Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  This electronic edition published 2013

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud, Gloucestershire

  GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © The Estate of Pamela Horn 209, 2013

  ISBN 9781445603186 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445635385 (e-BOOK)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword and Acknowledgements

  1: The Impact of War: 1914–1918

  2: Adjusting to Peace: 1919–1921

  3: Community Responsibilities and Sporting Pursuits

  4: Social Rituals

  5: Domestic Affairs and Breaking the Mould

  6: The ‘Bright Young People’ and the End of an Era

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Foreword and Acknowledgements

  In recent years television period dramas have depicted the ups and downs of life in an imaginary aristocratic household before and after the First World War. Country House Society seeks to examine the realities of the daily round and the joys and sorrows experienced by families who were actually living through the often turbulent years between 1914 and 1930. In collecting material for the book I must thank the staff in the libraries and archives where I have worked for their expert help and ready co-operation.

  In particular, my thanks are due to staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and especially to those in Special Collections; the British Library; the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College Archives, London; Market Harborough Museum, Leicestershire; the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, whose members of staff have so readily provided material from the Astor collection; the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Shugborough Hall Oral History Transcripts, Staffordshire County Council; St. Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, and especially Sarah Newman; and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham.

  Pamela Horn, August 2012.

  1

  The Impact of War: 1914–1918

  The First World War brought grievous sacrifices to the whole nation, and it perhaps brought greater losses to the landed families, with their long military traditions, than to any other class. It would be impossible to measure how much the quality and vitality of landed society in the post-war years suffered from the absence of the sons killed in France, or from the natural hedonism of the survivors of the holocaust.

  F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), p. 327.

  The Pre-War World

  In the early weeks of the summer of 1914, when temperatures soared to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, there were few indications that Britain was about to be engulfed in a devastating war, which would lead to the deaths of almost three-quarters of a million Britons.1 The social elite were to be particularly hard hit, with about one in five of the British and Irish peers and their sons who served in the war being killed. Many titled families lost the direct heirs to their titles and estates, though usually there were younger sons or other male relatives to inherit both the title and the land. It seems only three titles out of the 558 which had been linked to estates of at least 3,000 acres at the beginning of the 1880s were extinguished by the First World War.2

  In political and social circles, however, in the late spring of 1914 it was the threat of civil war in Ireland over the issue of Home Rule, and labour unrest on the mainland, including the possibility of a general strike, that were the prime causes of concern. Little attention was paid to the assassination by a Serbian nationalist of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian imperial throne, and his wife in Sarajevo on 26 June. Conflicts in the turbulent Balkans appeared to offer little immediate threat to Britain itself.

  Meanwhile, for members of High Society the London social season was following its traditional course. There were the usual presentations at Court of debutantes, the regular round of dinner parties, balls, visits to the theatre and opera, and attendance at important sporting events, as well as a multitude of Saturday to Monday house parties. For the widowed Lady Airlie, one of Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting, the 1914 Season proved particularly strenuous since not only had she to chaperone her youngest daughter, Mabell, to balls almost every night but she had to carry out the duties of Mistress of the Robes to the queen at the Courts, to replace the Duchess of Devonshire, who was ill.3 Chaperonage remained extremely important for young unmarried girls, so while they could play golf, ride or go on the river with young male friends in the country, when they were in London they were supposed never to ‘cross the street alone, go shopping, travel in a taxi or take a journey’ without a responsible older married woman or a maid accompanying them.4

  More daring girls, like Lady Diana Manners, the beautiful daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland and the centre of a group of friends calling themselves the ‘Corrupt Coterie’, flouted these restrictions when they could. After a visit to Venice in 1913, Lady Diana recalled the carefree gaiety she had enjoyed: ‘dancing and extravagance and lashings of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses’.5 Dancing was a major preoccupation, with the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and jazz beginning to penetrate British society, although their true conquest of the elite social scene was to come more than half a decade later.6 There was, however, a darker side to these exuberant activities, with drug-taking (particularly chloroform) and gambling part of the wider background. Of Alfred Duff Cooper, who married Lady Diana Manners in 1919, it has been said that on a single evening in 1914 playing chemin de fer, one of his favourite gambling games, he lost £1,645 to a Captain Taylor. That was nearly four times his salary as a Foreign Office diplomat.7

  Nancy Cunard, the rebellious eighteen-year-old daughter of Sir Bache and Lady Cunard, was another girl determined to go her own way as far as possible. In part her feelings of alienation arose from her dislike of her mother, whom she referred to mockingly as ‘Her Ladyship’, and from her resentment at Lady Cunard’s life as a prominent society hostess and devoted admirer of the leading conductor, Thomas Beecham. Maud Cunard was estranged from Sir Bache, and on one occasion when Nancy and Lady Diana Manners were discussing maternal attitudes and restrictions, Nancy declared defiantly: ‘My mother’s having an affair with Thomas Beecham; I can do as I like.’8 She was presented at Court in 1914, ‘wearing a pink dress with a train of tulle and rose petals’, and with the obligatory display of ostrich feathers on her head. It was a London Season she little enjoyed and it was to be her

  first and last, I swore to myself, as one ball succeeded another until there were three or four a week and the faces of the revolving guardsmen seemed as silly as their vapid conversation among the hydrangeas at supper.9

  More to her liking were the clandestine excursions undertaken with her friend, Iris Tree, who was a year her junior. As Iris remembered years later, she and Nancy would visit the Eiffel Tower restaurant, kept by Austrian-born Rudolf Stulik. It was a popular venue for artistic and literary figures, as well as for members of the Bohemian avant garde and the fashionable elite. According to Iris, the two girls also patronised other ‘fugitive’ haunts, unbeknown to their parents:

  We were bandits, escaping environment by tunnelling deceptions to emerge in forbidden artifice, chalk-white face powder, scarlet lip rouge, cigaret
te smoke, among roisterers of our own choosing … and the ‘coterie’ crowned by Diana Manners, which included the most brilliant and exuberant spirits united at the various Inns and outings; Cavendish Hotel, Cheshire Cheese, pubs in Limehouse, river barges, cab shelters and a secret studio which Nancy and I shared for secret meetings with the favourites … Nancy and I loved dressing up for the Chelsea Arts balls, given at Albert Hall, designing our own costumes …

  On one occasion we were arrested for swimming in the Serpentine, and emerged in dripping feathers and velvets to receive a summons, returning scared to our solemn doors and stealthy, clockticking stairways. After this, though latch keys were confiscated and curfew imposed, we somehow tricked the watch.10

  Even their lavish use of make-up was controversial, at a time when this was thought appropriate only for actresses – and prostitutes. Nancy and Iris rented a room in Fitzroy Place, which they called their studio, and where they could escape to meet their friends unchaperoned, or write and paint, and design their costumes. To Lady Diana Manners, though, the premises seemed to be ‘always in chaos’, and she found it unacceptably ‘squalid’.11

  But for most members of High Society the hedonism of these years took a less hectic and more respectable form, involving balls, visits to friends, and attendance at such events as Ascot or the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lords, where those who aspired to belong to the social elite contrived to be seen.

  In these circumstances, therefore, the society magazine The Bystander, in its ‘holiday issue’ of 8 July 1914, referred to the ‘whole of the English year being now a holiday season’:

  We make holiday, it is true, in July; but so we do in all the other months. We have summer holidays durating … from June to October inclusive; then we run an autumn holiday season (shooting, hunting etc.) up to round about Christmas. Then our Winter holidays (ski-ing, skating, etc.) until February, or thereabouts, followed by the ‘Spring in the Sunny South’ Season, which gives place in turn to that furiously active spell known as the London Season …

  July, despite Henley and the call of the river, Sandown, Goodwood, a Court, a few dances, a garden party or two, and the last gasps of the opera, is a holiday month.

  Three weeks later it noted that the London Season had finally ended: ‘From now till May we shall all behave like sensible “grown-ups” and neither receive nor accept more invitations than we have leisure to enjoy. One well-known lady habitually bids her friends “goodbye” at the beginning of each season, for she says “We shan’t see each other again till the rush is over.” Leisured classes, indeed! Why for months they don’t exist, in London at any rate’, so frantic had the demands of pleasure-seeking and the social round become.12

  Leading hostesses nonetheless continued to hold their Saturday to Monday house parties. At Highclere Castle, home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, 18 July marked the start of the last big house party of the 1914 Season, with twenty-six guests, plus their servants, in residence.13 At Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire Lady Desborough, too, organised weekend hospitality, including water parties on the Thames.

  There was so little concern about the international situation that Margot Asquith, the second wife of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, allowed her only daughter to leave on a visit to friends in Holland on 25 July, although she did recall her a few days later, thereby enabling her to reach England on 1 August. Yet, according to Margot, the apprehensions she had already begun to feel were shared by few others in London society. On 29 July, when she was hosting a luncheon party at Downing Street, attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury among others, she remembered her guests expressing surprise when she told them she had stopped her sister visiting France on a painting holiday, ‘and had telegraphed for Elizabeth to return from Holland’.14

  Similarly Lord Crawford departed on 23 July to attend the Wagner festival at Bayreuth and, apparently unaware of the imminence of war, complained to his wife four days later that the Austro-Serbian crisis was ‘wrecking Bayreuth!’ He was able to hear the Niebelunglied and then had to hurry away ‘owing to the Dublin disturbances’. Ironically before he got ‘halfway to London mobilisation had begun and my journey was adventurous’.15

  Lord Carnarvon’s sister, Winifred, and her husband, Herbert, Lord Burghclere, had travelled to Europe, too, in June. Only belatedly did they become aware of the growing tensions and decide to return early from the Vichy spa where they had intended to spend some weeks. They arrived back in London on 25 July.16 Interestingly, however, Lady Carnarvon, who was the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy banker Alfred de Rothschild, had become anxious about the European situation several months earlier, doubtless benefiting from her father’s extensive foreign contacts. She had already been given permission to turn Highclere Castle into a hospital for wounded officers, should the need arise.17

  In late July, events in central Europe gathered ominous momentum. Within Britain, it has been said that until 24 July, it was the danger of civil war in Ireland that seemed to the Cabinet ‘a much nearer and graver risk than war in Europe’.18 Two days before this The Bystander expressed alarm about the European situation and it reproached the national press for ignoring this in favour of its usual parochial preoccupations, at a time when some leading Continental countries were ‘armed to the teeth and in a state of preparedness at any moment for war’.19 Yet, despite these comments, its own columns still concentrated on the social events that marked the end of the London Season.

  On 28 July Austria-Hungary finally declared war on Serbia. Two days later Serbia’s ally, Russia, began to mobilise its forces, while the following day Germany and France ordered the mobilisation of their armies, and Germany declared war on Russia and France. Events were speeding up as pre-war alliances and animosities came to the fore. Britain initially had hoped to avoid conflict but when on 3 August Germany issued an ultimatum to neutral Belgium, it was clear that efforts at mediation were at an end. The following day, 4 August, as Germany invaded Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany. Given this rapid international transformation it is difficult to disagree with the conclusion of the Annual Register for 1914 when it commented drily, ‘The war had come suddenly upon Great Britain.’20

  The Onset of War

  Almost at once, war fever gripped the nation, and there were optimistic predictions that if determined opposition were shown to the German aggressors, hostilities would be over by Christmas. The landed classes, with their long-established military commitments, were at the forefront of the drive for mobilisation. Not only were they linked to the county yeomanry regiments but the officers of the regular Army were largely recruited from their ranks. Lord Crawford, observing the rising enthusiasm for war, noted gloomily in his diary, ‘We are ringing our bells today, tomorrow we shall be wringing our hands. The insouciance and lack of foresight in the patriotic crowds fills me with consternation.’21 The Marquis of Tavistock, the pacifist son and heir of the Duke of Bedford, was still more appalled. To add to his personal aversion ‘to re-entering what was to me the slavery of Army life … it would be definitely wrong for me, after my known and proved incapacity to do the right thing in a sudden emergency, to take a commission and then, by some blunder on the battlefield, perhaps sacrifice the lives of my men uselessly’. When he informed his father he would not serve, the duke disinherited him, although ‘legal difficulties ultimately prevented him from being deprived of an income. He spent the war working in a centre for troops in Portsmouth, cleaning and washing dishes.’22 He and his father remained estranged until the duke’s death in 1940.

  It was not merely the unthinking mass of the population which greeted the outbreak of war with enthusiasm. Landowners and their sons sought to get to the front as speedily as they could, and encouraged the workers on their estates to join the colours, too. Those landowners who were themselves too old to volunteer nevertheless encouraged their sons and employees to do so. Lord Derby, for example, according to his biographer, devoted all his time and energy to Army recru
iting during the first year of the war, particularly in Lancashire, where he enjoyed a position of dominance. In a typical speech given at Rainford, he noted that he had two sons, one of whom was at the front and the other was in the artillery and when fully trained would go to the front, too, stating, ‘If I had twenty sons I should be ashamed if every one of them did not go to the front when his turn came.’ Then, in a covert threat to his tenants and workers, he added,

  When the war is over I intend, as far as I possibly can, to employ nobody except men who have taken their duty at the front. I go further than that, and say that, all things being equal, if two men come to me for a farm and one has been at the front there is no doubt which is going to get the farm.23

  Lord Willoughby de Broke, who served with the Warwickshire Yeomanry in England, and was chairman of the Imperial Maritime League, was another enthusiastic recruiter. He claimed that his organisation had held a thousand meetings in country villages during the first half of 1915. Lectures were given with lantern slides, and according to him, ‘Few meetings failed to produce one to a dozen recruits in small villages.’24

  Sometimes a more direct pressure was exerted. G. L. Courthope, who was MP for the Rye Division of Sussex, not only joined up himself but took fifteen of his estate workers with him. ‘While Mr. Courthope’s employees are on service,’ reported the Sussex Express, ‘their families will not be worried about rent or food.’25 In Gloucestershire, the 11th Earl of Wemyss in late August 1914 issued an ‘abrupt ultimatum to all his employees, servants etc. – to join the Army or leave his service’. He then went off to London leaving his wife to ‘cope with the situation’. According to Violet Asquith, who was staying with Lady Wemyss, he had not consulted her before making the statement and it was ‘too cruel as the people here have hardly heard of the war’. In the end the ultimatum was withdrawn, but efforts were made to persuade the men to join up.26 On the Duke of Bedford’s estate a rather milder approach was adopted, with employees who volunteered promised that half their weekly wages would be paid to their dependants at home while they were away. At that time, few envisaged that the struggle would last for so many years, but it seems that the promise was kept since the families of some Bedford estate workers were still receiving payments in 1918.27