All in One Basket

by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire

  Sporting art may be in fashion but cataloguers are often wide of the mark. They ought to be sentenced to a few months in the country before being let loose on their job. When you think of the teams of young people employed by auction houses, who are often brought up in the shires – by followers of hounds, keen shots, farmers, foresters, fishermen and gardeners – the directors would do well to ask these boys and girls to get their dads to cast a critical eye over the descriptions of forthcoming sales. This would avoid partridges being described as grouse, grouse as black game, snipe as woodcock, ptarmigan (even in white winter plumage) as grouse, hares as rabbits and vice versa. Beagles, harriers and foxhounds would no longer be muddled up. Haycocks would not be described as corn stooks, or haymaking as harvesting corn. The Scottish illustrator, Archibald Thorburn, who knew one bird from the other, wouldn’t allow these untutored descriptions, so when his works are on offer they are correctly named – by the artist.

  Some artists, however, are apt to muddle us. On a Mossy Bank may combine birds’ nests and all sorts of flowers as though by chance. This is where we need a resident botanist to stop primroses being described as cowslips and an RSPB officer to stop the artists pulling nests and eggs from where they belong and dropping them in the open. The enormous canvases of Dutch flower-painters depict unseasonal combinations of tulips and roses, daffodils and passion flowers, hyacinths and dahlias, which is confusing. Did they paint the spring flowers and leave gaps till the summer ones came along? I wish I knew.

  I have a sneaking feeling that when it comes to less important pictures, cataloguers may have an off-the-peg list of descriptions to fit. The figures in rural scenes are always Peasants or Cottagers. If the female peasants have got pots on their heads they will be In an Italianate Landscape. Any water in the way puts them into A River Landscape. If you can see for miles, start with An Extensive Landscape. Should there be a glimpse of the sea it will be A Coastal Landscape or perhaps A Rocky Coastal Landscape. Sometimes add With a Town Beyond or With a Storm Raging or With a Tavern. Peasants and cottagers carouse outside these taverns, they are seldom just plain drinking. Cottagers’ wives are quiet types who are Gathering Flowers or Knitting – especially In a Cottage Interior where there is a wooden cradle in front of the fire, a sheepdog lying on a home-made rag rug and Grandpa sitting in a rocking chair smoking a clay pipe.

  Faggot Gatherers make up a considerable part of the rural population, and their near-relations, Woodcutters, provide fuel for the Charcoal Burners in a Clearing, who make a great deal of smoke – now illegal. These law-breakers seem to be very decent sorts of criminals, so it is just as well they are no more as I don’t think they would take kindly to being shut up in prison.

  Returning to sport, a favourite subject is Ferreting – sometimes threatened by A Gathering Storm. Ratting is the lowest of the low and unaffected by the weather. Anglers seem to be a better class of sportsmen as they cast their lines On a River in a Wooded Landscape. Fishermen spend a lot of time telling stories to audiences of little boys sitting on a breakwater gazing at the catch. Highland cattle and red deer are unheeding of the snow In a Highland Landscape. But the ubiquitous Faggot Gatherers are often bent double against a bitter wind as they approach their thatched cottages where, presumably, the faggots will be burnt in an attempt to warm the knitting wife, the baby and its grandfather.

  At a meet of hounds all the followers are described as huntsmen. As every country skoolboy knows there is only one huntsman, so this is a serious mistake. When it comes to horses the cataloguers prefer chestnut to any other colour, so bays, browns and blacks are chestnuts. Anything as unusual as a strawberry roan stumps them; piebald and skewbald are reversed, and as for a flea-bitten grey, such a rarefied description is far beyond them. Shire horses hauling timber wagons are mistaken for Clydesdales. Cavalry Charging is often just the King’s Troop practising their act for an agricultural show.

  This very day a catalogue has come from one of the leading auction houses. A Thoroughbred Mare and her Foal – the foal, as any fool can see, is an old Shetland pony. Dogs and hounds get the same treatment. An obvious Spaniel is a Setter while a Great Dane turns into an Irish Wolfhound, as does a Deer Hound. West Highland Whites are in fashion so they are correctly described, but Cairns are Scotties.

  None of these yawning gaps in the knowledge of country affairs seems to matter. Beauty is in the eye of the beholding bidders, who cheerfully pay millions of pounds for their fancy.

  Contemporary art is another subject altogether. The creators of these strange daubs have given up and Untitled is often as far as they will go – a wise decision.

  There is one more twist to the ways of auctioneers. In the name of economy, two have written to me recently to say they cannot go on supplying catalogues for nothing. No wonder, when they must cost a fortune to produce. So I wrote back to thank them for past generosity and to say how much I have appreciated receiving them over the years. The surprising result is that I now receive two copies of each. I’m not complaining but it is a funny way to economise.

  Buying Clothes

  London is becoming very odd. Shops, in particular. Wandering round the environs of Sloane Street, I saw in a window the very garment for the coming Derbyshire winter – a woolly coat one degree up from an old woman’s cardigan, decent to look at and warm. So I went in, looked closer and still fancied it.

  I asked the very nice but not exactly what the prime minister would call a British shop girl in a British job (sorry, Customer Service Assistant), just what colour it was. The reason for this basic question is that I have got an eye disease which muddles colours. The C.S.A. looked doubtfully at it, read a label or two and cleverly found the answer, saying very slowly, ‘ELM’.

  For one who cannot distinguish colours this is not very helpful. First of all, we have – alas – been denied the sight of an elm since the 1960s when they all died. The majority of shoppers are too young to remember them but depending on the time of year they were three totally different colours: in spring the buds were brownish-pink, in summer the leaves were dark green and in autumn they turned into the purest and most beautiful yellow.

  I bought the coat but I have no idea if it is pink, green or yellow. What’s more, I have suddenly thought, was it the bark they were on about? Add silvery dark-brown with deep fissures as a fourth possibility. I would love to meet the manufacturer’s colour expert and try to pin her down.

  The Duchess of Devonshire’s Ball, 1897

  A fancy-dress ball lasts only a few hours. Compared with other occasions for dressing up – performing in plays, ballets, operas and so forth – which are often repeated night after night, a ball is as ephemeral as a dream. Yet once they have accepted the invitation, serious grown-up people will take endless trouble – and often suffer extreme discomfort – to appear on the one-and-only night as their chosen character. The enthusiasm is infectious and the grumbling about what a bother it all is soon forgotten in the spirit of competition that goads the guests into making sure that their clothes are more beautiful, authentic, outrageous or funny than their neighbours’.

  The Devonshire House fancy-dress ball held on 2 July 1897 to honour Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee is legendary. Until my daughter Sophy began to find out more about it for her book, The Duchess of Devonshire’s Ball, I thought that, like many legends, it had become ridiculously exaggerated over the years. I was wrong.

  In the days when a ball was given in London on four or five nights a week in May, June and July, when the now-vanished private houses of Mayfair and Kensington were going full blast, it had to be a very special entertainment to arouse much interest. The Duchess of Devonshire’s ball was a very special entertainment.

  It was not difficult for Louise Duchess to mobilise her female guests – they can have had little else to do but arrange themselves for such an occasion and one can easily picture the excitement and pleasure it gave. But even clever old Louise must have been surprised at managing to persuade a lot of middle-age
d men to order their costumes and suffer the tedium of trying them on.

  That she was able to persuade her sixty-four-year-old husband to give the party in the first place shows how indulgent he was towards her. At the time, the duke was Lord President of the Council, responsible for education and the Cabinet’s defence committee in Lord Salisbury’s third government. By this time he had given up frivolity and his idea of a pleasurable evening was a game of bridge with his wife and some old friends. One can only imagine how he must have groaned and sighed at the prospect of the night’s entertainment. But he entered into the spirit of the thing to please his adored Louise.

  Perhaps Englishmen secretly love dressing up. Perhaps, by pretending to be somebody else, they lose the self-consciousness with which so many of them are plagued. Certainly at any ceremonial occasion, whether military, ecclesiastic, academic or political, whether in the City of London or at Westminster, it is the men who wear fancy dress. They appear in cock feathers and sables, ermine and swords, lace and silk tights, and even carry posies of flowers through the streets, while their women melt into the surroundings like hen pheasants in the bracken.

  Luckily for posterity, the duchess’s guests submitted to the boredom of being photographed for a privately printed album presented to Louise by her friends. The expressionless faces of the subjects remind us of the long exposures necessary for photography a hundred years ago. Fashion in beauty has changed and looking at the photographs of the women (with a few glittering exceptions like the Duchesses of Portland and Marlborough), it is hard to imagine the sitters as the heart-breakers they certainly were. One could be forgiven for questioning if they even possessed a heart, or any other organ for that matter, as they seem to be made of wood or some harder material, standing set as concrete against the photographer’s backcloths.

  In spite of the rooms full of papers at Chatsworth, there is surprisingly little about Devonshire House itself. Rebuilt in 1733 after a fire, to designs by William Kent, it stood opposite the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly. The 9th Duke of Devonshire sold it in 1919 but reserved some of the fixtures and fittings. Five years later it was pulled down by its new owners. Some of the doors (the ones from the billiard room had removable panels to let the smoke out) and fireplaces were used at Birch Grove, Harold Macmillan’s house in Sussex. Harold’s wife, born Dorothy Cavendish, was a daughter of the 9th Duke and had lived at Devonshire House as a child. For years, much of the furniture and even the silk off the walls were spread about Chatsworth. Piled high in the kitchen-maids’ bedrooms were silk curtains, cushions, tassels and braids. Chimneypieces lay on their backs in the forge by the stables, while in the granary loft above were stored the London state harness of the carriage horses, extravagantly carved and painted pelmets, gilded fillets, and other grubby and tattered remains of old glory.

  Just before Devonshire House was sold someone took a photograph of Billy Hartington, my brother-in-law, on the staircase. He was two years old at the time and stood on the wide shallow steps at the curve of the staircase with its crystal handrail that led to the saloon and other reception rooms. The photograph is doubly sad: the house disappeared in a pile of dust and twenty years later Billy was killed in action. The destruction of the house is one of many such tragedies of the twentieth century and it is not much comfort to think that today it would be forbidden to pull it down. The palace on Piccadilly has gone for ever and with it the elegance of the ghosts of 1897 whose everyday clothes are fancy dress now.

  1985

  A London Restaurant On Trial

  One of the perks of being a director of a hotel is visiting and eating at the competition. The idea is to taste, look and learn. On this mission (and on the instructions of our chairman) the managing director of the Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel at Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, and I met for lunch at one of the most famous restaurants in London. The Devonshire Arms is the proud possessor of a Michelin star, so the managing director and his chef know a thing or two about the job.

  As I seldom go to London, it is an excitement to see what’s what in the fashionable world. I have known the chosen restaurant19 for many years but I am so stuck in my ways that I was surprised by the changes I found since last eating there. There is a black-trouser-clad lady greeter, a new role in the restaurant staff. She was one of the few females to be seen, as the place soon filled up with men – a good omen for the quality of the food (and bad for the size of the bill).

  The arrangement of the tables is ideal, like a railway carriage with high divisions, so the booming voices of the confident customers discussing business and sport are contained. The decor is brown, beige and more brown. No colour. The lighting is perfect – full marks for that, as it is the hardest thing to get right. The plates are a normal size, none of those huge oval platters like dog dishes that put you off eating.

  Every table was taken. The charming head waiter (French? Italian?) answered our questions very politely. How many covers? Is there a private room? He may have smelt a rat and imagined we were from one of the many magazines that describe places to eat, or perhaps he just thought we were naturally curious country-bumpkins on an outing. My companion and I considered the overheads as we watched the young, long-legged waiters, so numerous that they were in danger of running into each other. These boys have taken the place of the middle-aged women in white overalls, with a lot of nanny about them, who used to serve the excellent, plain English nursery food in a plain English nursery way. Bread-and-butter pudding and raspberry crumble came naturally to them, as they do to the customers, all brought up on such no-frills fare. I am sorry the nannies have turned into waiters but that is because second childhood is setting in.

  When the bill came my companion and I smiled and marvelled at the prosperity of this country. Stuffed with decent food, one glass of house wine and two glasses of fizzy water, we went home to write our reports for the chairman. I can’t wait for the next outing.

  February 2004

  Edensor Post Office

  They shut our post office yesterday. For the first time in living memory there is no early morning light at that end of the ancient cottage and the little shop that goes with it. The stacks of newspapers and magazines with unlikely titles have disappeared overnight.

  No longer can a letter be weighed to go to the ends of the earth. No more postmaster, one elbow on the counter, turning the thick cardboard sheets with brightly coloured stamps of all prices lurking between them, painstakingly adding them up to the right amount for a letter to Easter Island or Nizhni Novgorod. No more blue airmail stickers to speed the thing along like a migrating bird. The letter box remains, but what good is that without a stamp? It is a ghostly reminder that yet another service in another part of life is finished.

  So it is into the car once more to queue in the Bakewell supermarket instead of walking down the hill, looking at the gardens and their dogs, and seeing the minibus calling for the schoolchildren. What about the old people who haven’t got a car? What about the other pensioners in the village? No one cares about them because they don’t stab each other after a bout of drinking and have never bothered the police or a counsellor in their long lives. They are just the nostalgic past because they behave decently. For these people, who spend most of their time alone at home, the post office was like a club. Old and young met there, people called in on their way to work to pick up a paper, as well as children on their way to and from school. They had a chat, a grumble, compared gardening notes or gave news of a former resident who has gone to New Zealand. We all knew each other, we knew when someone was ill or had gone on holiday. Now our meeting place is dark and dead.

  The government don’t care. They pretend to be keen on ‘rural welfare’. They have invented ‘community centres’ and spend our money building monstrous new ones when our post office was one. A vital support, impossible to value in money but sticking out a mile to those of us who live in villages, has gone. Teas in the cottage remain popular but the locals don’t go out to tea – they have
it in their own home. Fine-weather walkers and tourists are welcome but they don’t belong, their roots are elsewhere.

  There has been a post office in Edensor since 1886. It was one of the first in a small village, presumably provided to serve Chatsworth. By 1892 the postmistress, Mrs Jane Bacon, dealt with two deliveries and two collections on weekdays and one of each on Sundays. The then Duke of Devonshire and his politician guests made good use of the newly installed telegraph office and the locals appreciated several other services.

  A bellboy, aged twelve and a half, was the human on whom Chatsworth relied for telegrams. One of his jobs was to run the half mile to the Edensor post office to fetch and send them. His name was W. K. Shimwell. This education served him far better than sitting in a classroom, as he went on to be private secretary to the duke when he was governor-general of Canada, 1916–21, and later became comptroller of Chatsworth and clerk of works to all the buildings scattered over the thousands of acres of the Derbyshire estate, including Chatsworth itself. Sometimes it pays to leave school early.

  It’s all gone. There is no bellboy and no post office. Now, that horrible form of communication, email, rules. Even people in the same office send emails to each other instead of talking. Bang go human relationships. All is sacrificed to speed. No time to ponder – bung off the email and back comes another in a ridiculous new language invented for it. With no proper signature, no envelope for privacy and paper galore, manners, spelling and grammar are out of the window. Email is cold, impersonal, demanding, unfading, invading and often incomprehensible. Like the hymn, it is immortal, invisible…and silent as light.

  April 2008