Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (15 page)

Once that duty had been performed there was no need to devote further time or trouble to children. In a world where servants were cheap there was no shortage of staff to take on the chores of motherhood. First the wet-nurse, then the nanny and the nurserymaids, then the tutor or governess. Children might also have a footman assigned to them.

Why were parents so uninterested in those who, after all, represented the future of their dynasty? It might have been reasonable to expect the opposite – that they would be constantly exhibited to visitors, studied to seek out family resemblances, their thoughts and utterances noted for evidence of precocity. In other words, why were these children of privilege not spoiled and doted upon as was more commonplace among the bourgeoisie? Why did they so often suffer neglect, or form closer relationships with servants than with their own flesh and blood?

One general reason for strict treatment of the young was that life was hard and preparation for it must fit them to face its challenges. Children of the servant class were perceived to have no need for luxury or pampering. Let them instead become accustomed to plain living, plain food, modest ambitions. If their expectations were low, they could the more easily be contented with their lot. For those who lived in the nurseries of country houses, life must be hard for different reasons. They would inherit the good name of a great family. They must be worthy of it. If they were brought up in luxurious idleness, or with spoiled notions of their own importance (notions which many of them developed anyway), they could well bring disgrace upon the family through addiction to vice. More importantly, they must not develop extravagant ways that could endanger the family property and wealth. This concept is taken to an extreme by the author H. H. Munro (‘Saki’) in a short story called ‘The Butter Dish’. An aristocratic infant expresses the desire to put his foot in a butter dish, presumably just for the sensation of feeling the stuff ooze between his toes. His governess is horrified, stating that should he be allowed to do this he would grow up to be spoiled, selfish and profligate, and would ‘run through his fortune before he is thirty’. The urge, she says, should be beaten out of him forthwith. The story is, of course, humorous, but the point is serious. Those who are born to wealth and responsibility must learn at once that they cannot do as they like.

It was also commonplace that these were the children of parents whose marriages had been arranged and who were not personally fond of each other. Where there was little or no affection between husband and wife, there was unlikely to be warmth towards their offspring. The rising generation was left to the care of others who might, or might not, supply sympathy and affection. Very often the parents had themselves been the product of similarly loveless families, and did not know how to treat children with anything but indifference, exasperation or bewilderment or ignorance.

Sometimes it was made clear to the children that parental dislike was personal and not general. Edith Sitwell recalled that: ‘My parents were strangers to me from the moment of my birth.’ This was because she was not beautiful, and appeared too brainy. Her father disliked any traits in his children that could be traced to his wife’s family. Another intelligent and sensitive girl, Vita Sackville-West, had a similar experience. Her mother announced that she could hardly bear to look at her because she was so ugly.

A classic upper-class product was the young Winston Churchill, though his parents were untypical in that they were deeply fond of each other and had married for love. Their eldest son was devoted to both his parents, but they have gone down in history as aloof and unfeeling, uninterested in his company or his progress. This is probably something of an exaggeration, though they demonstrate just how preoccupied socially active parents could be. His father, Lord Randolph, was a Member of Parliament and was briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer, entirely focused on his career. Winston’s mother, the American heiress Jenny Jerome, was one of Society’s great beauties and a reputed lover of the Prince of Wales. She too was fully occupied with her role as hostess. The story avoids, however, becoming just another stereotypical anecdote, for Churchill’s mother later on resoundingly compensated for any earlier indifference.

Though Lord Randolph died young, before his son’s ascent to success had begun, Lady Randolph became a hugely important figure in her son’s life. It was she, through her wide-ranging and innumerable social contacts, who got her son gazetted to a socially smart regiment, who arranged the newspaper commissions that enabled Winston to work as a war correspondent while serving as an officer (something forbidden by regulations), and who enabled him to make the contacts that launched his career as a public speaker and politician. She did these things not out of a sense of duty but willingly, with enthusiasm. She and Winston were described, during the years that he was starting his career, as being more like brother and sister than mother and son. Many Victorian parents did not like children (the Queen herself despite having nine of them and a public image as a devoted mother, could not abide the sight of babies; she thought they looked like frogs). Once their young had grown up, parents might well behave very differently toward them.

Churchill’s nurserymaid, Mrs Everest, was in his childhood the parent-figure whom he learned to love. She was idolized by him, and in turn took the greatest interest in his activities and his life. She was unceremoniously dismissed by his parents once her two charges had grown up (Winston’s grandmother was apparently jealous of her influence over him), but he continued to visit her, and paid for flowers to adorn her grave after her death.

Even more significant was the influence of the nurserymaid who cared for Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who grew up to become 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. He was one of nine children. Ignored and openly disliked by his parents – he could never afterwards bring himself to feel the least affection for his mother – he received kindness only from an elderly servant who read Bible stories to him, and led him to the Christian faith that he was to combine with a political career. He was active in passing numerous pieces of legislation that improved conditions for the unfortunate, and indeed became the greatest British philanthropist of the nineteenth century – a man whose name is synonymous with goodness. So great was his impact on social welfare that the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus is a memorial to him. Such could be the result of a positive influence by a family servant.

Not all children were so fond of the women who ordered their lives in their earliest years. Lord Curzon and his siblings, growing up in the 1860s at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, were treated with outright savagery by their governess, Miss Paraman. He recalled that: ‘[S]he persecuted and beat us in the most cruel way and established over us a system of terrorism so complete that not one of us mustered up the courage to walk upstairs and tell our father or mother. She spanked us with her slipper, beat us with her brushes, tied us for long hours to chairs with our hands holding a pole or blackboard behind our backs, and shut us up in darkness.’

Though the experiences of children in the nursery or schoolroom of a country house would naturally vary, the notion of parents stiff and ill at ease with their own flesh and blood is one that is very widespread. Mutual awkwardness, and lack of subjects to talk about made contact between them an ordeal for both sides. Such visits were often a weekly appointment – in the Carnarvon family they took place on Sunday afternoons at teatime – and were probably dreaded by parents as much as by children.

Where then did the notion originate that parents and children need not know each other? It dates back centuries, at least to the Middle Ages. Before the discovery by psychologists that childhood is an important time in which young people’s characters are formed, it was seen simply as a training period in which they must learn the necessary life-skills as quickly and as quietly as possible. Aristocratic medieval parents sent their sons to the households of other nobles to take positions as pages and thus, in some sense, learn the workings of a great house through acting as a servant in it, performing menial jobs such as waiting upon table. This notion survived throughout the age of monarchies, for boys of noble birth continued to act as pages at Royal Courts. (In Germany, for instance, aristocratic young men in livery served the guests and then cleared the plates at palace banquets.)

The sense of inter-generational antipathy was allegedly expressed by King George V: ‘My father was scared of his father, I was scared of my father, and I’m damned well going to see to it that my sons are scared of me.’ This notion of parenthood is clearly one with which many people today would be uncomfortable, but it fitted the times in which these people lived. Parents were not supposed to be friends to their children. Their duty was to see that they were brought up properly. They themselves did not have the necessary skills to deal with childhood medical complaints or to see to the children’s education, therefore they employed others to do these things – qualified and experienced nurses and nannies and teachers – sometimes the same people who had looked after them in their own childhoods. This might be seen as neglect, but from another perspective could be interpreted as devotion – obtaining the best available specialist care for them. And rather than wanting to witness their son’s and daughter’s first halting words or first steps, they would prefer to wait until their offspring were articulate and accomplished.

It is hard to understand the attitudes of past ages from the perspective of our own time, especially given the notion of the ‘child-centred’ upbringing that is taken for granted today. If the culture of the class and the generation to which you belong dictates that you behave in a certain way – if everyone around you who is in a similar situation follows a certain code of behaviour – you tend to do so too. If you are the mother of small children and your husband is the lord of the manor and the owner of an estate, you yourself will have a great deal to do. Your primary function is not to bring up your children but to make possible the smooth running of the home and the estate, oiling the wheels through the tasks you carry out. You are expected to spend a large percentage of your time writing or answering letters. You are to be at home to callers, to entertain your husband’s friends or tenants, to visit the local sick and poor, to support local charities, open fetes, attend church on Sundays. If your husband is standing for, or sitting in, Parliament, and has an official career as well as his role in the locality of your home, you will have twice the entertaining and visiting to do.

You are also ultimately responsible for the servants. You will sometimes be the one who interviews applicants for posts as maids or footmen or housekeepers. You are the one to whom they come with serious complaints. You discuss the day’s tasks and their progress every day with the housekeeper. You plan the menus with the cook. Everyone expects you to do this. If you did not, you would be seen as failing in your duty. It is known, or assumed, that you have servants to deal with the upbringing of your children while you get on with the more important business of running your household. It is taken for granted that your children will not be very interesting until they are much older, and that until they have learned some basic social skills – until they can be shown to visitors without the danger that they will embarrass you and bring disgrace upon the family – they had better be kept out of sight. It is simply part of the culture to which you and everyone else belong that your children are best left in the hands of experts until such time as they have something to offer and can join the adult world.

For the same reason it will be entirely usual to send the boys away from home at what might seem a frighteningly young age. By the Edwardian era prep schools (at that time called ‘private schools’) junior boarding schools which prepared boys for entry to the great English public schools, at that time called ‘private schools’ – were taking pupils from the age of eight. At thirteen they would pass on to their senior schools. Not every boy followed this route. Delicate or highly strung sons might be educated at home, by a tutor who might be the local curate or, more commonly, a young man of intelligence but limited means who had recently graduated from university. There was a long and honourable tradition of such men undertaking to educate young gentlemen and aristocrats. To understand the life for which the country house served as backdrop, it would be useful perhaps to follow the young men from home to school or training and into the world beyond. Their professions and pursuits, their friendships and attitudes all explain something of the mysteries of upper-class British life.

If there was a naval or military tradition in the family, boys might go direct into the Service without passing through a public school first. Those destined for the Army could attend Sandhurst, the Royal Military College, from the age of about twelve in the early nineteenth century. This type of early start was especially true of the Navy, for, unlike the fashionable parts of the Army, service at sea required considerable technical expertise. Navigation and the other necessary skills took time to learn. Boys of twelve would be appointed Midshipmen and sent to sea to literally ‘learn the ropes’, so that by sixteen or eighteen they would be fully functioning officers. Queen Victoria’s grandsons, Prince ‘Eddy’ and Prince George (later King George V), entered the Royal Navy as boys and undertook a three-year voyage around the world between 1879 and 1882 aboard HMS
Bacchante
. In 1903, when the Queen’s former summer home at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight was turned into a naval training school for boys too young to go to the Naval College at Dartmouth, the practice continued of beginning the royal children’s careers early by sending them there. Three of George V’s own sons attended (the later Kings Edward VIII and George VI, as well as the Duke of Kent), as did their cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Despite this heavy patronage of the Navy by the Royal Family, and despite its undoubted prestige as the world’s greatest maritime force (a status it maintained until the Second World War), it was never as popular with the upper class as the Army, and neither would the Royal Air Force be, once that was established in 1918.