Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (10 page)

The Victorian country seats that sprang up to host such august gatherings all over the United Kingdom will, in many cases, have invited ridicule for their architectural pretensions. The use of Gothic architecture to suggest that the building – and the family – had been there for generations, if not centuries, already was widely mocked at the time, but gradually these overbearing arrivals settled into the landscape. Their stone or brick, weathered to a mellow patina and perhaps overgrown with ivy, has made their appearance much less abrasive than formerly, and many of them have earned the affection of visitors and architectural writers alike, either for their pleasing general aspect or because they are important examples of the style of their time. However, passing years cannot help some buildings, which simply defy admiration. A recent visitor to one house, the writer John Pearson, commented on his first glimpse of Joyce Grove, the Victorian family seat of the Fleming banking family, in a manner that suggests how such houses are viewed from our own perspective:

There are ugly houses and ugly houses, but this is a monster, an architectural tyrannosaurus which has blundered into these Oxfordshire beech woods from another age and somehow become preserved, dead but completely intact. As you peer at this house with its fierce red walls, its elaborate portico, its jagged roofs and chimneys and cornices, you murmur to yourself – who?

Rather more successful is Tyntesfield, the vast neo-Gothic house at Wraxall in Somerset built for William Gibbs (1790–1875), a member of an old West Country merchant family who made a fortune by importing guano to England from South America. He wanted precisely the sort of grand country seat that was enjoyed by the traditional aristocracy, and it was built for him by the architect John Norton. The house was occupied by four generations of the family before its upkeep – it has 43 bedrooms – proved too great an expense for them. As at Calke Abbey, the National Trust took it over, after a fundraising campaign in which the public was urged to donate by the argument that this was a very rare survival of house, estate, contents, gardens and estate buildings, all intact – and additionally by the rumour that the house might otherwise be bought by the singer Kylie Minogue. Again as at Calke, the public greatly enjoyed the fact that Tyntesfield was filled with a random collection of domestic objects, seemingly left as they had been when the last family member departed. There were children’s toys – for a Victorian nursery is a feature much loved by country-house visitors – and kitchens and servants’ quarters filled with mysterious implements or quaintly old-fashioned cleaning products. The family rooms boast enough artistic treasures to satisfy the aesthete, but the house’s chief interest lies in the fact that it reflects the aspirations and outlook of the mercantile class that built Britain’s nineteenth-century prosperity through overseas trade.

Age alone does not make a house interesting. There are medieval, Tudor and Elizabethan houses that, for all their authenticity, attract less public enthusiasm than later examples that have fascinating collections, or beautiful gardens, or associations with notable personalities. Sometimes, though rarely, it is the collection within rather than the building or the gardens that is the house’s chief ‘selling point’. Littlecote House in Berkshire – a magnificent Tudor mansion bought in the 1980s by a prominent businessman – was and is renowned for its collection of armour dating from the English Civil Wars. The owner decided to sell this, and there was an immediate nationwide campaign, led by the Royal Armouries, to raise funds and save it for the nation. All over Britain in the middle of that decade there were posters urgently pleading for donations before time ran out. In the end Littlecote’s owner, perhaps pleased or surprised by the amount of interest aroused, decided to keep the armour and display it, and it remains there today though the house is now a hotel. Objects can sometimes take on a life of their own.

As in the previous century there were architects – or firms of architects – who specialized in country-house building. They could provide from an extensive catalogue of historic styles any period look, or combination of them, that a client wished. They could also advise on the type of house that would best fit a particular landscape, be it the Thames Valley, the Midlands or the Scottish Highlands. Some architects, notably William Burges (1827–81), worked in an almost pure medieval style. The houses he built for the 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847–1900) were a dream worthy of Ludwig of Bavaria. Cardiff Castle (commissioned because Bute was a major local landowner and builder of the nearby docks) was not intended as a residence but as a civic headquarters. Nevertheless Burges, taking the sparse remains of an ancient castle as the basis for his building, created what looked like a fanciful, whimsical medieval dwelling. It was what an ideal house in the Middle Ages might have been like had the builders then had the technology available in the nineteenth century, and it included such modern refinements as a ‘winter smoking room’.

Castell Coch was a smaller, private residence built in the hills above Cardiff, used as a home by Bute and his wife (they had other country residences elsewhere, so that this was for them an occasional retreat). Again it used an existing ruin as the basis for a rebuild that was more elaborate and imaginative than the medieval masons could have dreamed of. Burges, in common with others who worked in the historicist idiom, did not just erect the shell but created all the interior fittings as well. Burges designed furniture, wallcoverings and washbasins for the castle – the antithesis, of course, the way the English country house traditionally developed, with elements added by each new generation. Though a hundred years earlier, the Adam brothers had designed interiors as well as exteriors, they had never shown such attention to detail. The hallmark of the art-architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to set their stamp on every room and feature of the house they were creating – to make of it a work of art, complete in every aspect.

Another change the Victorians introduced to house design was the new emphasis placed on the nursery. Despite the oft-quoted stricture that ‘children should be seen and not heard’, which is wrongly assumed to sum up the attitude of nineteenth-century parents, this was an age that set very considerable store by family life and the image of domesticity. Children were no longer regarded, as they had been in previous generations, as miniature adults. There had for a long time been schoolrooms in country houses, but the nursery is a Victorian creation – though perhaps spartan, even grim in its furnishings, its fireplace and its scattered toys and books can render it so cosy, comfortable and evocative that many houses have still preserved them, as intact as possible. They are frequently the room that visitors most enjoy seeing. The nursery with its scattered toys and books (for the amount of reading matter published entirely for juveniles was another striking characteristic of the time) soon became an institution.

The great hall, a distinguishing feature of medieval houses where it was used for dining, underwent a revival as Victorian architects reintroduced it to country houses. Because of the nineteenth century’s rediscovery of morality, many houses segregated male and female guests into separate corridors of bedrooms that might well be divided from each other by the whole width of the house’s central block. The great hall offered a magnificent setting for mixed social gatherings, where tea would be served and indoor games played, or for assemblies before dinner.

Another popular element in Victorian house design was the conservatory, a sort of hothouse in which exotic flora could be placed, providing a winter garden. The Victorians loved these spaces not only for the facilities they provided – the opportunity for light and modest exercise in inclement weather, and the opportunities to display collections of plants, ferns, palm trees (very fashionable at one time, as can be seen for instance in the paintings of James Tissot from the 1870s and 80s) – but also for their novelty value. It was only through recent advances in construction using glass and iron that such buildings had become possible. The Crystal Palace, built by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition that was held in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, was the wonder of the mid-Victorian age. Its prototype can still be seen at a country house – Chatsworth – for Paxton was employed there and owed his subsequent advancement to the greenhouse that he constructed for the Duke of Devonshire. The Great Exhibition made iron and glass fashionable building materials, and every home could, as it were, now have its own fragment of the Crystal Palace. The conservatory was often reached by French windows leading from a drawing room or dining room.

The manner in which people dined underwent a major change in the century’s latter decades. The traditional method of serving at a dinner table was for every dish to be placed in front of the master of the house, who would carve the meats and divide everything into portions, with servants passing the plates. The new fashion, which had become standard among elegant householders by the 1880s, was to dine
à la Russe
. This was a means of serving by which every dish would be carried round by footmen so that the guests could be served at their places rather than having plates brought to them. Though the adoption of this was gradual, it saved so much general confusion that it soon became the only way to serve at formal dinners, and has remained so ever since. The old way of doing things had meant that a servant had to be present for each diner, standing behind their chair. Though this was no longer necessary, the sight of liveried footmen thus arrayed in rows was impressive, and heightened the sense of occasion (as it still does at state banquets in royal palaces). Many hosts therefore wished to keep footmen in numbers suitable for this display, even though – as was commonplace – additional men had to be hired from agencies to supplement the family’s own servants, and all of them were often underemployed.

The drawing room became the setting, by late Victorian times, for the ‘morning call’, curiously always made in the afternoon. These were never such a feature of country houses as of town dwellings, for the obvious reason that where houses were set farther apart and distances were greater it was not possible to call upon so many ladies in the space of an afternoon. It was especially pointless in that a polite call should be of no more than fifteen minutes’ duration and should not involve the recipient of it in the offer of any refreshment. (This was because a caller could not be constantly eating and drinking – they might have ten calls to make!)

The custom of taking port and cigars after dinner was not native to England. It came from Germany and was first introduced in honour of the Duke of Sussex, one of the sons of King George III, because he had lived a number of years in Germany. His example was to be endorsed by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, a few decades later. In a pre-celebrity age it was the aristocracy, and even more the monarchy, which initiated social trends.

The notion of a house being divided into male and female territory was not entirely new, but it became more pronounced in the Victorian age and in the decades that followed. The things that set the sexes apart were their conversation and their leisure interests. Men wanted to smoke, and could not do so in mixed company because the habit would be objectionable to ladies, who until the very end of the country-house era did not smoke in public or, for the most part, in private. Men played billiards, which women on the whole did not. Men went shooting and hunting and, though women did these things too, their strength and aptitude and therefore expertise were not considered great enough to be taken seriously. Men wanted to talk politics and money, which were not considered subjects on which women could have informed opinions. While the men were engaged in these activities, their wives and sisters and daughters sat in other parts of the house, immersed in idle gossip or in looking at the pictures, browsing in the library or writing letters. They must frequently have been bored to distraction by the company, especially if they met the same friends and relatives week after week while visiting different houses, but for members of their class this would have been a common experience.

One thing that such girls had often done was to travel abroad to spend a few months, or years, at a finishing school on the Continent. This was considered an essential means of giving them some exposure to the polite world. For decades there had been English girls’ schools in European cities whose expatriate population could support them, and pupils might either stay in a residential environment or with a family considered to be suitable hosts. This practice was surprisingly similar to arrangements made for young people today, except that there was more emphasis on formality. One region that hosted thousands of young women in the years before the First World War was the German Kingdom of Saxony. Its capital, Dresden, had a long-established British colony. It was a city famous for its art collections, and was in fact a favoured honeymoon destination for Anglo-Saxons. In the television drama
Upstairs, Down-stairs
the daughter of the Bellamy family, Elizabeth, is sent to Frau Beck’s in Dresden to spend a few months acquiring social polish (instead she returns filled with radical social ideas and half-understood philosophy that puts off the young men she meets). Young women of a more intellectual bent might stay in Erfurt, the seat of a famous university. If they were musical they would opt for Leipzig. Once the home of Bach, it was a city entirely given over to music. Here there was a social scene based on concerts and recitals. The cafés were filled with musicians and music students, every other man seemed to be a teacher of piano or violin. This was a Germany that seemed far removed from the sabre-rattling of the Prussians, a country of picnics and excursions and health cures, in which even the smallest city seemed to boast an opera house. It was a place in which many young women spent a golden interlude before returning to ‘come out’ in the London Season.