by Jilly Cooper
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the very rich Yorkshire baronet, Sir John Smithson, married Elizabeth, sole heiress of the rich and ancient family of Percy. So great was the extent of their joint estate that Sir John was able to persuade George III to grant him the dukedom of Northumberland. Anxious to establish his new status, the first Duke set about transforming Alnwick, the neglected castle of the Percys. Capability Brown (who’d been such a success at Warwick Castle) was called in to rebuild the towers and add seven turrets and a complete new garrison of stone warriors was stationed on the battlements. At the same time Robert Adam arrived to re-gothicize the interior. Everything was done to make the castle as luxurious and self-consciously picturesque as possible. And no doubt the old aristocracy, who regarded any peer created after the Middle Ages as an upstart, thought the whole thing both phoney and vulgar.
So it was that generations of new noblemen harnessed the best talents of their time, as today David Mlinaric and David Hicks move around forming the tastes of the uncertain and the newly rich.
In the same way the pop star who makes it big immediately buys a large house in the Thames Valley with high walls and installs burglar alarms and vigilante systems as daunting as any medieval drawbridge to keep out the fans. He will decorate it to the nines to impress other rising pop stars, and in his spare time take up market gardening, breeding race horses and farming. The Rolls is replaced by a Range Rover. The Showaddy Waddy even hunt with the Quorn.
What is regarded as the height of vulgarity today—the huge oval bed humming with dials or the onyx and marble double bath with 22-carat gold-plated mixer taps—will probably be considered exquisitely beautiful when it is unearthed from the rubble in the year 2500. Certainly the furniture and building trades would grind to a halt if it weren’t for people erecting monuments to new splendour or ripping out the taste of previous owners because they consider it too grandiose or too vulgar.
Although they may have originally been built, to quote Ivy Compton-Burnett, ‘as huge monuments to showing off, few buildings quicken the pulses more than the great English country house, with its ‘towers and battlements . . . bosom’d high in tufted trees’, its sneering stone lions at the gate, and long avenue of chestnuts leading up to the russet walls rising gently from soft billowing green lawns which eventually melt into the park.
Harry Stow-Crat does not refer to his house as a stately home but as an ‘’istoric hice’. Perhaps he pronounces ‘house’ as ‘hice’, because he usually has more than one, like mouse and mice. The word ‘home’ except for putting ‘At Home’ on an invitation or saying ‘I’m going home’ is very common. It has been taken up by the media, so now you have the awful ‘stately home’, ‘family home’, or, even worse, ‘they live in a lovely home’. Other horrors include ‘homebuying’ instead of ‘buying a house’ or ‘home improvements’ instead of ‘painting ones house’.
Vita Sackville-West once said that the best historic houses grew in a leisurely way over generations, sprouting a wing here a tower there, like the oaks and elms that surrounded them. They grew inside, she says, in the same way as outside. ‘There is no question of the period room, so beloved by professional decorators. Everything is muddled up: Jacobean paintings, Chippendale tables, chinoiserie wallpaper, Carolean love seats, Genoese velvets, Georgian brocades, Burgundian tapestries, Queen Anne embroideries, William and Mary tallboys and Victorian sideboards, all in a mixture to make the purist shudder.’ But it is this feeling that each succeeding owners acquired beautiful furniture and pictures as the fashion of his generation dictated that makes up the glorious historical hotchpotch of the great house.
Lord Weymouth, who has contributed his own splendidly colourful murals to the walls of Longleat, says that everyone in his family ‘has been raised from birth to be an acolyte in the temple’. This sums up the attitude of the aristocrat: good husbandry rather than good husbands or ‘old masters and young mistresses’, as Peter de Vries put it. ‘I don’t mind black sheep in the family,’ said Lord Carrington. ‘What I can’t stand is people who don’t put back something into the house.’ Which explains the fearful chuntering over Lord Brooke flogging his Canalettos and the famous Warwick vase, and why so many aristocrats make very considerable sacrifices to keep their houses going when it would be so much easier to sell up and go abroad.
‘One has one s own piped music.’
Most upper-class houses, therefore, have a certain shabbiness about them. (There ought to be a shop called ‘Shabby-tat’ where Mrs Nouveau-Richards could buy aged-up furniture and materials.) The festoons and rosettes on the ceiling show the traces of the years, the pink and white striped silk cushions are falling to pieces; the faded red damask sofa is covered in dog hairs. On the walls, like the circle on the spiralist’s lapel, are squares of much lighter paper, where a Lawrence or a Romney has been flogged to pay taxes. When you go to bed you draw the pale blue, watered-silk curtains with care. The aristocracy believe in buying the best—silks especially woven in the colour they want—and then making it last. They’ll probably only redecorate their rooms every fifty years. Upper-class colours therefore tend to be faded into softness by antiquity—like a Beatrix Potter picture. The faded rose-reds and golds of the Tailor of Gloucester’s coat are particularly popular, and ice blue is very in at the moment. Green is never popular because there’s so much of it outside in the park. In upper-class London houses (perhaps because they miss the green of the country) you get a chilly Eaton Square eau-de-nihilism.
The floors are polished, and three-quarters covered with very good, very old, patterned carpet. Caroline Stow-Crat wouldn’t dream of buying a modern patterned carpet, but Casa Pupo rugs are somehow considered all right. Until recently she’s resisted plain fitted carpets as being an example of the middle classes boasting that they’ve got enough carpet to cover the entire floor. But convenience is a great leveller and, if you haven’t got a servant to polish the floor, you may sink to a fitted carpet. In the same way duvets are being surreptitiously smuggled into four-posters, particularly for the children, and the silver centrepiece in the dining-room, which is made up of forty individual bits and used to take two men three days to clean, has now been lacquered over.
Caroline also resists any man-made fibres, and certainly anything plastic, which Harry and his mother still call ‘plarstic’. The upper classes wear leather on their feet and on the elbows of their coats, but not on their sofas or their backs. Their rooms tend to be very leggy, like the bottom half of the paddock, because all the furniture has long, spindly legs. Huge libraries of memoirs and sermons are kept behind grilles. The bedrooms have slots on the door for the guest’s names, and interlocking doors, so people can bedhop easily without the servants finding out. The ceilings are particularly beautiful, so Caroline can admire them when she’s in the inevitable missionary position, as a change from shutting her eyes and thinking of England. On the whole the upper classes prefer things to be beautiful or functional. They wouldn’t hide the television in a repro cabinet, although they hide plant pots in bowls called cache-pots.
The rooms are lit by crystal chandeliers or candelabra, or by lamps with no tassels. Tassels on anything—umbrellas, lights or chairs—are very vulgar.
The bath and basin are always white; the lavatory is white with a chain that pulls and a wooden seat which is often agonizingly cracked, and gives exquisite pain by nipping the Old School bottom. All upper class loos smell of asparagus pee in June. The kitchens are traditionally hellish because that was where the servants lived.
As the outdoor life has always been more important to the English gentleman than indoors, the field more alluring than the hearth, their houses tend to be terribly cold. (One member of the landed gentry always asked you to bring old telephone directories when you went to stay to feed the insatiable boiler.) On the walls hang huge paintings of battles, hunting scenes and ancestors. There are also portraits of the dogs, the horses and the children. As the last go off to boarding school so earl
y, it’s useful to be reminded of what they look like.
The upper-class man always has a dressing room. Even though Harry sleeps in the same room as Caroline, he would refer to it as ‘Caroline’s bedroom’ if he were talking to an equal, ‘my wife’s bedroom’ if he were talking to a higher echelon servant like the woman who shows people over the house, and ‘Lady Caroline’s bedroom’ to a maid.
One very grand old lady said, ‘When Willy and I went to stay with some people in Norfolk, they didn’t give Willy a dressing room but they provided a screen in the bedroom so we managed very well.’ This was when they’d been married forty years—back to the Definitely-Disgustings again!
Because they have had their houses for hundreds of years, the aristocracy take the beautiful things in them for granted, and tend not to comment on them in other people’s houses.
‘Fellow noticed my chairs,’ said a surprised Earl of Derby after a visit from the Duke of Devonshire.
Equally it is not done to show someone over your new house unless they ask specifically or they pay at the gate.
There was an embarrassing moment when an actress we know, who was justifiably proud of her very expensively decorated house, asked an upper-class friend if he’d like to see over it.
‘Whatever for?’ came the curt reply.
In very grand houses they have an estate carpenter permanently on the premises doing repairs. One friend got locked in the lavatory when she was staying in Yorkshire, and her host fed her Bloody Marys through the keyhole with a straw while they waited for the house carpenter to come and free her.
PAYING GUESTS
The poor man in his castle
Sells tickets at the gate
While all the rich plebians
Have fun on his estate.
Leonard Cooper
‘Between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up, that’s all that can be said about land,’ said Lady Bracknell in The Importance of being Earnest, admirably summing up the plight of the aristocracy.
In the old days Harry Stow-Crat’s ancestor would have looked out of his top window and owned all he surveyed. Now someone else probably owns much of it. Most of the upper classes are feeling the pinch, and the days when they could man a chauffeurs’ second eleven against a footmen’s third eleven are over. Some peers, like Lord Montagu and the Duke of Bedford, who obviously have a strong streak of showmanship in their make-up, seem to rather enjoy it. Others hate it, like an earlier Lord Bath who was found cowering in a cupboard by one of the visitors, or Vita Sackville-West who hid in the roses. Some peers try to keep up standards and shock visitors to the house by putting up signs saying lavatories rather than toilets, but most of them descend to the level of public taste by flogging the most appalling souvenirs—key rings, caps, T-shirts, replicas of the house in a snow storm, bottled Welsh or Scottish garden fragrance—in order to keep going.
When we went to spend the weekend at Longleat, as we drove up the drive my children’s eyes grew rounder and rounder as they took in first the green mist of flat-bottomed spring trees, the herds of cows and sheep, then the lions, leopards, rhinoceros, monkeys and a giraffe. Finally, as the great golden house came into sight my son turned to my daughter:
‘He’s got an awful lot of pets,’ he said in awe.
When a Mrs Definitely-Disgusting visited an ‘istoric house recently there was a frightful squawking match because she refused to pay to go on the little train which ran round the estate, saying,
‘We don’t have to pay for things like this. We ought to go free. We’re the underprivileged.’
BUYING-UP AND DOING-UP
The upper-middle classes, not subscribing to the law of primogeniture and tending to move where their jobs take them, seldom live in the same house for generations. They start off in a flat in London or in some other big town when they get married, then move to a terraced three-bedroom house with the first child, then to a five-bedroom house when the second child arrives, because they need room for an au pair, or possibly for a lodger to help with the mortgage. Samantha Upward prefers a student, so she can combine altruism, free baby-sitting and help with Zacharias’ maths prep, which will soon—despite workshops—be quite beyond her. To live in a house with more rooms than you have family is regarded by the working classes as a middle-class characteristic.
The major change in the upper-middle-class house over the last twenty-five years has been the kitchen, which used to be an airforce-blue barracks where a sucked-up-to maid sourly banged saucepans. In the ’seventies financial necessity, coupled with the absurd stigma attached to domestic servitude, forced all but those with very young children out to work. The status-conscious upper-middle classes promptly revamped their houses. If Samantha Upward occasionally has to sink to housework or cooking she must do it in congenial surroundings. Kitchens became more and more like drawing-rooms with sofas, low lighting, Welsh dressers covered in ornaments and books, pictures on the walls, and a low pine table for the children to play improving games. As it was essential for the children to play on the ground floor near their parents, the dining-room was also turned into a ‘playroom’, and in order that Samantha shouldn’t miss a word of the intelligent dinner-party conversation, as she was flambeing chicken breasts, or whipping the zabaglione, the kitchen was turned into a dining-room as well. The drawing-room by this time was feeling a bit neglected and was consequently filled up with plants and natural earthy colours until it resembled Kew Gardens. The garden filled up with furniture, reclining chairs with gaudy seed-packet upholstery, stone lions and white wrought-iron chairs and tables. What was once the ‘terrace’ became the ‘patio’, or, as Mrs Nouveau-Richards would say, the ‘pate-io.’
As stripped pine and William Morris are taken up by the lower-middles, the upper-middles have latched onto rattan and art-deco sofas and chairs, French and English antiques when they can afford them, good Chinese furniture and Laura Ashley itsy-bitsy cottage prints (sort of William Morris Minor). Recently a friend heard a builder showing a plumber over the house they were working on.
‘They’ve got Philip Morris curtains in the lounge,’ he said.
A word might be said here about the words ‘drawing-room’ and ‘sitting room’. Both seem to be acceptable except that ‘droin’ room’ is slightly more formal, and ‘sitting room’ more easy and relaxed. You’d never have a ‘droin’ room’ in a cottage for example. ‘Living room’, a ghastly modern compromise, is extremely vulgar. So are ‘lounge’ (except in an hotel), ‘front room’ and ‘parlour’.
In Samantha Upward’s house you would find a few antiques and some good china and silver. She thinks repro furniture is very common, and whereas she might put prints or reproductions in the lavatory or the children’s room, they wouldn’t be allowed in the drawing-room. Nor would a Victorian painting from her parents’ house of a four-year-old girl in a boat with a grizzled fisherman entitled ‘His Mate’ get further than the landing. All her curtains would be on brass rails. Her carpets would be plain but fitted, and relieved by a few rugs, and her counterpane would be distributed evenly over the whole bed, not mill-pond smooth and then edged in a fat sausage under and over the pillows. Since the middle classes discovered sex in the ’seventies, she’d probably have a bidet in the bathroom, next door to Gideon’s and her bedroom. The bidet is a constant reproach as Gideon is usually far too tired and too drunk to want sex. Samantha is gradually installing ‘continental quilts’, as she insists on calling them, in every bedroom; she thinks the word ‘duvay’ is vulgar. Zacharias’s cello is allowed to stay in the drawing-room among the Spectators and New Statesmans and the clutter of books. Samantha spends a lot of time removing the jackets from books to make them look more read. Dried flowers, or honesty in a pewter mug, gather dust on the window ledge.
‘Zacharias is very creative at the moment.’
Upper-middle-class houses smell of beeswax, drink and sometimes cats. As their owners are always knocking things over when drunk and not being able to afford new ones, they have a lot of Christopher Wray lamps with bites out of them.
On Saturday mornings throughout outer central London—Fulham Clapham, Islington, parts of Hackney—the streets are alive with the sounds of ‘gentrification’, as coats of paint are slapped on the front of terraced houses, rooms are knocked through and the net curtains of previous occupants are shoved in the rag bag. The upper-middle classes would far rather spend a bit of money knocking a Victorian workman’s cottage into shape than move into a modern house where everything worked, so they quite happily rip plywood off doors to reveal the original mouldings, strip banisters and replace aluminium windows with wooden frames as close to the original as possible. Soon follow the French number plate, the brass letter box, the trellis for the honeysuckle from the garden centre and the bay tree which soon gets nicked. Blue tubs, bought cheap from the brewery round the corner, are soon filled up with bulbs or pink geraniums (Samantha thinks red ones are rather common). Vivaldi pours out of the stereo into the street, and balding architects can be seen drawing lines at their desks and drinking coffee out of Sainsbury’s mugs.