by Hilda Newman
By the time all of this landscaping work had finished Croome was transformed into one of the most impressive aristocratic estates anywhere in England. So much so that in 1792 The Gentleman’s Magazine (can you imagine seeing such a title today?) was moved to report,
Never did I see a more beautiful spot; nor any kept in such perfect order. A vast extent of ground, formerly a mere bog, is now adorned with islands and with tufts of trees of every species; and watered round, in the most pleasing, and natural manner, possible.
But it wasn’t just the parkland that got this amazing makeover. At the same time as Capability Brown was working his magic on the landscape, the 6th Earl of Coventry hired Robert Adam – the finest interior designer of the age – to renovate the main house and its numerous outbuildings. Out went all the hodge-podge of the original 16th-century fixtures and fittings; in their place Adam built magnificent neo-classical pillars and frontages and fireplaces. Actually, if you go to any DIY store today and look at ready-built fireplaces for your own home, you’ll find that many are copies of the style that Adam used at Croome Court.
Not content with that – and goodness knows how much this landscaping alone must have cost the Earl – Adam was also commissioned to come up with Gothic designs for the decoration of Croome Church. Those were the days when every respectable aristocratic family had their own church built on their estate. Croome Church was built on a little hill overlooking the main house. It was a place that I came to know well and, if you wish to visit today, it’s still standing, as calm and reassuring as ever – though, as we shall see, amid its lasting memorials to the dead, there lies the sad and telling outcome of a scandal.
By the time the 6th Earl died in 1809, bills for work at Croome were running at £20,000 per year – many millions of pounds in today’s money. On top of that, a new window tax had been introduced. This did exactly what it sounds like: it levied a tax for every window in a house, and Croome Court alone had a total of 167. The cost of running the estate – let alone making any more improvements – was rising dramatically. Partly as a result of this, few, if any, new works were started at Croome after the 6th Earl’s death. His descendants were, in any event, happy to enjoy the magnificent house, pleasure gardens and estate just as he had created them. But such tranquility as Croome offered was not reflected in the family’s fortunes.
Throughout the 19th century the Coventry’s fought amongst themselves, suffered tragic accidents and bankruptcies and generally behaved in a way that my own ordinary, working-class family would have viewed with shame and disgust: the 6th Earl loathed his eldest son – who carried the hereditary title Viscount Deerhurst – and banned him from Croome Court for much of his adult life. Deerhurst was, from all accounts, rather ‘fast’: he eloped to Scotland with his lady love, thus causing a scandal that his father would never forgive. The 6th Earl also effectively disinherited his youngest son for apparently falling in love with and marrying a lowly woman, who was probably a servant at Croome. He died in obscurity and poverty, estranged from his family and all their privilege.
By the time Viscount Deerhurst came to his inheritance, he was 51 years old and had been blinded in a riding accident while out hunting with King George III. Apparently, the Viscount was a thoroughly impetuous man – he had already managed to shoot himself in the leg – and had forced his poor mount to jump a difficult five-bar gate. The horse slipped and fell on top of him with such tremendous force that – according to reports in the newspapers – his right eye ‘was beat into his head, his nose broke and laid flat to his face’. As a result, he completely lost his sight and, by the time he ascended to the title 7th Earl of Coventry and returned to Croome, he was completely unable to enjoy the visual feast that his father had created on the estate. Perhaps this was one reason he caused so much anger – in the family and with his tenants – by ordering the felling of a huge number of trees on the estate. He further alienated the poor ordinary people who lived and worked at Croome by doubling their rents.
The other parts of the Coventry family spent much of the early and middle years of Queen Victoria’s reign mired in scandal – more elopements, bankruptcies and a scandalous court case in which the mother of a suitor for one of the 7th Earl’s daughters sued the Coventrys in the High Court in London for the Earl’s refusal to allow the marriage. Meanwhile, his son, styled Lord Deerhurst and the future 8th Earl, had carried on the family tradition of a dissolute early life before eloping to Scotland with his paramour – Lady Mary Beauclerk, a descendant of King Charles II and Nell Gwynne. She appears to have been just as wild and irresponsible as her husband, having not one but two affairs shortly after their marriage – both with the future Earl’s own brothers.
He promptly had a nervous breakdown, followed by Lady Mary embarking on yet another adulterous affair with one Colonel Sanders of Lee Bridge in Kent. Sanders decided to blackmail Deerhurst over his wife’s philandering – a situation made even worse when Lady Mary gave birth to an illegitimate child. The upshot of all of this was a very public divorce, something truly scandalous in Victorian times. In the 19th century husbands and wives were expected to stand by each other in public, whatever either of them got up to in private.
Divorces did happen but it’s certainly true that they were essentially reserved for the nobs and snobs: certainly no one of my family’s class would ever have entertained the thought of divorce because of the very real social stigma that came with it. I suppose the very fact of being an aristocrat somehow insulated the gentry from this stigma.
The 8th Earl then developed a very odd reputation for meanness. Newspapers of the day had already decided he was fair game for satire and ridicule and they reported gleefully that he bought all of his clothes from second-hand shops and claimed that he dined with his tenants – the poor farm workers on the estate – six days out of seven. One such report stated, ‘How noble it is to find a Peer of the Realm, possessing his thirty thousands a year, dining off a rasher of bacon and preferring that rasher at another’s expense!’ While a subsequent report of what in other circumstances would have been seen as a normal act of civic duty by a local landowner was turned about to become a savage satire:
This is certainly the age of wonders. It is said that the leopard cannot change its spots, but we must now believe the contrary. Dinner was lately held at Tewkesbury among the new Corporation, and we are told that ‘the Earl of Coventry kindly presented the venison’. Are we to believe that he presented the venison free gratis and all for nothing? Is it likely, we ask, that this man, the meanest of the mean among the aristocracy, would give away a haunch of venison, when he will not allow any one of his own brothers, relatives or acquaintances – for friends he cannot have – to take away a single head of game from the grounds on which it is shot? The presenting of venison by Lord Coventry is about as liberal and gratifying as the presenting of a bill by one determined to sue you, if it be not paid.
The Earl sought solace from this public ridicule in a string of completely unsuitable – and, in their own way, scandalous – affairs, including a number of local working-class women and an opera singer. These liaisons produced a number of illegitimate children, with resulting demands for large sums of money to ensure their upkeep and education. The chaotic state of his personal life was reflected in a series of wills. He tore the first one to pieces in 1836, made a second four years later in which he left most of his wealth to his housekeeper, and a third one bequeathed an annuity to a mysterious Fanny Brunton, of whom his family had no knowledge whatsoever.
The 8th Earl’s life was blighted with conflict, public ridicule and personal tragedy. His eldest son, who was heir to the Coventry title, had been publicly labelled a simpleton and lived a somewhat dissolute and wasteful life before being shot in the eye in a bizarre hunting accident in 1836. Two years later he attended a party held by Queen Victoria, caught a severe cold and died within weeks – thus predeceasing his father. It would not be the last time that the heir to the Coventry name passed away
before inheriting.
The upshot of all this was that, when the 8th Earl finally died in 1843 – still being lampooned in the press and abused in Parliament – his successor was just five years old. It really wasn’t an auspicious start and anyone looking on from outside would have viewed the succession as just the latest twist in what had become a very public soap opera.
But the 9th Earl – that kindly old bewhiskered gentleman we saw in the Pathé Newsreels at the start of this chapter – was to be the saving of the Coventry family. He would restore its good name – if not its fortunes – and once again earn for the Earldom the respect of rich and poor alike. Which is probably just as well because, if he hadn’t, I can’t imagine my father would have allowed me to take employment at Croome Court.
Born in 1838, George William Coventry had been brought up on the Seizincote Estate in Gloucestershire but he visited Croome Court regularly and was determined to restore it – and the family name – to its former glory. He would be the first Earl in many generations to take seriously the responsibilities that came with being one of the leading aristocratic families in England, as well as reaping its rewards.
Because he was only a child when the 8th Earl died, the estate was looked after by his great-uncle but, when the law allowed him to come into his inheritance – it was 21 before a man became legally an adult in those days – he set about his task with gusto. The Coventrys had once been one of the most respectable families in the land, with a great tradition of public service. The 9th Earl became, in fairly quick succession, the elected president of the MCC – the Marylebone Cricket Club, the foremost sporting organisation in England – a member of the Privy Council, which advised Queen Victoria on the exercise of her Royal Prerogative, and Captain and Gold Stick of the Corps of Gentleman-at-Arms, which is less formally known as the monarch’s bodyguard. On top of all that, he was Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire and a Colonel in the Worcestershire Regiment.
He also restored two other family traditions. He became a Justice of the Peace and served as chairman of the Worcestershire County Quarter Sessions (as court schedules were known back then), and he re-established the Coventry family link with hunting, serving Her Majesty as Master of The Queen’s Buckhounds and Master of the newly formed North Cotswold Hunt. It was this involvement with fox hunting that would later play a leading role in the relationship between his family and me.
But as well as all this public service and polishing up of the family name amid the rich and powerful gentry, the 9th Earl also began repairing the damage his predecessors had done in relations with the ordinary working-class people who worked for him and lived on the estate.
I’ve always been a strong believer in two things: family and community. The 9th Earl appears to have shared my commitment: community, in particular, was very important to him and his family and they threw themselves wholeheartedly into many local causes.
One great tradition that he and his wife, Blanche, began was an act of great kindness, which marked the beginning of the Christmas festivities at Croome – and one which carried on during my time there. On Christmas Eve every year the Earl and his wife handed out gifts of beef and bread to all the tenants and their children. One such typical occasion, recorded in notes from 1915, shows that 270 large loaves, 100 small ones and ‘two fat beasts’ were distributed among the 167 families who lived and worked on the estate. Now, that may not sound like much to you but, in those long-ago days, such generosity from an Earl to his subjects (as I suppose we must call them) was pretty much unheard of. And in years to come it would prove a vital lifeline when times grew hard all over England.
Nor was it just a question of charity. Lord Coventry also saw that his tenants needed help in earning enough money for themselves and so he established a jam-and-pickle factory in a former industrial building, a few miles away near Pershore railway station. This enabled his tenants to sell their produce at fair market prices, thereby saving the cost of railway carriage and the risk of sending large consignments of perishable goods on long journeys. According to his diary, the factory cost £700 to build – the equivalent today of around £150,000 – and processed fruit from more than 60,000 strawberry plants, raspberry canes and currant bushes from the Croome estate.
I suppose in these cynical days, people might look on all of this and denounce the Earl as a rich paternalistic landowner, spreading a few crumbs from his lavish table on the poor and hard done by. But it wasn’t like that back then and I have every reason to believe that the great tradition of Coventry benevolence that he re-established was genuine and came from his heart.
On the day he came into his inheritance, the Earl promised that he was ‘ardently attached to the country, and should be pleased to spend [my] days in the midst of an affectionate tenantry’. And it seems that his tenants did genuinely love and respect him for his diligence in restoring honour to Croome Court.
And what times and glamour they must have seen. The Court regularly hosted royalty – the Prince of Wales, who would go on to become King Edward VII; the Duke and Duchess of York (the future King George V and Queen Mary, whose coronation I would one day witness for myself); the cream of European royalty and Prime Ministers and leading politicians: all of them came to house parties and country weekends in the great mansion at Croome.
The complement of servants then – the staff I would one day join – was enormous: 40 men and women – some of them really no more than children, since the lowliest servants, the hall boy and the steward’s-room boy went into service at the age of 14. It was a mark of just how grand an important Croome Court was in the hierarchy of English aristocratic life: most great houses of the time employed no more than 15 servants but Croome … well, Croome was one of the greatest of the great and no expense was spared on ensuring that the Coventry family were waited on hand and foot.
As well as the wages this paid – wages which were hard-won and desperately needed in the grim years that followed the Great War – the 9th Earl was determined that his servants should be the best looked after in the land. And so he began a number of improvements to the house, improvements for which I would become deeply grateful in the years to come.
Do you remember I said that electricity was something of a rarity in those days? Like even the most humble houses – like my parent’s little terraced cottage in Stamford – Croome Court was largely lit by gas. But, gradually, electric lighting was fitted in the family’s quarters and in the great receptions rooms on the ground floor. Although electric lights weren’t installed in the servants’ bedrooms or ‘beneath stairs’, where most of them worked, the electrification of the house would soon bring enormous benefits to my working day.
He also commissioned a vast new furnace, fuelled by coke, which would provide hot water and – as a by-product – pump out gas to fire the remaining lights. In part, this was born of financial necessity – the 9th Earl checked his books and discovered that in one year alone Croome Court had consumed 290 tons of more expensive coal – and, in part, to ensure that everyone who lived in the great house, whether servant or master, would have access to hot water.
But the generosity and forward planning which characterised the 9th Earl’s life were under threat. Although the parade of lavish house parties continued, and although the traditions of helping the tenants with handouts carried on, by the end of the Great War cracks had begun to appear in the life of the Coventry family and the estate itself had begun to struggle for survival. It seems to me, when I look back, that bad luck – or was it bad behaviour? – always seemed to dog the Coventrys. Just as the 9th Earl’s predecessors had as often as not been wastrels and attracted scandal and public opprobrium in generous measure, his eldest son was to continue the tradition.
George William, Viscount Deerhurst, had been born in 1865. After the traditional aristocratic schooling at Eton, he went up to Cambridge. But the academic life bored him and he devoted his time at university to gambling and shooting. For the next few years he led a dissolute life
and only an appointment as Aide de Camp to the Governor of Victoria in Australia avoided unpleasantness with a notorious bookmaker. But even on the other side of the world he couldn’t live up to expectations of respectability and he got himself caught up in the great Australian Gold Rush, until he caught a dangerous fever and had to return home to England. A brief and unsuccessful career as a stockbroker on the London Exchange was followed by a new outbreak of gold-rush fever, this time in South Africa. Armed with a rifle (for hunting game) and a shovel (for prospecting), he swaggered his way across the Cape until his deeply unimpressed father summoned him home again to Croome.
The country life obviously bored him though and he was soon back in London and back to his wastrel ways. He ran up huge gambling debts – owing the then vast sum of £17,000 (the equivalent of more than £3 million today) to a moneylender. In 1890 Lord Deerhurst was declared bankrupt. Somewhat reluctantly, the 9th Earl came to his financial aid but within a year scandal would once again come to haunt the Coventry name.
It all began with a game of cards. On 8 September 1890 the 9th Earl and the Countess of Coventry were attending a house party at the home of a wealthy shipping magnate near Hull. It was quite normal for the gentry to travel hundreds of miles to spend weekends at other rich folk’s houses and, on this occasion – as often happened – they were joined by royalty: the Prince of Wales – the future Edward VI – was one of the assembled guests and after dinner all the gentlemen retired to the smoking room for a game of Baccarat. One of the players accused another – a colonel in the army – of cheating and, in the way of things back then, the alleged cheat was made to sign a secret undertaking, drawn up by Lord Coventry, that he would never play cards ever again.