Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (29 page)

But the owners too had changed. There had been a revolution in their expectations. By the late 1940s the landowning families had already lived through two decades of decline. An entire generation had grown up accustomed to financial hardship and sacrifice. They were used to seeing pictures disappear from their walls and acres sold from their grounds to pay taxes. The outbreak of war in 1939 had then brought nearly six years of much more acute privation and of the need to make do. Sleeping in unheated bedrooms, dining in semi-darkness on rationed food, and doing the cooking themselves were by now routine experiences for many. The whole nation had had to become much tougher, and the upper class followed – indeed had often set an example and led – this trend. The more self-reliant and enterprising of them saw it as a challenge, an adventure, a necessary patriotic duty, for ‘doing one’s bit’ was a national watchword and there was a prevalent feeling that sacrificing peacetime luxuries was of direct benefit to the war-effort. To the owners of country houses, as they dined upon spam or rabbit pie, the ways of their Edwardian forebears will have seemed as wanton and wasteful as they did to other members of society. The notion of being awoken by a servant with an ironed newspaper, commonplace only thirty years earlier, would have been a laughable extravagance.

With this privation, a new era of informality arrived both in country houses and in the world beyond. Clothes could not be as formal because material was difficult to obtain. Schoolboys at Eton ceased to wear the top hat after 1940, partly because it was no longer possible to get them made, and partly because everyone was now required to carry a gas-mask in a satchel over their shoulder, and the putting on of this every day meant that a hat was simply one encumbrance too many. At home the boys’ relations, if they were not in uniform, might well be wearing pullovers and Wellington boots around the house instead of tweed suits, frock coats or day dresses. The fact that clothing remained rationed until the early 1950s meant that, even after peace came, there could be no sudden return to pre-war elegance.

As a class, the landowners no longer saw themselves as a race apart. They had shared not only – on the part of men – the dangers of the front line with their former servants, as they had done in the First World War, they had also experienced with other classes the hardships of the Home Front – air-raids, rationing, blackouts, and anxiety over loved ones. British society could not, during those years, be said to consist of ‘two nations’ (a phrase used by Victorian novelist and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to describe the isolated worlds of rich and poor). Even the wife of the current Prime Minister, the aristocratic Winston Churchill, made the gesture of wearing in public a hat that was like those of female factory-workers – effectively a simple headscarf tied turban-fashion to keep hair out of the way. This equality was not as universal as national mythology has suggested. number of wealthy families had sent their children – or even gone themselves – to safety in North America at the start of hostilities. Nevertheless there was a sense of common hardship and common purpose that went some way to eroding class differences.

The British public was getting used to equality. Rationing of food meant that, for the first time in history, all classes had access to the same level of nutrition. The poorest were able to eat better than ever before, and the general health of the population rapidly improved. The Government set officials to work on ‘post-war planning’ long before the conflict actually ended, to design new towns, new schools, new recreational facilities. All of this led to an expectation that once peace came there would be a wealth of change in environment, opportunities and attitudes, and that a more equitable sharing of resources would result. In one field – education – this process had already begun. From 1944, Oxford and Cambridge began recruiting undergraduates from a much wider range of social backgrounds.

Regarding the upper class, the public had developed an increasing impatience. This class, as represented by the pre-war Conservative Government, was roundly blamed for failing to see the war coming and for involving Britain in it. Every reluctant soldier at the front blamed the Conservatives for putting him there, and astute observers were aware that as soon as the electorate had a chance to take revenge they would do so. Though the Government had been a coalition throughout the conflict it contained a number of prominent Conservatives – most conspicuously Churchill himself, whose able leadership would not save him from electoral defeat.

Though a general election did not take place until July 1945 – and result in a landslide victory for the Labour Party – the writing was already on the wall. In the spring of 1944 there was an important by-election at Bakewell in Derbyshire. One of the candidates was the Marquess of Hartington, eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire. Like many aristocrats, the Devonshires had always nominated candidates for the local parliamentary seat and expected the populace to endorse them. On this occasion Hartington, though a man of genuine integrity and ability, was routed by his socialist opponent (a serving soldier, the Marquess was in any case killed in Normandy only a few weeks later). The people of Bakewell were sending a deliberate massage that they would no longer do as their betters expected them to – in some cases, the new era arrived even before the war was over.

The decisive victory of a Labour government brought in an era of nationalisation and equality (‘We are the masters now!’ yelled one labour M.P. during a debate in the House of Commons – though he would later defect to the Conservatives). The life of the country house patently did not fit with the social and political climate of these times. Though industry was expanding and there was little unemployment, austerity measures still applied to many areas of life and shortages were to remain for years after 1945. The enjoyments of the upper class remained muted for a time.

This feeling did not last long, however. By 1951 the Conservatives were back in power, to remain there until 1964. The country gradually became wealthier, but now there were other perspectives, other priorities. During the ’50s, the wages of young people soared in proportion to those of other age groups. This created the ‘teenager’ as a part of the social landscape – a group whose spending-power deserved respect – and it also put the final nail in the coffin of domestic service as a career for young Britons. Servants, thereafter, would increasingly be recruited from poorer places overseas.

The notion of the political house party, so much a feature of British society from Georgian times onward, had survived the Great War and had flourished through the twenties and thirties (the great hostesses – Nancy Cunard, Lady Diana Cooper, Lady Astor – were among the major personalities of the day). It lasted until the 1960s. The Prime Minister from 1957-63, Harold Macmillan, was the personification of the old-school English gentleman. He disdained the use of Chequers (the ‘stately home’ that is the official weekend home of British premiers) because he preferred his own country residence, Birch Grove in Sussex. His successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (who happened to be the 14th Earl of Home, a member of an ancient Scottish noble family) was the last Prime Minister to possess his own ancestral country house, but by the time he took on the Premiership scandal had already severed the link between political machinations and manicured parkland.

Cliveden was the country home of the Astors, an imposing house overlooking a bend in the River Thames in rural Berkshire. At a party there in 1961 John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, met a call-girl named Christine Keeler. They had a brief affair, though he ended it after a few weeks. It was a year before rumours of this reached the public but they provoked widespread outrage, for it transpired that Miss Keeler had also had a close friendship with the Senior Naval Attache at the Soviet Embassy. The risk to national security in an era of international tension (1962 was the year of the Cuban missile crisis) was grave. Profumo, challenged to make a statement in the House of Commons in March 1963, denied that there had been any impropriety. When the truth came out and it was found that he had misled his colleagues he was forced to resign. The Prime Minister’s own resignation followed shortly afterward. The Conservative Government limped on for a further year but was then defeated in a general election. Any notion of powerful political figures gathering for relaxation at a country house would from now on be a cause of sniggering speculation and innuendo on the part of press and public.

There were other factors that had already eroded respect for the upper class. In 1951 two young men in sensitive Foreign Office posts, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, had defected to Moscow and been revealed as Soviet spies. The information they had given to Stalin’s government had caused immense damage to the West. Both had been from highly-educated, socially-influential backgrounds of the sort that were thought to make them automatically suited to the Diplomatic Service, though it had somehow been overlooked that they had had strong communist sympathies while at Cambridge in the thirties. In 1963 another man from the same circle, Kim Philby, also defected to Russia. The public wondered how many more effete young men would turn out to have been traitors. The notion that the upper class had an automatic right to rule because of background, or connections, or inherent understanding of politics and diplomacy was in tatters. That homosexuality had also been involved heaped further fuel on the flames.

And what of upper class women? They too had had to endure scandal, both in fiction and in reality. The book that outsold all others at the beginning of the sixties was
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
, a novel written by D.H. Lawrence over thirty years earlier but which had not been available in Britain until it was issued, by Penguin, in 1960. It told the story of a titled lady who had an affair with a gardener on her estate – an unthinkable breach of propriety to members of her class. It was not the subject-matter so much as the treatment of this relationship that caused an official outcry, however. The language and description were earthy and vivid, the sexual encounters rough and animalistic. The four-letter words that littered the text had never before been used in print in ‘polite’ literature. The result was that Penguin was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. The trial attracted immense public interest and copies of the book (in paperback, and thus affordable) flew off the shelves. The court found in favour of the publisher, opening the floodgates for any others with similar inclinations. Some of those who read the novel may have known that Lawrence had based his plot in part on reality. The literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell had allegedly had such a relationship with a man on her estate (a sculptor of garden statuary rather than, in the novel, a gamekeeper). This too went some way to diminishing respect for the ‘ruling class’ whose opportunities and education, it had been assumed, would place them above such basic behaviour.

If any doubts remained, they were dispelled by the divorce, in 1963, of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. The Duchess, who as Margaret Whigham had been Debutante of the Year in 1938, was famously beautiful and had been previously married. Such was her sexual voracity that her husband cited an incredible 88 co-respondents, allegedly including government ministers, members of the Royal Family and at least one film star. The country was torn between shame and curiosity as the details emerged.

After the War there was, as we have seen, little left of the institution of domestic service. With so few houses retaining large staffs, the hierarchy that had seemed so impregnable within living memory was obsolete and unsustainable. Stewards, under-butlers and footmen disappeared, as did the ‘pugs’ parlour’ and the notion of senior and junior servants. Though the maid, always the most common type of domestic, remained, the ‘housekeeper’ – formerly a specific title for the most senior woman below stairs, and a word that inspired considerable respect – had become a loose term for a general female servant who might be little more than a daily cleaning woman, and who could well be the only domestic on the premises. She might combine cooking with her cleaning work, and ironically thus became a latter-day version of that Victorian stock-character, the maid-of-all-work. Such was the change in both circumstances and attitudes, however, that she was often treated from the beginning as a member of the family, and her employers would take it for granted that they had to do their own cooking when it was her weekly night off.

Though the ‘downstairs’ side of country house life thus became all but extinct, the ‘upstairs’ has survived largely intact, if not in the full glory of its golden age then at least in the rituals and the institutions that make up the life of the upper class. The annual round of rural events goes on as it always has, and with undiminished popularity. There are still garden parties on the lawns of country houses. There are still village fetes at which aristocrats present the prizes. There are cricket matches, point-to-points, horse-trials. Packs of hounds, and galloping horsemen, still bring colour to the winter countryside even though the Government made foxhunting illegal a few years ago, for the hunts still meet and go through the motions – it is just that the fox is no longer killed by the hounds. In one indication that the ‘posh’ are becoming even posher, polo – an expensive game that requires each player to have a string of ponies – has become widespread at public schools, not one of whom boasted a team a generation ago. The upper class, for all its troubled recent history, is not in hiding and is still able to go about its business with vigour and enthusiasm. There is, in the Country Landowners’ Association, a professional body for those who oversee estates.

Like their forms of leisure, the institutions of British Society go on as before. No revolution has overthrown them, no force – political, social or economic – has proved strong enough to remove or even to seriously challenge them. The public schools, the training ground of Britain’s social elite, flourish today as they did in the reign of Victoria. Some have closed, or merged, as a result of changing fashion or difficulty in keeping financially afloat, but new ones have also opened. Because their teaching and facilities are often excellent, they remain fully subscribed and highly respected even in a meritocratic age. The ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, now much more intellectually selective than in the days when aristocrats merely had to choose to attend, have shut out a large percentage of upper class youth. These have responded by colonising other seats of learning, giving to some universities a reputation for parties, debutantes and field sports that they did not have even a decade or two previously.