The Gentry

by Adam Nicolson

  After Richard had resigned his seat in the House of Commons over the H-bomb in 1955, and after his failure to be re-elected as an independent, he became a teacher at a comprehensive school in Wandsworth and then at St Luke’s College in Exeter, one of his Victorian ancestors’ great educational foundations. But like many ex-politicians he was a little adrift.

  For all of Henry Acland’s youth, his father was ‘trying to recapture the moment when Unser Kampf was written, when he had really touched a nerve’. Occasionally he would come out to play, build boats or go canoeing on the Exe. But, like the old scholar Casaubon in Middlemarch, he wanted to write ‘the book’, the statement that would say everything. It was difficult for him as he was not a natural writer and one day Henry suggested he should simply ‘write down the record of how this happened and then that happened. But he couldn’t stop himself turning that into a polemic.’ When Henry asked him what the title was going to be, he replied, ‘I think I’ll call it A Story of Failure.’116

  For all that, Richard’s radicalism, his belief in the possibilities of moral government, his reaching for nobility and his loathing of the capitalist conspiracy never diminished. When, in 1982, the National Trust allowed the Ministry of Defence to build a giant nuclear command bunker under its land at Bradenham in the Chilterns, Richard fired off a passionate letter to Lord Gibson, the Trust’s Chairman, telling him that although he would always ‘stand up for the National Trust because I so deeply believe in its basic purpose, … on this issue I feel that I have been betrayed’.117

  Richard died in 1990, Anne in November 1992. After the death of Sir John Acland in 2009, his son Dominic Acland (the 17th Baronet, but he doesn’t use the title) went to live in Sprydon. He commutes to work in Torquay, where he runs the Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust, a wildlife and heritage charity, looking after 1,700 acres of beautiful South Devon landscape, all of it accessible to the general public. Dominic was still living at Sprydon when I spoke to him and I asked if he still had anything from his ancestors’ possessions. ‘Well, I have this,’ he said, holding up the little finger of his left hand on which there was a signet ring bearing the Acland arms. He had been given it on his twenty-first birthday in 1983. ‘And I have had to have it repaired. The gold had worn through.’118 Apart from that was there anything? A collection of photographs and a pair of bellows, he said, also emblazoned with the family’s chequered coat of arms and the one-word motto: Inébranlable, or ‘Indestructible’.

  1950s–2010s

  Continuity

  The Cliffords

  Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire

  On one of the first shooting days of the winter of 2010 the party gathers, just before ten o’clock, in the yard of Manor Farm in Frampton on Severn. It has already been a beautiful morning, with the underside of the clouds over the Severn Vale pink and red in the sunrise. The frost has turned the yews grey in the garden and the whole of Gloucestershire is quietly smoking, as if just out of the freezer. The chickens are pecking on the edges of the yard, the Gloucester Old Spots’ run is corrugated in the frost and breath hangs in puffs that come and go in front of the sows’ nostrils. It could be any morning in the last 600 years.

  About thirty men and their dogs, Labradors and spaniels, one or two quivering terriers on leads, are standing in the yard outside the old stone dovecote – a cider-making shed now – between a huge and beautiful Tudor barn and a row of stables, the blanketed horses hanging their heads out over the half-doors.

  The men, as usual on these occasions, are all dressed in the same colour, a brownish dun green. ‘We don’t do us and them here,’ Rollo Clifford says. He is the squire of Frampton and he and his family are the last of this gentry sequence. Rollo looks exactly as he should, his face the sort Gainsborough would have painted, a little careworn but tinged with an almost-boyishness, the ever-present possibility of a smile. He is sixty-six now and has the sloping shoulders and bowed legs of a man who has spent his life in the saddle, a snaggle tooth under his upper lip, and a slight, dropping tone at the end of everything he says. There is no doubting this man’s strengths – he has dug his life into this place, supporting the people here and everything it means to him – but his convictions are coated in an extraordinary gentleness.

  For nine years in his twenties Rollo Clifford was a cavalry officer in the 14th/20th Hussars, and then continued as a part-time soldier in the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars. He still has something of a softened military air, giving quiet commands to his wayward spaniels Pocket and Zephyr. He begins but often doesn’t finish his sentences, as if circling before deciding to land and settle. ‘He’s not …’ he says, describing a man he has had trouble with in the past. ‘I don’t think I am the only one …’; then a long pause as he looks at you sympathetically. ‘He is not, I wouldn’t say, very … He was never very personable. We certainly had some … I think they used to imagine that we would give in. Not that we would.’ All this to describe a long, grumbling disagreement, which has now stretched over three generations, between the Cliffords and a family of neighbours, who are very definitely not here this morning.

  But it is time to get things organized. There are seven guns – Rollo himself is not shooting – and twenty-odd beaters, men from Frampton and the surrounding villages. He knows them all well. ‘Far too many,’ Rollo says to me. ‘They are only here because we’ll give them all lunch afterwards.’ Every one of them, carrying their ash and hazel sticks, calls him ‘Rollo’ and is wearing rough, bramble-scratched Barbours and waterproof trousers for the job in hand.

  The guns wear ties and breeches and are a selection of the sort of people who have inhabited this book. Time has not passed: there is Colonel Ker, smart-looking in the neat, almost dandyish way of professional soldiers, who once commanded the Green Jackets, a man with a distinguished military record, mentioned in dispatches from Borneo in the 1960s, decorated for services in Northern Ireland, but now a little hesitant on his feet after a hunting accident. (‘It was stupid,’ Rollo says. ‘They should never have told him to get back on.’) Talking to him is Shaun Parsons, a long-standing Gloucestershire County Councillor, like Rollo once an officer in the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars and the senior financial controller in Coutts Bank. He has endless stories for me about families in which the young men play fast and loose throughout their twenties ‘but as soon as they turn thirty they all become boring as hell and the accountants can sigh with relief. It happens in every generation. It’s all in the genes.’

  Rollo introduces me to the writer Duff Hart-Davis, who has been discussing with Mark Cleaver, one of the beaters, the swap they are intending to make of some Hart-Davis partridges for a catch of grey mullet that Mark has made with his net in the Severn. Rollo’s son Peter, a handsome, tousle-haired 25-year-old, who stands a foot taller than his father but has the same hesitant and gentle Clifford manner, has his great friend George James with him. They have been working together in George’s fencing business. George’s father Guy is here too, a local estate agent. He is worried that his shooting is going downhill and tells me how he is ‘always going home nowadays with other people’s Labradors. You can’t really tell them apart, can you? But then you get home and you look down and you notice how there’s something funny about your dog – the ears not quite right, a look in the eye, the wag going round the wrong way. And then you see it’s not yours! Far, far too late!’

  Finally, standing smiling at the side is a huge retired judge, Gabriel Hutton, ‘twelve foot tall’ as Rollo says, with big darned patches in the knees of his orange breeches, an army scarf knotted at the neck and perfectly dubbined size fourteen boots. I tell him he looks magnificent, he grins like a ten-year-old and I have the extraordinary feeling that the characters in this book have quite suddenly come back to life. The past has not passed. These are the friends of William Plumpton and George Throckmorton. Gentry consciousness knows no history.

  Janie, Rollo’s wife, comes out to see all is well. She is tall and gentle, a graceful 1960
s beauty, with big grey eyes, her hair pulled back from her face, visibly Peter’s mother. She is the daughter of a much-loved Appeal Court judge and Exmoor hunting man, and she too, like Rollo, has a relaxed familiarity with command, the at-homeness of someone who habitually decides and ordains. This is their place. There is no sense of imposed order but it is clear that these two are making this scene happen.

  They complement each other. Just as Rollo has the habit of turning his sentences down towards the end, Janie has a way of lifting her words into slow and buoyant laughter. As she moves around the yard in her tweed plus fours and deerstalker, going from one knot of people to the next, saying hello and good morning to them, a bubble of that laughter follows her.

  As in family after family in this book, authority in the Cliffords is subtly distributed between husband and wife. Largely, he fronts the performance and she supports it; but she is the better communicator and he the more reticent reservoir of knowledge. In public they very decorously refer to and engage with each other on any question. And, as he told me much later that evening, he knows that for any Clifford at Frampton, of any generation, by far the most important factor in his life is the woman who chooses to share it with him.

  He pulls on his cap, gives his instructions to the assembled guns and beaters – no one is to shoot the foxes, people are to pick up their empty cartridges ‘if you can’ – and we leave for the first drive. Flocks of redwings and fieldfares fill the air between the little coverts and woods. We move out from the village, across its half-mile-long green which Rollo says was ‘designed for long-bow practice’, and on to the 1,500 acres of the Frampton estate. Its place in the Severn Vale becomes apparent. Over to the east are the dark blue wooded heights of the Cotswold Edge; to the west, beyond the Severn, the trees of the Forest of Dean; and between the two this long flat sliver of the Vale, low, wet country, criss-crossed by the ditches they call ‘rhines’ (rhymes with ‘sheens’) and with hedges lining those ditches. It is green and lush, born dairy country.

  We come to the first drive and Rollo arranges his troops. ‘Why don’t you stand here?’ he says to Shaun Parsons, the tall man in spectacles from Coutts, pointing to a spot under the high-tension wires that loop between pylons striding off to the south. ‘Should I avoid the wires?’ Parsons asks. ‘Oh no,’ Rollo, says, ‘you can shoot them.’ The atmosphere remains League of Gentlemen military. Rollo refers to the older men among his guests as ‘the senior officers present’ and disposes them at the near stands, the younger boys being sent off on the walk to the far end of the line. Colonel Ker is given a spot on the track at the corner and Duff Hart-Davis is placed next to him, in the fringes of a plantation of young walnuts which Peter Clifford planted last year. The others are spread out in a widely dispersed line to the north and Rollo and I walk off with Zephyr and Pocket to join the beaters who will push the pheasants on to the waiting guns.

  It’s not a highly organized shoot. There are no numbered pegs. The guns miss almost everything they aim at. The gamekeeper, Alan Franklin, is part time and unpaid. ‘He wouldn’t accept a tip if you tried to offer it to him,’ Rollo says, ‘so don’t.’ They only put down 250 young birds at the beginning of the season – one to every six acres of the estate – and they never sell a day’s shooting here. ‘I couldn’t bear a commercial shoot,’ Rollo says as he gives one long blast on his whistle to start the beaters off. One of the neighbours ‘puts down a million pheasants on a small patch of land on our boundary and he is always moaning because we shoot their birds. They don’t like that. They think I am creating a vacuum which their pheasants are going to flood into. But why should I have to put down birds which I don’t think … which are against my better judgement? I know he thinks I am too mean …’

  The beaters are making their chirruping way through the old, tired game crop and Zephyr and Pocket are huffing through the brambles in the ditch beside us. For about five minutes not a single bird appears and the guns stand silent. Then a cock gets up and flies, high and straight, towards Duff Hart-Davis. ‘Ah,’ says Rollo, ‘there’s the Frampton pheasant,’ a joke which I imagine has been made by the Cliffords of Frampton since about 1420. Rollo follows its course steadily across the November sky. Hart-Davis sees it, raises his gun, tracks his muzzle towards it, squeezes the trigger, the pock of the detonation comes brightly over the field towards us and the pheasant flies on into the clear blue air towards Bristol and Somerset. ‘Oh good,’ Rollo says quietly. ‘I am rather glad that one defeated Duff.’

  The scene is a continuation of the past. Every figure in this book has been a hunter and shooter of one kind or another. For almost everyone a half-military air has hung around their lives. All have been taught to play the gracious host. Every one has used his piece of land as a theatre in which to display that courtesy, generosity and wellbeing. Every one would have seen himself, in one way or another, as a friend of the people who were his tenants, his community, his human surroundings, and at the same time would have been a little sceptical about their good intentions. Every one would have liked the idea that he was continuing the habits and practices of his father and grandfather, and to have seen his own son and his son’s friends taking those habits on into the future. Except for an aberrational moment in late Victorian and Edwardian England, this way of going about a shoot, which is ad hoc, without any elaborate stocking or staffing, would have been the norm. Lunch was always an integral part of it. The whole day always revolved around little courtesies, between the guns, between the guns and the beaters, between host and guest. Men in these situations have always talked endlessly about dogs and horses. This is the world of Harry Oxinden and Oliver le Neve. These things, for all the vicissitudes of time, have been constant for hundreds of years. Of course there is modernity here, but the joint animation of these modern gentry is positively medieval. It is, extraordinarily, the inheritance of knightliness.

  What is different? Everything: Rollo would never have been beating with me in the past. He would have been with his guns. The guns would not have been modern breech-loaders. I would not have been here. The farmed landscape itself is no more than half recognizable. Although the Cliffords have been careful to preserve as many as possible of the old hedges and greenways that cross their land, and there are still 117 separate fields on the Frampton estate, that is no more than half what was here until the 1950s. The fields are now drained. There are few cattle. The track we are on is made of planings scraped off the M5 when the surface was renewed a year or two ago. There is the noise of distant traffic. The pylons cross the land. A young crop of EU-subsidized oil seed rape extends in its usual hideous way across the field next to us. ‘I rather … I really rather hate oil seed rape,’ Rollo says as we walk along, ‘but there seems to be an unending market for it.’ All of the fields are surrounded by grassy headlands which are subsidized by EU agri-environment schemes. Just behind the trees to the west are two 100-acre lakes, the flooded gravel pits made when Frampton’s most precious resource was dug out during the twentieth century. They are now rich with bird life, willow lined, much fished in and sailed on. To the north is the gently rising ground of what was until recently the site of a large and rather smelly landfill site, on whose five-figure annual fees the estate survived for thirty years until it too finally closed in 2008. The rubbish, first from foundries and then extending into food waste, was dumped in what had been yet another gravel pit. Nowadays the rubbish is sealed in, grass and maize grow on the surface and a tiny power station generates electricity from the methane given off by the slowly rotting remains of supermarket dinners and pots of taramasalata lying far below.

  The shot birds are now gathered up and strung in braces with baler twine. Their feathers are broken and ruffled by the shot that has gone through them, their coats torn in patches. They are joined in the trailer by the body of a myxy rabbit which Pocket had picked out of the hedge and Rollo had dispatched with the thick end of his hazel thumbstick. A beautiful big dog fox had slunk out between the guns, glossy on th
e pheasant dinners he had been enjoying, but no one raised a barrel to him. ‘Good,’ Rollo says when given the news. ‘I like to hear the foxes are well.’ He is a great hunting man – Senior Joint Master of the Berkeley Hunt – and is keen on the idea of preserving foxes so that one day the hounds can hunt them.

  The Cliffords have been at Frampton at least since the Domesday Book was written in 1086.1 Shaun Parsons told me as we sat on the bales in the back of the trailer that he had once at a dinner party said that the Cliffords had been at Frampton since 1110. ‘1110?’ Rollo had said from the far end of the table with his eyes like saucers. ‘What are you talking about? It’s at least 1080.’ A man called Pons, William the Conqueror’s first cousin, came over in 1066 and ended up owning Frampton among other places. He sounds important but he was the son of a younger son of a second marriage of the Conqueror’s grandfather. The son of his younger brother, Walter Clifford, became the squire of Frampton. He probably lived in a house on the site of Manor Farm. From the beginning this place was always on the lower edges of gentry life.2

  Apart from one flirtation with royalty in the twelfth century when the exquisitely beautiful Rosamund Clifford became the mistress of Henry II,3 the Cliffords have maintained a superbly steady state ever since: often acting as local justices, very occasionally MPs, sometimes with a house in Gloucester, never one in London, never losing their place entirely, never reaching for the heights and never sinking into penury. One Elizabethan Clifford, James, nearly destroyed the enterprise by building a prodigy house at nearby Fretherne on the banks of the Severn, to which the Queen, although invited, never came.4 Otherwise, the family has remained, in effect, Mr and Mrs Clifford for a millennium. Rollo is the 28th Frampton Clifford and Peter the 29th.