The Gentry

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by Adam Nicolson


  51 Sale at Sotheby’s Bond Street, 3 July 1929

  52 Boxhall, Kinmel Characters, 68

  53 Kinmel Estate, Staff Accounts for 1896

  54 Kinmel Estate, Staff Accounts for 1859

  55 Kinmel Papers 1513, Kinmel Park Meat Book for 1858

  56 Kinmel Papers 1500, Cash Book for 1854

  57 Kinmel Papers 1501, Wine Cellar Book for 1857, W. H. Brophey’s accounts 58 Kinmel Papers 1513, Kinmel Park Meat Book for 1858

  59 Kinmel Papers 1518, Household Account Book for 1863

  60 Kinmel Estate, Kinmel Game Book

  61 Kinmel Estate, Visitors’ Book

  62 College of Arms files; Boxhall, Kinmel Characters, 55

  63 B. Burke, A Genealogical History of the Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited, and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire, London, 1866

  64 The overmantle was moved in 1926 to Kinmel Manor, now a hotel, where it is still in the dining room.

  65 Kinmel Papers 1616, draft of letter to Charles Mainwaring about Hugh Hughes, no date

  66 Kinmel Estate, Florentia Hughes, Photograph Album, 1900

  67 Boxhall, Kinmel Characters, 69

  68 Information from Stephen Treseder

  69 Mrs Bradley to Elaine Boxhall, Kinmel Characters, 71–2

  70 Testament of Hugh Seymour Bulkeley Lewis Hughes, 8 October 1913, Jersey Archive D/Y/A/78/103

  71 W. B. Yeats, ‘Ancestral Houses’, Part I of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1922), in The Tower, London, 1928

  PART VI The After-Life 1910–2010

  1 John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, English Landownership 1650–1950, Oxford, 1994, 655

  2 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, 654

  3 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, 623

  4 Trevor Rowley, The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century, London, 2006, 285, quoting Giles Worsley, England’s Lost Houses, London, 2002

  5 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1963, 343

  6 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, 667

  7 Heather Clemenson, English Country Houses and Landed Estates, London, 1982

  8 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, 661

  9 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, 658

  10 Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, 692, 704; Rowley, The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century, 256

  11 James Lees-Milne, Diary, 28 January 1944, Prophesying Peace, London, 1977, 14–15

  12 www.sherbornecastle.com

  Renunciation

  1 Anne Acland, A Devon Family: The Story of the Aclands, London, 1981, 21

  2 Acland, A Devon Family, 54

  3 Acland, A Devon Family, 67

  4 Sir Robert Inglis (1845) in Acland, A Devon Family, 69

  5 Acland, A Devon Family, 66

  6 Acland, A Devon Family, 118

  7 Acland, A Devon Family, 102–3

  8 Acland, A Devon Family, 105

  9 Acland, A Devon Family, 118

  10 Acland, A Devon Family, 126

  11 Acland, A Devon Family, 128

  12 Acland, A Devon Family, 145

  13 Acland, A Devon Family, 144

  14 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, Oxford University Press, 1867, 48, 51, 54

  15 Acland, A Devon Family, 144

  16 Acland, A Devon Family, 143

  17 Eleanor Acland to her sister Maisie Fletcher, no date (?1911), among the Acland Papers, Devon Record Office, 1148M add. 14 (unlisted)

  18 For the developments in Aclandshire Liberalism between 1910 and 1929 see G. Tregidga, ed., Killerton, Camborne and Westminster: The Political Correspondence of Sir Francis and Lady Acland, 1910–1919, Devon & Cornwall Record Society, New Series, vol. 48, Exeter, 2006

  19 The Times, letters to the Editor, 22 February 1917

  20 Francis Acland to Eleanor Acland, in Acland, A Devon Family, 150

  21 Eleanor Acland to her sister Maisie Fletcher, no date (?1911), among the Acland Papers, Devon Record Office, 1148M add. 14 (unlisted)

  22 Richard Acland to Anne Acland, 12 February 1940, in the Acland Papers, Devon Record Office, 1148M add. 14 (unlisted), where all the surviving letters between them are to be found

  23 The Observer, 23 May 1943

  24 J. Melling interview with Richard Acland, 12 July 1990, in M. Hilson and J. Melling, ‘Public Gifts and Political Identities: Sir Richard Acland, Common Wealth, and the Moral Politics of Land Ownership in the 1940s’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 11, no. 2, 2000, 163

  25 Richard Acland to Anne Alford, August 1935

  26 Richard to Anne, 2 September 1939

  27 Richard to Anne, 11 April 1941

  28 Interview with Henry Acland, 26 January 2011

  29 Richard Acland, unpublished autobiography, MS, no date, in Acland Papers, University of Exeter library, 1.15; quoted in Hilson and Melling, ‘Public Gifts and Political Identities’, 162

  30 Richard to Anne, 22 January 1940

  31 Anne to Richard, 31 January 1941

  32 Interview with Sir John Acland in Hilson and Melling, ‘Public Gifts and Political Identities’, 166

  33 Richard Acland, Unser Kampf: Our Struggle, Harmondsworth, 1940, 25

  34 Acland, Unser Kampf, vii

  35 Acland, Unser Kampf, 26

  36 Acland, Unser Kampf, 40

  37 Acland, Unser Kampf, 39

  38 Acland, Unser Kampf, 45

  39 Acland, Unser Kampf, 45

  40 National Trust Accounts at Heelis: Box 133.36

  41 Acland, Unser Kampf, 94

  42 Acland, Unser Kampf, 135

  43 Acland, Unser Kampf, 135

  44 Manchester Guardian, 1 April 1941, 6

  45 Acland, Unser Kampf, 99

  46 Dryden’s translation of Virgil, Georgics, Book 1, lines 191–96

  47 Richard to Anne, 22 January 1940

  48 Richard to Anne, 22 January 1940

  49 Manchester Guardian, 22 November 1940, 7

  50 Richard to Anne, 10 July 1941

  51 Anne to Richard, 5 December 1940

  52 E. Pethick Lawrence to Richard Acland, 14 November 1941, Acland Papers, Devon Record Office, 1148M add. 14 (unlisted)

  53 Richard to Anne, 15 February 1941

  54 Richard to Anne, 20 January 1941

  55 George Orwell, ‘London Letter’ to Partisan Review, reprinted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, London, 1968, vol. ii, 289

  56 Anne to Richard, 3 February 1941

  57 Anne to Richard, 8 November 1941

  58 Anne to Richard, 19 June 1941

  59 Richard to Anne, 4 April 1941

  60 Anne to Richard, 24 April 1941

  61 Anne to Richard, 5 May 1941

  62 Anne to Richard, 5 May 1941

  63 Anne to Richard, 5 May 1941

  64 Anne to Richard, 17 June 1941

  65 Richard to Anne, 24 June 1941

  66 Anne’s ‘Final Testament’, 1981, in Acland Papers, Devon Record Office, 1148M add. 14 (unlisted)

  67 Anne’s ‘Final Testament’

  68 Anne Acland, talk on Woman’s Hour, 27 August 1951

  69 Richard to Anne, 20 April 1942

  70 Richard to Anne, 4 November 1941

  71 Richard to Anne, 29 April 1942

  72 Richard to Anne, 30 April 1942

  73 Anne to Richard, 20 February 1942

  74 Anne to Richard, 20 February 1942

  75 Richard to Anne, 30 June 1942

  76 Richard to Anne, 30 June 1942

  77 Richard to Anne, 30 June 1942

  78 Richard to Anne, 30 June 1942

  79 Richard Acland, The Forward March, London, 1941, 51

  80 Acland Papers, Devon Record Office, 1148M add. 14 (unlisted), Anne’s ‘Final Testament’

  81 Anne’s ‘Final Testament’

  82 Richard to Anne, 5 January 1943

  83 Manchester G
uardian, 27 July 1942, 2

  84 Anne’s ‘Final Testament’

  85 National Trust Executive Committee minutes, 14 October 1942

  86 National Trust Executive Committee minutes, 14 December 1942

  87 Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1943, 6

  88 Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1943, 4

  89 The Observer, 28 February 1943, 4

  90 Anne to Richard, 20 February 1943

  91 For these figures, see National Trust file at Heelis, 1341: D. M. Matheson to Home & Birkett (Acland’s solicitors), 15 June 1943; D. M. Matheson to Richard Acland, 17 August 1943; D. M. Matheson to Finance Committee, 13 September 1943; also analysed in Hilson and Melling, ‘Public Gifts and Political Identities’

  92 Manchester Guardian, 18 February 1944, 4

  93 National Trust Papers, file 1341, Richard Acland to D. M. Matheson, 18 September 1943

  94 Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Greville, Dame Margaret Helen (1863–1942)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

  95 J. Pearson, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, 1978, 134

  96 R. Buckle, ed., Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1979, 215–16

  97 Photocopy of original Memorandum, dated 10 January 1944, in National Trust files at Heelis: LMW/1 ‘Supplemental Memorandum of Wishes – Sir Richard Acland’

  98 Photocopy of original Memorandum, dated 10 January 1944, in National Trust files at Heelis: LMW/1 ‘Supplemental Memorandum of Wishes – Sir Richard Acland’

  99 Richard to Anne, 24 January 1943

  100 Anne to Richard, 28 January 1943

  101 Anne to Richard, 9 February 1943

  102 Interview with Henry Acland, 26 January 2011

  103 Richard Acland to his brother Cubby Acland, 19 September 1943

  104 The Observer, 30 January 1944, 5

  105 North Devon Journal, 3 February 1944

  106 Manchester Guardian, 9 December 1943, 3, 6

  107 Manchester Guardian, 1 February 1945, 6

  108 Manchester Guardian, 10 April 1944, 2

  109 Anne to Richard, 4 March 1951

  110 R. Acland to P. W. Broomhead, 2 September 1984, National Trust file at Heelis: LMW/1

  111 P. W. Broomhead to National Trust solicitor, 26 September 1984, National Trust file at Heelis: LMW/1

  112 National Trust solicitor to P. W. Broomhead, 2 October 1984, National Trust file at Heelis: LMW/1

  113 Interview with Henry Acland, 26 January 2011

  114 Interview with Henry Acland, 26 January 2011

  115 With Anne’s ‘Final Testament’

  116 Richard Acland, unpublished autobiography, MS, no date, in Acland Papers, University of Exeter library

  117 Richard Acland to Pat Gibson, 14 April 1982. A copy of Gibson’s reply on 20 April 1982 is in National Trust file at Heelis: 2093/3

  118 Interview, 25 January 2011

  Continuity

  1 C. R. Elrington et al., Victoria County History, Gloucestershire, vol. 10, 1972, 143–8

  2 R. Hewlett and J. Speed, Frampton on Severn, Frampton, 2007, 29–30; Elrington, Victoria County History, 143

  3 Hewlett and Speed, Frampton on Severn, 30–1

  4 Elrington, Victoria County History, 160

  5 Gloucestershire Archives, Clifford Papers D149/X7: Appointment of R. Clutterbuck as Searcher of the Port of Bristol, 1727

  6 For the raid on Rafa see W. T. Massey, The Desert Campaigns, New York, 1918, esp. 103–15; Lt-Col C. G. Powles, The New Zealanders in Sinai and Palestine, Auckland, 1922, 64–81

  7 Printed memorial notes in Frampton Archive

  8 Printed memorial notes in Frampton Archive

  9 For the Desert Column First Spring meeting see Massey, The Desert Campaigns, 122–9

  10 Peter Clifford to Henriette Clifford, ‘Frampy’, 4 January 1970, Frampton Archive

  11 ‘Summary of the Frampton Court Estate and of the Incumbrances thereon’, late nineteenth century, no date, Frampton Archive

  12 www.framptoncourtestate.co.uk/

  CONCLUSION: Return of the Native

  1 Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, 1658, ch. v

  2 Sir John Lowther, David Roger Hainsworth, The Correspondence of Sir John Lowther of Whitehaven, 1693– 1698: A Provincial Community in Wartime, Oxford, 1983, xiv

  3 Geoffrey Hickes, A Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life, Written for the Instruction of a Young Nobleman, London, 1709, 29

  4 Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove, Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England, Manchester, 2005, 29

  5 In H. A. Lloyd, The Gentry of South-West Wales 1540–1640, Cardiff, 1968, 17

  6 Sir Gilbert Scott, Secular and Domestic Architecture, London, 1857, 140

  7 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London, 1970, 258

  8 J. P. Cooper, ‘The Social Distribution of Land and Men in England 1436–1700’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, xx (1967); those for 1790 and 1873 from F. M. L. Thompson, ‘The Social Distributon of Landed Property in England since the Sixteenth Century’, Economic History Review, xix (1966), and English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1963; and G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1963, and The Gentry, 1976, 59

  9 The nineteenth-century figures are from F. M. L. Thompson, ‘The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England since the Sixteenth Century’, Economic History Review, xix, 1966, drawing on J. Bateman, The Return of Owners of Land, London, 1873. Those for today are adapted from Kevin Cahill, Who Owns Britain, Edinburgh, 2001

  10 Bryan Forbes, The League of Gentlemen, Final Shooting Script, Pinewood Studios, 1959, 28

  11 ‘He’s so wet you could shoot snipe off him,’ from Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, London, 1951, 14, was the accusation repeatedly thrown at non-Thatcherite Tories in the 1980s.

  12 Howard Jacobson, The New Republic, 30 June 2010

  13 http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/news/government-launches-big-societyprogramme

  14 ‘Building the Big Society’, Cabinet Office, May 2010

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe many thanks for the generous help of the following who have talked to me, guided me and corrected what I have written, as well as feeding and housing me, on my many enjoyable journeys around gentry England.

  Joan Kirby; Ruth Wilcock; Peter Marshall; Kate Harris; Glenda Sluga; Steve Hobbs; Ms Fanny Oglander; Clifford Webster; Simon Dear; Colonel Aylmer; John Doyle; Matthew Rice and Emma Bridgewater; Karen Lynch; Simon D. Smith; Dr Roderic Vassie; David Sarsfield; Katherine Giles; Matthew Lockhart; Henry and Shirley Anglesey; Dickon Fetherstonhaugh; John Rushby; Einion Thomas; Jason Castledine; Janne White; Dominic Acland; Henry and Di Acland; Mary Hilson; Gemma Poulton; Denise Melhuish; Darren Beatson; Rollo and Janie Clifford; Peter Clifford; Jessie Clifford; Harry Spurr; George James; Guy James; Gabriel Hutton; Alan Franklin; Rose Hewlett; Jean Speed; Astrid Lever; Roger Godwin; Shaun Parsons; and Duff Hart-Davis.

  My editors Susan Watt, Anne Askwith and Arabella Pike and my agent George Capel have all been irreplaceable.

  Extracts from the letters, diaries and other manuscripts of the families described in this book are published here with grateful acknowledgement to the following people and institutions:

  The West Yorkshire Archive Service for the Plumpton correspondence; the National Archives at Kew, for George Throckmorton’s two confessions now in the State Papers; the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire for quotations from the Thynne Papers; Ms Fanny Oglander and the Isle of Wight County Record Office for quotations from the Oglander Account Books; the British Library for the Oxinden letters and the bulk of the le Neve and Gawdy letters; to the Norfolk Record Office for other le Neve, Gawdy and Hobart papers; Henry Robinson, Microform Academic Publishers and Wilkinson and Gaviller Ltd for extracts from the Lascelles & Maxwell Letterbooks; South Carolina Historical Society and the University of
South Carolina Press for quotations from the letterbook of Eliza Pinckney; the Marquess of Anglesey for quotations from the Capel papers; Bangor University and Dickon Fetherstonhaugh for extracts from the Hughes family papers and albums; Dominic and Henry Acland for quotations from the Acland papers held in the Devon Record Office (Exeter); the National Trust for papers held at their head office in Swindon; and Rollo Clifford for quotations from his family archive at Frampton.

  Detailed references to these papers can be found in the Notes.

  NOTE

  Further details, links and images on the families in this book, their lands and history are to be found at www.thegentry.org.uk

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

  ‘1941 Committee’ 366

  Acland, Anne Alford (d.1994) 353, 355–6

  poverty on the estate 356

  description and character 358–9

  marriage 359

  Socialist beliefs 360

  manages Killerton estate 365, 366–70

  problem of death duties 367–8

  marital difficulties 370–1

  agrees to give estate to the National Trust 371–2

  education fund set up for the children 374, 375–6

  relationship with the National Trust 378–9

  relationship with her sons 380–2

  death of 359, 383

  Acland, Arthur 354, 356, 357, 367

  Acland, Charlie (d.1921) 354–6, 357, 358

  Acland, Dominic 383

  Acland, Eleanor Cropper 356–7

  Acland, Elsie 354

  Acland family 351–8, 399

  Acland, Francis (d.1926) 356–7, 358

  Acland, Gertie 355

  Acland, Henry 378, 379–82, 383

  Acland, John (d.2009) 360, 370, 378, 380, 381, 382, 383

  Acland, Richard ‘Buckie’(d.1990)

  Christian Socialist beliefs 358–63, 365–9, 370–1, 377, 382, 383

  description and character 358, 359, 364–5, 380

 

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