Wentworth Woodhouse: Rotherham mansion volunteers feature in BBC documentary Our Yorkshire Stately Home

These days, she is very well-acquainted with its hallowed hallways. Along with more than 300 others, including her husband, she is part of a proud community of volunteers who diligently keep the mansion house near Rotherham held together and open for the public.

Tonight, their efforts are being showcased in Our Yorkshire Stately Home, an Our Lives television documentary on the BBC.

While Rosemary, 81, might remember Wentworth from her childhood, her husband of nearly 45 years David ‘Brasso’ Johnson – he’s known for cleaning plenty of brass – had no idea about it until seven years ago when he went to the estate for a tour. Now, he can be found there six days a week.

David says: “I came into the house, went up the main staircase, and I noticed the stair rods sliding out of the brackets. So I went back to the person on front of house, and I said: ‘I can repair them’. So I took one home with me, repaired it all, then brought it back and showed them what it was like, and they said: ‘Oh, that's brilliant. Right, do you want to do them all?’. So I did them all.

"There's 84 brackets and 42 stair rods, so I fully restored them all. And then after that, they asked me: ‘Could you restore the chandelier in the chapel?’”

That particular task took him around 400 hours. “They found it in a long box all wrapped up in wartime blackout curtains,” says David, 78, a former motor mechanic and engineer.

These requests were absolutely no trouble for David, who loves the challenge. Nothing goes to waste, either – David and fellow volunteers have raised about £40,000, they say, by making clocks from old materials from the roof.

"Whatever you give to the house, it more than repays it,” he says. “We're volunteers, so we don't get paid anything, but the house gives so much back to you. It seems to reward you whatever you do and it's a very strange feeling. I came here seven years ago, and well, eight years ago, if somebody just said to me, you'll be working at a mansion estate and you'll fall in love with the place, I would have thought that was ridiculous, but it just draws into it. And I can't wait to get here in the morning. I just love being here, loving the work that I do.”

Rosemary, who has been a shop worker in the past, helps to clean Wentworth with other volunteers.

"I named us the Classy Scrubbers. As I say in the film, anybody can be a scrubber, but we are classy as we work in this wonderful place. And I've met a lot of nice people, made a lot of nice friends. As David says, it's just wonderful being here.”

The current Wentworth Woodhouse – there was an original house in the 17th century but no one knows what it actually looked like – was built for the 1st Marquess of Rockingham from around 1725 with the work continuing over four decades before it was passed on to the aristocratic Fitzwilliam family, who built its success on the rich coal seams they owned.

Over recent decades the estate became dilapidated until, in 2017, it was saved by a Preservation Trust which bought the house for the benefit of the surrounding former mining community. They are gradually restoring the estate, which has more than 300 rooms standing on over 80 acres, after crucially making the roof water-tight.

Some in the documentary share their earliest memories of the house. Former pit worker Brian Ware, who drives a buggy around the estate, tells of how his grandparents’ house belonged to the Wentworth estate, so he would go along to the stable block with his mother to pay rent.

"My grandma and grandad would have been paying rent to the Fitzwilliams, Lords of the Manor,” he tells the documentary crew. “They’d be like King and Queen of England, really, and it were incredible. I think it just stuck in your mind, probably like when you go and see Santa. They always gave you either a glass of pop and a sandwich or a bun, I always remember that.”

Rosemary tells the Yorkshire Post: “When I was about eight, my dad had a lot to do with the sea cadets in Rotherham, and he used to bring the sea cadets up to Dog Kennel lake (in Wentworth) to teach them how to row. So I remembered it from years ago. We used to come and walk through the park when I was a little girl, and then when I got married and had (their children) Raymond and Rachel, we used to come through with them. So they grew up knowing all about Wentworth.”

People from many walks of life volunteers at the house, say the Johnsons, of Kimberworth – one used to be their GP, but there are others with backgrounds in teaching, the judiciary, plumbing and, of course, mining.

In the documentary, Brian says: “I think the irony of the house is that, basicially everyone knows it was built on coal and now it’s going through this full cycle and a guy like me, who worked at the pit, is volunteering to still keep it alive.”

David says: “We want to stress that it is important that we represent everybody because all of us are putting so much into the house, staff and volunteers. They're amazing people, all of them.”

He believes the Earls would have approved, too, and sometimes chats to the paintings of them.

“I think they’re looking down on us and they’re happy with what we’re doing. We are custodians – we’re keeping the house going for future generations.”

Our Yorkshire Stately Home is on BBC One in England at 7.30pm tonight, and on iPlayer now.