by Bill Bryson
Hardly a great house in Britain didn’t yield something at some point. The Howards at Castle Howard relinquished 110 old masters and more than a thousand rare books. At Blenheim Palace, the Dukes of Marlborough sold stacks of paintings, including eighteen works by Rubens and more than a dozen by Van Dyck, before belatedly discovering the financial attractiveness of marrying rich Americans. The fabulously rich Duke of Hamilton sold nearly £400,000 worth of glittery oddments in 1882, then returned a few years later to sell some £250,000 worth more. For many, the great auction houses of London assumed something of the qualities of pawn shops.
When the owners had sold everything of value from walls and floors, they sometimes sold the walls and floors, too. A room with all its fittings was extracted from Wingerworth Hall in Derbyshire and inserted into the St. Louis Art Museum. A Grinling Gibbons staircase was removed from Cassiobury Park in Hertfordshire and reerected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sometimes entire houses went, as with Agecroft Hall, a handsome Tudor manor in Lancashire, which was taken to pieces, packed into numbered crates, and shipped to Richmond, Virginia, where it was reassembled and still proudly stands.
Very occasionally some good came of all the hardship. The heirs of Sir Edmund Antrobus, unable to maintain his estate, put it on the market in 1915. A local businessman and racehorse breeder named Sir Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge for £6,600—roughly £300,000 in today’s money, so not a trifling sum—and very generously gave it to the nation, making it safe at last.
Such happy outcomes were exceptional, however. For many hundreds of country houses there was no salvation, and the sad fate was decline and eventual demolition. Almost all the losses were unfortunate. Some were little short of scandalous. Streatlem Castle, once one of the finest homes in County Durham, was given to the Territorial Army, which used it, amazingly, for target practice. Aston Clinton, a nineteenth-century house of vast and exuberant charm once owned by the Rothschilds, was bought by Buckinghamshire County Council and torn down to make way for a soulless vocational training center. So low did the fortunes of stately homes sink that one in Lincolnshire reportedly was bought by a film company just so that it could burn it down for the climactic scene of a movie.
Nowhere was entirely safe, it seems. Even Chiswick House, a landmark building by any measure, was nearly lost. For a time it was a lunatic asylum, but by the 1950s it was empty and listed for demolition. Fortunately, enough sense prevailed to save it, and it is now in the safe care of English Heritage, a public body. The National Trust rescued some two hundred other houses over the course of the century, and a few survived by turning themselves into tourist attractions—not always entirely smoothly at first. A grandmother at one stately home, Simon Jenkins relates in England’s Thousand Best Houses, refused to leave one of the rooms whenever horse racing was on the television. “She was voted the best exhibit,” Jenkins adds. Many other large houses found new lives as schools, clinics, or other institutions. Sir William Harcourt’s Nuneham Park spent much of the twentieth century as a training center for the Royal Air Force. It is now a religious retreat.
Hundreds more, however, were unceremoniously whisked away. By the 1950s, the peak period of destruction, stately homes were disappearing at the rate of about two a week. Exactly how many great houses went altogether is unknown. In 1974, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London staged a celebrated exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House,” in which it surveyed the enormous loss of stately homes. Altogether the curators, Marcus Binney and John Harris, counted 1,116 great houses lost in the previous century, but further research raised that number to 1,600 even before the exhibition was over, and the figure now is generally put at about 2,000—a painfully substantial number, bearing in mind that these were some of the handsomest, jauntiest, most striking, ambitious, influential, and patently cherishable residences ever erected on the planet.
III
So that was the situation for Mr. Marsham and his century as they headed jointly toward their closing years. From the perspective of domesticity, there has never been a more interesting or eventful time. Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century—socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually, and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb. Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval—a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old—and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers.
It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-to-day change people were exposed to in the nineteenth century, particularly in the second half. Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand-new. The term is not recorded in English before 1879, when it appears in the magazine Notes & Queries in the sentence: “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his weekend at So-and-so.” Even then, clearly, it only signified Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then only for certain people. Not until the 1890s did it become universally understood, if not yet universally enjoyed, but an entitlement to relaxation was unquestionably on its way.
The irony in all this is that just as the world was getting more agreeable for most people—more brilliantly lit, more reliably plumbed, more leisured and pampered and gaudily entertaining—it was quietly falling apart for the likes of Mr. Marsham. The agricultural crisis that began in the 1870s and ran on almost indefinitely was as palpably challenging to country parsons as it was to the wealthy landowners on whom they depended, and it was doubly difficult for those whose family wealth was tied to the land, as Mr. Marsham’s was.
By 1900, a parson’s earnings were much less than half in real terms what they had been fifty years before. Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1903 bleakly recorded that a “considerable section” of the clergy now lived at a level of “bare subsistence.” A Reverend F. J. Bleasby, it further noted, had made 470 unsuccessful applications for a curacy, and finally, in humbling defeat, had entered a workhouse. The well-off parson was resoundingly and irremediably a thing of the past.
The rambling parsonages that had once made the life of a country clergyman commodious and agreeable were now for many just vast and leaky burdens. Many twentieth-century clergy, coming from more modest backgrounds and struggling on much reduced incomes, couldn’t afford to maintain such spacious properties. A Mrs. Lucy Burnett, wife of a country vicar in Yorkshire, plaintively explained to a church commission in 1933 just how big was the vicarage that she had to manage: “If you played a brass band in my kitchen I don’t think you could hear it in the drawing room,” she said. The responsibility for interior improvements fell to the incumbents, but increasingly they were too impoverished to effect any. “Many a parsonage has passed twenty, thirty, even fifty years without any redecoration at all,” Alan Savidge wrote in a history of parsonages in 1964.
The simplest solution for the church was to sell off the troublesome parsonages, and to build something smaller nearby. The Church of England Commissioners, the officials in charge of these disposals, were not always the most astute of businesspeople, it must be said. Anthony Jennings, in The Old Rectory (2009), notes how in 1983 they sold just over three hundred parsonages at an average price of £64,000, but spent an average of £76,000 on building much inferior replacements.
Of the thirteen thousand parsonages that existed in 1900, just nine hundred are still in Church of England ownership today. Our Old Rectory was sold into private hands in 1978. (I don’t know for how much.) Its histo
ry as a rectory lasted 127 years, during which time it was home to eight clergy. Curiously, all seven later rectors stayed longer in the house than the shadowy figure who built it. Thomas John Gordon Marsham departed in 1861, after just ten years, to take up a new post as rector of Saxlingham, a position of almost exactly equal obscurity in a village twenty miles to the north, near the sea.
Why he built himself such a substantial house is a question that can now never be answered. Perhaps he hoped to impress some delightful young woman of his acquaintance, but she declined him and married another. Perhaps she did choose him but died before they could wed. Both outcomes were common enough in the mid-nineteenth century, and either would explain some of the rectory’s design mysteries, such as the presence of a nursery and the vague femininity of the plum room, though nothing we can suggest can now ever be more than a guess. All that can be said is that whatever happiness he found in life, it was not within the bounds of marriage.
We may at least hope that his relationship with his devoted housekeeper Miss Worm had some measure of warmth and affection, however awkwardly expressed. It was almost certainly the longest relationship of either of their lives. When Miss Worm died in 1899 at the age of seventy-six, she had been Mr. Marsham’s housekeeper for over half a century. In that same year the Marsham family estate at Stratton Strawless was sold in fifteen lots, presumably because no one could be found to buy it whole. The sale marked the end of four hundred years of prominence for the Marsham family in the county. Today all that remains as a reminder of that is a pub called the Marsham Arms in the nearby village of Hevingham.
Mr. Marsham lived on for not quite six years more. He died in a retirement home in a nearby village in 1905. He was eighty-three years old and, apart from time away for schooling, had lived the whole of his life on Norfolk soil, within an area just slightly more than twenty miles across.
IV
We started here in the attic—a long time ago now, it seems—when I clambered up through the loft hatch to look for the source of a leak. (It turned out to be a slipped tile that was allowing rain through.) There, you may recall, I discovered a door that led out onto a space on the roof giving a view of the countryside. The other day, I hauled myself back up there for the first time since I began work on the book. I wondered vaguely if I would see the world differently now that I know a little about Mr. Marsham and the circumstances in which he lived.
In fact, no. What was surprising to me was not how much the world below had changed since Mr. Marsham’s day but how little. A resurrected Mr. Marsham obviously would be struck by some novelties—cars speeding along a road in the middle distance, a helicopter passing overhead—but mostly he would gaze upon a landscape that was seemingly timeless and utterly familiar.
That air of permanence is of course a deception. It isn’t that the landscape isn’t changing, but that it is changing too slowly to be noticed, even over the course of 160 years or so. Go back far enough and you would see plenty of change. Travel 500 years backward and there would be almost nothing familiar except the church, a few hedgerows and field shapes, and the dawdling line of some of the roads. Go a bit farther than that and you might see the Roman fellow who dropped the phallic pendant with which we began the book. Go way back—to 400,000 years ago, say—and you would find lions, elephants, and other exotic fauna grazing on arid plains. These were the creatures that left the bones that so fascinated early antiquaries like John Frere at nearby Hoxne. The site of his find is too distant to be seen from our roof, but the bones he collected could easily have come from animals that once grazed on our land.
Remarkably, what brought those animals to this part of the world was a climate just 3 degrees Celsius or so warmer than today. There are people alive now who will live in a Britain that warm again. Whether it will be a parched Serengeti or a verdant paradise of homegrown wines and year-round fruit is beyond the scope of this book to guess. What is certain is that it will be a very different place, and one to which future humans will have to adjust at something much faster than a geological pace.
One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require now to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot—a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in just the last twenty years. Disproportionately, it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction.
Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet’s other citizens. One day—and don’t expect it to be a distant day—many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield.
The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.
* A hundred years later when the significance of the find was finally realized, a geological period was named the Hoxnian after the village where Frere made his discovery.
* Pitt Rivers’s eldest son, Alexander, seems to have inherited his father’s affection for tormenting tenants. One, a man of previously mild character, was so driven to despair by young Alexander that he wrote “BLACKGUARD LANDLORD” with weed killer in large letters across the Rushmore lawn. Alexander sued for libel and was awarded token damages of one shilling, but rejoiced in the fact that the trial costs had reduced the tenant to destitution. Pitt Rivers’s other eight children seem mostly to have been pretty decent. George—the one banished from the estate and thus the inadvertent cause of his sister’s beating—became a successful inventor with a particular interest in electric lighting. He demonstrated an incandescent bulb at the Paris Exhibition of 1881 that was deemed the equal of anything produced by Edison or Swan.
* The name “bank holiday” was an odd one, and Lubbock never really explained why he elected to call it that instead of “national holiday” or “workers’ holiday” or something similarly descriptive. It is sometimes suggested that he meant the holiday only for bank workers, but that is not so. It was always intended for all.
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •
As ever, I am much indebted to many people for expert help and guidance in the preparation of this book, in particular the following.
In England: Professors Tim Burt, Maurice Tucker, and Mark White of Durham University; the Reverend Nicholas Holtam of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London; the Very Reverend Michael Sadgrove of Durham Cathedral; Keith Blackmore of the Times; Beth McHattie and Philip Davies of English Heritage; Aosaf Afzal, Dominic Reid, and Keith Moore of the Royal Society; and the staff of the London Library and Durham University Library.
In the United States: Elizabeth Chew, Bob Self, Susan Stein, Richard Gilder, and Bill Beiswanger of Monticello; Dennis Pogue of Mount Vernon; Jan Dempsey of the Wenham Public Library in Massachusetts; and the staff of the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University and Drake University Library in Des Moines.
I am also indebted in ways too numerous to cite to Carol Heaton, Fred Morris, Gerry Howard, Marianne Velmans, Deborah Adams, Dan McLean, Alison Barrow, Larry Finlay, Andrew Orme, Daniel Wiles, and Tom and Nancy Jones. I must express particular thanks to my children, Catherine and Sam, for much heroic and good-natured assistance. Above all, and as always, my greatest thanks is to my dear and infinitely patient wife, Cynthia.
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