?

-Fine, thank you.

-Good to see you, good to see you.

What do you think of this lovely old house, then?

Well, it's still standing, which is quite novel.

Alex has never explored Poundsbridge.

He hopes looking round the house will tell him about the techniques

of his forebear, Brian, who founded the family business.

-Hello.

-Hello, hello. May we come in?

This was an open hall,

so it would have been open right the way through to the roof line.

This would have been something like a flagstone floor

and then sleeping bedroom areas up above it.

If you look at that post there, can you see the tool marks on it?

-Yeah.

-Where that's been cut by hand.

And that could have been cut by a Durtnell?

It may well have been.

Who'd have thought, eh? That's why it's so well done.

Now we go up into here then, Alex.

These timbers here, Alex, appear to be original

and here we've got some carpenter's marks.

Yeah. Across there.

-Up there. Some of them.

-And there.

-Yeah, some of them...

-Most of them have, actually.

The carpenter's marks are a telltale sign,

the result of a building technique called timber framing.

Huge oak timbers provided a sturdy skeleton.

The rooms inside were then created with smaller oak timbers.

This entire frame was put together offsite.

The carpenter then marked every timber to show where it fitted

before he disassembled the frame

and then carted the timbers to the building site.

So when the cart delivers all the timbers,

they look at number three, number four, OK right, where it is.

Now, we can't see the corresponding... Well, we can here.

We can see the corresponding marks there.

This is the original flatpack construction.

-This is Ikea, but 19...1593.

-Yes.

Timber framing goes back thousands of years.

In late-16th century England,

it was a highly sophisticated construction technique

used in everything from a barn to a palace.

Mind your head as you come up.

If you come through to the bedroom,

see, we've got very similar details, all hand cut.

-Is that original, would you say that's original?

-Yes, definitely.

Really? You know, to me, you know,

some of these look like they could have gone through a machine.

You know, they're quite neat.

They've obviously taken a bit of time on some of these,

-they haven't rushed them.

-No.

Look at the detail on it, the time and effort they spent on that,

because that is very nice...

-Oh, yes, it's lovely.

-..that detail on there.

When you look at the detailing and the timber,

it was certainly a sort of a level above in terms of the carpentry.

It's interesting because this sort of building is,

we are building stuff like this, current stuff like this, you know,

for guys with sort of five, six bedrooms,

nice houses and nice materials and so on,

and I think that is a sort of similar, you know,

level to what we've got here now behind us.

Just like his father used to do,

Alex is visiting one of the building sites that Durtnell's is working at.

It's a £10 million contract to build 15 luxury homes in a former quarry.

-So this is unit 1.

-15.

Sorry, beg your pardon, unit 15.

This is a show house, nearly finished,

so it gives a good flavour of what you are going to get.

So what's in here, Mark?

-This is what they call an open-plan living area.

-Right.

Alex knows that everyone is watching how he will measure up

to being chairman and chief executive of R Durtnell and Sons.

Before he took over, Alex's father John and Uncle Richard

ran the business successfully for 40 years.

Uncle Richard died five years ago.

Though Alex's father John remains one of the firms seven directors,

he's now semi-retired.

You have to remove yourself from the stage, really,

to let your successor find their feet

and establish their way of doing things and dealing with things.

And if you are there, well then, you are in the way, aren't you, really?

The very important bit is that he leads the show.

In our industry, you get some peaks and troughs,

you get bubbles, you get crashes,

so you have to sort of bend with the market, don't you?

I guess Alexander will try things in the future

and good luck to him and maybe some of them will fail,

maybe some will succeed and that's... that's absolutely right, isn't it?

Alex's first year in charge

has been at a difficult time in the construction industry.

Over 7,000 British building firms have gone bankrupt

since the financial crash of 2008.

It's become an industry

in which only the canny and resilient survive.

How would you describe the present climate in your industry, then?

Pretty crap.

It's not, it just seems...

Sometimes you just think it would be nice to have a day of good news.

It's just one knock after the other knock after the other knock,

you know, and you think, oh crikey.

But it's bloody hard.

I mean, winning work is very hard, doing it is hard,

surveying it is hard, everything is, you know,

you're pricing jobs against six, seven, eight other contractors.

Then you price it and they beat you up about timing

and all this sort of stuff, and you're thinking, "Oh, God."

I'm not looking for sympathy, but that's just how the industry is

and that...unfortunately, that's what we're in and what we know

and we have to make the best of it.

As Alex continues to grapple with the challenges ahead,

he's about to return to his investigation of his family's past.

It seems the business took off because Brian Durtnell

exploited the demand for flashy timber-framed houses

among the growing merchant class of late Elizabethan England.

Now Alex wants to see if that entrepreneurial spirit

continued in the generations after Brian.

So he's travelled from Brasted to London

for an appointment with building historian Elizabeth McKellar.

-Hello, Elizabeth.

-Hi, you must be Alex.

-Yeah. Morning, how are you?

-Nice to meet you.

-Yes, good to meet you.

Elizabeth has asked him to meet her in Bedford Row,

on the edge of London's financial district.

Some of the houses here were built in the late 17th century.

With a population approaching a million,

London was then the biggest city in the world

and it had just been struck by a catastrophe.

The Great Fire of London was just the most spectacular of many fires.

Towns burning down was a longstanding problem.

It wasn't the first time it happened.

But because it was so devastating...

I mean, four fifths of the city were destroyed.

You can imagine if four fifths of the city burnt down today.

-The priority was to rebuild what's lost.

-Sure.

And everyone was desperate about their businesses,

it was the commercial heartland and so, you know,

they were just rebuilding the existing as fast as possible.

It was understood that London had burnt down

because it was built of wood.

So in 1667, the Rebuilding of London Act was rushed through.

This made it law that the city must not be rebuilt in wood,

but of something less combustible.

If you could afford it, stone - but mostly brick.

And to enable that to happen,

a lot of people flood into bricklaying,

looking at this as a way to make money.

John Evelyn, the diarist at the time,

refers to them as scoundrel builders and vermin.

-Because they are untrained and...

-Yeah, sure.

..they're just cobbling up streets.

Brick houses were quick and cheap to erect

and London's expanding population couldn't get enough of them.

Soon brick-built houses were springing up

even beyond where the pre-fire city had stood.

Most of these hasty developments have been lost,

but a few better quality buildings survive, like here in Bedford Row.

These houses here were built by somebody called Nicholas Barbon,

who was the biggest builder and speculator in London at the time.

This one, in particular,

is very much as it would have looked in the 1680s, so incredibly plain.

But they're very simple, aren't they?

Very simple. It's a brick box,

they are mass produced, mass designed

and Barbon made a fortune.

So he certainly, at one point, was spectacularly rich.

What would you have done?

You're there 1666, Alex Durtnell is there, you are running the firm...

I would have come to London quickly and jumped on the bandwagon.

Alex has no idea

if his 17th-century forebears shared his entrepreneurial instincts.

Brasted, as the crow flies,

is something like 15 miles from the centre of London,

if you take a dead straight line, so it's very close,

but it would be interesting to see if they were entrepreneurial

and picked up the pace quickly or pottered around in the villages.

It would be interesting to know.

To find out if his forebears

exploited the post-fire bricklaying boom,

Alex deduces who was running the business at the time.

After the Elizabethan carpenter builder Brian Durtnell began it,

two generations had passed by 1666.

The business was now in the hands of David Durtnell.

From Uncle Cyril,

Alex has discovered that in the years after the Great Fire,

David Durtnell built himself a home and workshop called Fords

in a row of cottages in Brasted.

Alex is off to look at Fords cottage,

he wants to see if it was built

with any of the techniques pioneered after the Great Fire.

Small windows, they had big windows.

Predominantly timber frame, I guess, behind the tile hanging.

No, not...not really no, they... Completely opposite!

So if you're saying at a similar time, I think you said,

then, obviously, the word hadn't quite got to Brasted

or to the Durtnell family anyway,

that we're actually moving on to brickwork.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Are you Gary?

-I am, yes.

-Hi, Gary, Alex Durtnell, nice to meet you.

-Come on in.

Thank you for letting us into your...

-No problems, just turn the light on.

-..into your house.

-Just come on in.

-Thank you. I've driven past these so many times.

-Have you?

But I have never been inside one.

It's quite a nice little old cottage.

-Lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Built by...

-One of your relatives.

One of my relatives.

So they learnt nothing from the Fire of London in terms...

This is Poundsbridge Manor, isn't it? Similarly, nice feeling,

little smaller windows, nice beams,

you know, sort of nice layout and so on,

which is completely the same

as the building nearly 100 years earlier, I guess, isn't it?

David Durtnell seems to have foregone the opportunity

to make easy money from bricklaying.

Instead, he stayed true to his craft.

In his will dated 1682, he called himself a carpenter.

Gosh, so it's pretty, er, as is, isn't it?

It's nice to think that, you know,

relatives built this and lived here, which is quite cool.

You grow up with knowing about the family business

and all that sort of thing and locally in Brasted and whatever,

but the fact he lived here and tried to make a go of it

when times are hard and stuff, it's nice, yeah, just to say...

And it's a long time ago, it's not like, "Oh, Grandad lived here,"

this is 12 generations ago, maybe, 11 generations ago, a long time.

So, yeah, I just think that's quite special.

The Durtnell family lived and worked at Fords for the next 100 years.

And all through this time,

the Durtnells still described themselves as carpenters.

This was the 1700s, the Georgian Age of the Enlightenment

and the scientific revolution.

And the brick box that had been pioneered after the Great Fire

became the standard British home.

By the 1790s,

even Brasted had been transformed by elegant Georgian houses.

Alex wants to find out how sticking with carpenter builder traditions

throughout the 1700s affected his family business.

So he's arranged to meet a local historian

who knows about the Durtnells in this era, Bob Ogley.

-Hello, Bob.

-Hello.

-Alex Durtnell.

-Hello, Alex.

-Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

-I've heard you, I've heard your name before.

-Oh, right.

-All good.

-Good, well, I knew John very well, how is he?

-He's still here.

He's still semi-retired. We're trying to get rid of him, but...

I thought you'd got rid of him completely.

Well, we tried to, but Mum won't have him at home, so we sort of...

Bob is in Durtnell's boardroom

because on the wall here is a family tree

with facsimiles of the signatures of Alex's ancestors.

The signatures from the 1700s are mostly taken from wills.

At every generation in this century, the estate gets smaller.

These people had been carpenters

and, somehow, they kept it going

through 200 years of fluctuating family fortune.

But then it went downhill, it went badly downhill.

There is no record of what the Durtnell carpenter builders

worked on in the 1700s.

The surviving wooden structures from this era

are mostly just sheds and barns.

It's very likely that by the end of the century,

these were the only buildings for such outdated craftsmen.

So that's the, that's the background and it was this fellow...

That one or that one?

It was this one, Richard Durtnell.

-OK, yeah, yeah.

-The second.

You can see there's an X,

which means that he couldn't even sign his name, so, he...

-I mean, was education important if you were a...

-No, I doubt it.

..a carpenter? No, no, I doubt it.

When he died in 1791, he left £100, that's all.

I mean, he was known...

he's gone down in history as the family's prize failure.

I think it's a little bit cruel.

The business was in very, very bad condition.

The end of Durtnell's was in sight.

The illiterate Richard Durtnell,

known in the family as Richard II,

was the third generation to live and work at Fords since David,

just after the Great Fire of London.

Richard II was followed by his son, Richard III.

This document, which the family still has,

reveals what Richard III did

in a desperate effort to save the family business.

It's not known where he got the money,

but in 1802, he somehow raised £360

to buy a new and much larger business premises.

To explain the critical importance of this investment,

Bob is taking Alex onto Brasted Village Green.

-He lived at Fords.

-Yeah.

And in 1802, he bought Constables.

He fenced off the land around here, and it was quite a big site,

that is where he positioned himself and that is the land he bought,

that is what became the family business we know today.

Buying Constables and the land around it

was a risky investment for Richard III.

But now he had space for a builder's yard.

Durtnell's offices are based on the land Richard III bought

and Alex's father, John, can remember this place 30 years ago,

when it was still operating as a builder's yard.

Lots of buildings, there was the paint store, the nail store,

the glass store, the workshops and metal departments and joinery works

and so on, all as a, all as a hub.

By setting up his yard,

Richard III made a strategic change in how the family business worked.

Before the 19th century,

the construction industry had been fragmented into competing artisans.

Builders had been either carpenters or bricklayers or stonemasons.

All had worked for themselves and jealously guarded their craft.

Then, in the early 1800s,

pioneers like Richard III set themselves up as general builders.

In his yard, he brought together

all the various different construction crafts,

not just carpenters or bricklayers,

but ironmongers, glaziers and so on.

The Brasted yard was a one-stop shop

that did everything from foundations to fittings.

Alex wants to know if Richard III's gamble paid off.

Nearly all the papers from the Durtnell business

in this important era were lost during the Second World War.

But Uncle Cyril, who wrote the family history,

read some of Richard III's personal journals before they disappeared.

"His business interests in 1828 were widespread over Brasted..."

which is where we are now, "..Westerham, Sevenoaks, Mitcham,

"Deptford, and London, among other places.

"Over 150 customers appeared in the 1828 book."

That's a lot of customers, that's a hell of a lot of customers.

Big or small, it's a business

as opposed to being a man with some tools as a carpenter.

He sounds like quite a... quite a good, good chap.

It's not known precisely who were Richard III's 150 clients

and which buildings he worked on.

His yard was set up to erect anything from a stable to a mansion.

According to Uncle Cyril,

Richard III was the family's first modern builder.

Going back a long time ago,

it went downhill a bit and there is a bit tumbleweed blowing around

and they were sort of living in not... I wouldn't say poverty,

but it's certainly not as affluent as they had been.

The Baldric type characters, do you know what I mean?

In that sort of way, a bit... quite local, cut a bit of wood,

and this guy - definitely seems a bit more about him.

He seems like he is keener to push, expand, develop.

And then it sort of comes up again.

So I think, you know, sort of coming out from the sort of Baldric years

to this slightly better...

He seems to be the chap that's laid the sort of foundations

for where we are now.

I think all of us owe him a bit of a debt really.

He did that through, through coming through from nothing,

you know, he did it off his own back so, you know, it's good.

Richard III died aged 79 in 1845.

His will is an impressive list, several pages long,

of investments and properties.

No Durtnell who has run the business since him

has had to make something out of nothing, as he did.

Today, Alex faces a very different kind of challenge -

his father passed on a thriving business.

But it is quite daunting

because you don't want to be the one to, you know,

bugger it up really.

How would you feel if you were the one who...?

Well, not great.

Because it's gone on that long, it's the history...

I mean, you wouldn't want to be the one to muck up a company anyway

even if it was one, two generations old, because it's embarrassing

and it's, you know, it's sort of a slur on your abilities, you know.

But it... all I want to do is make sure that,

eventually, whenever I hand it over to whoever is going to run it -

hopefully it's a Durtnell and someone's interested -

end up handing it over in a half decent shape.

After Richard III, the family continued to prosper.

By the mid-19th century,

the business was run by the grandson of Richard III, Richard V.

He's the great-great-grandfather of Alex.

Richard V's photo is on Durtnell's boardroom wall.

When he took over, it was the Victorian age

and the Industrial Revolution was in full swing.

This was the time of steam power and railway mania,

when thousands of miles of iron roads were laid.

Across Britain, isolated villages were plugged in to the rail network

and were turned into cities, it seemed to some, almost overnight.

Then in 1881, the railway came to Brasted.

The Westerham Valley Railway

ran from the village of Westerham through Brasted to Dunton Green,

where it connected with the mainline to London.

It was the brainchild of six local businessmen,

among them Alex's great-great-grandfather, Richard V.

Alex has always known

that Richard V was one of those behind the Westerham Valley line.

But he has no idea how it affected the family business,

so that's what he wants to find out next.

The line was ripped up in 1961.

Alex is going to take a walk along the old route

with rail enthusiast Bill Curtis.

-Hello, Bill.

-Hi, Alex, how are you?

-I'm very well, nice to meet you.

-Good to meet you.

It's nice to see the straightness and the fact that, you know,

you are standing on remnants below what we are standing on here of what was put in, it's fantastic.

It's an interesting beginning to the railway because, obviously,

businessmen, especially those in the hard trades,

would have a great interest in having a railway built

just purely to speed things up, you know, to bring economy to the area.

Yeah, and why do you think Richard Durtnell was involved?

If you've promoted something

which is going to mean that the towns and villages get larger,

there is going to be more house building to go on.

There is no evidence that I have seen

that the promoters of the company,

the Westerham Valley Railway,

that is Richard Durtnell and the other businessmen,

that they had any financial stake in the company.

They would look to somebody else to do that.

The money came from the extremely wealthy owner of Brasted Place,

a large estate along the route.

Called Squire Tipping,

he contributed £60,000, which is about six million today.

This paid for just four miles of single track that didn't

even connect with a convenient junction on the main line.

There was a fatal flaw in this railway right from the beginning.

Now, if you think about the fast trains that go to London,

none of them stop at Dunton Green.

This was always going to take you to Dunton Green,

where you have to change trains if you are a London businessman.

And you would always be on the slow chug up to town,

so it didn't bring the prosperity, the business that everybody hoped,

but it would have helped people like Durtnell.

Being part of the Westerham Valley Railway Company

gave Richard more opportunity

because he was mixing with some quite powerful and influential businessmen

-that perhaps he wouldn't necessarily have involved himself with before.

-Sure, sure.

Richard V even appears in the gossip column of the local newspaper.

A report of the dinner on the night the railway opened

shows him hobnobbing with Kent's great and good.

"Great rejoicing.

"The chairman proposed the prosperity of the towns of Westerham and Brasted. Hear, hear.

"He would couple with a toast the name of Dr Thompson,

"of Mr Fox and Mr Durtnell, who was connected with Brasted."

Good lad! Yeah, yeah.

He schmoozed into, into the important people locally

and I'll have a bit of that and, you know,

see what comes out of that, which was a bit of work I guess.

"Westerham return train to London left Westerham Station at 9pm..."

probably full of a load of drunks,

"..subsequently a grand display of fireworks took place on the green,

"the Westerham town band playing a selection of music during the display."

It's a bit dusty, I might get all covered in dust.

Alex doesn't know

if Richard V's new social status benefited the business.

Ah, knuckles!

So he's got some safe deposit boxes out of the bank.

He believes these boxes contain Durtnell account books

going back to the late 19th century.

Durtnell's something, summary of accounts 1883.

Alex is looking for Richard V's account books for 1882,

the year after the railway opened.

Oh, here we go.

Colonel Ward, so that's Wards...

Earl Stanhope.

Lord Bramwell.

Tipping.

Squire Tipping is the wealthy local who had backed the railway.

Well, there is a whole page of it.

House, gardens, mills, stables, laundry, carriage.

There is a whole page of stuff for Tipping.

And another bit here, another load of stuff for Tipping.

Basically everything in his estate, I guess, it seems like.

£800 worth in '82. Good stuff.

The account books show that, during the 1880s,

Durtnell's regularly made annual profits of thousands of pounds -

equivalent to hundreds of thousands today.

Richard V built himself a house beside the yard and lived there

amid a retinue of servants, rather like his well-to-do clients.

If you look at Richard Durtnell up there he's, he looks less...

he's not of the Baldric era, but he looks more gentlemanly like

in his dress and his attire and that sort of, you know,

how he's sort of groomed.

So clearly Richard V is ambitious... socially and in business.

But not all Richard V's profits came from maintenance work

on the crumbling mansions of Kent's old squirearchy.

Since the time of Elizabeth I, Durtnell's have built.

And in late-Victorian Kent,

there was once again a wealthy merchant class which wanted

flashy houses like Poundsbridge to display their wealth.

They were self-made men

who wanted to set themselves up as landed gentry,

ideally close to London where their business interests were often based.

The house Lewins was built by Durtnell's for a retail magnate.

One of the grandest mansions erected in Kent around this time

was Foxwold. It was built for the lawyer Horace Pym in 1884.

Alex has heard his great-great-grandfather Richard V

was somehow involved in Foxwold, so he wants to pay it a visit.

I've seen pictures, but that's it.

I've never seen it in real life.

Look at this, crikey. Big house.

Foxwold is in new hands now.

But Alex has come here

to meet a descendant of the original owner, Fern Ogley.

-Hello, Fern.

-Hello, Alex.

-Nice to meet you.

-Pleased to meet you.

-In the end, yes. We've brought the weather.

-Unfortunately, yes.

Did Durtnell's build it or did they do some works to it?

-I don't know really...

-They built the whole thing.

-They built this?

-Yes.

-Wow.

This is my grandmother's notes.

"Came into Foxwold," it says here, "built by Durtnell's."

Oh, wow, OK. Great.

Though it looks like Poundsbridge,

Foxwold was built with the latest techniques of the time.

Its main structural beams are not actually wood but iron.

Durtnell's was paid £9,400 to build it -

equivalent to over a million today.

I believe there are 51 rooms supposed to be.

OK, but it looks quite decent sized windows

-and a nice vista on the other side so maybe quite light.

-Lovely.

So nicely designed and hopefully well-built,

but it's one of those houses where you need it full of people,

and children running around and lots of laughter.

My grandmother grew up and had the most luxurious life here.

She rode and they had balls and servants, dances and...

Very nice, yeah, yeah.

I bet life back then was very much to do with Upstairs Downstairs?

Yes, I was going to say it's like Upstairs Downstairs,

it wasn't quite as grand as... Downton Abbey.

-You lived here for a bit?

-No, I never lived here.

-You didn't live here.

-I visited my cousins.

And how was that, was it a nice house to come and visit?

Lovely, yes. Oh, and there was one lovely point about it.

He built the most wonderful sewer down to Brasted.

-Who did? Richard V?

-Yes. And I think...

Oh, well, that's a claim to fame.

Oh, right!

I'll take a picture of that on my phone, have it as my screen saver.

That's when you know life is over -

when you are taking a picture of manhole covers.

Richard V died in 1911 aged 76.

He left his family business in better shape than it had ever been.

There are two family Bibles here.

This one is in two halves, as you see and, hang on, this one..

Intrigued by what Alex has learnt so far about their forebears,

his father John has dug up a couple of heirlooms.

These are Bibles

and they were originally owned by Richards III and V.

Both of them seem quite similar.

They are entrepreneurial, I think,

they seized opportunities, they diversified,

they did both, I think, they did quite well.

-So you are saying that these Richards...

-III and V.

-..did well?

-And so they started that, didn't they?

-Yeah, sure, very much so.

So the interesting bit is...

-Where are we now?

-Is it like that or is it like that?

And the really, really, really interesting bit is,

is it going to go up or is it going to go level

-or is it going to go down?

-Hopefully no worse than level.

Let's have a look.

Alex's younger sister Alexia isn't involved in the business.

So here we are, lots of my brother,

that's a family Christmas, I think.

That's Dad and that's my mother and Alex and I.

But like all the Durtnell family,

she's keenly aware of the pressure on Alex.

There has been a little bit of jostling at the top

to fit everybody into their new role.

So, you know, for my father to step aside and slightly backwards

and my brother to step forward and into those big shoes

will have been quite difficult and slightly unnerving,

I would imagine, for everybody, because, you know,

my father has been chairman for 40 something years,

to then slightly swap over and backwards,

it's quite difficult, I would imagine,

because you are just used to doing something your way and successfully

and then for it to change

and perhaps you are nervous about the future and what will happen.

So I think it's been quite tricky

but the good thing is that, because they are very close,

they can talk about it and work on it together

rather than in a competitive way, it's a supportive way.

Alex knows that whatever the challenges ahead of him,

his ancestors have come through worse before.

One of the most testing times for the family

was the early 20th century.

In the First World War,

the grandson of Richard V, Richard Neville Durtnell,

was killed in 1917 at the Battle of Arras.

So instead of Richard Neville,

his younger brother, Geoffrey, became head of the business.

Geoffrey is Alex's grandfather.

Geoffrey had a hard start.

During the war, people stopped building houses.

Even when peace came,

the wealthy upper classes that Durtnell's had been working for

no longer had the money to build big houses.

In 1922, Durtnell's made a loss.

Though they soon got out of the red,

for most of the interwar period, profits were slender.

Then in 1939 came the Second World War

and house building stopped entirely.

Alex wants to find out how his grandfather Geoffrey

got the business through the Second World War.

So he's arranged to talk to Battle of Britain historian Robin Brooks,

who has told Alex to meet him at a wartime aerodrome called Detling.

-Hello, Robin.

-Hello, Alex.

-How are you?

-Pleased to meet you.

Welcome to what's left of Detling Airfield.

-Crikey. This is a Durtnell building? I hope not.

-No, no, it isn't.

Here at Detling in August 1940,

Geoffrey Durtnell got a chance to show how his building business

could contribute to Britain's war effort.

It was Tuesday afternoon, 13th August 1940,

a raid was coming in, it was a really strong force of Ju 87 Stukas,

out of the blue sky, absolutely devastating raid.

It only went on for about five minutes,

but during those five minutes,

the airfield was hit so very, very heavily.

It was one of the worst raids on any of the airfields in Kent.

Detling performed a critical role in Britain's coastal defence.

It was essential the RAF got it operational again.

But their own construction crews were overstretched.

So just days after the raid,

Geoffrey Durtnell was asked to send a gang of men to Detling

to repair the damage.

After the raid, they would have found absolute devastation,

two of the hangars were completely gone,

most of the buildings received shrapnel damage,

two of the air raid shelters were absolutely blasted,

there were 67 people in these air raid shelters,

they were killed outright.

Many of the bodies, of course, after the raid were unrecognisable,

it was quite a job.

Back then, being a builder in that environment was not just turning up

and dealing with your day-to-day stuff,

but also seeing the outcome of those raids, which was pretty ghastly.

-That's right. That's right.

-Having to deal with all that

and probably put your hand to doing other things,

like you say, perhaps moving bodies

or dealing with people's possessions that had been killed

and all that sort of stuff, which is pretty personal, isn't it, really?

Many civilians did actually refuse to work on these airfields

and it was only the threat of getting no pay that, I think,

induced them to stay and to work to earn a living.

-Life is easy now compared to that, I guess.

-I should think it is, yes.

I think I need to stop moaning.

The work at Detling was perilous.

But in the next six months,

Durtnell's earned over £1,000 from it.

It was the start of a busy and lucrative period.

As well as working at other airfields,

Durtnell's was contracted to build air raid shelters and tank traps.

Like many builders, Geoffrey did his bit throughout the war

and his business benefited from it.

Making annual profits of up to £4,000 -

double the return in peace time.

90-year-old Rosemary Browne was Geoffrey Durtnell's secretary.

She went on to work for the family business for three generations

and has known Alex since he was born.

One of the things they always know is there's a solid rock behind them.

There really is because the Durtnell thing, as people,

they meet adversity and they do something about it.

They don't sort of say, "Oh, woe is me, isn't it dreadful?" No.

"What are we going to do to put it right?"

This is, I've watched this attitude from the word go

and I've seen so much of it over the years

and they really do, they tackle it.

One of the toughest times that Miss Browne can remember

is the late 1940s.

There was no more war work,

neither was anyone building houses

because, like meat and clothing,

the amount people could spend on building work was rationed.

All you were allowed was £10 worth of work

and even then, it wasn't an awful lot.

Really, things were very sad after the war.

There was no money, there was no money anywhere.

But Geoffrey Durtnell managed to find someone with money to build.

Well, it wasn't really much our standard,

but we got a contract to build council houses.

They needed them badly.

Well, I mean, you are not proud,

you take what it is whether it's a council house or a log cabin.

I mean, you still go and build it.

I have to say, they're very realistic,

they didn't turn their nose up at work.

The Durtnell account books show that, in 1955,

Geoffrey got a contract to build 60 homes

on the Sherwood council estate in the nearby town of Tunbridge Wells.

Alex has never seen these council houses.

-Hello, Alex.

-Nice to meet you.

-How do you do?

-How are you?

-Nice to meet you.

Alex doesn't know how this contract affected his family business.

To find out, he's with housing historian Peter Malpass.

Together, they set off for the Sherwood Estate,

where Durtnell's built 60 houses,

all according to a nationally standardised design.

You could see houses like this in any town in England,

brick and tile houses like this, in rows or in pairs, perfectly common.

In the decade after the war,

the British government funded the construction

of 1.5 million council houses.

This vast building effort was part of an even more ambitious plan

to shake up the housing market.

I believe your firm was building

big houses at the beginning of the 20th century...

-Yeah, I think...

-..for rich people.

-That's right, yeah.

And then in the war, you were doing what was required for the war effort,

which wasn't building houses.

No, sort of Detling Aerodrome rebuild job, yeah.

Exactly, so the work on this estate

gave you some...some work,

but it also gave you the experience

of contracting to build quite large numbers of modest-sized houses.

So it was making a transition and enabling you, in the longer run,

to get into building at scale for owner occupiers.

-Very much different discipline.

-Yes, that's right.

The repetitious work, it's...

I think of the local authorities, in a sense,

putting building firms into a position

where they could go on and build private houses.

The council house building programme was a sort of transition.

In 1955, the massive council house building programme stopped.

The government hoped private building firms like Durtnell's

would now carry on building,

paid for by a new generation of mass owner occupiers.

In 1957, Harold Macmillan said to the nation,

"We have never had it so good."

So people were acquiring affluence for the first time,

they were acquiring new consumer goods,

and buying a house was becoming affordable for many people

in a way that it hadn't been in the past.

The 60 houses Durtnell's built in Tunbridge Wells are the only homes

the business is known to have built for a local authority.

But the government's plan worked.

In the following years, Durtnell's worked as a private developer,

building hundreds of very similar houses all over Kent.

Like this cul-de-sac on the edge of Brasted.

Alex has learned how, once again,

his family had found someone with money to build

and adapted the business to fit its new client.

Looking at different markets.

You are used to doing the Foxwolds for Mr Pym.

If that was not in abundance, then they were doing something else,

like the 60 council houses in Tunbridge Wells.

It's work, isn't it? You've got to...

At the end of the day, you can't be too picky

if there's not much work out there.

I mean, he's doing what we're doing, he's carrying it on,

we're just here to take it on

and hopefully leave it in a better state than when we got it

or in as good a state. And he is no different, really.

And dealing with the same sort of things and issues.

There's good and bad times. Never always a good time or a bad time,

so he's been there and done what we've done

through probably harder times, I should think, and good for him.

Geoffrey Durtnell died in 1979 when Alex was only five.

To get to know his grandfather better,

Alex has found an interview Geoffrey made for the BBC 40 years ago.

Alex has never listened to it before.

'Mr Durtnell, is it good for business

'being known as the oldest building firm in Britain?'

'No, I am terribly proud of the fact that we are,

'but from a business angle, I don't think it makes any difference.

'I think people judge you on what you do and how modern you are.'

'It seems a terrible thing to say,

'but being the oldest building firm in Britain

-'doesn't seem to really be worth all that much.'

-'Financially?'

-'Yeah.'

'No, but it's a hell of a kick.'

Geoffrey's two sons Richard and John

continued to grow the family business

through the peaks and troughs of the late 20th century.

It's been down to Alex

to get R Durtnell and Sons out of the most recent long recession.

Now he's completed his journey into the past of his business,

he has learnt how some of his forebears have survived

in the volatile construction industry.

I think knowing more now about the family history...

We knew quite a bit anyway but obviously we've added to that.

..it does reinforce that you can get through it, you know.

There's been far tougher situations, I guess,

the family have been through in previous generations

than what we have got now.

They've done it, they've succeeded and there is no reason why,

you know, we can't be here in another 100 years' time.

Yes, things are tough at the moment,

you know, get on with it and stop crying sort of thing.

And I think, generally, things will work out all right.

Maybe that is a blinkered view, but that's what I feel.

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