Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (14 page)

The season for opening a country house begins at Easter and ends in the autumn, but increasing numbers of properties have discovered that Christmas offers another lucrative opportunity to lure visitors through the gates. Such is the appeal of a grand rural house in the festive season that it is not difficult to create a suitable atmosphere. In some cases this is deliberately nostalgic – Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire annually stages a Victorian/Edwardian Christmas, with dummy servants and family members in appropriate settings and costumes. Chatsworth, on the other hand, puts on a lavish decorative display that has nothing to do with the history or contents of the house. It is themed, in much the same way that the windows of department stores are at this time of year, and is highly popular.

The age is long past, in other words, in which to live in an English country house is an unalloyed pleasure. Such a life was relatively carefree until about the middle of the nineteenth century, but for most families it has been growing steadily more difficult ever since. For every generation it is a challenge to maintain this heritage, which can seem not so much a privilege as a millstone around their necks. What is often very obvious when listening to the owners talk about their homes, however, is the affection they feel for them. To grow up knowing that, for generations and centuries past, your forebears have lived in these rooms, dined at this table, strolled in this garden, ridden from these stables, and that, equally, generations of servants spent their lives in service to your family, is a heady feeling indeed. It inspires determination to hang on to this heritage by any means possible and to do whatever you can to preserve it. No wonder the owners of these houses will so often put up a fight!

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UPSTAIRS

‘I suppose no children so well born or so well placed ever cried so much or so justly.’

Lord Curzon (1859–1925), recalling his upbringing

Just as the public has notions of what a house should look like, so it has ideas – collected from a host of novels, films and television dramas – about the archetypal owner. English literature, as well as the visual media, have seen to it that the country landowner is a stock figure in the national imagination. As presented by the twentieth-century author or dramatist, the titled owner of an estate should be either peppery and irascible or, more commonly, amiable, bumbling, vague, modest, inoffensive, somewhat scruffy and – virtually compulsory – eccentric. The perfect example is the obsessively pig-breeding Lord Emsworth in P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings chronicles. A real-life personification of this fictional figure was the 8th Duke of Bedford, the first member of the high aristocracy to open his house – Woburn Abbey – to the public on a commercial basis. One of those grandees who dressed casually to the extent of being unrecognizable as a member of the upper class, he was, according to his son, sometimes spotted by visitors sitting on a bench in the grounds. Mistaking him for a tramp, some shared their sandwiches with him. He was certainly not the only member of his class to avoid a showy appearance, for there is truth in the oft-repeated story of landowners who gave their new tweed suits to their gamekeepers to ‘wear in’, until they looked and felt comfortable enough to put on themselves. Today that essential garment of the English country gentleman, the Barbour jacket, is regarded as an embarrassment to its wearer if it looks new, and some will go to great lengths – such as putting it for days in the bottom of a dog-basket – to give it a suitably old and shabby appearance.

There are other stereotypes that are summoned up by the image of the country house. The mistress may well be a forceful, formidable personality, bristling with eccentricities of her own. The daughter is traditionally headstrong, either because she has always been spoiled or because she is trying to get some fun out of life before being married off to an uninteresting and unsuitable older man. The son and heir may be a wastrel, the despair of his parents, but he is often charming nonetheless. The most important family member is frequently the owner’s mother – the dowager. Having been the wife of the house’s previous owner (since his death she has been banished to a ‘dower house’ on the estate), she can be relied upon to criticize everything about the running or decorating of her former home, and to make her daughter-in-law’s life a misery. Such is the power of this personage that the word ‘dowager’ has come into general use to describe any elderly and genteel lady who is firm in her views. The Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by Maggie Smith in
Downton Abbey
, follows in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Lady Bracknell in
The Importance of Being Earnest
.

While to our way of thinking upper-class people living on country estates in the Victorian and Edwardian eras seem to have been idle for much of their time, we must remember that they thought of themselves as very busy. Not, of course, compared to their servants or the workers on their estates, and not in the sense that their descendants are today, juggling jobs and commuting. Nevertheless even for women, who had very little chance to do anything useful, the days could be full. The elaborate system of calling on other equally unoccupied women, or upon local worthies, occupied a surprising amount of time. So did the ‘good works’ that were such a significant part of local charity at that time. Some instances were of vital importance, others a matter of whim. One fictional example can be seen in Benjamin Britten’s opera
Albert Herring
, set in Edwardian East Anglia. The story begins with a visit by the vicar to the home of the formidable Lady Billows, the occupant of the ‘big house’. She is in the habit of rewarding virtue among local maidens with an annual gift of money and with the title of May Queen, bestowed by her at the village fete. It is the vicar’s task to select those eligible and recommend the winner. The plot hinges on the fact that no suitably virtuous young woman can be found, and in a break with precedent a man – Albert Herring, a delivery boy for the local grocer – is chosen as meeting the requirements of good behaviour. Intoxicated by his triumph, he spends his winnings getting intoxicated in another sense, and loses any claim to virtue. In the character of Lady Billows – as given to snorts of outrage as any gin-drinking colonel – gentle fun is poked at a character that had, and continues to have, real-life counterparts everywhere.

To some modern sensibilities the notion of an aristocrat rewarding the behaviour of others may seem risible. It did not seem that way to people at the time. She was presumably wealthy, they were not. If she was willing to part with money, they were willing to accept it. Before the age of media celebrity in which we live, it was the local aristocracy that provided ‘celebrity’ and brought glamour to local events, in the way that the Royal Family still does. The attractive young wife of the heir to an estate – a duchess or marchioness or countess – could attract a crowd to the opening of a church fete and be greeted with polite applause. Her beauty and her clothes would be admired, her utterances repeated afterwards. In a small town today the Christmas lights would be switched on by a television personality (probably one who is appearing in pantomime at a nearby theatre). It was not the equivalent of such people – actresses and music-hall stars – who performed this sort of task in the years before 1914, but some titled personage (or their attractive daughter) who lived in the area. It is worth remembering, too, that these people were not necessarily unknown outside the place in which they lived. There were, from late Victorian times onward, a host of illustrated papers or magazines in which they featured.
The Sketch
became the most popular, joining the already-existing
Illustrated London News
. These papers covered, as a matter of course, the events of the Season and the gatherings of the rich and titled. They published photographs of young women as they ‘came out’. (
Country Life
, with its frontispiece portrait of a young woman about to be married, continues this tradition.) Their clothes would be admired by shop-girls; the announcement of their engagement would be greeted by readers with envy or sneers, depending on whether or not the fiancé was handsome. Though coverage of them was always respectful, they were part of popular culture in a way that is no longer the case. The public would often know the names of younger sons or elder daughters in the great families, and would follow the doings of ‘black sheep’ (in Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
the appearance of Sebastian Flyte in front of a magistrate, and the resulting headline ‘Marqui’ Son Unused to Wine’, causes widespread hilarity) with the same amusement that is nowadays given to gossip about film stars and pop singers. Something of this is still apparent in the celebrity magazines of today –
OK
and
Hello!
– and, in the same manner, Victorian housewives and female workers would look through
The Sketch
and dream of being able to dress like the women on its pages. Instead of covering movie premieres, the illustrated press would send photographers to Monte Carlo to take pictures showing the season’s fashions worn by expatriate British ladies as they walked on the promenade.

Aristocracy continues to reward endeavour and to assist the local community, and even in an egalitarian age such gestures are both useful and appreciated. The Duke of Northumberland maintains a Prize Fund to which charities can apply for grants. The estate office at Alnwick Castle also gives work experience, or internships, to young people. The notion of good works by local gentry – no doubt derided by some as ‘paternalism’ – is unlikely to die out completely.

On the whole it is true to say that families who had lived for generations in the same house or the same area took an interest in the local people. Whatever some may think of such ‘paternalism’ or of the notion of noblesse oblige, there can be no question that it brought benefits to the community. The support of local charities was one of the principal functions of the lady of the house, assisted by whichever daughters or sisters were to hand. Alms houses are still to be found in numerous towns and villages, built and maintained by the lord of the manor for the benefit of the local aged, no doubt including his own former servants. Remembering that, until the advent of the National Health Service in the mid-twentieth century, there were no public hospitals and that all of them were thus private foundations, either set up by wealthy individuals or by subscription, it is important to note that many cottage hospitals were the gift of local families, who maintained a benevolent interest in them. There were other benefits conferred on the local people too. One example was the owner of the beautiful Montacute House in Somerset, W. R. Phelips, who was responsible for installing piped water, mains gas and a modern sewage system in the nearby village. We should not underestimate the extent to which the presence of an ancestral family in an area could benefit even those who had no personal connection with them or their house.

The milestones in the lives of the landowning family were often celebrated throughout the neighbourhood, usually with the help of funds or provisions sent down from the house. It was common practice for the tenants on the estate to make a presentation – paid for by a collection among them – to the eldest son (if not his brothers as well) when he reached his majority. When he married, the local community would decorate the streets with flowers, bunting and messages of loyalty. The Harpur-Crewes, owners of Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, had just such a relationship with their neighbours, tenants and employees. When Sir Vauncey Harpur-Crewe was married in 1876, the town of Melbourne erected a large sign that read: ‘Welcome. Long Life and Happiness’ (an arch bearing this sort of greeting was more usual). The young couple, as they travelled to Calke from their wedding, were cheered by enthusiastic crowds and their carriage escorted by mounted yeomanry in plumed helmets. When their son reached the age of twenty-one in 1901, he was presented with an elaborate illuminated address by his father’s tenants. It bore his picture and the family coat of arms, and had a decorative border that showed views of the estate. When the heir to the Earl of Warwick, Guy Greville, attained his majority, the celebrations included the issuing of drink to the tenantry. An immense iron pot is among the artefacts that visitors to Warwick Castle can still see. A note beside it was written by a Victorian servant: ‘I myself have seen this punch bowl filled four times when the present Earl came of age. It holds 18 gallons of Brandy 18 gallons of rum 100 gallons of water lemons & sugar in proportion. Jan 11th, 1872.’

A common perception of upper-class British children of this era is that they were unloved and kept at arm’s length by their parents. Confined to nurseries and schoolrooms high above the main floors of the houses they could be forgotten except on special occasions, their upbringing and education left in the hands of specialist servants who came to know the children better – and received more devotion from them – than their mothers and fathers. This was by no means a universal attitude, however, and there is much evidence of indulgent, affectionate parents. There were aristocratic houses in which the children dined not in a distant nursery but at the family table, and whose mothers and fathers played games or read to them, but too many memoirs bear out the image of cold indifference for the image to be dismissed as untypical. A significant number of upper-class children, many of whom went on to do important things, appear to have grown up remote from the love or guidance of their elders.

While we are often surprised and even outraged to hear of such treatment of children by their nearest relatives, it would help if we tried to understand something of the perspective from which parenthood was approached by men and women of this class (and for that matter other classes) at this time. Childbirth was unavoidable for upper-class women charged with producing an heir. The Victorian aristocracy tended toward large numbers of children for the same reason that poorer families did: because it was likely that illness or accident would cause the loss of some before they reached adulthood. Large broods were, in any case, the fashion. Queen Victoria had nine children, and Society followed her example. For a delivery in 1859 she used chloroform to ease the process. This had been a risky, somewhat experimental procedure at the time, but its success in the case of Her Majesty made it at once widely popular, and easier births gave further impetus to an already existing tendency to produce numerous offspring.