Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  Ten months later, however, Lady Astor contested and won her husband’s Plymouth seat when he was raised to the House of Lords, and she thereby became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons. Lady Londonderry quickly congratulated her, and in response Nancy Astor admitted, ‘I feel you realise what a great responsibility it is.’3 In the event she needed all her natural strength of character and determination to overcome the hostility and prejudice of some of her male colleagues, including a fellow Conservative, Sir Frederick Banbury. On one occasion she tried to stop him from speaking ‘by pulling him down by his coat-tails’.4 But even Lord Winterton, who was a close personal friend of the Astors, criticised her efforts to promote a further reform of the franchise in favour of women. On 14 April 1920, he noted that a debate within the Standing Committee to amend the Representation of the People Bill had become

  like a Palais Royale Farce. Constant points of order … a scene between Nancy and old Banbury … The position on the Committee is that there are reactionaries … who are opposed altogether to the principle of women’s suffrage, extremists like Nancy and the Labour Party who are far too violent in their support of the Bill and moderates like myself. Nancy also had trouble with Joynson Hicks about her seat, the latter resenting her placing a Committee card where he had previously placed a white card.5

  However, Lady Astor continued to follow her independent line in Parliament and over the course of the 1920s was joined by other female MPs from all three major political parties. At the 1929 general election fourteen women members were elected, including a few aristocrats, such as the Duchess of Atholl and Lady Cynthia Mosley, daughter of the former Foreign Secretary and Conservative grandee, Lord Curson. She, however, represented the Labour Party.6

  Significantly, too, despite Lord Willoughby de Broke’s lamentations, after 1920 the rural elite did recover some of their former political influence within the countryside by promoting ‘new paternalistic institutions like village halls, Women’s Institutes, the British Legion, war memorials, and Young Farmers Clubs’. Some of these were designed to improve the quality of life of villagers.7 Similarly, leading male members of landed society were called on to fill major ‘ceremonial’ roles within their county by serving as its Lord-Lieutenant or as chairman of the County Council. David Cannadine notes that in Wiltshire, ‘power was divided between the Bath and Lansdowne families’. The Marquess of Bath also chaired the quarter sessions until 1923 and served as Lord Lieutenant of neighbouring Somerset. In Shropshire the County Council was chaired by ‘a succession of local landowners’, while in Berkshire, ‘a tightly-knit group of local gentry virtually monopolised the great county offices’.8 The Earl of Derby was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire in 1928, and despite his divorce, the Duke of Marlborough continued as Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire into the 1930s. Over the Welsh border, Charles Coltman Rogers chaired the county council from 1896 to 1929. He also became its Lord Lieutenant in 1922. In Brecon, Lord Glanusk held both positions before and after the First World War.

  Through their background and education these men were well able to perform the official duties associated with such offices and to uphold the county’s dignity. At the same time, many landowners preferred to confine their attention to county matters rather than dabble in national politics:

  The work was less contentious, much less demanding, much less expensive, and much less risky to reputation than the rough and tumble of parliamentary public life. In the relative calm of the county council chamber, grandees … could still dominate with a patrician style no longer acceptable in the Lords or the Commons Aloof, Olympian, and detached … they lent a tone of aristocratic grandeur to the proceedings and elevated the whole level of county council business.9

  Some leading figures like Lord Crawford played an important part in the nation’s cultural life. As his biographer points out, within a year of his leaving national politics, in 1922, he had ‘acquired “interlocking directorships” stretching across the cultural world: Chancellor of Manchester University, President of the London Society, a member of the committee on the mint, resident of the Society of Antiquaries, trustee of the British Museum and Chairman of the Royal Literary Fund’.10 He also served on the board of trustees of the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, and was unhappy when in 1930 the Prince of Wales was appointed to the board of the former institution. He was fully aware that the prince had little interest in art or in cultural matters generally, being more involved at that time in golf, gardening and dancing at fashionable night-clubs. Crawford’s reservations were confirmed when the prince persisted in gossiping to his neighbours during board meetings and in December 1930 he openly admitted that he had attended one meeting primarily because the king had wished him to shoot at Windsor. ‘I don’t care much about shooting,’ he declared, ‘but it was a splendid excuse to say that there was an important Trustees’ meeting at Trafalgar Square … Rather a good score, wasn’t it?’11

  Unlike many fellow peers, Crawford had little interest in field sports. He never fished or hunted and rarely went shooting. Even golf, then gaining rapidly in popularity among the upper classes, did not appeal to him. His interest rather lay in the conservation of the countryside than in the destruction of the creatures living in it, and he was particularly active in promoting the work of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.

  Within his local community Crawford also played a part, opening the war memorial in the parish church at Wigan, where his main country house was located and where his mining interests were based. When his son and heir came of age in June 1922, there were great celebrations in the town, with a supper for estate employees on the Saturday, and a garden party for the public officials of the neighbourhood on the following Monday. This was attended by five to six hundred people. They included the Mayor of Wigan, who presented an illuminated address from the Corporation. The next day another garden party was held, this time for tenants and guests from the Wigan Coal and Iron Company, with ‘something like 1,500 people attending’. As Crawford recorded triumphantly in his diary, ‘Two more addresses … The weather was brilliant, and everybody enjoyed themselves immensely.’ Later, when the family moved to their Scottish seat in Fife there were more celebrations, with two garden parties held for 300 neighbours and 300 tenants, respectively, and with a dinner for around 100 estate workers.12

  Lord Crawford’s close links with the community were shared by some other landowners, for whom the coming-of-age or marriage of the heir or the marriage of another family member became occasions for major local celebrations, much as was the case before 1914. In 1921, when the Marquis of Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort and with strong fox-hunting interests, came of age, the members of the Beaufort Hunt presented him with a motor car. The farmers and tradesmen resident in the area covered by the hunt also gave him a platinum watch and a platinum and gold chain. Two years later, on his marriage, the farmers of the hunt gave his bride a ‘diamond and pearl ornament’, while the marquis himself received a pearl tie pin. Members of the hunt on this occasion presented the young couple with a cheque.13

  Significantly, even in the difficult post-war period, most landowners and their wives and daughters were expected to dispense charity and give personal advice to parishioners. Lady Phyllis MacRae, daughter of the 4th Marquess and Marchioness of Bristol, remembered that at her Ickworth home in Suffolk, it was considered inappropriate for girls such as she to take paid employment, especially when so many people were out of work. Instead

  you were expected to do a lot of voluntary work. You might be a secretary or chairman of the Women’s Institute or the Red Cross; you might run the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. You did not get paid for it … when I started the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides locally in 1919 … I had them up at Ickworth every week.14

  At Wallington in Northumberland, Lady Trevelyan was also a prominent supporter of the Women’s Institute, among other organisations. According to her daughter, she ‘never failed to vis
it any house where there was a new baby – she was very close to the people’.

  Danish-born Ulla, Lady Hyde Parker, who came to her Long Melford home at the beginning of the 1930s, at first found the duties expected of her very bewildering, since as the wife of the squire various responsibilities were thrust upon her. ‘I hardly knew what the Women’s Institute was at the age of twenty-two, but I was made President. I had to be Vice-president of the Conservatives at Sudbury … I was President of the Mental Hospital in Colchester, which didn’t really involve much: I had simply to get people from all over the area to give money, and then I sent it on to the Secretary of the hospital … I was Chairman of the District Nursing Association, and the district nurse used to come and see me.’ It was part of the same process that she was expected ‘to know everybody in the village’ and to patronise the local shops.15

  Enthusiastic foxhunters, however, might have ulterior motives for the interest and the hospitality they proffered, being anxious to maintain good relations with the farmers over whose land they wished to ride. ‘The time spent in a draughty [village] hall lit by a smoky light, slowly discussing the arrangements for the Summer Flower Show on a winter’s evening after a tiring day’s hunting,’ declared Lady Apsley, ‘is not wasted.’ But nouveau-riche businessmen who had taken up the sport after acquiring a country estate did not always appreciate the importance of these extraneous social ‘duties’.16

  Others, too, were unenthusiastic about their community role. Even Lord Winterton, Master of the Chiddingfold Hunt and a keen rider to hounds, admitted in January 1921 that the ‘Rent Audit Supper’ he provided for his tenants was ‘always rather a depressing entertainment’.17 Gladys, the American second wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, similarly carried out her charitable duties in visiting the poor and sick at Christmas in the neighbourhood of Blenheim Palace with a notable lack of zeal. However, she may have been influenced by her husband’s arrogant attitude towards social inferiors – as reported by the Earl of Carnarvon, who was at Blenheim for a shooting party on one occasion when the head keeper was ill. The man sent the duke a message to say that he had entrusted the business of the day to his deputy. ‘My compliments to my head keeper,’ responded the duke coldly. ‘Will you please inform him that the lower orders are never ill.’18 Another visitor was shocked by the unfeeling way in which he expressed a wish that the already high unemployment figures would rise to 2 million.19 In fact in the 1930s they were to climb well above that level.

  The duke, however, seems to have been embittered by the way in which both the population at large and the government in particular had made the landed classes a target for critical comment and heavy taxation. ‘The old order is doomed,’ he wrote gloomily in The Times on 19 May 1919. ‘These fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality.’20 His pessimistic viewpoint was echoed by Lady Newton of Lyme Park in Cheshire in 1925, when she complained of the ‘cruel and ruthless taxation’ that made it ‘a crime that we should have succeeded to places too large for present-day requirements … We cannot sell, there are no buyers. We cannot afford to live in our homes, what is to become of them?’21 In 1919 and 1921 a total of 3,000 acres were sold from the Lyme Park estate, and staff, such as the woodmen, the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the roadmen, the drainers, and nearly all the remaining workshop men were dismissed, in an economy drive. The keepers no longer concentrated on raising game. Instead they built walls, went into the gardens, and carried out some of the tasks formerly performed by the woodmen.22 In this way the old community spirit on the estate was lost. ‘When we came back and saw all that at Lyme we thought, what’d we been fighting for?’ was the verdict of one local man.

  Although less vehement in their comments than the Duke of Marlborough and Lady Newton, other patricians shared their discontent at their declining status after the war. As Peter Mandler has commented, ‘landlords as a class felt wounded and shunned by modern society and were reluctant to “present” themselves as anything in public’.23 For some that meant they spent less time on their estates than had once been the case, as Lord Willoughby de Broke noted. They preferred to seek their pleasures in London or abroad, and to use their stately homes, where these were retained, as a base for their sporting activities and country house parties. They came to value their privacy and to be reluctant to open their houses to the visiting public as many of their ancestors had done. Mandler claims that nearly three-quarters of the great houses which had attracted thousands of visitors in the late Victorian period were closed to the public by the beginning of the 1930s. That included some of the major show houses of the past, such as Woburn, Belvoir Castle, and Blenheim Palace. The last Earl of Berkeley, who had sold his London property for £2 million, spent some of the proceeds in modernising Berkeley Castle, but then closed it to the public. As he told his wife bluntly, ‘I loathe humanity.’

  Even those great houses that admitted visitors, like Castle Howard, limited the days and hours they could enter, and warned those who came that they might not walk to the castle ‘unless they wish to see through the house on the appointed days’. For this an admission charge of 1s per head was levied. Visitors were also warned against picking wild flowers, swinging on the boughs of trees or playing games in the park.24

  At Haddon Hall the reaction was more extreme. Initially the Marquess of Granby, heir to the Duke of Rutland, to whom his father had already given the Hall, welcomed visitors while the property was being renovated. He also raised the admission charge, to help cover the cost of the work. But then in 1925, as the restoration was nearing completion, he began to make Haddon less accessible. First he closed off footpaths through the park, on the pretext that charabanc parties had ‘left litter about’, and had behaved inappropriately. The local authority responded by taking him to court, claiming that the footpaths he had closed were public rights of way. Eventually a compromise was reached, whereby certain outlying paths remained open to visitors but those nearest to the Hall remained closed. In May 1925, Lord Granby succeeded his father as duke on the death of the latter, and from 1926 he closed the house to the public. When he and the duchess moved into Haddon in 1927 it remained shut to outside visitors except for one day a year when it was opened to benefit local charities.25 It was in these circumstances that early in January 1926 Country Life commented drily,

  The country has lately become more conscious of what a loss it suffers if a great landowner departs, but, at the same time, it is difficult for neighbours and villagers to take a real interest in a house if they never have an opportunity of seeing the inside of it. Everybody is delighted that the Duke of Rutland is going to live at Haddon Hall … We feel sure that the Duke, whose interest in architecture and history is bringing him to Haddon, will allow the Hall to be visited freely, as are Knole, Penshurst, Petworth, Chatsworth and so many of the famous houses of the land.

  That did not occur and even Chatsworth restricted its visiting times to midweek during a limited period from Whitsun to the August Bank Holiday. In some years, entrance was further reduced by arbitrary closures, according to the family’s own needs or whims. Then, too, properties like Knole, which remained open, were often neglected and uninhabited. One visitor drew attention to ‘the cheerlessness of the state rooms (and particularly the dust at Knole)’, and to ‘the silken brocades and carpets sadly faded in places because the family are poor’, in the case of Burghley, home of the Marquess of Exeter.26

  There were, therefore, many ambiguities about the position of members of High Society within local communities and in their attitude towards humbler neighbours. Some, like the Trevelyans at Wallington, took a close personal interest in the lives of parishioners, while others, like Lord Granby (or the Duke of Rutland as he became in 1925) had a more arm’s-length approach, reinforced perhaps in his case by the extensive post-war estate sales and by resentment at high taxation. Indeed, for many surviving members of the old landed families and for the nouveau riche who had purchased the estates of
some of them, it was the sport offered by the countryside that proved the prime attraction rather than the welfare of the villagers.

  Sporting Activities

  Sport played a major role in the lives of the social elite. In the summer there was cricket, tennis, croquet, and golf, or for the wealthiest there were polo matches and yachting competitions. The yachting week at Cowes was, in fact, seen as marking the end of the London Season, with the yacht races themselves largely subordinated to the cycle of parties held on shore or aboard the largest yachts. It was at Cowes in 1921 that nineteen-year-old Edwina Ashley got to know Lord Louis Mountbatten (or Dickie as he was known to his friends). He was twenty-one and she was the granddaughter and heiress of Sir Ernest Cassel, one of the wealthiest financiers of the day.27 They married a year later.

  On 10 July 1926, Country Life noted that the preceding week had seen the culmination of a long series of sporting events. ‘There were cricket matches everywhere, there was golf at Gleneagles, running at Stamford Bridge, rowing at Henley and, perhaps, most attractive of all, lawn tennis at Wimbledon.’ Tennis was also popular at country house gatherings. At Chartwell, for example, Mrs Churchill was a noted tennis enthusiast, and the game was a great feature of life there. According to her youngest daughter, the young men attracted to her two older sisters ‘were much in favour if they were good players’.28

  Some house parties were centred around the major race meetings. At Knowsley the great event was the Earl of Derby’s party for the Grand National, run at nearby Aintree. In 1921, his guests included the king and queen, the Prince of Wales and Princess Mary. After dinner a film of the race itself was shown, even though it had only taken place a few hours before. The guests were much impressed that such a technical feat was possible.29