Everywhere there are signs of this deep, careful conservatism. A small noticeboard on the green announces that ‘Only under 13-year-olds from Frampton families can fish in the ponds.’ Rollo thought it was ‘too gloomy to have too many old men stuck there day in day out’. The family owns about thirty cottages in the village, all of them let on affordable, non-commercial, short-term leases, with a heavy emphasis on providing housing for village families. There is an application list, but it is certainly not first come, first served. ‘Londoners want to come here all the time but they haven’t got a chance,’ Rose says.
It is incredibly old fashioned here but that is why we love it. We are still quite feudal. If there is a lost dog, it gets brought to the estate office because that is the centre of the village. Frampton is the end of the road, a complete cul-de-sac, and arriving back in the village when you have been away is like going on holiday. Money doesn’t interest Rollo. It is not about money. It’s about being custodian of the estate. If you think what he owns, the Court, the Manor, the Orangery, the land, he would be a very rich man. But they don’t behave or live like the rich, or want a life that the rich might lead.
No, they don’t: they have battered cars, an ancient VW camper van in which they went on honeymoon – its roof leaks and in Scotland they drove for days catching drips in pans – and a smoky blue Morris Traveller. The heating in the manor is set well down, good thick jerseys are a winter necessity and the hot water is turned on only when a bath is required. Foreign holidays don’t happen every year. The render on the timber face of the manor has come away in places, revealing the lathes beneath.
The story of the Clifford finances in the twentieth century is a salutary one. The death of Rollo’s grandfather in Palestine in 1917 was a moment of reckoning. In the eighteenth century, the arrival of the Clutterbucks, who derived a good income from posts in the Customs Office in Bristol, and then the Winchcombes, who had connections with the cloth business in Stroud, had brought money to the Clifford enterprise. Through the nineteenth century, to support a huge number of Clifford brothers and sisters, very large mortgages were taken out against the value of the land, so that by 1917, when Major Clifford was killed, the 2,000-odd acres of Frampton Court Estate were encumbered with over £33,000 of debt, the equivalent of about £6.5 million today, involving annual charges of over £2,200, or in modern terms at least £400,000 a year. On top of that, the new level of estate duty at 10 per cent was charged on his death.11
These debts and tax bills forced Rollo’s grandmother to sell three of the farms, a quarter of the estate, reducing the landholding to about 1,500 acres, a bitter moment which the Cliffords regret to this day. Through the course of the twentieth century, the essential unviability of the reduced estate was for many years held at bay by income from gravel extraction, which ate away about 280 acres of farmland. Peter Scott, the great naturalist who set up the Wildfowl Centre at Slimbridge just down the road and was a great friend of the Cliffords, even encouraged them to claw away the whole of the park in front of the house, excited at the possibilities for even more wetland bird habitat that would open up. Thankfully he was resisted, and even now a single field remains in the midst of the gravel-pit lakes, the site of the very best gravel, not yet quarried and known to the Cliffords as the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The gravel allowed the family to make of Frampton what they wanted. Rollo’s father was one of the several men in Clifford history who changed his name after marrying the Clifford heiress. He was born Peter Haggie, became a flail tank commander on D-Day (where Janie’s father, a gunner, was too) and after the war devoted his life to maintaining Frampton as a living organism.
‘My father came out of the war seeing a great land of milk and honey,’ Rollo says, ‘and he did try to achieve that.’ He believed in openness. As part of a social vision, he started the sailing club on the lake, encouraged the wildfowlers and the fishermen, and alongside Peter Scott pioneered wetland creation, planting willows around the lakes ‘and in came these marvellous birds. There was an excitement about the whole thing and they were very generous about all that.’
Through the 1950s and ’60s, the farm had gone slightly into abeyance. Tenants had died or left and all the land was taken back in hand. There was a beautiful herd of Ayrshire dairy cows, whose milk went to the small factory opened by Cadbury’s on the edge of the village, in which ‘chocolate crumb’ for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk was made. But the gravel money meant the farm did not have to be driven too hard. By the time Roger Godwin, a new 24-year-old manager, arrived in 1973, the whole place was covered, as Godwin says, in ‘permanent weeds’.
The gravel by then had come to an end, and for twenty-five years Godwin drove the land along a new high-intensity track, draining the wet fields, putting irrigation into the dry lands, taking out a lot of hedges, although fewer than most farmers because hedges were good for hunting, spraying off the precious weeds, growing cabbages, potatoes and Brussels sprouts, even wheat on the floodable washlands along the Severn, ‘High Farming, as opposed to dog-and-stick farming’. Rollo’s father loved having Roger there, introducing this surge of new energy to the place, and Roger thrived on the warmth Peter Clifford showed him. ‘You are the same age as Rollo,’ he told him when he first arrived, ‘and I want you two to grow old together.’ No sentence could have been more welcoming. ‘It was his trust and confidence that locked me in,’ Godwin says. He is still there, although now managing several other farms as well, spread across Gloucestershire, more than just the treasured Frampton fields.
The farm started to make a profit and that, combined with the revenues from the landfill fees, continued to keep Frampton afloat. But both of those income streams have now come to an end. The landfill was closed in 2008 and the fashion for high-intensity farming has also moved on. About 500 acres of Frampton are still ploughed and sown with wheat, rape and beans, but much of the rest of it, attracting more nature-friendly EU payments, has gone back to the permanent weeds Roger Godwin was so horrified by when he first arrived. ‘We don’t farm enough now to keep the estate,’ he says quite straightforwardly.
Frampton Court is now open for delicious, deeply comfortable, upscale bed and breakfast but that does no more than contribute to the building’s maintenance.12 It cost £35,000 in the autumn of 2010 to mend a single chimney, far more than a year’s profit on the B&B. The pretty Strawberry Hill Gothick Orangery, let out a week at a time for holiday-makers, does better.
Such things can scarcely match the income from high-productivity horticulture, landfill or gravel pits – or, looking further back, the bribes and fees derived from the customs business in the global entrepôt of eighteenth-century Bristol. The ending of this money sequence hangs over them all. How to maintain Frampton when all possible opportunities seem to have been tried and exhausted?
Rollo suggested to me one evening that ‘farming people’, making Frampton into a tourist business, might be the way out. They were already trying it in a small way: holiday lets in the Orangery, the bed and breakfast at the Court, to a small extent having these houses open, the odd wedding function. But could that really fill the gap left by the ending of the gravel and high farming which had sustained them through the twentieth century?
It is another version of the question which has confronted the gentry since the fifteenth century: how do you keep the enterprise going when the world changes? And without abandoning your ideals? There is no easy answer and the worry takes its toll on the Cliffords. Technical decisions over effective tax planning loom large and a certain sack-carrying weariness hangs behind these conversations, a sense of the glorious millstone dangling from their necks. At times it seems as if the whole community of Frampton on Severn, with all the niggles and discontents of any community, streams through the kitchen of the manor house, like a thousand needy children. Spend a day or two with the Cliffords in this beautiful and dignified place and you can have no doubt that the millstone has some weight in it.
The future is unr
esolved. Rollo’s older brother David, a Bristol musician, knew since boyhood that the Frampton life was not for him. But a few years ago, there was a serious disagreement between Rollo and his younger brother, an environmentalist who now lives and works in America, over who should be involved in Frampton and its future. The family was pained by this confrontation and the younger generation does not want it to recur between them.
It is not certain who will take over. The Cliffords have three daughters, Jessie, Anna and Sarah, and a son, Peter, the 25-year-old who had come shooting in the morning. Jessie also lives in the village with her husband, Harry Spurr, a barrister and wine entrepreneur.
I talked to Rollo’s and Janie’s son, Peter, by the fire in the manor that evening, with the clock ringing the hours, the logs spitting beside us and the flames glimmering on the polished oak. Peter got Frampton in the blood as a boy, ‘as a place where I felt totally free, total freedom, doing whatever I wanted’. He would only ever come inside to eat something and then get out again, on to the farm, to the woods, or the stacks of hay bales, or the shores of the great tidal river. And so, I asked him, did he want to do this, what his father had done, and his, and his great-grandfather and his and his?
Sometimes it terrifies me, and you want to run away. I didn’t decide for a long time. My mother’s dad asked me once a few years ago, ‘Do you want to?’ and I said – then – ‘No way. Dad is so busy the whole time.’ And so I went to Dad and asked him, ‘Do you like living like you do?’ And he said, ‘Look at our lives. That is all you need look at. That is the life that comes with this place.’
This attachment to place is a strange addiction. Through their childhoods and their family culture the huge branding stamp of FRAMPTON has been imprinted on the Cliffords. And yet, because this is no superbly funded ducal estate, it is only partly a gift. It is, and will be, a struggle for the Cliffords merely to stay still, not to lose what they have had. That struggle to keep something precious is different from the struggle to gain something you have never known. It is the glorious burden to which Rollo repeatedly returns. I remembered suddenly the letters of Harry Oxinden in Kent in the 1660s as finally, at the end of all his travails, he was relieved of the weight of continued ownership which his estate had imposed on him, and the great inrush of freedom he felt even as he lost the thing that was more important to him than anything in the world.
It is nothing new for a gentry enterprise to feel under threat from the prevailing currents of modernity – every family in this book has struggled with that. Nor to wonder about the uncertainty that hangs over every heir, or set of heirs. But for now Peter Clifford is coming to feel his way to this succession, this continuity, this repeating of the pattern:
I’d love to keep it the same but improve it. To keep the buildings up, to keep farming, keep the timber going, keep the local guys in the cottages, not selling up to commuters. It’s a beautiful place and it’s a beautiful place for everyone to share. I’d like to improve the houses but not completely change them. I don’t want to make them unaffordable. A nice balance, that’s what we need.
A nice balance. Peter said it in the quietest of Clifford voices, murmuring beside the fire, the gentlest-possible statement of an ancient and almost never voiced philosophy. Perhaps this was the final landing of the gentry story. It had gone through such turmoil and struggle in its early years, had been so embroiled in self-assertion and self-dramatization in its middle years, but had now, by the twenty-first century, come down to a stoic search for calm and continuity in a noisy and troubled world.
CONCLUSION
Return of the Native
‘To be gnaw’d out of our graves’, Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Urne-Buriall, his long, slow meditation on loss and human vanity, published in 1658, ‘to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes … are Tragicall abominations.’1 The great Norwich doctor and antiquary may have disliked the idea but he was describing the point of this book: to scoop the life out of dead men’s brains.
These stories are more a series of excavations into the skulls of the gentry than a comprehensive tour of their world and for that reason any general conclusions may be difficult. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the Gentry, as an institution, which might from a distance have seemed fixed and even decrepit, characterized by its overpowering sense of the past, its fading energies and crumbling fabric, turns out when looked at closely, in its own time frame and under its own microscope, to be turbulent and contingent, with uncertainty and struggle its dominant qualities.
It was never really characterized by what Edmund Burke called in the 1750s the ‘unbought grace of uncontested ease’. If you set aside for a moment the gentry’s graceful acts of self-display, the beautiful houses and landscapes, the clothes they wore, their consciously easy and courteous behaviour to strangers, what remains, above all in their private documents, is a profoundly restless state of mind, full of anxiety, in contest and conflict with neighbours and rivals, worriedly looking to keep going in a world where heirs died young and marriages might be barren. The gentry’s own account of themselves was never at ease.
Attendance to the realities of money was of foundational importance to them. None could afford to ignore the bottom line. Sir John Lowther, a seventeenth-century member of one of the great Cumbrian gentry families who would make their fortune from mining and trade, thought straightforwardly that ‘without wealth, nobilitie or gentrie is a vaine and contemptible tytle hear in England’. Without money or property, a would-be gentleman ‘will beare a bigger saile than he is able to maintaine’.2 ‘Nobility stript of means’, the super-refined Geoffrey Hickes wrote in the early eighteenth century, ‘makes no genteel Figure; it can’t stand without golden supporters.’3
This close attention to the serious challenges of a competitive world, even among such overt elitists as Hickes, is a sign that the English gentry lived with an ever-present sense of social mobility and mutability around them. The world did not owe them a living. Every generation had to re-validate its place in the gentry universe. An ancestry and coat of arms may have provided a young man with a set of examples; it did not guarantee a continuation of them in him. This was the psychological power of the lineage: fathers and their fathers were not to be let down. The line should be kept going by a combination of honourable and entrepreneurial behaviour in the real world. Failure was the spur.
Only when the money – for which you can read ‘land’ over most of this history – had been sorted out could attention be paid to the qualities of gentlemanliness. And they, amid all this inconstancy, are curiously constant, a complex interplay of self-conception, social position, property, privilege, dress, education, the demands of honour, the constraints of obligation, the primacy of friendship, the concerns for beauty, ‘stoutness’ and justice. An anonymous writer in about 1500 identified the four central gentry virtues as ‘Trauthe, pettee, fredome and hardynesse’:4 in modern English perhaps honesty, empathy, generosity and integrity. No translation can be exact and each of the medieval terms carries a different subtext. Truth then was to do with piety, pity with social hierarchy, freedom with a sense of grace and hardiness with martial valour. This was the knightly inheritance that played out over the following centuries.
Compare that list with the requirements made in the early seventeenth century by the Carmarthenshire squire Sir William Vaughan:
The means to discern a gentleman be these. First, he must be affable and courteous in speech and behaviour; Secondly, he must have an adventurous heart to fight and that but for very just quarrels. Thirdly he must be endowed with mercy to forgive the trespasses of his friends and servants. Fourthly, he must stretch his purse to give liberally unto soldiers and unto them that have need; for a niggard is not worthy to be called a gentleman. These be the properties of a gentleman, which whosoever lacketh deserveth but the title of clown or of a country boor.5
And this is Sir Gilbert Scott’s description at the height of the Victorian re-creation of the s
quire ideal:
The position of a landed propietor, be he squire or nobleman, is one of dignity. Wealth must always bring its responsibilities, but a landed proprietor is especially in a responsible position. He is the natural head of his parish or district – in which he should be looked up to as the bond of union between the classes. To him the poor man should look up for protection; those in doubt or difficulty for advice; the ill disposed for reproof or punishment; the deserving, of all classes, for consideration and hospitality; and all for honourable and Christian example.6
Scott may have imagined that he was speaking eternal verities in that paragraph. But there are symptomatic elements of change: by 1857 land was no longer the only wealth – this was now the most industrialized country on earth – and landownership, with its land power, had come to seem like a specialized subset of leadership. The insistence on the deference of others is also, subliminally, fragile – it had never needed such clumsy articulation before. A sort of sanctimonious and clammy piety has entered the room and Scott’s words feel like an over-restored church.
The Gentry Page 41