Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (13 page)

The architect chosen was Edwin Lutyens. By 1911, when building began, he was highly sought after and correspondingly busy. He loved romantic buildings and had recently completed a successful, evocative and highly praised restoration of a ruin on Lindisfarne Island, off the coast of Northumberland, creating a comfortable Edwardian country house. Now he was travelling to and fro between England and India, where he was planning and constructing an entire city: the administrative centre of the British Raj, New Delhi. He was, however, delighted to be given the chance to create a castle, and to do so from scratch with the sort of extravagant budget that Drewe could provide.

Unfortunately the funds available were not as limitless as Lutyens had expected. When the site was marked out, Drewe immediately ordered it reduced by half, and the building would, when finished, be only one-third of the size originally envisaged. Costs had to be cut from the beginning, and Lutyens was to be constantly exasperated by major changes that had to be factored in while construction was under way, but nevertheless the result was impressive. Now owned by the National Trust, it is admired by thousands of visitors every year, but its owner was never to see it complete. Julius Drewe died in 1931, the year the building was finished, but at that time not all the rooms were yet habitable.

Because the notion was to build an instant ancestral home, Castle Drogo had to incorporate several architectural styles. The Castle was built with a lack of symmetry that was quite deliberate, to imply that extensions had been tacked on by succeeding owners. The granite exterior seems forbidding and impregnable yet its lack of battlements – only a few turrets are castellated – gives it a curiously modern look. It is, as it was intended to be, an authentic fortress that could actually withstand a siege (in some places its walls are six feet thick). It has usable arrow slits and even a working portcullis. The sense of gradual evolution was evident in the interior details too. The stonework for the fireplace in the entrance hall shows some carvings that appear to be medieval and are clearly unfinished, as if abandoned halfway through by a long-forgotten stonemason.

Inside, the house is a great deal more comfortable than the grim ramparts would lead visitors to expect, yet here also large areas of bare granite are visible. The effect is softened by fittings and furnishings of oak – such as the billiard table and library shelves – designed by Lutyens himself. There is a ‘Georgian’ sitting room. There are comfortable bedrooms and an elegant library, in styles that suggest the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is a chapel, by no means a necessity by the 1920s, though this quickly took on the character of a memorial. There are also features that were, at the time of construction, very advanced: an electricity generator, set below the ramparts on the River Teign, and servants’ quarters that were nothing short of palatial.

Drewe was an enlightened employer. A devoutly Christian man, he felt the sense of obligation towards his servants that was the hallmark of a good aristocrat and, having succeeded in the world of commerce, was no doubt aware that happy employees work more readily. He said that he wanted them to have ‘a full view of the gardens’, a thing no Victorian employer would have permitted, since they might witness all manner of indiscretions on the part of their betters.

The kitchen and its storage facilities were very modern and highly efficient, with much use made of cool underground caves for keeping foodstuffs fresh. There were no cheerless attic rooms for servants at Castle Drogo. The butler’s quarters, which visitors can now see, contain a pleasant fireplace, a telephone and a collection of gramophone records. Though the butler was the most senior servant, conditions for those lower down the scale were also comparatively luxurious. Even the hallboy, on the lowest rung of the ladder for a male employee, occupied a ‘manservant’s room’ which compares very favourably with accommodation in any officer’s mess or expensive boarding school. The servants had a separate staircase and their own ‘wing’ in the Castle’s North Tower, but these were of the same materials as the rest of the building. Their rooms had access to light and fresh air and distant views, and they had a telephone box of their own. All this was complete and ready for use just as the house became a costly anachronism as well as a place of mourning.

Construction was considerably affected by the First World War, which meant the loss of virtually all the stonemasons working on the Castle, for some did not survive the conflict and others did not return to the area. Indeed building ceased entirely between 1917 and the end of the war. Another loss was that of Drewe’s eldest son Adrian (1891–1917) on the Western Front. It was for him more than anyone else that the house had been intended. After his death, Julius Drewe found it difficult to retain enthusiasm for the project. He became wheelchair-bound in the years after the war, and was disheartened by the length of time the building took to finish, as well as by the fact that it cost three times the original budget. He and his wife were able to move into part of the building in 1927, and the Castle was thus his home for a few years before his death.

Without doubt, Castle Drogo would have attracted ridicule from the inhabitants of more established and traditional country seats throughout Devon and beyond. Drewe did not allow this to distract him. His house soon blended into the landscape, where it has become an easily recognized feature to this day. The Castle had its own salmon leap and the fishing was excellent. It also hosted meets of the local foxhounds. Once they had had the chance to experience both its hospitality and its traditional country pursuits, it is likely that even the most snobbish among its neighbours regarded the house more favourably.

Before it was finished, though, Castle Drogo began to experience the problems of houses that were centuries older. Drewe had insisted on having flat roofs so that all the views from the hilltop location could be enjoyed. The roof was of concrete panels covered with asphalt and, when the panels expanded in changing weather, the asphalt cracked and the roof leaked. This became a major nuisance, and one that was never to be solved during the family’s tenure. Similarly, the amount of electricity generated from the River Teign varied according to the weather. When it was windy the supply would drop and all the lights in the Castle would dim dramatically, something that must have heightened the tendency to gloom among the tall granite halls. There was a sense of Fonthill Abbey about this place – of a house too grand to live in, doomed to fall victim to its own pretensions. It is sad to think of a family of great wealth sitting in damp and semi-darkness in the new home to which they had devoted such care and expense.

It was occupied by them for less than forty years – effectively a single generation – before being offered by Julius Drewe’s grandson Anthony to the Trust in 1973. Designed to look as if it had stood for a millennium, and intended to be a family seat for a few centuries, it had proved too much for them to handle a few decades later. Built by the twentieth century’s greatest British vernacular architect, one whose name will forever be synonymous with country houses, Castle Drogo was a glorious, but fittingly impractical, epilogue to the era of the grand country seat.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 the remaining vestiges of country-house life came to an end. The traditional features of this – the London Season, the weekend house parties, the shooting and hunting – could not go on as they had, and neither could the expectation that staff would always be there to ensure their smooth running. Unlike the previous war, when there was no conscription until two years into the conflict and male servants could linger in service without breaking the law, this time both males and females were compelled to report for war work or military service from the outset. The call-up for men began in 1938.

A number of country houses were destroyed as a result of requisitioning by the armed forces during the war. Not only were the interiors terribly altered and hacked about, but several burned to the ground as a result of carelessness – drunken soldiers or thrown-away cigarette ends could destroy the heritage of centuries. There were stories of panelling chopped up for use as kindling, and of American servicemen racing jeeps along the wide corridors of some houses.

When war broke out, houses all over the country were commandeered by the Government for a multitude of purposes. Some were used for training (Osterley Park in Middlesex became a school for the Home Guard). Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire was used both before and after 1945 as a re-education centre for high-ranking German officers. A wise owner knew not to wait for the Government to requisition his house, but to offer it first. If he did this you might hope to have some say in what was done with his property. The least popular option was to have it occupied by soldiers. A better fate was that it be used as offices, or perhaps a research centre, by some official body. The most well-judged solution was found by the Duke of Devonshire for his Derbyshire home, Chatsworth. He offered it to a girls’ boarding school which was being evacuated from a more unbearable part of the country. They accepted and moved in. The Duke was well aware that, with his home full of schoolgirls, it would be entirely out of bounds to soldiers!

Perhaps the most famous country house used in wartime was Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. A Victorian mansion that had neither beauty nor history to commend it, it had been bought – and saved from demolition – by the Government well before war broke out. It became, unbeknown to locals, the Code and Cypher School and the place in which a community of boffins cracked the secret codes of the Germans, making a vastly significant contribution to winning the war. Because of their isolation, the secrecy provided by their comparative remoteness and the walls that often ring estates, and because they were big enough to house large groups of people (the members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service who operated the computers at Bletchley Park slept in the stables, two of them occupying each horse’s stall), country houses were seen as being ideal for a multitude of official purposes.

For the majority of owners after the war ended it would never again be possible to assemble staff, even on the reduced scale to which the past few decades had made them accustomed. There was too much choice for young people of both sexes in terms of other work, both during the conflict and in the climate of economic recovery that followed. Domestic service had been deeply unpopular after the First World War among precisely the class of young men and girls that had previously been its mainstay, and their successors in the 1940s similarly had no wish to be tied down by the long hours and lack of mobility that characterized servants’ lives.

It was sometimes possible to attract staff with other forms of inducement: one Scottish owner of a house offered the chance to live rent-free in the lodge house at the gate, in return for the performance of a single domestic task – bringing him tea in bed each morning. Otherwise, the owners of houses learned to make do and, to their credit, adapted remarkably well to the new era. Technology would continue to make household work easier. The vacuum cleaner became increasingly common, and the washing machine put paid to the need even for a commercial laundry. To a very large extent the landowning families took a robust view of changed times and embraced the need for discomfort and economy as a sort of adventure, an attitude summed up in the popular cartoon of upper-class life in which the owners of a house sit in their damp and freezing drawing room with dogs on their laps. When one complains of cold, the wife replies laconically: ‘Put on another dog.’ Antiquated plumbing that makes peculiar noises (perhaps attributable to a family ghost!), leaking roofs, howling draughts and electric lights that go dim at intervals, are all greeted with rueful jokes and even affection.

Many houses passed out of private ownership and have found other and better uses as institutions of one sort or another. The isolation of country houses makes them suitable to become various types of hospital. Some become schools, or research institutes, or exhibition space (Finchcocks, a charming Queen Anne house in Kent, is a museum of musical instruments). Their grounds can often take on a life of their own as public attractions, as has been the case at Nymans, a house destroyed by fire, to leave only a romantic ruin surrounded by beautiful and highly popular gardens.

The story of the English country house is not, of course, all a matter of decline and misery. Since the 1950s more and more houses have opened to the public, though this is a mixed blessing. They can only do so if there is some reason for the public to be interested in them. If they have no noteworthy items left to show, or have no architectural merit, or are too far from main roads or centres of population, they are unlikely to thrive as tourist attractions. Before they can officially open they must, of course, be able to prove that they have made adequate provision for the health and safety of visitors and for the disabled. All this, as well as the need to set up and staff a tearoom in the stables, to print guide books and tea towels and postcards, and to pay the wages of local people to act as guides or waitresses (though a surprising amount of such work is done from straightforward goodwill by volunteers), can make the economics of opening to visitors seem self-defeating, at least initially.

Nevertheless, the rising value of property has helped, and with land for development always in demand it is sometimes possible to sell off odd corners of an estate to help with its upkeep. Alan Wyndham-Green, the bachelor owner of Godinton House in Kent, wished his house to be preserved for the public. With the nearby town of Ashford lapping at the edges of his park, he shrewdly sold off a corner of this, in the 1970s, as a means of paying for the rest, and created a trust that, following his death in 1996, has taken charge of Godinton and its contents.

Many houses can make additional income as wedding venues. A change in British law that allows marriages to be celebrated in premises other than churches and register offices has meant that the beautiful and historic surroundings offered by a country house can be used for this purpose. If the house in question has a chapel, so much the better. Otherwise a lawn for the marquee, and the library or the stables for the bar, can be all that is required. Other houses are active in promoting themselves as locations for photo shoots, film or television. Every country-house owner is aware of the publicity value of having his home appear as the setting for
Rebecca
,
The World of Wooster
or yet another remake of
Pride and Prejudice
. In some cases the publicity fallout will last for years, especially if a television series is repeated. Some of the biggest houses – Longleat and Woburn, for instance – have now had decades of experience in running parts of their estates as tourist attractions, overseen by professional appointees, and have nothing to learn when it comes to pleasing the public. Some landowners, of course, simply do not have financial worries on a scale large enough to threaten their homes. The Duke of Bedford, owner of Woburn Abbey, is also the owner of much of London’s Bloomsbury district, for instance. The Duke of Westminster, proprietor of Eaton Hall in Cheshire, owns an even bigger slice of London real estate which includes most of Mayfair and Belgravia.