Age when loopy toffs were as as they were loaded
The Duke who bagged a bird, a dog, its owner AND his chef with one shot — and other delightfully eccentric stories from the ...
AT HIS lavish country house near Newmarket, Lord Fairhaven had an extra touch of luxury for his guests — when their shoes were taken away overnight by servants to be cleaned and polished, they were returned with the shoelaces ironed.
Such excess was de rigueur at opulent, over- the- top Anglesey Abbey. Every afternoon a chauffeur- driven limousine from his lordship’s extensive fleet of RollsRoyces was dispatched the six miles into Cambridge just so his valet could pick up an evening paper.
At night, Fairhaven — whose father made a fortune in oil — listened to the BBC news on a wireless set on a silver salver.
This was life for one of Britain’s gilded social elite, its top drawer, in that strange and haunting period between the two world wars, an era when tradition and radical change coexisted — before World War II erupted, tradition went out of the window and the country changed for ever.
It is generally seen as a period of gentle decline for our thousand or so stately homes, in which shadows lengthened on the lawns, estates were broken up, their oaks felled and their parks given over to suburban sprawl.
But there proved to be life in them yet. New money — of which the Fairhavens were just one example — poured in, and Britain’s country houses were to have a final heyday.
This had not seemed likely when the First World War ended in 1918. The slaughter carried off many an aristocratic son and heir. It also severely depleted the numbers of house staff and agricultural workers on which the great estates relied.
Times seemed harder for the likes of Thomas, 5th Marquess of Bath. He lost his eldest son and his brother on the Western Front and was forced to sell off 8,600 acres of the Longleat estate over the next three years to raise money.
But decline is hardly the word for the life he still managed to lead. He kept an indoor staff of more than 20. His footmen still wore silk stockings, patent-leather pumps and cockade hats — and when his surviving son, Henry, came of age in 1926, the year of the General Strike, 1,000 guests sat down to lunch at Longleat.
Nor did much change at Lowther Castle in Westmorland, where every morning the Earl of Lonsdale, a keen racing man, had his grooms lay out a stencil of the family coat of arms with numbered partitions on the stable yard floor.
Into each partition they sprinkled different coloured sawdust — and when the stencil was complete, there lay the Lonsdale arms in fullcolour.
Each morning the earl would come to inspect it, bringing with him his pack of pet dogs, which scrabbled around in the sand and ruined the grooms’ hard work.
Similar disregard for others’ efforts was shown at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where 50 servants kept 80 open wood fires burning in the rooms because the crusty, old-fashioned Duke of Bedford refused to install central heating.
He clung to tradition. Dinner guests were assigned a personal footman who stood behind their chair while they ate. Housemaids all had to be 5 ft 10 in in height. When electricity was eventually installed at Woburn, each bedroom was still equipped with a single candle so house guests could seal their letters with wax.
But other country houses of the era were achingly modern and daring. At Faringdon the eccentric Lord Berners dyed the pigeons a different colour every month and suggested to neighbouring farmers that they might like to do the same to their horses and cattle. His guests included the surrealist artist Salvador Dali, who played the piano in the ornamental lake, and poet John Betjeman’s wife Penelope, who brought her horse to tea in the drawing room.
Another of his guests was the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who kept a pair of pet cheetahs at her palazzo by the Grand Canal in Venice and was reputed to have dipped her black servants in gold paint.
When she stayed at Faringdon, she brought a boa constrictor in a glass case. ‘Would it like something to eat?’ Berners’s mother asked. ‘No,’ the Marchesa replied, ‘it had a goat this morning.’
Similarly louche were the legendary parties that society photographer Cecil Beaton held at Ashcombe, his house on the Wiltshire Downs, where at weekends he could indulge what he called his ‘queer streak’. At a time when homosexuality was illegal, there were lots of masks and dressing-up and play-acting by him and his gay friends.
Ashcombe was something new — a place in the country rather than a fully fledged country house. Beaton would drive down from London on Fridays and guests arrived the next day, their way to the house lined by gesticulating papier mâché figures pointing them in the right direction — and the fun began.
A favourite trick of the camp, cross- dressing Sir Michael Duff- Assheton-Smith — to all intents a hunting, shooting squire who was later to be Lord Lieutenant of Caernarvonshire — was to dress up as Queen Mary and act out a royal visit to a hospital.
Meanwhile, at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, Earl Beauchamp had a passion for male servants, which he indulged with reckless abandon. Diarist Harold Nicolson remembered a dinner there where an astonished fellow guest turned to him and asked: ‘Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the butler, “Je t’adore”?’
Quick as a flash, Nicolson — whose own homosexual affairs were pursued rather more discreetly — said: ‘Nonsense! He said, “Shut the door”.’
Lettice, Beauchamp’s wife and the mother of his seven children, seemed not to have noticed her husband’s behaviour until her homophobic brother, the Duke of Westminster, deliberately outed him. She divorced Beauchamp and, on the urging of the King, he fled abroad to avoid arrest.
At other country houses, more traditional pastimes still held sway, such as at Chatsworth, where the 9th Duke of Devonshire was uncertain with a shotgun.
HE Proudly showed friends a gate on the estate where he made a record bag with a single shot. A wounded cock pheasant was running past the gate and he fired at it and killed it.
With the same shot he also killed a retriever that was pursuing the bird, wounded the dog’s owner in the leg and hit his own chef, who happened to be on the other side of the gate watching the action. My, how everyone must have laughed.
Viscount Castlerosse could be similarly hit-and-miss with his sporting passion, golf, especially as he insisted on being accompanied on a round by a servant carrying a jug of whisky. The Viscount helped himself to a tumblerful at each tee.
During one competition he buried his ball in a bunker and the crowd that gathered to see how he would extricate it watched as he cried to the skies: ‘oh God, come down and help me with this shot. And don’t send Jesus. This is no job for a boy.’
Castlerosse built his own fullsize course at the family seat,
Kenmare House in Co Kerry. Here he set up a series of locked huts at strategic points around the course, each containing a bottle of whisky, to do away with the need for a servant with a jug.
In other places the dream lived on, as at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, where the super-rich Astors maintained a lifestyle of incredible extravagance.
The Astors’ wealth was largely unconnected with land and so, impervious to the agricultural depressions of the Twenties, they were able to hold court unaffected by the vicissitudes of the market.
When the house was full at weekends, there were as many as 40 people staying. Charlie Chaplin was a regular guest, as was Lawrence of Arabia.
On one occasion Lawrence and Nancy Astor, the American-born socialite who had married Waldorf, the 2nd Viscount Astor, suddenly leapt up from the drawing room and ran outside, where they jumped on Lawrence’s motorbike and roared off. A few minutes later they were skidding back. ‘We did 100 miles an hour,’ shrieked Nancy.
Presiding over the staff was the Astors’ formidable butler Edwin Lee, who had joined as a footman in 1912 and worked his way up. ‘People have met him and thought it was Lord Astor himself,’ remembered one of his colleagues. ‘He acted like it.’
Lee was a hard master. On one occasion a footman dropped a plate of savouries. The man pleaded that the plate was scalding hot, but Lee was not sympathetic: ‘You’re hired to hold it and hold it you will in future, even if it burns you to the bone. Fingers heal, food doesn’t.’
Nancy Astor, meanwhile, was a demanding employer.
Rose Harrison, her personal maid, recalled her mistress as capricious and occasionally violent. The secret, Rose found out, was to stand up to her. After one spat, Nancy announced grandly that the difference between them was ‘that I was born to command’.
Rose replied sparkily: ‘ The difference between us, my lady, is that you have money, and money is power.’
It was well said. But by the end of the Thirties, even houses such as Cliveden were starting to feel the winds of social change as a younger generation of servants was less prepared to accept the terms of employment their elders had meekly accepted.
Many landed families also found they could no longer pay for a vast army of staff. Indeed, when war broke out in 1939, smart owners were quick to offer up the mansions for the war effort.
THERE was a feeling that doing so voluntarily — and, as a result, being able to choose one’s tenant — gave a degree of control: better to offer the premises to an evacuated girls’ boarding school than for your house to be requisitioned by the military as a gunnery training ground.
And they were right. In the decade after 1945, hundreds of country houses were demolished as a direct result of wartime mistreatment or neglect.
Many owners never occupied their ancestral homes again.
The country houses of Britain had their swan song between the wars. But as reality, austerity and the demands of a more egalitarian world caught up with them, there was only silence.
adapted from the Long Weekend by Adrian tinniswood (Jonathan Cape, £25). to order a copy for £18.75 (25 per cent discount) visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640, p&p free on orders over £15. Offer valid until June 9, 2017.