Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (5 page)

The aristocracies of Scotland and Ireland were in no sense separate from that of England. They were related through innumerable marriages. They attended the same schools and universities (usually in England). They met in London because they rented houses there for the Season. They took part in the round of sporting and social events that every summer drew the wealthy and fashionable to parts of southern England, but in August, when the time arrived for deer stalking and grouse-shooting, it was the English aristocracy that trekked to Scotland. The British upper classes were completely integrated, regardless of where in the realm they lived.

There was much more to do in these houses too, and as the nineteenth century wore on the railway made them easier to visit. Electricity and adequate hot water made them more comfortable. The invention of what would be called ‘the weekend’ made them attractive places to spend the time between Saturday and Monday. The creation or growth in popularity of half-a-dozen pastimes (croquet, lawn tennis, billiards, motor-car and carriage driving, charades and amateur dramatics), added to the traditional pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing, provided a wealth of amusements for the leisured classes. The invention of the gramophone meant that music was available, for dancing or merely for listening to, at any time of the day or night that one desired and that other guests would put up with. The country house was also, of course, an important setting for flirtation and for amorous affairs. It provided an enclosed world filled with pleasure and relaxation.

And, of course, many of these country dwellings were strikingly beautiful. Britain’s increase in wealth over the nineteenth century meant that far more people could afford to live in country houses. Since there were not enough to go round, or because many of them were too out of date and uncomfortable to live in, new ones had to be built, and the result was that the Edwardian era became a golden age for British rural architecture. The Arts and Crafts Movement, an aesthetic reaction against the age of the machine, affected everything from the decoration of lampshades to the architectural style of private mansions and public buildings. It looked back to traditional methods of manufacture. The result was that country houses were no longer derivative of Classical architecture but drew from the vernacular, incorporating elements that were imaginative, witty, quirky, genuinely interesting. Though the houses were new their character derived from English buildings of the past, so that they would look as though they had always been there. The major figure in this architectural revolution, Sir Edwin Lutyens, created houses such as Goddards and Munstead Wood in Surrey that would still be admired more than a century later and would never go out of fashion. North of the border, his contemporary Sir Robert Lorimer created a style that, though similar, blended with the traditional architecture of Scotland. These houses later became national monuments, treasured because they capture the essence, the epitome, of a self-confident era that had no idea it was about to end.

By no means every family that occupied a country house actually owned it, of course. It was perfectly easy to rent one, filled with the portraits and ancestral clutter of others who perhaps could no longer afford to stay there. Though some tenants rented houses to live in all the year round, and those that were within convenient reach of London might be used for entertaining, it was more common to lease for a season a house or estate that came with specific sporting facilities – some in Hampshire were much in demand for their accompanying rights to fish on the River Test, for instance. Others, in northern England or the Scottish Highlands, had desirable rough-shooting in the surrounding woods, fields and moors. Amid the pastures of Leicestershire, houses were sought after from autumn to spring for their proximity to famous hunts. In Maidenhead on the Thames this notion of short seasonal renting was taken to extremes, for it was the ‘only place to be seen’ among members of Society on a single weekend every year. This was ‘Ascot Sunday’, the day following the races at nearby Ascot at the beginning of June. Once that had passed, the riverbanks rapidly emptied.

If you were a female inhabitant or guest at one of these houses, you had comparative freedom. Though you still left the gentlemen after dinner to their port and cigars, you would be able to dress less restrictively than your predecessors had done while outdoors, and as well as riding and following hounds you could bicycle or even play golf, since these were now considered acceptable pursuits for a woman. You might even, if you are sufficiently daring, ask to go out in the motor car and drive some distance yourself. There seems to have been a great deal less dreary sitting around than was previously the case.

Or was there? Social historian Gordon Winter commented in his book
The Golden Years
on country-house life during this heyday from another perspective: ‘Somehow life at the top of the [income] bracket seems to have become unutterably boring. The social columns of the papers described the same people going through the same ritual year after year simply because it was thought to be the right thing to do. If overeating is a sign of boredom, these people excelled at it.’ Whatever the pleasures available, it was true that they could be followed only in accordance with a rigid, unyielding set of conventions. It may have been a glittering era, but on reflection was not perhaps one in which it would have been an unmitigated pleasure to live.

Besides the leisured inhabitants of the world upstairs, there were of course the well-drilled and hard-working population of below stairs: the servants. Those who strove to make these houses and their surrounding estates function smoothly were sometimes career servants who would work anywhere, and sometimes retainers whose families had served there for generations. Both categories may well have felt a sense of belonging to the house and the family that employed them. They would also have had the constant companionship of other people like themselves, similar in background and experience, in hopes and dreams. The prospect, however distant, of foreign travel or of taking part in lavish entertainments and of being at close quarters to the wealthy and the famous and the glamorous – these things would all have been incentives to those who were in any case ‘bettering’ their lot by being in service. Such people were still available in sufficient numbers to keep the great country houses running in the years up to 1914, although in smaller, less affluent households there was a serious shortage by the end of the nineteenth century.

We must not, of course, imagine that these places were idyllic, or even easy, to work in. The problems of maintaining them would have been commensurate with their size and complexity. It was sometimes assumed by employers that to be surrounded by artistic treasures or great books would somehow make servants more refined and cultured, but the notion was derided by those whose only contact with beautiful objects was to clean them, often with not enough time to do so and in a state of constant anxiety in case they somehow caused damage. We should remember, as we admire the surviving treasures, that there was always a price paid by someone for maintaining their beauty and delicacy.

Interestingly, despite the fact that it was clearly hard work being a servant in a great house many people today, it seems, feel they would happily take on the burdens of service – at least until the novelty wore off. When in 2002 Channel 4 set out to re-create for a television series a fully functioning Edwardian country household, they received more applications from members of the public wanting to be servants than those seeking to be masters. It is also frequently the case that country houses open to the public today find that the most popular features with visitors are the re-created ‘working’ rooms – the kitchen, laundry or scullery – often featuring realistic mannequins dressed in old uniforms or livery.

Although there are still large houses lived in by wealthy families who need looking after, a British domestic servant is in fact a rarity today. The majority of those engaged as household staff are foreign nationals. Outside the Royal Household, little now remains of the hierarchical world of ‘below stairs’, a place that could, with its colourful liveries and arcane titles, be more structured and snobbish than its upstairs counterpart. It is a world that has largely vanished, thanks to rising costs, punitive taxation, a mass of labour-saving machines and an overwhelming general disinclination to pursue what is seen as menial work. Now safely consigned to the past, it is more of an escapist fantasy than an actual work prospect – but one that millions throughout the world continue to enjoy contemplating.

2

THE PEOPLE AND THEIR HOUSES

‘Oh! but the hideousness of everything, the showiness! The sense of lavish wealth thrust up your nose! The coarse mouldings, the heavy gilding always in the wrong place, the colour of the silk hangings! Eye hath not seen nor pen can write the ghastly coarseness of the sight!’ Lady Frances Balfour, describing the Rothschilds’ Halton House

The lifestyle enjoyed by the wealthy in the opening years of the twentieth century had taken many generations to create. The houses, like the tastes and pleasures of those who occupied them, evolved over a lengthy period of time. To appreciate what the Edwardians perfected, it is worth considering what the country house was and how it developed between the Middle Ages and the reign of Edward VII.

There are several vintages of British aristocracy. The oldest families are those descended from the soldiers who came to the British Isles with William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy. He distributed the lands taken from the defeated Saxons among his followers, who in return owed him feudal allegiance – they were obliged to support him by raising troops in the event of war or emergency. Originally the Normans took control only of England; they were later to colonize Ireland, and to extend their influence far into Scotland. It is these members of the aristocracy, descended originally from Vikings who had settled in Normandy and then crossed the Channel with the Conqueror, who form the oldest stratum of the titled upper class.

Other families rose to prominence over the subsequent centuries, but the next sizeable intake into the landowning class took place during the English Reformation of the 1530s–40s. The Church had been – after the Crown – the biggest landowner in England. King Henry VIII, upon breaking from Rome, confiscated this land and thus vastly enriched himself. He sold on much of it to his wealthier subjects, who were eager for the prestige land ownership conferred. The King and his Protestant successors, Elizabeth I and James I, duly awarded titles to their favourites and thus launched a number of new aristocratic dynasties. Perhaps the greatest of these was the Cecil family, created Earls of Salisbury for their administrative service. Their country seat, Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, has remained a family possession ever since. An archetype of Jacobean brick architecture, it was built between 1608 and 1611, and is one of the best-known and most characteristic of early English country houses.

The third mass recruitment into the titled and landowning aristocracy came towards the end of the nineteenth century. Wealth, and therefore power, had shifted decisively by that time from the old aristocracy to the new captains of commerce and industry. They wanted all the trappings that usually accompanied power, and increasingly governments instead of monarchs proposed such men for peerages or knighthoods. It is difficult perhaps for others to appreciate the extent to which the ownership of a country house has dominated the ambitions of talented men since there were first such places. The importance of the country villa in antiquity is well documented in the writings of, for instance, Horace (65–8 bc) and Pliny the Younger (
c
.61–112). The nineteenth-century newly rich bought land – and often houses – from the older cash-strapped aristocracy, or they built their own homes and continued the way of life traditional to country estates. There were so many such landowners in the last quarter of the century and the beginning of the next that they formed a distinct sub-class, leaving an indelible mark upon both the British landscape and British society through the houses they built and the bloodlines they revived.

Between 1850 and 1880, however, the British economy was booming. Gross National Product doubled in that time. Low taxation, low inflation, rising wages, booming markets both domestic and foreign, improving infrastructure in transport, largely unregulated markets, and a 25 per cent increase in population, all tipped the balance decisively in favour of the business elite at the expense of the traditional landowning aristocracy. Yet the ownership of land was still the thing to which both old and new rich aspired. It had been seen as the safest commodity, solid and eternal (as well as exclusive because its availability was limited), the antithesis of stocks and shares that went up and down in value. Between 1875 and 1897, however, the cost of agricultural land fell by more than half, going from £54 an acre to a mere £19. Nevertheless it kept an almost mystic hold on the imagination of the old and new rich, as a symbol of solidity, permanence and authority.

Of the three things that characterized the ruling elite – money, land and title – those who had the first seemed almost inevitably to want the others. Titles were, by the early twentieth century, becoming relatively easy to obtain in any case, for King Edward VII, friend of so many
arriviste
plutocrats, raised no objection to ennobling them, and in fact created four times as many baronets as his mother had done. During the premiership of Lloyd George, titles would even be sold semi-openly by the Government. Julius Drewe of Castle Drogo was offered one, but considered it too expensive at £100,000.

The oldest families naturally lived in castles. Their power originally depended on military might as much as on possession of land because under their feudal obligation they had to impose the king’s authority on the surrounding area. In an era of instability – and in England this lasted from the Norman Conquest to the late seventeenth century – it was necessary to have physical protection from your enemies. Some families still dwell within the original defensive fortifications thrown up by their forebears. To cite one example: the Percy family, Earls and then Dukes of Northumberland, have lived at Alnwick Castle since they bought it in November 1309 from the Bishop of Durham. (They still have the deed of sale!) Set in a strategic position commanding the Northumbrian countryside, the castle provided vital protection against attack from marauding Scots, and remained a military outpost for many centuries. It still looks like one, with serviceable, battlemented walls and towers that would withstand considerable punishment. Their home is, after Windsor, the largest still-inhabited castle in Britain.