There are multiple examples of new money buying into history. My own great-grandfather Sir Robert McAlpine had done it with much less discrimination than the Pearsons when, having risen in the world, he moved into Knott Park, his sprawling Tudorbethan mansion. Another of the major country dances of that summer of 1958 was held for Christa Slater at Ladbroke Hall near Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, a fine eighteenth-century house owned by Christa’s stepfather, Geoffrey Rootes, eldest son of William Rootes, the motor manufacturer. He was to succeed his father as the 2nd Baron Rootes in 1964. At the time it took a wealthy industrialist to maintain a major country house in the condition it deserved with the specialist staff to service and maintain it. Many of the more traditional landowning families were floundering, short of cash, lacking the means of sustaining the inheritance they had been brought up to regard as their birthright and their lifelong responsibility.
The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stand
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand.
Though the fact that they have to be rebuilt
And frequently mortgaged to the hilt
Is inclined to take the gilt
Off the gingerbread –
And certainly damps the fun
Of the eldest son.
But still we won’t be beaten,
We’ll scrimp and screw and save.
The playing fields of Eton
Have made us frightfully brave –
And though if the Van Dycks have to go
And we pawn the Bechstein grand,
We’ll stand by the stately homes of England.
As Noël Coward pointed out in his tragi-comic song ‘The Stately Homes of England’, a great favourite with the beleaguered upper classes, the post-war stately homes were ‘rather in the lurch’. Many had been requisitioned in the war, invaded by evacuees from London and the big industrial cities, occupied by schoolchildren transferred from public boarding schools in vulnerable areas, used as military headquarters and hospitals and finally, towards the end of the fighting, taken over as billets for the foreign troops temporarily based in Britain. Longleat, Blenheim, Castle Howard, Knebworth, Chatsworth: these and many other great houses in the English countryside were transformed to new uses. Parham Park was typical in giving shelter, in the early war years, to many bombed-out members of the family and friends. It then became the temporary home of thirty small boy evacuees from Peckham, before being requisitioned for three companies of troops of the Canadian Third Corps in training for the eventual invasion of Europe. The main house was taken over as the regimental headquarters, the officers occupying the Great Hall and all rooms to the west. Canadian troops remained at Parham until late 1946. Such long-term and large-scale occupation took its inevitable toll on the fabric of the building. Requisitioned country houses were always knocked about a bit. Judging by the horror stories circulating in the fifties of Van Dycks used as dartboards, Grinling Gibbons carvings ripped out and burned for firewood, Parham was relatively lucky. The wartime depredations in many other English country houses had been even worse.
The plight of these country-house owners comes over graphically in the diaries of James Lees-Milne, written during the war and over the next decade while he travelled from crumbling castle to disintegrating manor as a member of the staff of the National Trust. What was the future for these tragic houses with their disillusioned owners rattling around in their twenty (or two hundred) freezing rooms without the servants they used to depend on not just for their own comforts but the basic upkeep of the place? Lees-Milne’s own considered view was unequivocal: ‘One thing is quite certain. The country-house way of life as some of us have known it, will never be revived.’ The problem was addressed officially by the Gowers Committee on Houses of Outstanding Historic or Architectural Interest which reported to the government in 1950. It is interesting that the report had been commissioned by a socialist government, which recognised the problem as being one of national significance, not simply the selfish concern of the elite. But official recognition did little to solve the immediate dilemma of the owners of large English country houses, increasingly impractical and financially draining in a post-war period of high taxation and low agricultural rents. It was not always possible, even if one could afford it, to carry out repairs on houses damaged in the war since building licences, which put strict restraints on building, had been mandatory up to 1953.
Many of these anxieties impinged directly on the families of the girls that I came out with. Some were resilient and able to diversify in such a way as to keep their houses and estates viable. Annabella Loudon’s father, Francis Loudon, ran a market garden at Olantigh near Wye, the house in Kent where Annabella had her dance that autumn. The decor included his home-grown chrysanthemums. There were other fathers who lent their ancient titles to modern business ventures. The 7th Marquess Townshend, who in 1958 owned 7,000 acres, helped sustain his large estate and Raynham Hall, where Carolyn had made her ‘sparkling debut’ in the summer, by his directorship of Anglia Television from its very early days and his active involvement in other public companies. Carolyn’s father is a very good example of mid-twentieth century aristocrat turned entrepreneur.
But many families lacked a comparable enterprise. As Giles Worsley indicates in his professionally expert study England’s Lost Houses, the 1950s were years of extreme crisis for the nation’s country houses. Almost three hundred substantial and architecturally important English houses were recorded as having been demolished in that decade. The many demolitions unrecorded could lift that startling total even higher. Family houses not in line for actual demolition were being frequently sold off and adapted in their usage, turned into flats and schools, offices and institutions. Even girls of my own age were well aware of the heart-searching that could lie behind the decision to abandon buildings that were often regarded by their owners as a sacred charge. 1958 was a year of frantic downsizing among the upper classes. A typical announcement appeared in The Times Court Circular for 26 April 1958: ‘The Countess of Gosford and her daughter Lady Caroline Acheson have left Gosford Castle, Co. Armagh and their permanent address is now Stone Hall Cottage, Oxted, Surrey.’ From castle to cottage, like a novel by Jane Austen: Caroline Acheson was a fellow deb of mine. Caroline Butler’s dance in June was held at the Café de Paris in Bray rather than at nearby Taplow House, her father’s former home. Her father had just sold it. He arrived at the Café de Paris bearing 5,000 flowers, the last raid on his garden, to decorate the ballroom. A poignant incident that sums up the whole impermanent feeling of the time.
The alternative to selling a house of course was opening it to a paying public. Ragley Hall, the Warwickshire home of the Marquess and Marchioness of Hertford, opened for the first time in March 1958, in the week after the final presentations. It had now been renovated after its use as a hospital in wartime. In April, Burghley House, near Stamford in Northamptonshire, was also opened. This was the palatial Elizabethan house built for the first Lord Burghley, Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I, and lived in ever since by the Cecils and the Exeters. These were two of the forty British country houses which opened to the public in the year of the last curtseys. Woburn, Chatsworth, Blenheim, Longleat, Hatfield, Harewood and others were already open, the most popular attracting a quarter of a million visitors a year. None of this was achieved without misgivings. There was an obvious reluctance to surrender privacy, to relax the social boundaries. It was widely felt that you were letting down your ancestors by allowing the hoi polloi to come surging in. The Duke of Bedford’s showmanship in pushing Woburn to the top of the stately homes league table was unpopular: he became a byword for betrayal of his class by bringing in such vulgar attractions as a zoo, a children’s playground, a milk bar and a jukebox. He was even to be seen guiding tours around himself. In 1958 a certain shame still attached to opening your house up. I remember a weekend house party in which we stayed cowering indoors in the roo
ms kept private for the family while the paying public thronged around the grounds.
But some families’ attitudes were much more positive. Miranda Smiley’s grandparents, Clive and Alicia Pearson, had been pioneers in the opening of country houses at the suggestion of a visionary art consultant Rupert Gunnis, seeing this as the only means of repairing and refurbishing the recently de-requisitioned Parham and giving it a role in a more democratic age. By the time of Miranda’s ball in 1958 Parham Park had been open to the public for ten years. Rupert Gunnis was also to advise the Howards on the opening of Castle Howard. George Howard wrote to Alicia Pearson saying ‘You were our godparent’ when Castle Howard first opened in 1952.
Clandon Park, where the Countess of Iveagh, daughter of the 4th Earl of Onslow, held her dance
The sense of so many changes happening so fast gave that Season its sometimes surreal quality. An alternative solution to selling up or opening their houses to the public was the National Trust Country Houses Scheme, a temptingly convenient arrangement which enabled families to hand over their houses to the National Trust with an endowment and, in many cases, to continue living there. The Trust acquired twenty-one houses between 1956 and 1960, more than ever before. One of these acquisitions was Clandon Park in Surrey, the early eighteenth-century house where the Countess of Iveagh held a dance for her granddaughter the Hon. Eliza Guinness and her grandniece Lady Teresa Onslow in the summer of 1958. The family was no longer living in the big house, which had been donated to the National Trust by Lady Iveagh two years earlier, but in a smaller house within the park. Clandon was opened up especially for the occasion. At the time it was still a kind of ghost house, sparsely furnished and shabby after its wartime requisition by the Public Record Office as a store for important state papers. Clandon’s flamboyant redecoration by John Fowler and its splendid augmentation with the fine collection of eighteenth-century furniture, porcelain and textiles bequeathed to the Trust by the famously discerning Mrs Gubbay was still to come. In 1958 it was a sad house, half abandoned. The young dancers waltzing, foxtrotting and Charlestoning through those wonderful paved marble halls at Clandon brought the building strangely, temporarily to life.
Elisabeth Hyde Parker’s coming out was at Melford Hall near Sudbury in Suffolk, a joint celebration for Beth and for her brother Sir Richard Hyde Parker, 12th Baronet, who was twenty-one that year. The faded red-brick house, with its cupolas and turrets, is one of the most romantic of all English country houses, mainly dating from the mid-sixteenth century. When Queen Elizabeth I made her progress around Suffolk in 1578 she was entertained at Melford. According to contemporary records:
There were 200 young gentlemen cladde alle in white velvet, and 300 of the graver sort apparelled in black velvet coates and with faire chaines … with 1,500 servying men all on horsebacke, well and bravelie mounted, to receive the Queen’s Highnesse into Suffolke … and there was in Suffolke suche sumptuous feastinges and bankets as seldom in anie parte of the worlde there hath been seene afore.
In the eighteenth century the hall was bought by Sir Harry Parker, 6th Baronet. The Parkers were a great naval family, producing a succession of three distinguished admirals, all of them called Hyde. It was the second Admiral Hyde Parker who, at the Battle of Copenhagen, gave the signal to withdraw which provoked Nelson to put the telescope to his blind eye. The third of these illustrious Admiral Hyde Parkers fought in the Napoleonic Wars, finally becoming First Sea Lord. Portraits of the admirals and the spoils they acquired give the house its particular historic atmosphere. Later Parkers were keen antiquarians and collectors. By the time of Beth Hyde Parker’s coming out, Melford Hall had been in the family for almost two centuries. But their tenure was now coming to an end. On the death of her father in 1951 the house, which had been badly damaged during military occupation in the war, had been accepted by the Treasury in lieu of death duties, together with some of the principal contents and a hundred and thirty acres of park. Two years after her party in that memorable setting Melford Hall too had been transferred to the National Trust.
Sarah Norman’s dance was held at Sutton Place in Surrey, the vast country house where in the 1930s the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland frequently entertained the Prince of Wales. The dance was given by her mother, the Hon. Mrs Willoughby Norman with the duchess as co-hostess. Jennifer of course was there: ‘I join 800 at a duchess’s ball,’ she reported in the Tatler, rather breathlessly. ‘The lovely house of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland is a superb setting for a ball, and each one I have been to here has been outstanding.’ She praised the duchess, ‘enchanting in a rose and white printed taffeta dress’, who had personally arranged the exquisite flowers throughout the house. The duchess was apparently ‘in no way perturbed’ at having a party for more than thirty friends staying in the house, and a dinner party of eighty guests before the dance. She praised the duke, ‘always a charming host’, seen quietly going round chatting to his many guests. Jennifer was a thrilled spectator of the dancing in the long panelled library and out on the small dance floor beside ‘one of the best designed and prettiest swimming pools in the country’. The scene reminded her of fairyland. But this was not to last. Only two years later Sutton Place had been sold to the multi-millionaire Paul Getty. In her memoirs, describing a party held in 1960, Jennifer expresses deep displeasure at the transformation:
I have been to many gracious parties in this house: this was a complete contrast. Firstly it was far too crowded. Secondly, around the swimming pool that evening were stalls with milk shakes, soft drinks and a variety of other items, all advertising their wares – it looked like a market. Thirdly, the ladies’ cloakroom was a row of creosoted loos in creosoted huts such as you had at point-to-points in the old days, which the ladies in their often very pale silks and satins were afraid to use, as Mr Getty had had all the luxurious bathrooms locked!
Milkshakes at Sutton Place. Portaloos out in the garden. To Jennifer this signified the coming of the barbarians.
Unlike the London dances, deb dances in the country were completely unpredictable. Every weekend through the summer you would set off on this magical mystery tour, travelling on Friday afternoon, usually by train, to a probably unfamiliar part of England to stay with people you most likely had never met before. Week by week you were landed in new social situations with little possibility of rescue or escape. Not easy in, say, Warwickshire to take a taxi home as you could do if an evening in London proved disastrous. In this respect, upper-class parents had always been hard-hearted. Being sent off into the blue without compunction had been an element, I think, in all our upbringings: the children had to be taught to be socially adaptable, to stand on their own feet.
My sister and I had started young with house parties, having been invited at the age of seven and ten respectively to stay with some distant friends of my mother’s, the D’Avigdor-Goldsmids. Looking back I imagine the idea originated with my lounge-lizard of a godfather, Colonel ‘Dicky’ Pembroke, who was the close companion of Rosie D’Avigdor-Goldsmid at the time. The invitation was for a children’s dance at Somerhill, the Goldsmids’ country house near Tonbridge in Kent. Slightly in trepidation, the two small girls, as we then were, wearing our identical gingham cotton dresses with rick-rack round the hem, travelled alone by train from Victoria having been given strict instructions to get out at Tonbridge, where the Goldsmids’ chauffeur would be meeting us. In the car we caught a first breathtaking view of Somerhill, the dramatic Jacobean building standing high on a ridge above the lake and forest, as Turner had painted it in the early nineteenth century. We were led in through the entrance porch and hallway, through reception rooms and library, which we were informed by the parlour maid was the longest room in Kent, to an upstairs drawing room where a tea party was in progress with a greater choice of sandwiches and cakes than I had seen in my whole lifetime, far outdoing the selection in the tea lounge at the Dorchester. I was accustomed to middling rich families but it was obvious even to a ten-year-old that the D’
Avigdor-Goldsmids were in a different league.
Sir Harry was a bullion broker and came from a famous Anglo-Jewish banking dynasty. At the time we went to Somerhill he was also on the brink of a political career. In 1955 he entered Parliament, becoming Parliamentary Private Secretary to Duncan Sandys when Sandys was Minister of Housing, a post for which Sir Harry’s ownership of a 270-room Kent mansion gave him a particular expertise. The regime at Somerhill was famously hospitable. Rosie herself, the china-doll-like chatelaine who chain-smoked small cigars, compared her house to a hotel, ‘except that the guests never paid’. Writers, artists, politicians, royalty, John Betjeman, Hugh Casson, David Niven, Enoch Powell, a fashionably eclectic mix, sat down to banquets so gargantuan that, according to Violet Powell, a frequent visitor, ‘stiff sets of tennis were a necessity between meals’. The Goldsmids’ effusive hospitality extended to the children. As friends of their daughters, Sarah and Chloë, the little girls from South Kensington were cosseted. For the dance in the evening we were bathed and changed and our hair was brushed to shimmering point by a succession of maids. Local children and bashful teenagers were ushered in to join us in Sir Roger de Coverley, Strip the Willow, the Dashing White Sergeant and other such galumphing performances, the staple of all Pony Club dances in the country, while the grown-ups in their evening clothes drifted in and out, smiling indulgently at the scene. At breakfast in the morning footmen stood behind our chairs in the dining room hung with Brussels tapestries. After breakfast a line of little ponies was led out by the grooms for the children to take a morning ride. When we got back to London I wrote an account of the stay in a wide-eyed style reminiscent of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters. It was useful childhood training. If you could cope with a weekend at Somerhill you would be equipped for whatever life might bring.
Last Curtsey Page 17