The Gentry

by Adam Nicolson

  It has been the most braided of streams. Descent has often been through the female line. Husbands marrying Clifford girls have changed their names to match the inheritance. The Manor Farm has for long periods been in the hands of families other than theirs, but Cliffords have never been absent from Frampton. More often than not, they have lived on the other side of the green from the manor, on the site where the wonderful Frampton Court, a creamy chunky-Palladian villa in Bath Stone, was built in the 1730s.

  Particular lines have come to an end and distant relatives have succeeded. Nephews have inherited, cousins have bought the estate. Marriages have been contracted with other gentry families of the vale and alliances made, above all with the lordly Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle nine miles to the south, but Frampton has never been immensely grand and never had its own castle. Manor Farm is a beautiful late medieval house, but Frampton Court was built with the money of a searcher in the Bristol Customs Office.5 Money of that kind, derived from the moment when Bristol was a world-dominating city, afloat on sugar, slaves and the African trade, would never have emerged from here.

  Go down to the little church in Frampton and the long story of what is essentially a lesser place becomes plain. St Mary’s is old not rich. There is nothing here to match the church architecture you would find in the Cotswolds or East Anglia. It is the building of a rather poor and marginal parish. At the east end of the north aisle, the Cliffords have their chapel, but compared with other family chapels in other village churches around the country, this is simplicity itself.

  There is a fourteenth-century Clifford warrior with his feet resting on his spaniel and his legs crossed in what was thought to be the Crusader way, with his lady next to him in her own niche, but neither is carved with any pomp or grandeur. There are some crudely lettered Clifford slabs from the 1500s on the floor of the vestry and one or two dignified marble plaques from the centuries that followed. They are all part of the Clifford inheritance but the names flicker and change as daughters inherit and men die childless. A Clutterbuck (the Bristol man) and then some Winchcombes appear and disappear again. The cumulative picture is of a relatively modest family continuing in its honourable but unflamboyant way. This is gentry normality, the tradition Rollo Clifford is heir to.

  The memorials in the church make their slow approach to the twentieth century, finally reaching the point where the people on the walls are within touching distance. Rollo’s grandfather, Henry Francis Clifford, is here, in gothic lettering on a brass plate, with his own coat of arms and motto on one side (Dulcis Amor Patriae – Sweet is the love of your country) and on the other those of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars. He was a major in that yeomanry cavalry regiment and with it he died fighting the Turks on the borders of Palestine in January 1917. He was forty-five and his death left his widow, Hilda, pregnant with a daughter, Henriette, Rollo’s mother, who never saw her father.

  Fleurs de lys decorate Major Clifford’s polished plaque. It aims to be a medieval thing, a reversion to the knightliness this family has embraced for a thousand years. The memorial carries a stanza from the Epilogue to Asolando, the last poem Robert Browning wrote, chosen by Hilda as an epitaph:

  One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,

  Never doubted clouds would break,

  Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

  Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

  Sleep to wake.

  Those lines identify a certain Clifford mentality: a sense of near-bafflement, of life not running quite with the grain, of difficulty all round you, but faced with a kind of principled obstinacy, a dogged insistence that things will come right in the end.

  The Raid on Rafa in which Major Clifford died might have come out of a medievalist Edwardian illumination, a dream of gentry honour.6 In the chill January of 1917, the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars were an element of a raiding party which attacked a Turkish force heavily dug in just south of Gaza on the southern borders of Palestine. The British cavalry rode to battle through a beautiful moonlit night for thirty miles across the desert and then on to the grassy plains of northern Sinai. The Warwickshire Yeomanry and the Worcestershire Hussars were with them, as well as the Imperial Camel Corps, some Australian and New Zealand cavalry and the Royal Horse Artillery. No infantry were there. All night they travelled past mud-brick villages and their gardens, the horses grazing now and then on the clover and young barley of the open plains. They bivouacked in the deep-shadowed orchards of pear, apricot and almond trees, only the almonds in blossom.

  In the dawn of 9 January, 600 yards or so from the Turkish lines, the cavalrymen dismounted and began to attack on foot across an entirely coverless, shallow, sloping hillside. The Turks had set up their positions well and their machine guns effortlessly commanded wide fields of fire. Turkish snipers were buried up to their armpits behind small aloes. The Gloucestershire men were given the northern flank of the battle, where sand dunes spread in from the Mediterranean coast. Even here, though, the cover was minimal and under the machine-gun fire they could move only a few yards at a time. That is where a Turkish bullet killed Rollo’s grandfather, instantaneously, ‘with not a moment’s pain, or knowledge he had even been hit’, as his groom, Horton, wrote to Hilda in Frampton.7

  Henry’s body was taken 130 miles back to the military cemetery at Kantara on the east bank of the Suez Canal. At his funeral in the desert they sang ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ and, according to his brother officer Frank Mitchell, he left ‘a great blank in everyone’s heart, and especially all the old yeomen’.8 His dusty grave was marked with a wooden cross and outlined in a rough desert kerb.

  The Raid on Rafa very nearly ended in defeat but the New Zealanders got round the back of the Turkish position and finally stormed it from behind, killing the defenders with their bayonets. After all was over, and the dead removed, the victors held ‘The Desert Column First Spring Meeting’ on the beautiful grassy downland of southern Palestine over which they had fought. Officers and other ranks raced for the Rafa Cup, the Promised Land Stakes, the Syrian Derby and the Jerusalem Scurry (for mules only, over five furlongs). Henry Clifford wasn’t there but every Clifford in history would have loved it.9

  As we walk towards the next drive on the shoot, across the fields still marked with the ridge-and-furrow of medieval farming, I talk to Rollo about what he believes in. What is it that is motivating him here? He is not the most voluble of men but first, or at least easiest, we talk about horses. ‘That’s an important element to register really,’ he says, suddenly like a colonel in a novel. ‘The old cavalry ethos of you look after your horse first, then your men, then yourself. Which I was certainly brought up with.’

  He had loved the cavalry when he was in it and every summer at the Frampton Country Fair, a great celebration of the whole Clifford world of horses, dogs, hunting, shooting, river skills and rural crafts, to which 15,000 people come, Rollo and his fellow cavalrymen from the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars put on a stomping exhibition of horsemanship, riding at full gallop with lances extended, skewering burning tent pegs as they pass or amazingly re-enacting a scene from the battle of Waterloo. ‘The idea’, Rollo says, ‘is to try to get your lance down the Frenchman’s throat.’ He must be one of the few men in the world who every summer gets to shout ‘Charge’ to 15,000 people at the top of his voice. It is like something out of the Mongol steppe. Janie is a little horrified by his performing like this on his strong horses, but his daughter Anna says ‘It’s nice to see my dad showing off.’

  Since the Bronze Age, the hunt has been the continuation of a cavalry charge by other means, and hunting is in the Clifford blood. Rollo’s mother, Henriette, ‘lived and breathed horses. It was what lit her up more than anything else.’

  Pictures in the Frampton archive both of her and of her own mother show strong, elegant and handsome women, taut with energy, almost always on or with a horse, hunting well into their seventies and even then coming bac
k from a day’s hunting ‘saying I have never had such a thrill in my whole life’.

  Alongside those pictures are letter after letter from all members of the family describing, like match reports, the breathless detail of hunt after hunt across the Frampton acres …

  … swinging right-handed before Parks, through Mincepie and along the edge of Withybed, Buster and Tim over the Tiger Trap south of Withy Bed but the rest over the ditch at Mince Pie & along Westward and into Marsh Lane where we met a very affable Coole [a farming neighbour]. Fox turned right in Coole’s Cabbages by his house and across the rough diggings towards Park Corner Cottages. Everyone on & beaming faces … on the Morse’s [another farming neighbour] & fox to ground behind Whites Mill. Small place & he was bolted by a terrier. Fool of a fox could have gone straight to Johnny Teesdales [the portraitist, a Clifford neighbour] but turned left through the hedge & met the pack. They ran him one field and bowled him over in the open. Found again at once and ran the ‘classic’ line …10

  and so on for page after page, hunt after hunt, year after year. This is the language and thought pattern of the hunting gentry over the centuries. The Plumptons would have talked like this, the Oxindens, the Gawdys, the Aclands. It has always been a form of warfare in which no one dies, of fun, of bringing like-minded people together, of the storming use of rural England, but it is also more that, a form of enormously conspicuous consumption, a kind of displayed command of the country. Its florid indifference to usefulness – of time, horses, men, hounds, the environment, land – has always been, at least in part, its purpose.

  Since the ban on hunting imposed in 2005 – or rather since the general antipathy to hunting began to take hold in the 1980s – things have not been quite the same. Rollo has put up a poster outside his kitchen window at the manor which says ‘Vive la Chasse’ in red and green and another on the road, but so high up a tree that no objector could reach it, which says ‘Fight the Ban – Keep Hunting’. And Rollo is quietly reflective about his modern circumstances.

  Development is the curse, Bristol coming up and Gloucester coming down. And the roads. Two motorways. The dreaded wire. It is very parochial now, even compared with my childhood, round and round in circles because of the motorways and the roads. Before the ban you could still have 5, 6, 7 miles points if you were lucky, up and down the vale, between the A38 and the river. And there is some very lovely wild country south of Berkeley which has only been intruded on by the two nuclear power stations. Two great lumps of concrete don’t interfere in the way a road does.

  But he has his visions of perfection:

  What I always used to love was when the dog fox was out of his territory, on the lookout for a lady wife when you found him and then he made a wild run back home and the hounds hunted him all the way.

  But do you know what I dream of? What I really long for? If you could orchestrate a railway strike, then we could hunt along the railway lines. You always have brambles and scrub there. If you could guarantee a railway strike … We have done it but it doesn’t happen very often these days. Sadly. Mrs T is to blame for that.

  So what was it about hunting? Why did people devote their lives to it? ‘It was nothing to do with the demise of the quarry,’ Rollo says, in language whose roots must surely stretch generations back into the nineteenth century, and then goes on in his usual, pausing, unfinishing, philosophical way:

  The basic instinct, when you hear the hounds running … Nobody thought about the quarry being exhausted. The unpredictability of the chase, the glorious uncertainty … The fact that the hounds were doing the hunting for you. At the end of the day, a bit like after a day’s skiing, that marvellous feeling of wellbeing.

  ‘It is quite quiet sometimes,’ he says.

  You hear the birds singing. The uncertainty, that’s important, the fusing of these things …

  The best hunting moment is on a low winter afternoon just as snow is coming on … that was the best scenting moment, when the scent is just breast high on the hounds, the best moment of any possible year really, the hunt in the dark with snow coming in the cold air …

  Love of the countryside, Adam, it’s not produced with a camera and a note pad. The hunter-gatherer side forms a bond that is deeper and sounder than that. You slowly lose your blood lust as the years tick on. If you ever had a blood lust that is. But that connection to a place which you get by knowing it, as you do when you are hunting, that never goes.

  This is not a very wordy culture and emotions rarely break surface; but it is, and perhaps always has been, a world of near-silent passion.

  The shoot moves on from drive to drive. Through Blackthorn Covert, and then across Ploughed Piece and a small orchard of old perry pears, we drive the pheasants on to the guns who are standing in Sweet Meadow and one or two in Broad Croft. Rollo distributes lumps of dark chocolate at one pause. We push a few birds out of the game crop in Pear Tree Leaze and then through Old Withy Bed, the little covert between Pear Tree Leaze and Teazle Ground – where the teazles were once grown for the cloth industry. Finally, Rollo lines his guns up on the edge of the plantation called Pancake – so-called because it was first drawn by the Berkeley Hounds one Shrove Tuesday.

  Rollo tells me to stay to one side ‘in the 12/6s’ while he arranges his friends in front of Pancake Covert. On the sound of the whistle, the beaters start to make their way through the maize. The old gentlemen wait for them patiently in front of the scrubby and brambly edge of the wood. A lemon-yellow sun shines down hazily on Gloucestershire. One or two pheasants come up out of the corn, fluttering to gain height, flustered at the trouble, like milkmaids disturbed from their work, and then soon enough sail high and straight through the winter sky towards the guns, their long tails quivering with each beat of the wing.

  The men stand waiting as the birds come over. One after another the barrels rise hesitantly skywards, as if the men were manikins, puppet-like, the guns pulled up by strings attached to the flying birds. Pock, pock, pock – one after another shots are tossed into the winter air. None of them makes contact and the pheasants fly on, curving away to the cover in another wood. The low ones are allowed through. Occasionally a bird flutters in mid-air, a hesitation, almost a cough, as it is ‘pricked’ by the cloud of shot, and it drops into the wood behind. Dogs will retrieve them later. The old men miss nearly everything, pointing their firing sticks at the sky, looking to get on to a pheasant and then again and again losing the line.

  It is a picture of the gentry, complete in all its archaic dignity. ‘How can I live among this gentle/obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?’ Keith Douglas asked of his fellow cavalry officers in the Western Desert in 1942. He saw them as ‘unicorns, almost’, beautiful, redundant, not part of this world, perfect but surely meaningless. Those words come back to me on the drive over Pancake. But then, as I am watching, I see something else: Colonel Ker, who has not found it easy walking between the drives, raises his gun to a high and distant bird, flying fast and true towards him, perhaps ninety feet above, and as he tracks it, he fires and shoots the pheasant in full flight, the bird falling into the wood behind us as the Colonel breaks open his gun and replaces the cartridges for whatever might come next.

  It was a long and friendly morning, the mild theatre of an English November. Alan Franklin, the keeper, said it had gone exactly to plan: lots of birds, most of them missed. ‘All you want,’ he said, ‘is to show the guns something they can shoot at. You don’t want them hitting everything.’ There was a late lunch for beaters and guns in the big Wool Barn, everyone lined up at the long gingham-clothed table, gas heaters and red wine, rabbit stew and apples in trugs. Faces glowed like frost-caught pippins and we chatted on into the afternoon about elvers and the Environment Agency, Forest of Dean men and the ignorant millionaires now living in the Cotswolds, hunting and the National Trust, the techniques for netting fish in the waters of the Severn, the codling you could catch on a flood tide by the bridges, the tax status of inherited land, the end of dairying
, the future of families, what ‘gentry’ means and whether it meant anything any more.

  The shoot was one of the display days at Frampton. It dramatizes the place but it is not the whole story. Nor are hunting and shooting what Rollo and Janie Clifford’s life is devoted to. The goal they have in mind is more straightforward than that. It is, simply put, the wellbeing of their community, driven by a sense of duty. Frampton, because of that, is what Rollo calls ‘a glorious millstone’, a borrowed phrase, which he first heard on his grandmother’s lips.

  ‘It’s being friends with people,’ he says. ‘That is a vast part of it.’ But being friends with people takes an enormous amount of time. Rose Hewlett, the Estate Secretary and a local historian, who is in love with Frampton and the Cliffords and who, unlike her boss, pours forth an unending and delighted cataract of talk, says ‘Rollo is on the job 24/7.’

  He is a parish councillor, as he has to be really, as the estate and village are so intertwined. He is chairman of the Frampton Wildlife and Sporting Association, which deals with all the possible conflicts between fishermen, sailors, wildfowlers, birders, their nets, walkers, paths, permissive paths, hunters. He is chairman of the Frampton Country Fair, which happens every summer and is an enormous amount of work. And the Cliffords give every single penny of what the fair makes to charity. He is chairman of the Trustees of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars. He is chairman of the Point to Point. He does the shoot. He is joint Master of the Hunt and Field Master every other Wednesday. Thursday afternoons he does his historical research into the Hussars. He is a brilliant networker – and I don’t like the word networker – but it gives him a buzz to bring people together. He copies half the world into something if he thinks they should know. It is all about stewarding the whole place, keeping it whole. It is not done on a whim. It is all done very, very, very carefully. Neither of them are getting any younger but there is no sign of them slowing down. He takes so long deciding. Every decision is important. You know exactly what he is going to say for ten minutes before he actually says it. He talks to the men for half an hour each morning. They all know exactly what they have to do anyway. But that is the point, going round and round the same tracks. When I first came to work here ten years ago, one of the files in the filing cabinet had been started in 1896 and was still going. Rollo doesn’t do computers really. We have to do all that. But Frampton stays what it is because change has not been thrust on to it.