Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (30 page)

The ‘smart’ regiments of the British Army continue to recruit officers from top-drawer backgrounds. A Guards officer today is as gorgeously dressed, and as aristocratic, as he would have been in the reign of Edward VII, though the studied languor will now conceal a thorough professionalism and a familiarity with modern weaponry. The young woman he marries will normally be his female counterpart – privately educated, polished in speech and behaviour, linked by blood or school or merely by party-circuit with a host of similar people, part of a network that remains vigorously alive.

Even the Season continues. It is much less conspicuous than before 1939, because it commands far less media attention. The grand town houses of the aristocracy have almost all gone, and therefore the balls that once provided set-piece occasions for the launch of young women into the world have been replaced by more informal cocktail parties, perhaps at one of the gentlemen’s clubs. Presentations at Court were discontinued in 1957, though the impetus came not from any Labour government but from the Queen, for the event served no useful purpose and could be a chore for all those involved. Debutantes no longer traipse past the monarch, though they do still study the social graces. Young women continue to ‘come out’, though those that do are often the daughters of international businessmen rather than aristocrats, and the events they attend owe a good deal to corporate sponsors. Queen Charlotte’s Ball, first held in 1780 for the wife of George III, still takes place as a charity fundraising event. Instead of sinking in practiced curtsies to a sovereign, the girls bend the knee toward a giant cake, the successor to the one with which Queen Charlotte celebrated. For young women of patrician background, whose families are confident enough of their social standing not to need the endorsement of formal ceremony university, or ‘gap year’ foreign travel, provide a more practical and enjoyable introduction to the world.

The shops and the clubs patronised by the aristocracy, the tailors and hatters and gunsmiths, are still doing business, as expensive and exclusive today as ever. There are no circumstances foreseeable in which, in this aspect at least, the world of Downton is going to end within our lifetime.

EPILOGUE: THE HOUSES

The State Apartments keep their historical renown,
It’s wiser not to sleep there, in case they tumble down;
But still, if they ever catch on fire
Which, with any luck, they might,
We’ll fight for the Stately Homes of England.

Noël Coward, ‘The Stately Homes of England’, 1926

‘It is a fact, patent to all and deplored by some, that the large-scale private paradise is already obsolescent.’

Clough Williams-Ellis

‘What country houses of any size, one wonders, can hope to survive the next fifty years?’

Osbert Sitwell

For almost a century the great houses of Britain have been in decline, suffering from crippling maintenance costs, taxation, the difficulties of staffing them, and even the trend towards smaller families, which naturally produces fewer heirs and family members who can help. As we have seen, one significant blow was the loss of so many young men in the First World War. The heirs to many estates perished in the mud of Flanders and left their parents with little incentive to keep the houses going, as was the case with Castle Drogo, where the building was not even complete when its owner’s eldest son was killed.

Perhaps the most poignant reminder of this sacrifice is a plaque in the cloisters at Eton College that commemorates the Grenfell family. Listed on it are the names of seven young men who died in Britain’s wars. Of these, one was killed in the Matabele War (1896) and another, two years later, in the famous cavalry charge at Omdurman. A third died of fever while serving in India. The other four were lost in the Great War, three of them in the same place – Ypres – and at the same time, the summer of 1915. Between them they won a DSO and a VC, but this will have brought scant comfort to their surviving relatives. The family home, Wilton Park in the nearby town of Beaconsfield, was left with no heir. It eventually passed into the hands of the Army, who in the 1960s demolished the Regency house, filled in its ornamental lake and now run a language school there.

No one could possibly pretend that the twentieth century, or indeed the present one, represents in any sense a ‘golden age’ for the English country house, or for those who live in them. However agreeable it is to dwell among beautiful architecture and museum-quality artefacts, many owners faced, and continue to face, a continuous struggle to keep their heads above water financially. Great houses were still being built up to the First World War, and even beyond. Yet Noël Coward’s song, written in the 1920s, reflects a situation that was already painfully true for many owners – that of selling paintings by the row, surviving with primitive and broken plumbing, and even hoping that a wing of the house would burn down so that insurance could be claimed. The rot had set in with the collapse of agriculture in the 1870s, and the situation grew worse with the introduction of new forms of taxation. In other words, four or five generations of a landed family may have been fighting a rearguard action to protect their heritage, and this state of affairs will be all they will ever have known.

It was quite obvious to observers by the end of the Great War that the country house no longer had a long life expectancy. So much was now conspiring against it, but principally the combination of greatly increased taxation with greatly reduced land values. The owners simply could not win. Taxation was a more serious threat that at any time in the past. Estate duties, already a generation old (they had begun in 1894), went up to 40 per cent in 1919 on estates worth more than £2 million. Rates and taxes were, by the 1920s, taking on average 30 per cent of the rentals paid to estates. Six million acres were sold throughout the country. As the great houses struggled, the suburbs expanded, swallowing up thousands of acres of agricultural land, and speculators were often waiting to buy any real estate that a family could not afford to maintain. Many country houses were pulled down and their land built upon. These were the blackest days that the owners of such houses had ever faced. They were worse than the troubles caused by agricultural decline fifty years earlier or the economic crises of later decades. It was not just the loss of land or of architectural heritage that was causing such concern, it was the sale of the houses’ contents, at a time when regulations on the export of art objects were a great deal less strict. There was little to stop the large-scale removal from the United Kingdom of whole libraries, picture galleries, furnishings and interior fittings.

A collector like William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), the American newspaper magnate, or Henry E. Huntington, the railway millionaire who collected entire British libraries in his California home, had a virtually limitless budget. If Hearst could – as he did – buy a Spanish monastic cloister to surround his swimming pool in California, it was clear that he and others like him could carry off an important part of Britain’s heritage. The country-house owners, and their allies in the British art and museum worlds, felt that it was best to leave these things where possible in their original context, and to have them cared for by those families that had commissioned them and owned them for centuries.

It is ironic that it is precisely this time of decline, dispersal and deep anxiety that seems, from a later perspective, to be such a ‘golden age’ in country-house life. These were the years recorded in the works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, P. G. Wodehouse and dozens of other writers. Society still looked up to the aristocracy, and their houses continued to be viewed both as an ideal way of life and an unchanging one, despite the often grim reality. This is the world that evokes such nostalgia when viewed through the camera lens in
Downton Abbey
or
The Remains of the Day
. Yet, however gorgeous the clothes and cars and ladies’ hats may have looked, it was a time of the deepest anxiety. Like every other golden age, it would not have seemed golden to those who lived through it.

It was argued that taxation – and estate duty in particular – represented nothing less than a death sentence for many stately homes. If the government could be persuaded that these architectural and antiquarian treasure troves would best serve the nation by being maintained in situ by their owners, these men and women should be assisted through relief from taxation: houses deemed – after examination – to be worthy of preservation with their contents should be made exempt, so long as they were preserved with their collections intact and no attempt was made to sell off valuable items.

It was at this dire moment in the history of the landowning class that a solution was suggested. The beleaguered owners should band together, forming an association of house owners – a trade union, as it were. Like all professional associations they could share expertise, discuss problems and lobby the government. It was not only the owners of estates who rallied to this banner. They had sympathizers in Parliament, in the fields of academia and museum curating, and in the wider public for anyone who appreciated art or valued such collections was likely to share the concern that irreplaceable items might be lost abroad.

Somewhat by default, the National Trust became the focus for this campaign, the organization that came to the rescue of a number of houses and provided an official voice for the landowning class. It had originally been pledged by its founders to the preservation of ‘places of historic interest and natural beauty’, but much of its work in its early decades had dealt with the natural world – landscape and coasts – rather than the works of man. Nevertheless, it already had in its care two houses in the county of Somerset, Barrington Court and Montacute.

In 1934 one aristocratic owner, the 11th Marquess of Lothian (a man who had inherited not from his father but from a distant cousin, and who had felt the heavy weight of estate duty), made the suggestion that the National Trust should formally extend its remit to encompass the care of historic houses. In a memorable speech he sought to remind the public of the aesthetic and artistic value that these added to the nation’s heritage: ‘The country houses of Britain with their gardens, their parks, their pictures, their furniture and peculiar architectural charm, represent a quiet beauty which is not only specially characteristic but quite unrivalled in any other land.’

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was already in existence, but seemed the wrong body to take on, or offer sponsorship or protection to, houses that might well be attached to great acreages of land. This was not a welcome prospect for an organization that needed all its resources to help scores of often small and vulnerable buildings. The Council for the Preservation of Rural England was likewise interested in land but did not necessarily have the time for, or see the relevance of, caring for architectural treasures. It was eventually deemed feasible for the National Trust to take on houses provided they came with sufficient land – or some other form of endowment – to pay for their upkeep, for without the taxes that were levied on private owners, many of these estates became profitable again. The Trust could even pay for renovation and modernization, and – where no family any longer inhabited a house – look for tenants to whom they could be leased. For those owners who wished to remain in their ancestral homes, there would be an uncomfortable adjustment to make – they were no longer able to do exactly as they liked. The organization that would now own the rooms in which they lived would be able to tell them what they were, or were not, allowed to hang on the walls.

The Trust, after a good deal of thought, agreed to accept this responsibility, were its resources adequate to do so, and thus came to take charge of a significant aspect of Britain’s heritage. It set up a Historic Country Houses Committee, under the chairmanship of James Lees-Milne. The first property it acquired under this scheme was Lothian’s own house, the splendid Blickling Hall in Norfolk. The benefit of the scheme, as one relieved owner wrote in
The Times
, was that it ‘ . . . combines freedom from responsibilities with the assurance that the connection with the family seat will not be sharply and completely broken’. For those who would visit there was: ‘access to treasures of natural and artistic beauty with the preservation of the character which makes the difference between a dwelling and a museum’.

The outcome was two Acts of Parliament – the National Trust Acts of 1937 and 1939 – which launched the Country Houses Scheme. These came just in time. At the end of a deeply troubled period for owners, and on the cusp of a World War that would wreak terrible damage on country houses throughout Britain, the ‘stately homes of England’ at last had a degree of protection, with the legislation and machinery in place to save them and their contents. It would not be able to help in every case, but it was certainly an excellent beginning, the start of a process that would ultimately bring over 200 such houses within the Trust’s stewardship. Several notable properties, representing some of the most-visited houses – West Wycombe Park and Speke Hall, for instance – were donated to the Trust during the conflict, and thus the work of preservation went on even at a time of national danger. Scotland and Northern Ireland, which have always had their own National Trusts, were to follow England’s lead and seek to preserve some of their own great houses through similar means.

With the coming of peace in 1945 the future of British stately homes was given a fillip by a new scheme. The government and the public were interested in ways of honouring those who had died in the war, and one outcome was the setting up of the National Land Fund. Launched in 1946 for the purpose of buying property to preserve, it was the work of Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, and Hugh Dalton, his Chancellor of the Exchequer. These men personified a government that landowners had dreaded – the Labour Party, which had won a sweeping victory in 1945 and was seen as threatening the whole fabric of traditional Britain. In fact, the Fund had the opposite effect – that of enabling many owners to stay in the houses their families had inhabited for generations. It was a generous and farsighted move by a government that could easily have acted otherwise. The biggest social problem facing the whole country at the time was, after all, the housing shortage.