Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Secret scandals of a REAL DOWNTON
It was our grandest country pile, but the sexual proclivities, reckless spending and eccentricities of the family who owned Wentworth Woodhouse were mind-boggling. No wonder producers have been clamouring to make a TV series
History went up in flames, during three long weeks in July 1972, when the tenth and last Earl Fitzwilliam ordered the bulk of his family’s 20th-century records to be destroyed – in a maniacal attempt to hide three generations of secrets and scandal.
Sixteen tons of documents were hauled by tractor from the Georgian stable block where they were stored, to a beech copse called Trawles Wood in the valley below the Yorkshire mansion, and burned. It was the biggest attempt to cover up the Fitzwilliam past, but far from the first.
The private papers of the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Earls had been destroyed after their deaths – reams of embarrassing documents, letters, diaries and legal papers. The cull extended to letters and diaries kept by their employees. The Fitzwilliams guarded their secrets through destroying evidence and vows of silence.
One descendant of the family, Ann, Lady Bowlby, recalled how her grandmother, Countess Fitzwilliam, ‘made me promise I would not tell anyone about private things that went on. She didn’t want it broadcast’ – the Countess believed the world was run by Communists, who would use the family’s secrets to bring them down.
But not everything has been lost. Scattered collections of papers, and especially the memories of people who lived and worked at the house, remain. Most of all, Wentworth Woodhouse itself still stands. For 250 years it was the largest privately owned residence in Britain. Today, now the Fitzwilliam earldom has died out, it is maintained by a trust.
Many fans of Jane Austen believe the house helped to inspire several of her books: the hero of Persuasion is called Captain Wentworth, while the heroine of Emma is Miss Woodhouse. The house may be the original model for the family estate of Pemberley, owned by dashing Mr Darcy
‘Sixteen tons of documents were burned to cover up the past’
in Pride And Prejudice. Television viewers may recognise it as the backdrop in costume dramas from Victoria to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. But no TV show could convey the vastness of the place, or the eccentricity of its owners.
It is a house of two fronts, built back-to-back in the 18th century. The baroque West Front is hidden behind tall cedars but the 600ft Palladian East Front can be seen from the Trans-Pennine Trail public footpath running through Wentworth Park. It has five miles of passageways.
One guest, a Baron von Liebig, resorted to crumbling wafers along the route from his bedroom to the dining room so he could find his way back after dinner. Thereafter, guests were given a crested silver casket containing different-coloured confetti.
At the start of the 20th century, living conditions at Wentworth were medieval. Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, was five when the Sixth Earl, her great-grandfather, died in 1902. She described the house at the time of his death: ‘There was no electric light, no gas, no central heating. In our living rooms we had glorious raging fires, but the mansion was like an icehouse. In the hard winters, going downstairs to be with my mother after tea was a very chilly affair. We couldn’t go along passages without heavy shawls.’ Unsurprisingly, the Sixth Earl died of a chill.
There were no bathrooms. ‘Tin
baths were carried into bedrooms by footmen,’ recalled Lady Elfrida. ‘Hot water was brought up from the kitchen two floors below in large brown metal cans – filled by footmen, emptied by housemaids.’ If the water got cold, a bather could draw a cotton cloth over the top of the bath, to cover their modesty. The footman would then pour hot water under the cloth’s edge before inquiring, ‘Is there anything more, sir?’ – whether the bather was male or female.
Two men, Moses and his assistant Aaron, were employed seven days a
week to light the house. Every morning before dawn, they walked the length of the house replacing the candles in chandeliers and wall sconces, and collecting the oil lamps they had put out the evening before. The wicks were trimmed and the lamps filled, cleaned and polished, then put back. ‘They did nothing else except lamps,’ recalled Lady Elfrida, ‘never had a day off, never wanted one. When my father [the Seventh Earl] succeeded, he insisted they each have a Sunday off. Moses went in tears to the head steward and said, “What have I done wrong? I’ve always worked on a Sunday, now I’ve got to do nothing.”’
But the Fitzwilliams had not always been so penny-pinching. A century earlier, in 1807, the heir to the earl- dom celebrated his 21st birthday with a party for 10,000 guests. Two oxen were roasted whole on the lawns, served with 26 roast sheep, 10 hams and 10,000 gallons of ale – with nearly 500 bottles of wine and more than 50 gallons of spirits. The local paper noted that some local peasants ‘by their gluttonous and drunken indiscretion made beasts of themselves’.
In the wild 1920s, house parties were all the rage, with guests descending for a weekend of antics. One remembered watching a house favourite, curling. ‘They collected the chamberpots, sliding them across the polished marble floor. Some were prize Rockingham [porcelain] – a few shattered to pieces.’ Another guest described the ‘Fox Hunt’ – ‘A young man was chosen to be a fox and given ten minutes start to go anywhere in the house. Then the rest of the party hunted him. In full cry! When they caught him, they stripped him. There was a kill! They took all his clothes off. Scragged him, and brushed his hair up the wrong way. He came back into the dining room looking like nothing on earth.’ The austere Sixth Earl would not have approved. Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey is published by Penguin Books, £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until 15/12/ 2018. Book adapted here by Christopher Stevens.