Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  The rentals … are confined to the strictly agricultural parts of the estate. They do not include any rent, whether estimated or actual, for the house, garden, shooting, nor in the outlay is there included any attributable to such ‘amenities’.80

  This estate had been particularly hard hit but Country Life maintained that its experience was not unique. It was located in the counties of Moray and Inverness and the accounts showed that overall, net income had disappeared, and had been replaced by a loss of £621. But even elsewhere the return per pound of gross rental that found its way to the landlord also showed a sharp decline. In the case of property in Forfarshire, for example, the decline was from 11s 5d in the pound before the war to 6s 3d in its aftermath; in Perthshire, Stirling and Lanarkshire, the decrease was from 9s 8¼d to 4s 6¾d in 1920–21, and in Argyll, the respective figures were 5s 3d and 2s 7¾d in the pound.81

  Even wealthy landowners, like Lord Londonderry and the Duke of Northumberland, who benefited from royalties from coal mines on their estates, were hit by other forms of taxation. In 1918, the Duke of Northumberland had a gross income from mineral royalties of £82,450, but of that he received just £23,890 net, the remainder having gone on a 5 per cent Mineral Rights Duty, an 80 per cent Excess Mineral Rights Duty, income tax at 6s in the pound and supertax at 4s 6d in the pound.82 Hence, as David Cannadine has pointed out, ‘The combination of reduced incomes, increased exactions, and eroded confidence meant that most patricians were obliged to economise and to retrench’.83 For many the answer was to reduce their obligations by selling land, selling or letting country houses, and disposing of other valuable assets, such as paintings, silver and furniture. The latter was especially the case where a country house was sold and its contents dispersed, with some being taken to another of the properties and the rest auctioned. Where houses could not be sold to new owners for residential purposes, they might be disposed of for other purposes, becoming schools, convalescent homes, hotels, country clubs and similar institutions. Taymouth Castle, sold at the end of 1920, became a hydropathic hotel, and Wrightington Hall near Wigan was acquired in 1921 by Lancashire County Council for a convalescent home. On occasion, when all else failed, houses were sold to property speculators for demolition, thereby ending the landowner’s responsibility for maintaining them and enabling the site to be developed for other purposes. The raw materials, including valuable wood panels and marble mantelpieces, were often sold separately to those seeking to embellish their own property. In a few cases they were exported to the United States of America. In August 1921, Country Life reported that Carshalton gates were ‘about to be taken to America’.84 In fact The Field advised owners to demolish houses which were merely ‘incubuses sitting heavily upon impoverished acres that can no longer support them’. 85

  Against this financial background, therefore, it was accepted that an owner could do very well for himself by selling an asset which perhaps yielded him 3 per cent, clearing off mortgages whose burden had risen during the war, and reinvesting the surplus in trustee securities yielding 7 or 8 per cent.86 In the immediate post-war period, therefore, many landowners embarked on a feverish sale of substantial parts of their estates, both to reduce the burden of their outgoings and to achieve a better return on capital. One of the early vendors was the Duke of Sutherland, who in 1918 had already sold nearly a quarter of a million acres in Scotland. But it was in the following year that what was described as an ‘avalanche’ of sales began, with the Duke of Sutherland again in the market, offering a further ‘114 square miles of the Highlands, with Dornoch castle’.87 He also sold Lillenhall House in Shropshire and the Trentham estate in Staffordshire, this latter realising £333,000. Although he argued that it was ‘unwise to have so much capital tied up in land’, even after these major dispersals he remained one of the country’s largest owners of land.88 Other important vendors at this time included Lord Aylesford, who sold 2,000 acres of the outlying portions of his Packington estate in Warwickshire for £65,000. That still left him with 17,000 acres. In Lincolnshire the Earl of Yarborough also sold nearly 2,000 acres out of the 50,000 he owned – with just 346 acres in Grimsby alone realising £41,000. Likewise the Marquess of Northampton disposed of part of his Long Compton estate in Warwickshire and 3,000 acres in Devon.89

  In March 1919 the Marquess of Aberdeen put the greater part of his Haddo House estate on the market, though the tenants were assured that ‘the fullest possible consideration [would] … be extended to [them] so that they [might] not be dispossessed of their holdings’. The sale involved around 50,000 acres, and was important from an agricultural, residential and sporting point of view. According to Country Life it covered five parishes in the centre of the county of Aberdeen, and was approximately 15 miles in length: ‘the rental exceeds £28,000 a year … the population on the portion now in the market is between 5,000 and 6,000 inhabitants’; also included were churches, schools and villages. The sporting possibilities, too, were good, with ‘low ground shooting and the salmon and trout fishing’ mentioned as being of a ‘noteworthy order’.90 This was all sold for £200,000 and was described as ‘the largest break-up sale of high-class agricultural land that has ever taken place in the United Kingdom.91

  Lord Aberdeen’s action did not escape criticism, one female correspondent to Country Life accusing him of seeking ‘to escape the responsibility of being a large landowner’. Furthermore no financial help was proffered to enable the tenants to keep the land when bought.92

  In September 1919 the Earl of Pembroke sold 7,000 acres of his 40,000-acre Wilton estate, while the Marquess of Bath disposed of more than a third of his Longleat estate in Wiltshire and Somerset, as well as, in 1920, selling outlying estates at Minsterley in Shropshire and Weobley in Hereford. The sale of 8,600 acres of his Longleat property yielded £50,000.93 However, the largest vendor in 1920 was probably the Duke of Rutland, who sold land in the nearby market town of Bakewell, along with 13,000 acres of his Belvoir estate and nearly 15,000 acres in Derbyshire. Together these comprised half the land he owned in those two localities. He realised £1.5 million from the sales. A good deal of that vast sum was spent on restoring Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, which the duke handed over to his son and heir, Lord Granby, together with the rest of his Derbyshire estate.94

  In March 1919 the Estates Gazette was already commenting on the ‘revolution in landowning’ that was taking place, and a month later The Tatler referred to the passion for selling up ‘land and white elephant estates’. It noted that Lord Northampton had given as his reasons for selling his large Cornish holdings the fact that landownership in general had become unpopular, being ‘regarded as a monopoly’; that there were doubts over the government’s long-term intentions towards landlords; and Cornwall was a long way from his core estate. Further, his family had only owned it ‘for the last century or so’. The Tatler then added drily, ‘One supposes the new war millionaires and people will buy the big houses’.95 That did happen in some cases, as the nouveau riche sought to acquire high-status landed properties. Hence in September 1921, Compton Verney, the family seat of Lord Willoughby de Broke, was sold to Joseph Watson, ‘soap-boiler and racehorse owner’, who was created Lord Manton about three months later.96

  A good deal of land was sold to tenant farmers, so that whereas in 1914 around 11 per cent of the improved land of England and Wales had been owned by its occupiers, including the home farms of the major estate owners, by 1921 that had risen to 20 per cent of the land so owned.97 And while much of the land might be sold off to farmers or to speculators, and a number of country houses converted to other uses, a minority were demolished when it proved impossible to find a purchaser. That was to be still more the case later in the 1920s.

  By the end of 1919, therefore, reports on the land market were full of the phrase ‘England is changing hands’. The Times took up the call in May 1920, when it declared,

  England is changing hands … Will a profiteer buy it? Will it be turned into a school or an institution?
For the most part the sacrifices are made in silence … The sons are perhaps lying in far away graves … and the old people, knowing there is no son or near relative left to keep up the old traditions, or so crippled by necessary taxation that they know the boy will never be able to carry on when they are gone, take the irrevocable step.98

  In reality that was a far too gloomy conclusion. Many owners were selling simply because it was financially advantageous for them to do so, or they wished to divest themselves of some of the responsibilities of estate ownership. Meanwhile Country Life joined in the lament at this exodus ‘from the stately homes of England’:

  Peer and squire, knight and lady, are forsaking the halls, gardens and grounds which, in many cases were built or laid out centuries ago and bear traces of the loving care bestowed on them by a long succession of owners … We are not so advanced, or so Bolshevik … as to feel no regret that these ancient associations should be so shattered.99

  Landowners, it argued, had become disheartened by those who declaimed against property: and had ‘got it into their heads that they [were] not popular with the majority … Many are as frightened as mice.’ Inevitably this post-war land sale bubble soon burst. It had been sustained in the immediate post-1918 period by the buoyant prices for farm produce, the state guarantees offered to farmers for their cereal crops, which had encouraged them to purchase their holdings, and by the desire of some war profiteers to acquire a landed property to give dignity to their new wealth. But by the end of 1920, a general downturn in the economy began to appear and this intensified in 1921, with agriculturists particularly hit by the repeal of the system of guarantees in that year. At the end of 1921 the Estates Gazette claimed that during the previous four years around a quarter of the land of England had changed hands.100 But from that point estate sales slowed markedly, and even early in 1921 Country Life was commenting on the growing demand for ‘sporting properties, especially those offering a combination of shooting, fishing and hunting’.101 In July of that year it reiterated the point, claiming that the ‘sporting element’ was ‘becoming of more and more importance’ in regard to the sale and letting of landed property, rather than food production.

  Elsewhere, and this was especially true of the deer forests and grouse moors of Scotland, owners were able to derive a valuable income by letting their land to English sportsmen or those from lowland Scotland anxious to pursue their shooting interests.

  Finally, in these post-war years it was not just country estates that were being sold, but urban land and large London town houses as well. The Duke of Bedford, for instance, sold £2 million worth of his Bloomsbury ground rents in 1919, while Lord Portman disposed of 7 acres of Marylebone, including 300 houses, five public houses and thirty shops, for £94,000. Lord Southampton, who owned land near Euston Station, sold sites on Euston Road for £73,000, and the Berkeley estate, which adjoined the Duke of Westminster’s Mayfair property, was sold by the Earl of Berkeley to Sir Marcus Samuel, later Lord Bearsted, in 1919. Country Life applauded that sale, commenting that if London land had to be disposed of ‘we can desire nothing better than that it should pass into the hands of men of the standing and personal repute of Sir Marcus Samuel.102

  As regards town houses, the Marquess of Salisbury sold his Arlington Street home for £120,000 in 1919. It had been in the Cecil family for decades.103 Lord Dartmouth, too, sold his town house in these post-war upheavals, as did the Duke of Devonshire with the sale of Devonshire House. The latter was to be demolished and the Duchess of Albany’s ball held there on 14 April 1920, for a Deptford charity, was its swan song before it was ‘handed over to the house-breakers’. Tickets cost three guineas and those attending had to wear eighteenth-century dress. According to The Tatler it attracted a thousand guests.104 On the whole, though, it was later in the decade that the large-scale sale and demolition of many of these once great mansions got under way, as their sites were cleared for more lucrative commercial or residential purposes, including flats.

  As in the case of the Duke of Westminster and his sale of some of his valuable pictures, so other grandees put unwanted antiques and works of art on the market. In June 1920, The Tatler observed acidly that it seemed ‘to be the fashion among our dukes nowadays to sell up anything they’ve got in the shape of loose property; from live stock to antiques. The dukes of Hamilton, Buccleuch, Rutland, and Sutherland have all had sales pretty recently … And the Duke of Leeds has been getting high prices for his old English furniture and silver’.105 The following April it returned to the theme, claiming that ‘libraries and pictures and art treasures’ were ‘all going soon there’ll be no sign at all of the glories and traditions of the ancien regime, and the only people who’ll have money will be the New Rich and the Americans’.106

  So it was that High Society began to adjust to the new world order after 1918. For some it was a time of severe financial pressure but for others there was the establishment of new priorities and new interests. As the biographer of the Duke of Westminster has put it, his property sales ‘in no way meant that he was cutting back on his personal pleasures’:

  In 1919 he began to purchase blood stock again … He also bought the 1,000-ton French merchant ship Belem and spent more than £100,000 converting it into a luxurious auxiliary motor-yacht, but in August 1920 he put it up for sale. Belem was an expensive toy: the wages bill alone was £700 a month … Soon after the war ended, [the Duke] … took a polo team to compete in America, and in April 1922 he revived his famous Eaton Polo Week.107

  Later another yacht was acquired, there were shooting and fishing parties in Scotland and Scandinavia, and parties for polo and tennis at Mimisan, his estate in France. The duke, with his great wealth, was always on the move and could afford to indulge his many whims. But many other aristocratic families, despite their periodic worries concerning financial matters, were still keen to have a ‘good time’ after the trauma of the First World War, and to enjoy the pleasures that the ‘Roaring Twenties’ could offer.

  3

  Community Responsibilities and Sporting Pursuits

  Derby … was a natural, inevitable and highly successful aristocrat. He took it for granted that his employees, his tenants, his neighbours and, indeed, the entire population of the County Palatine, would expect him to live and behave as his ancestors had done in earlier centuries … He did not himself care for shooting, but the park maintained an abundance of pheasants and he would often fill the house with relations and dependants and provide for them two shoots a day.

  Randolph S. Churchill, Lord Derby, ‘King of Lancashire’ (London, 1959), pp. 106 and 108.

  Sport had become the opium of the upper classes, indicating ‘some structural defect in the society which over-indulges it’.

  Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 244.

  Community Roles

  As many landowners sold off large parts of their estates in the post-1918 period, either to invest the proceeds more advantageously elsewhere or to reduce their debt burden, their former pre-eminence in national politics was also being undermined by the relentless rise of the middle classes. In these circumstances a number ceased to take on the burdens of public office. Admittedly, grandees like the Earl of Derby and the Marquess of Salisbury, as well as enthusiasts like Earl Winterton, continued to exercise power and influence outside their immediate neighbourhood, but for less vigorous or less ambitious aristocrats, it was only in their own locality that they were considered important. The despondency to which this change of fortune gave rise among some of them was expressed by Lord Willoughby de Broke in 1924 when he noted how rarely ‘The County’ was spoken of at that date

  in the tone of calm and reverent assurance that we heard when we were young … In these days people do not remain in the country for long enough at a time to steep themselves in its atmosphere. A dinner-party in the country to-day is hardly distinguishable from a London dinner-party … There is nothing bucolic about such an entertainme
nt … A flavour of local gossip may percolate mildly through the evening, but if any one really pulls the handle of the parish pump, he or she will be soon voted a bore …1

  Of course, a number of landowners continued to serve as magistrates, even if they were no longer the dominant influence they had once been, and they acted as patrons of the living at their parish church. The magistracy now included some female aristocrats after women became eligible for appointment as Justices of the Peace under the terms of the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. In April 1921, The Tatler highlighted this rapid increase in the number of ‘lady JPs’. Among them at the end of the decade were such titled magistrates as Lady Mount in Berkshire, Lady Slesser and Lady Susan Trueman in Buckinghamshire, and Viscountess Harcourt in Oxfordshire.2 Lady Londonderry, too, was sworn in as the first woman magistrate for County Durham. Nonetheless she continued her campaign to achieve equal political rights for men and women, and for the election of female MPs. But at the beginning of 1919 that still seemed a remote possibility. As The Bystander of 29 January declared,

  There is a consensus of opinion from agents in the country highly adverse to the prospects of petticoats in Parliament. The electors passionately insist on the male article, however indifferent a performer he may be … We may be sure that no woman will be … likely for a long time to … win an election.