There was also trouble ahead. Already, by 1885, HRH had a mortgage debt of £52,000 secured on his land. On into the 1890s, Hughes was selling off more of his assets, including the Glan y Wern estate, the Bee Hotel in Abergele, and many farms and cottages, and building land in the new railway-accessible holiday resort of Rhyl on the north Welsh coast.67 The picture was unravelling; the impetus provided by the now-long-exhausted Parys Mountain was losing its force. HRH had replaced a perfectly reasonable house at Kinmel with his gargantuan palace. It was, in retrospect, a ridiculous mistake, a crime against the first gentry principle of survival: take no risks. He was caught in the pincer of a changing world and his own destructive fantasies.
On a personal level, the family was also falling apart. HRH had disinherited his eldest son, Hugh Seymour Bulkeley Lewis Hughes, known as Seymour Hughes. In 1885, he had married Mary Caroline Stewart Hodgson, the daughter of James Stewart Hodgson, a partner in Baring’s Bank, and a close friend and patron, among many other artists, of Frederic Lord Leighton. Leighton painted Mary Caroline and her sister Agatha soon after they were both married, in a portrait of adult sisterhood which their father treasured. But then a disaster. Seymour fell in love with a show girl, Florence Treseder, from Newington in south-east London, whose father was stage manager at the Lyceum and whose stage name was ‘Lily Maud’.68 HRH would have none of that and he cut Seymour out of his will. Fred Bradley, the eleven-year-old son of the head coachman at Kinmel, ‘well remembered the day [Mr Seymour] came to say Goodbye to them all. He kissed Mrs Bradley and said he would never see them again.’69 Seymour got a divorce from his first wife, married the show girl and went to live with her in a little cottage on Jersey, where he died in 1918, aged fifty-six.70
Florentia died in 1909 and HRH sixteen months later, in April 1911, aged eighty-three. The estate went to a second son, Henry, a bachelor captain in the 14th Hussars and then a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers. After the 1914–18 war, Colonel Hughes struggled to maintain his inheritance but the legacy of HRH’s overpowering need for self-aggrandizement had made it impossible. Much of the park was let out as a military camp. Another 1,000 acres were sold off to the Kinmel Bay Land Company in 1925. In 1929 Colonel Hughes left the great house and sold its contents. The house itself was sold in 1934 and over the rest of the century it became a school, a spa, a military hospital, a school again and a religious conference centre. Colonel Hughes died in 1940, making his sister’s daughter, Mrs Fetherstonhaugh, his heir. Her great-grandson Dickon Fetherstonhaugh now owns and manages the 4,000 remaining acres of the Kinmel Estate and lives in Nesfield’s wonderful model farm at Llwyni.
As for the great house, a fire in 1975 burned through large parts of it; a property company bought it, failed to sell it and went bust; now (April 2011), largely watertight but empty, it is in the hands of receivers and is for sale at £3.5 million, needing several million more spent on it. It may become a hotel, the destiny it failed to achieve under its creator.
Yeats understood the phenomenon: ‘a rich man’s flowering lawns’ and his ‘escutcheoned doors’, ‘The pacing to and fro on polished floors/Amid great chambers and long galleries’, even in their beauty and gentleness, are all monuments to pain:
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;71
PART VI
The After-Life
1910–2010
Ambivalence hung over the gentry after their social and political decline at the end of the nineteenth century. The democratization of political power, nationally and locally, their accumulated debts, higher inheritance taxes and the decimation of the English officer class in the First World War all combined to erode them. They did far worse than the better-insulated aristocracy, which had stronger links to the world of business and finance, and survived the twentieth century, diminished but surprisingly intact. In the late nineteenth century, the Marquess of Bristol and the Duke of Marlborough had both married railways, the Earl of Carnarvon and the Marquess of Cholmondeley banks and Lord Curzon and the Earl of Suffolk a Chicago department store.1 Titles were always welcome on company boards, and by 1896 167 peers were being paid as company directors.2 As a result of this deep penetration of the modern world, 70 per cent of the grandee families that had owned great estates upwards of 10,000 acres in 1880 were still landowners in 1980; 33 per cent still owned between 3,000 and 10,000 acres; and 24 per cent still owned over 10,000.3 Despite the widespread mourning for the death of the English country house, five out of six that existed in 1900 were still upright and occupied in 2000.4 The twenty-first-century Dukes of Beaufort, Bedford, Devonshire, Grafton, Marlborough, Norfolk, Northumberland, Richmond and Rutland still live in their enormous art-encrusted palaces and castles at Badminton, Woburn, Chatsworth, Euston, Blenheim, Arundel, Alnwick, Goodwood and Belvoir. The twentieth century turned out to be a perfectly good time to be immensely grand.5
It wasn’t like that for the gentry. Half of the families in the 1863 Burke’s Landed Gentry did not appear in the 1914 edition.6 By the 1920s, so many of the old gentry families had lost their lands that the ownership of land was no longer a requirement for a family to appear in the book at all. Between 1880 and 1980, over half of those who had owned between 3,000 and 10,000 acres went out of land entirely. For those with less than 3,000 acres, the rate of attrition was more like 80 per cent.7 Although the question of definition is as difficult as ever, at the end of the twentieth century less than 1 per cent of England belonged to the gentry, perhaps 500 families owning 1,000 acres each.
The triple shock of the agricultural depression, death duties and the ebbing of self-confidence had all dealt them a blow far worse than anything they had experienced before. Death duties were first raised on land in 1894 at a rate equivalent to two years’ net income. This was about the same as the fines imposed on the Royalist estates by the Parliamentary committees in the 1640s, but the atrocious returns from agriculture and the much better income available from industrial investments or government bonds made the burden more difficult to bear. The Finance Act of 1919 raised that tax from 12 per cent to 20 per cent, a level which encouraged many families to leave land entirely. Between 1918 and 1927, six to eight million acres, including at least 25 per cent of Britain’s farmland, changed hands.8
Land was no longer the ultimate valuable. In 1880, it was estimated that the estate of the Marquess of Camden, which yielded £1,700 after all expenses had been paid, would sell for £190,000. If that capital sum were invested in government bonds it would yield £5,700 a year. The case was put in court:
One man would say ‘I would rather have the £5,700 p.a than £1,700 p.a. – I would rather have the money than the land; and another would say ‘If I have enough to live on, as long as I can make ends meet, I would rather have the land, and no amount of money can compensate me for the loss of an ancient estate on which my ancestors have resided and in which many may have been buried.’9
If the aristocracy were thinking that, the gentry thought it in spades. Their history in the twentieth century was one of shrinkage, nostalgia and fragmentation. Their lower margins were more indistinct than ever. The land they were unable to hold on to was usually bought by its tenants, so that where 10 per cent of land was owned by the man who farmed it in 1914, that figure rose inexorably to 21 per cent in 1921, 37 per cent in 1927 and 49 per cent in 1960.10 Approaching two-thirds of all farmland is owner-occupied today.
The effect was that the distinction between the great lords and the gentry widened; and that between yeomen and gentry disappeared. Many gentry families started to till their own land. Many became culturally illiterate. When in 1944 the aesthete James Lees-Milne, Secretary to the Historic Buildings Committee of the National Trust, visited an ageing Colonel Freddy Wingfield Digby at Sherborne Castle in
Dorset (Digby headquarters since 1617, the year in which they took it over from a disgraced Sir Walter Raleigh), he found a man and a consciousness which had survived the centuries but had now sunk towards the condition of the unlettered squire:
The Colonel is a stooping M.F.H. with the manner of one. Very autocratic, very conscious of his not inconsiderable dignity. He took us through the very beautiful wooded walks round the lake. Here we came upon Pope’s seat, where the poet wrote letters to Martha Blount. The Colonel showed little interest in these fascinating associations. When I responded excitedly, the Colonel snorted, ‘Pope indeed. I’ve no idea which pope it could have been.’11
On cold winter days, the Colonel used to climb one of Sherborne’s many towers with his rifle and from there shoot the ice on the lake so that the people of Yeovil, who liked to skate on it, would sink.
The nouveaux pauvres clung on in their damp cold manor houses. Many sold up or demolished, incapable of maintaining what the modern world could not sustain. A Punch cartoon from the late 1940s showed an old gentry squire dressing down his playboy son: ‘Unless you behave yourself, I won’t leave the place to the National Trust.’ Sherborne remained in the hands of the Wingfield Digbys and their website describes the modern situation:
In changing times we now act as host to wedding ceremonies and receptions, a country fair, classic car rallies, film crews, sporting events and a variety of other corporate and private events. Our Tea Room serves morning coffees, light lunches and delicious afternoon teas. The Gift Shop has a selection of gifts, souvenirs and our very own Sherborne Castle wines.12
The most pitiable word in that list is ‘host’. According to Simon Jenkins, Marilyn Monteith, hanging on in Cochwillan Old Hall at Tal y Bont, near Bangor, keeps warm by jumping up and down on a trampoline, because she can’t afford the heating.
The two twentieth-century families in this book dance in and out of that mainstream. Both their stories are bound tightly to the question of land and inheritance, not only material but moral and psychological; the first as a theatrical and paradoxical renunciation which in fact carried within it many continuities from its own family culture; the second as a dogged and determined persistence in the face of the deep structural difficulties to which most of the gentry have succumbed and whose threat will not go away.
1890s–1950s
Renunciation
The Aclands
Killerton, Devon and Holnicote, Somerset
In the eighteenth century the Aclands could walk from the shores of the Bristol Channel in Somerset to the shores of the English Channel in Devon without setting foot on another man’s land. That, anyway, was the emblem of the family,1 an estate that spread from sea to sea. It was almost true. A series of brilliant marriages, with Blackford, Dyke, Arundell, Wroth and Fox-Strangway girls, had funnelled estates into their hands, so that by 1800 Aclandshire stretched to about 45,000 acres spread across the fifty-odd miles from the beach at Porlock, over Exmoor, down the steep, moss-cushioned valley of the Exe, to Exeter and Exmouth, with large outliers to the west in north Devon, around Bude and Trerice in Cornwall and eastwards in Somerset.
The estate shrank a little in the 1800s, but some 35,000 Acland acres survived into the twentieth century. This chapter describes how, in the middle of that century, under no compulsion but with a mixture of high idealism and fierce political ambition, the last Acland squire got rid of every last stick. It was a moment in which the gentry’s belief in itself did not exactly die but was turned on its head.
If you sit down outside the limewashed church at Selworthy in the middle of what was once the Aclands’ Holnicote estate, you are given an image of what people in this book dreamed of and fought for: a blessed valley, rising to the dark, stag-rich heights of Exmoor to the south, with deep sessile oak and beech woods clinging to the lower moorsides and a skirt of pastures and hedges, coppiced and laid, below them.
Yews stand in the churchyard and there’s an orchard of old cider apple trees. In 1828, around the sloping green to the west of the church, Sir Thomas Acland built a perfect little run of thatched, bow-windowed cottages coming down the hill beside a leat, now with wobbly box hedges around their gardens and lichened apple trees inside them. There are wrens in the hedges, toadflax and polypody ferns by the pathway.
It is a little vision of completeness. Inside the church, under a beautiful wagon roof spangled with angels, are memorials to nineteenth-century Aclands: two young men who died in the 1820s and ’30s, victims of the diseased conditions on ships of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, stationed off the gulf of Benin to suppress the Atlantic slave trade; and a brass to their father and brother, successive squires of Holnicote and Killerton, both called Sir Thomas Acland:
The father and son were in succession owners of Holnicote for more than 100 years.
They were deeply attached to this valley and devoted to the welfare of its inhabitants. Animated by a strong affection for their hill country home, they constantly strove to render the natural beauty of its surroundings more available to their neighbours and to visitors from afar.
Let us who come after them gratefully rejoice in their benevolence and follow their good example.
This brass plaque, set up in 1898 by the son of the second Sir Thomas, concentrated every element of the old gentry gospel: land, beauty, neighbours, charity, godliness and leadership. Here, sanctified by the late Victorians, were the founding principles of gentrydom. Only in ‘visitors from afar’, a phrase from the railway age, can one detect the faintly self-conscious, revivalist tone.
The twentieth-century Acland story is only intelligible in the light of these nineteenth-century roots. The first Victorian Sir Thomas (1784–1871) had been a liberal Tory, doling out welfare to the poor on the estates, building a school just outside the park fence at Killerton, another in Broadclyst just down the road and another in Selworthy. As MP for Devon, he advocated religious liberty for both Catholics and dissenters as early as 1813, fulminating against the extravagance of the royal family, deprecating the conditions in the cotton mills, excoriating the ‘horrible and infamous slave trade’,2 calling the game laws savage and the Corn Laws, which kept grain prices high for the benefit of farmers and punished the poor, iniquitous. But he was no burning radical. At the Great Reform Bill in 1832, he finally voted against any extension of the suffrage.
On his estates, Acland was the benevolent despot. Along with his indecipherable handwriting and impulsiveness – ‘a walk in London with Acland is like walking with a grasshopper’3 – he was a man of reckless generosity. One of his friends told him he was guilty of ‘benevolent careless self-indulgence’ – a finely aimed phrase – ‘but not sufficiently considering that the day of self-denial must come, when, in more justice to yourself and your family, present and future, you must restrain yourself’.4 It was never quite possible to tell in Sir Thomas whether great altruistic gestures were acts of generosity, of egotism or both.
In 1841, he built a new chapel at Killerton. The historian of the family, Anne Acland, described its theatre:
Its whole style reflected the views of its patron. The seats were arranged along the walls, in rows facing each other, so that he could see the entire congregation of family, servants, estate workers and tenants, all sitting in their appointed places. Sir Thomas himself was the presiding figure. Here in miniature, was society as he wished it to be: a paternalistic hierarchy, held together by the cohesive element of Christianity and expressed in corporate worship. Here he could believe in Church and State as one.5
These were some of the ingredients in the immensely powerful Acland family tradition, a phrase always abbreviated among them to ‘the A.T.’:6 great riches, energy, seriousness, generosity, religiosity and an unquestioned sense of command. There was no doubt the Aclands were members of the governing class.
The second Victorian Sir Thomas was more radical than his father, a friend and contemporary of Gladstone and of F. D. Maurice, the high-minded founder of Christian so
cialism. This younger Sir Thomas became a Liberal in 1867, and was instrumental in setting up new education policies, but even he was not interested in giving the vote to the unpropertied classes until ‘education, thrift and sobriety’7 had done their work.
In the election of 1885 this Sir Thomas became Liberal Member of Parliament for Wellington in Somerset, his eldest son, Charlie, for Launceston in Cornwall and his second son, Arthur, for Rotherham in Yorkshire. ‘Aclands are trumps!’8 Gladstone wrote to the father excitedly. But the A.T. amalgam of grand humanitarian gentry government, a form of progressive patriarchy, began to break down in this third Victorian generation. Charlie and Arthur came to loathe each other, Charlie taking on the mantle of the rural squire, turning more conservative, his interests local, while Arthur became increasingly important and radical as education minister in Gladstone’s 1892 Cabinet. He was the new Labour party’s particular ally within the Liberal establishment.
Aclandshire was scarcely part of this democratic ideal: ‘The place is full of my former self,’ Arthur wrote of Killerton in 1883, ‘whom I look at as if a different creature. The huge trees, the big garden, the mass of servants, how grand I once thought all this and seem to dislike it now.’9 Rather than the smartness of the Charlie-dominated Acland estate, Arthur took his family to Clynnog on the Welsh coast for sailing and sandcastles, where Elsie, Arthur’s wife, in her loose Liberty clothes, could indulge the ‘high-thinking and plain living’ she loved.10
When Sir Thomas died in 1898, Charlie inherited the estates: 16,000 acres in Somerset, 15,000 in Devon, 5,000 in Cornwall. He was, according to his brother, ‘quite the monarch’,11 his mind increasingly feudal. It was Charlie who set up the medieval-nostalgic brass plaque in Selworthy church to the gentry virtues of his father and grandfather. The house at Killerton was enlarged with a new drawing room and billiard room. Portraits of Charlie and his wife, Gertie, were added in plaster to the dining room walls, developments at which other Acland noses wrinkled. The whole place ‘smelled of beeswax, woodsmoke and freesias’,12 delicious things, thought to be too much by the severer members of the clan.
The Gentry Page 35