Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (17 page)

Once there, there was no expectation that the young men should do any work, or indeed stay for the full academic course. This attitude had its origins partly in the fact that a degree had traditionally been so easy to buy or to obtain, partly that it was largely unnecessary, and partly in the fact that teaching staff, who were appointed for life to positions of prestige and comfort that they need do nothing to justify or earn, often had no interest in teaching or in the young undergraduates in their colleges. To an extent that Americans, with their meritocracy, would find difficult to understand, university was viewed as an interlude in which wealthy young men went hunting and played pranks and held supper parties. In Compton Mackenzie’s novel
Sinister Street
(1913–14) the central character, Michael Fane, arrives at Oxford in the 1890s where the new undergraduates are told by the Master of their college: ‘You have come to Oxford some of you to hunt foxes, some of you to wear very large and very unusual overcoats, some of you to row for your college and a few of you to work. But all of you have come to Oxford to remain English gentlemen.’ A generation later Charles Ryder, the hero of another novel set at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
, says to his friend Sebastian Flyte: ‘I think we should be tight [drunk] most of the time, don’t you?’ Flyte concurs.

Young men like these did not need a degree. Their futures were long-since planned, and the professions they went into would depend not on a degree diploma but on the contacts their families could mobilize. They would attain good positions because their fathers were acquainted with those who would employ them. Their backgrounds, homes, friends and interests were believed to be appropriate and therefore their integrity and their suitability could be guaranteed. Nobody pretended that matters were arranged otherwise. Nepotism of this sort was an accepted part of life. Until 1919 the Foreign Office recruited only young men who were personally known to the Foreign Secretary. As a system it worked surprisingly well and produced some very successful careers, which greatly benefited the country.

A particularly good example of the way the established order worked was Winston Churchill. Though not educated at university, he had a background as an army officer (which would have been considered just as good). He had brains and enterprise, but it was his father’s political contacts and, much more importantly, his mother’s manipulating of her extensive Society connections, that got his political career off to a good start.

For those who did attend university, the three years they spent on the Cam or Isis were mostly a chance to enjoy some frivolity before life became too serious. With the cult of games and the diversions of gambling and lethargy, there was enough to fill a young man’s life without the tiresome need to work. There was plenty of time for enjoyment, and autobiographies dealing with this time are understandably filled with happy memories.

John Galsworthy, chronicler of upper-middle-class Victorian society, describes how one of his characters arrives at Cambridge from Eton in the 1860s, a time when the languid, upper-crust novels of William Whyte-Melville were all the rage. Modelling himself on the heroes of these, as did many young men of the time, he quickly suffers a fate similar to theirs:

From continually reading about whiskered dandies, garbed to perfection and imperturbably stoical in debt, he had come to the conclusion that to be whiskered and unmoved by Fortune was quite the ultimate hope of existence. He passed imperceptibly into a fashionable set, and applied himself to the study of whist. He began to get into debt. It was easy, and ‘the thing’. At the end of his first term he had spent double his allowance.

The young man in question is not a member of the aristocracy, he is the son of a wealthy merchant, but in order to be fashionable he apes the behaviour and the tastes of those around him who are more socially exalted. The aristocracy disdains ‘trade’, does not look upon those in commerce as gentlemen, and therefore does not regard it as a matter of honour to settle debts with them. His father, a self-made man to whom one’s word is sacred, is baffled and disappointed on hearing of the debt and comes straight to Cambridge to settle it.

It is worth remembering that British attitudes to learning at this time were not the same as those to be found in the United States. In America the top drawer of society was made up of men quite different from their British counterparts. They were entrepreneurs, wealthy businessmen, and members of the learned professions of medicine and the law, which were widely respected as they required the longest study and the greatest measure of learning of any occupation.

In Britain, the elite have traditionally not needed book learning or academic qualifications. They could always employ clerks to do their writing – or even their thinking – for them. The aristocracy was a military, knightly caste, and the army officer was the nearest modern equivalent to a medieval knight. Other than this, the most suitable profession for an English gentleman was to farm his estate and, by serving in Parliament, help to govern the country. That is what the eldest sons of aristocratic families habitually did. Until the reform of the Parliamentary system began with the great Reform Act of 1832 it was common practice for aristocrats to have ‘pocket boroughs’ – parliamentary seats under their control – and to give these to sons or family friends. Some aristocratic boys at school and university already knew that, when they reached their majority, they would be given a seat in the House of Commons. Their younger brothers would go into the armed forces or the Civil or Diplomatic Service, or the Anglican Church – alternative ways of serving the nation.

For those who chose the Army, commissions in regiments were for sale. You could buy an officer’s rank, the price varying considerably. ‘Line regiments’ – infantry units that were not part of the Sovereign’s bodyguard – were affordable to the moderately wealthy. The cavalry cost far more, and the Guards regiments were astronomical. (The unfashionable branches of the Army, the artillery and engineers, which required technical knowledge and aptitude, did not sell commissions.) Prospective officers needed not only to satisfy their future comrades that they would fit in with the regiment’s social and military ethos, but also that they would be able to afford it. They needed a private income several times larger than the salary they would be paid. An officer was expected to live fashionably, which meant the possession of horses and the playing of polo (this required a whole string of ponies), perhaps a carriage, expensive clothes, a mistress, and the full panoply of feasting and drinking and other vices.

A temptation that assails armies after a decisive victory is to live on past glory and not adapt to changing times. The British had claimed the lion’s share of credit for the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (in fact, the last-minute arrival of the Prussians had been the decisive factor), and this had brought peace to Europe. There was no other prospective enemy in sight. The heyday of louche idleness among officers therefore took place in the years between 1815 and the Crimean War of 1853–6. Gambling was a besetting vice in some regiments. Young officers were expected to participate, but if any of them incurred debts he could not honour, he would be expected to resign his commission at once. The Crimean experience shook a number of these young men out of their complacent and hedonistic existence, for it was run with such incompetence, and resulted in such needless loss of life, that public and politicians alike were outraged. After extensive enquiries, committees and Bills in the Commons, the necessary restructuring took place. The ‘Cardwell Reforms’ of 1868–74 abolished the purchase of commissions and introduced a number of measures designed to ensure that efficiency would in future be considered before idle prestige. Nevertheless the connection between military service and social elitism was not seriously altered. There was still no question of officers being recruited from backgrounds other than the aristocracy or the gentry.

The expectation that only the well-born could, or would, serve as officers was common to all the old European powers. In many countries – France or Germany, for instance – it has disappeared today because of the cataclysmic changes undergone by those societies in the interim. In Britain, as is so often the case, no revolution has occurred to upset or replace the traditional order of things, and there is still a certain currency in the notion. A hundred years ago it was even more pronounced. Major General J. F. C. Fuller, who was a cadet at the Royal Military College in the 1890s, was to recall that: ‘When I went to Sandhurst we were not taught to behave like gentlemen, because it never occurred to anyone that we could behave otherwise.’ In parts of the British Army today this remains the case, and it is a system that works well.

That the British aristocracy had taken to the military profession with enthusiasm can be seen by the number of country houses that abound in family portraits of men in uniform. This is especially the case in Scotland, a nation that historically has been both poor (thus less able to support siblings in its great families) and warlike. Legendary Scottish regiments won fame throughout the world: the Black Watch, the Cameronians, the Seaforth Highlanders. Two in particular have had close connections with aristocratic families: the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders has been virtually the personal regiment of the Dukes of Argyll, and the Gordon Highlanders were raised by members of the eponymous family. When in 1794 Britain faced invasion by the French, Jean, the famously beautiful wife of the 4th Duke of Gordon, rode through the local countryside and attended fairs dressed in regimental uniform, promising a kiss to any man who enlisted.

Because the Army has a regimental structure by which landowning families can serve in the infantry regiment of their county – these include ‘The Buffs’ (East Kent Regiment), the Suffolks, the Norfolks, the Northumberland Fusiliers, the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry – the link between the aristocracy and the military world is thus a very close one. Some titled families raised their own entire units; the Percys, Dukes of Northumberland, formed the Percy Tenantry Volunteers in 1798 to defend their corner of England against the French. Almost exactly a century later, with the outbreak of the South African War or Second Boer War (1899–1902), the Scottish landowner Lord Lovat raised an auxiliary cavalry unit from among the employees on his estate and led it in action thousands of miles away on the African veldt. The Lovat Scouts, as the regiment was called, was no short-lived venture. It remained in existence as part of the British Army, and took part in both the First and Second World Wars.

Even where a family does not have a direct link of this sort with a regiment, it may well house, within its ancestral home, the regimental museum of a local unit. Military service did not have to be a full-time occupation. Throughout the 1790s volunteer regiments were raised across the country, and continued to exist thereafter. Cavalry was, as always, a more socially exalted branch of service than infantry, not least because officers need be able to afford their own horses, saddlery and uniforms, and the yeomanry regiment – a volunteer cavalry unit made up of farmers and country gentlemen – became an important part of upper-class social life within the counties. A local aristocrat, the natural leader of a district, was often appointed commanding officer. Members could design the uniform, and the result might be a riot of braid, frogging, feathers and tassels that looked like something from an operetta. One London unit, the Inns of Court and City Yeomanry, outfitted itself with such eye-catching splendour that the king, when inspecting them, said that they looked like ‘the Devil’s Own’ (a title they have been proud to bear ever since). Their social events, for a regiment would usually have at least one annual ball, gave opportunities for flirtation as well as for the showing off of uniforms. The annual camp, a fortnight under canvas in some familiar landscape during the summer, gave both horses and men the chance for exercise outside the hunting season. An archetypal unit of this sort was the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. In the years before the Great War this was commanded by the Duke of Marlborough. His cousin, Winston Churchill, was a major in it and its camp was, on at least one occasion, held in the grounds of the Duke’s home, Blenheim Palace.

This not only gives visitors to the house something else to look at but makes such a collection easier to maintain. The Duke of Rutland had for many years, at his home in Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, the museum of the 17/21st Lancers. The Dukes of Northumberland have, within the walls of Alnwick Castle, the museum not only of their own Tenantry Volunteers but of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. The connection between the apparently peaceful farming of nearby land and fighting wars overseas is often an unexpectedly close one.

The Guards were – as they still are – the apogee of the British Army, the regiments with which the aristocracy are most closely associated. The two cavalry regiments within the Household Division, the Life Guards and the Horse Guards (or ‘Blues and Royals’), are arguably the most aristocratic units of all, but the Foot Guards have an entirely similar ethos. In the nineteenth century there were three regiments: the Grenadier Guards (1656), the Coldstream Guards (1650) and the Scots Guards (1642). To these were added, in the twentieth century, the Irish Guards (1900) and Welsh Guards (1915), units that took on at once the same spirit of military excellence and social elitism that characterized their older counterparts. As with schools, so with regiments. The aristocracy supports them through generations and centuries, sending their sons to serve in succession. For a member of a good family this military interlude is a useful preparation for later life. Since the Cardwell Reforms officers have not been able to ignore the men under their care. They are expected to lead from the front and to earn the respect of their soldiers – to have professional as well as social qualifications for leadership. This may be the only time in the life of a landowning aristocrat that he deals on such an intimate level with people, en masse, of a class below his own. It gives him an easy confidence that will come in useful, years later, when his house is open to the public and he has to deal with them face to face.