These masterpieces hung in an atmosphere of overwhelming materiality. When it came to furnishing the Hugheses’ gargantuan house, the influence of Nesfield’s light aestheticism did not penetrate far. The interior of Kinmel was a world of thickness and substance, of gilt and crimson velvet settees, ebonized torchères, Buhl chests, ‘a heavy crimson velvet table cover, with fringe’, ‘fine feather cushions in magenta silk’, eighteenth-century gilt mirrors, ‘heavy crimson plush curtains’, ‘a black and gold lacquer cabinet’ and so on almost ad infinitum. A ‘small rounded settee in crimson and yellow silk damask’, now in the V&A, had been commissioned from Gillows by Lord Dinorben and some of these furnishings were probably inherited from him by HRH. Giant Axminster carpets filled the rooms. The mahogany dining table had seven spare leaves and thirty linen damask banqueting cloths, each 24 x 24 feet, plus another four that were a more modest 20 x 20. There were silver claret jugs and cream jugs, a pair of superb Adam mahogany urns and the most beautiful Paul de Lamerie coffee pot decorated in silver with exquisitely modelled leaves of the coffee plant.
Dead animals played their part: in the Grand Corridor, beside the gong and beater on a mahogany frame and the Queen Anne grandfather clock, two stuffed eagles under glass shades joined a stuffed figure of a pheasant and another of a sparrow hawk, a stuffed figure of an angora rabbit and a ‘dessert service of the finest quality’. Further stuffed golden eagles and a selection of stag heads could be found in the Lounge Hall.
The billiard room had its obligatory red leather settees and engravings by Spy. The library contained a valuable first edition of the New Testament in Welsh, tales by la Fontaine in fine eighteenth-century bindings, shelf on shelf of archaeology and antiquarianism, 200 volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine, the Waverley novels and untold yardages of genealogy, among them Burke’s gloomily entitled 1866 volume on Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages, material for the long sad evenings in which H. R. Hughes Esq. fingered its mournful pages.
Don’t weary of this tour: the accumulation of stuff is the purpose of this building. It is a monument to standing and taste, a display of HRH’s self-conception as a prince of Wales, a piling up of the rich and old to demonstrate that the mind of the Hugheses was nothing new or vulgar. The chapel had a combined lectern and pulpit in oak and many rush-seated pews. The altar was adorned with brass candlesticks and ‘a very fine altar frontal worked in gold and silver thread and many different coloured silks with the Annunciation on a magenta silk ground’.
Upstairs, great lumps of furniture fill the cavernous spaces of the corridors: mahogany cupboards, lacquered cupboards, a choice Italian cupboard, a Charles I chest in walnut, a massive carved seventeenth-century oak court cupboard. There were thirty bedrooms suitable for visiting gentry, all fitted with beautiful antique beds, Japanese screens, hip baths, large enamel hot water cans, japanned coal boxes and writing tables. Every bed had a hair bed and then a feather bed, a white honeycomb quilt, a feather bolster and a down pillow. Some had ‘a quantity of specimen shells under a glass shade’. One had a mahogany bidet. Several had engravings of country mansions by John Nash.
Penetrate into the twenty-six furnished bedrooms of the servants’ wing – the maids’ separate from the men servants’ – and the beds were much narrower here, 3 foot 6, with wool mattresses, but all rooms with fireplaces, the furniture mostly painted but some ‘grained’. Downstairs, the upper servants enjoyed well-appointed fragments of privacy, with a ruby-red Axminster carpet on the floor of the cook’s room, and some repro-Chippendale and ebonized chairs in the house steward’s room.
HRH’s fiercely exact style means that the existence of his family and household at Kinmel remains carefully accounted for in book after book of figures. Kinmel was, in many ways, life as a list, every book signed off on every page, usually by Florentia but often by HRH himself, either with those initials, or more often as ‘H of K’, Hughes of Kinmel.
Through the middle part of the century, up until the early 1880s, there were always about twenty-eight indoor servants here and a further fourteen in the stables, serving HRH, Florentia, their two sons and their five surviving daughters (one had died young). The indoor servants and stablemen were liveried when on display, part of the decorative scheme of the house, footmen matched for height and appearance, their wigs powdered. The twenty-five men and boys working in the kitchen garden did not have to wear livery. But the head coachman wore a gold-braided cream jacket and red waistcoat, with silver-plated buttons bearing the Hughes crest – ‘Out of a baron’s coronet, a demi-lion rampant, holding a rose’, supplied by Sherlock & Co. of King Street, Covent Garden – with breeches of thick red velvet, black shoes with large buckles, white cotton socks and a powdered wig.52
The extraordinary subdivision of rooms and functions in the plan of the house – a map of human hierarchy from the plushed-up grandeur of ballroom and library at the north end to the steward room boy’s WC far to the south – extends into a taxonomy of human beings. It was as if Kinmel had its own system of genera, species and subspecies, an organo-gram of the ideal gentry establishment, descending from the stupendous heights of HRH himself, with his monogrammed linen and the man who came from London to cut his hair, to the menials in the washyard, the underpaid casual labour called ‘helpers’ in the accounts and those few poor of the parish, usually no more than three or four a week, who received a bowl of soup at the back door.
Leaving aside the head coachman, Edward Bradley (on £45 a year), and the second coachman, Charles Ogden (£30), the world of the servants had two monarchs: the butler, George Nash, paid £80 a year, and the housekeeper-cook, Mrs Selina Moore (on £70). Under the butler were two footmen, William Hambrook and Edward Jarraway (£41 10s. a year each), and a steward’s room boy, Ernest Wooding (£20), plus the head lady’s maid, Mrs Mee (£32), the second lady’s maid, Marie Charlton (£32), and the third lady’s maid, Jessie Goode (£25). The needlewoman, Janette Faure (£29), was part of Mrs Mee’s department.
Mrs Moore, the housekeeper, managed the head housemaid, Laura Evans (£30), who in turn controlled the second housemaid, Clara Moore (£26), and the third housemaid, Annie Randall (£30). In the kitchen, Bessie Jones was the first kitchenmaid (£25) and she had under her the scullery maid, Ellen Wood (£21). The first laundry maid was Kate Bell, operating in another part of Mrs Moore’s empire, on £28 a year, with Amelia Clarke as second laundry maid (£24) and Elizabeth Davies as third laundry maid (£10).53
Impressive as this list from 1896 might be, it had shrunk a little from the complement twenty-five years earlier, when there had been a cook separate to the housekeeper, a postillion in addition to the second coachman, two dairymaids, a valet and an under-butler as well as a nurse and under-nurse.54
Careful accounts were kept, and signed off, of precisely who was eating what in the servants’ end of the house. The weight of meat in the larder was calculated daily (on 1 January 1858 it was 250 lbs)55 and the strangers dining that day were ‘5 stable people, 4 gardeners, 1 bailiff, a forester and his daughter, the land steward’s clerk, 3 dairy people, the head keeper and 3 of his family’. The postman was also given lunch in the servants’ hall. That day 46 people were having lunch in the building: 18 ‘family’ – in the medieval sense of members of the household – and 21 strangers in the servants’ hall, plus 3 family in the kitchen, 3 nurses in the nursery and a governess in the parlour. No member of the Hughes family was present.
This was an establishment consuming itself. The money pouring out was enormous and the tradesmen who had to be paid for their wares formed the basis of yet another giant ledger:
Butcher, Butterman, Poulterer, Fishmonger, Milkman, Baker, Fruiterer, Greengrocer, Iceman, Brewer, Earthenware supplier, Glazier, Confectioner, Coalmerchant, Ironmonger, Brushmaker, Bookseller, Cutler, Tailor, Bootmaker, Hatter, Wigmaker, Farrier, Harnessmaker, Sadler, Blackingmaker, Cheesemonger (Paxton and Whitfield), Tallow chandler, China dealer, Upholsterer, Clock cleaner, Newsagent, Auctioneer, Spirit
merchant, the supplier of an ice refrigerator (October 1854), Cooper, Timber merchant and Wine merchant.56
In this way the accumulated money from the mine, the rents from the hundreds of Welsh farms and the proceeds from the family bank were being distributed around the economy.
There was not much stinting on the wine cellar. On 1 January 1857, it held 2,558 gallons of ale and 1,080 gallons of small beer, as well as 76 bottles of delicious Johanisberg Hock, plenty of Moselle, sherry and Madeira, 244 bottles of 1844 Lafitte, some magnums of 1834 Latour, plenty of 1848 Margot, 251 bottles of sparkling champagne and 130 of still.57
Attempts were made to impose some economies. HRH took to questioning entries in the servants’ lunch book. ‘Carman’, the housekeeper entered one day. ‘From where?’ HRH wrote. In the week beginning 21 February 1858, he placed a big fat question mark against ‘Carpenter? Shoemaker? 2 carpenters? Tailer? 2 servants, Mr Edwards Mr Jenkins?’58 all of whom had been happily enjoying a spot of Kinmel lunch.
The cook was not ordering particularly elaborate ingredients: occasionally some fondu cases but usually ‘old ale for ham’, potatoes, two pairs of chickens, oranges and lemons, duck and fowls, lamb, tongue, veal, mushrooms, eggs, an occasional salmon, fish from Liverpool and sweetbreads. It was not luxury but the sheer scale of the establishment that was draining the resources.
Everything was ranked, but even so, totals were massive:
The emotional lives of HRH and Florentia and their children lie buried within the confines of this vast exoskeleton they had constructed and bought for themselves. At this distance they seem like beetles scuttling around the body an abandoned lobster. The hints that can be found are not happy. HRH used to go shooting and his game book has survived. He was often busy with it, shooting on eighteen days in September 1859, fourteen days in October, but often on his own, or with a single neighbour or Liddell relation of Florentia’s. To begin with, the quarry was mostly partridges and hares, but over the years they went downhill and were replaced by pheasants and rabbits. A full-time warrener and keeper were employed but anger and discontent come seeping out through the pages of the game book.
1877–8
Another bad season. Barely a stock of Partridge left on the estate. Hares much diminished in number. And as for pheasants we are entirely dependent upon those reared by hand and many of these were destroyed by wet in July. Discharged ‘James Bushnell’ who is utterly incompetent. He obtained a place with the shooting tenants at Lleweni.60
Bleaker than the atmosphere revealed in the game book is the story told by the Kinmel visitors’ book which runs from July 1865 until August 1881.61 It is a sad and curiously thin document. As the years went by, a decreasing number of people came to stay. In 1865, the Hugheses had 62 people to stay, and the following year 53. But by 1874, when the new house was at least nearing completion, there was no great surge of sociability. For February, March and April that year, over which the Hugheses could have had 2,670 individuals to stay for one night each, in strings of richly furnished bedrooms, with tens of servants to look after them, they had precisely 29 guests, 13 of them vicars or their wives.
In the high visiting season of August and September that year, during which 1,830 people might have come to stay, they managed to invite only 39 guests, nearly all of them for a day or two at a time, including 13 vicars and their wives and a single titled lady, the Dowager Lady Willoughby de Broke (a neighbour), who came for the night of 9 September.
By 1880, when you might have imagined Kinmel would be powering ahead into its full flood of social delight, there were only 28 guests in the whole of August, September and October, the number of reverends remaining high at over 50 per cent (a bishop, a canon, nine vicars and their wives). Of a possible 2,760 bed-nights, some 84 were slept in (guessing at an average three nights a guest), an occupancy rate of 3 per cent. Even for the great celebrations of the Hugheses’ golden wedding in 1903, only 13 people came to stay, including HRH’s unmarried younger son, his daughters and his wife’s relations.
Here is the fact at the heart of this gentry story. For all the money, comfort, the extraordinary inventiveness of Nesfield, all the acres, the flowering lawns, all the servants, the pot plants and grapes brought in from the greenhouses, the mushroom house, the gravelled ways, the palms and cut flowers, the mountains of meat and vegetables in the larder, for all the contacts created by the London Season, the expense, strain and effort of life at Grosvenor Square, nobody wanted to come and stay at Kinmel. HRH was not a loveable or perhaps even a likeable man. The enormous house was never anything like full. The only life it had, the only vitality, deceit, lust and delight, was in the servant’s wing. Its grander bedrooms and corridors remained empty for years at a time. Two of HRH’s daughters, Frances and Horatia, remained single for the rest of their lives, their parents unable to attract any young man into marriage with them. Kinmel, for all its show, was an echoing sham.
There is a photograph of a tea party, taken in about 1908 outside the huge Palladian mansion of Baron Hill in Anglesey, at which an alert and bearded Edward VII looks at the photographer from among a bouquet of fragrant Edwardian ladies. In the foreground, a slightly louche figure, Sir Richard Williams Bulkeley, the owner of Baron Hill, half-lounges in an upholstered bamboo chair. Behind them all stands the tense and recessive figure of HRH, not princely but disengaged, unachieved, unrecognized by the world in which he had wanted to shine.
Hughes took refuge in the consolations of snobbery. He became the leading expert on the genealogies of the Welsh gentry. He was particularly keen that his own coat of arms, impaled with his wife’s, should look splendid on buildings and writing paper. In 1863 he wrote to Sir Bernard Burke, the great entrepreneur of Victorian genealogy, at the College of Arms:
My dear Sir Bernard
The older heralds were frequently in the habit of marshalling the Arms and quarterings of the wife, even when not an heiress, alongside of those of her husband. Will you kindly tell me under what circumstances this is allowable. The effect is to materially enrich the appearance of a large Escutcheon which otherwise looks one-sided and ill-balanced, when the quarterings of the ‘Baron’ are impaled with the simple paternal shield of the ‘Femme’ …
Yours very truly,
H.R. Hughes of Kinmel62
The nearly medieval language, the split infinitive, ‘alongside of’, the pretension, the implication he was somehow a ‘Baron’ by default: none of this can have struck HRH as ridiculous and he steamed ahead establishing the ancient importance of his ancestry. The Hugheses were ‘derived by uninterrupted male succession from Cadwaladr, 2nd son of Gruffyd ap Cynan, King of North Wales, and his second wife Dyddgu, dau. of Meredith ap Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, Prince of Powys’, while the Lewises, through whom the money had come, were descended from a twelfth-century figure, ‘Hwfa ap Cynndelw, founder of the first of the fifteen noble tribes of North Wales’.63 For all that, and despite doing his time as High Sheriff of Anglesey and Flintshire, as a colonel in the Denbighshire Yeomanry and Lord Lieutenant of Flintshire, despite his daughter Mary becoming a maid of honour to Queen Victoria, no hint of a title ever came his way.
Over the fireplace in the hall at Kinmel, HRH had Nesfield erect a giant faux-Jacobean overmantle, covered with little Nesfield touches, random pies, sunflowers scattered among the pilasters, but dedicated to a tabular display of HRH’s Welsh ancestors and their coats of arms back to the kings of North Wales whose status he longed to match.64 Fellow genealogists wrote teasingly to him about the low social status of his ancestors, particularly Hugh Hughes in the eighteenth century. ‘The various occupations assigned to him are vastly amusing,’ he replied.
Such anecdotes die hard. In fact they are imperishable. Even the most amiable people love to minimize a neighbour whose social position is better than their own. You and I do it freely! Not ill-naturedly I am sure, but only to our genealogical proclivities. But I need not tell you that. In Wales more especially, when properties were being perpetually sub
divided and 20 years ago the humblest employment was quite consistent with gentle birth and ancient descent. For example you mention Sir Robert Williams. His father in early life was a servant in the employ of the Hollands of Plas Ilsa, Conway. His mother being the daughter of a publican in that town. When it became evident that he would inherit the family baronetcy a subscription was made to pay for his education.65
Status was not about money, but deep, inherited grandeur. The family was obsessed with titles as he was. In the photograph album belonging to Mary Florentia Hughes, his daughter, there is a group photograph of a small shooting party at Kinmel in November 1900, surrounded by the signatures of those who had been there:
Lady Frances Gresley
Katherine Duchess of Wellington
Honble Alice Douglas Pennant
General the Hon Sam Mostyn
Sir Robert Hurley
Lord Penrhyn
Lord Powerscourt
Each of the guests had signed their names. The words in italic were added by Miss Hughes.66
To all the forms of failure to which the Hugheses fell victim – social, political and aesthetic – can be added, finally, the most unlikely: economic. In the great Victorian survey of landownership in Britain, officially called the Return of Owners of Land, 1873, but known then and ever since as the ‘New Domesday Book’, Hugh Robert Hughes, of Kinmel Park, Denbighshire, was listed as owning 15,177 acres, with an annual rental of £19,626. This survey did not include either woodland or waste and so the figures are an under-estimate. Even so, they suggest that his landholding was already well down on what he had inherited from his cousin twenty years before.
The Gentry Page 34