Sorry I shot your dog old boy — but I’ve had it stuffed!

Drugged cocktails, shoelaces ironed before breakfast and the odd shooting mishap . . . just a typical country house weekend

BOOK OF THE WEEK THE LONG WEEKEND: LIFE IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood (Jonathan Cape £25)

THOSe of us whose idea of entertaining on a Saturday is a frozen beef burger barbecued on the patio with the next-door neighbours will stand amazed at the upper-class way of doing things a century ago.

For a start, they never actually knew what a weekend was because, as they never worked, they never needed days off to recover.

Indeed, ‘one day was very like another’, says Adrian Tinniswood in this masterpiece of social history. Should you have been invited to a country house, ‘it would have been very rude to leave on a Sunday night’.

A party could last for as long as three weeks. ladies were expected to wear different dresses every day. For the gents, however, it was bad form to wear clothes ‘which seemed a little too new’.

Another arcane rule was that ‘you never travelled with your suitcase. That was not the thing to do’. One’s luggage followed in a separate car, with a separate chauffeur and footman.

upon reaching the designated house, guests would be greeted by the eccentric host.

Sir Paul latham, of Herstmonceux Castle, in Sussex, came to the door wearing silk stockings. Following inevitable rumours, he later ‘tried unsuccessfully to kill himself by riding his motor cycle into a tree’.

lord Berners, meanwhile, greeted people at Faringdon with his boa constrictor. ‘Would it like something to eat?’ asked a guest, nervously. ‘no, it had a goat earlier,’ came the reply.

Guests sat down to vast formal meals, followed by bridge tournaments and jigsaws. unless David, the Prince of Wales, got out his bagpipes, dancing to gramophone records was all the rage, and Chips Channon put Benzedrine in the cocktails at a dinner for the Queen of Spain, as ‘everyone likes their party to go with a swing’.

Though not the Duke of Marlborough. He was so silent and boring, his wife took up knitting to pass the time between courses.

DuRInG the day, the men went shooting. In the 1934/35 season, the Duke of Portland killed 5,148 pheasants and 3,268 brace of partridge at Welbeck Abbey, nottinghamshire. He was reticent compared with George V, however, who, with his group, slaughtered 3,937 pheasants, three partridges and four rabbits near Beaconsfield in a single day in 1913.

Guns were always going off at pointblank range, killing beaters or wives who’d wandered too close.

At the Marquess of londonderry’s estate, Winston Churchill’s father ‘ accidentally killed a fellow guest’s pet dachshund’, which, afterwards, he thoughtfully had stuffed and gave to the bereaved owner as a Christmas gift.

Hats off to the marksmanship of the Duke of Devonshire, though. At Chatsworth once, with but a single shot, he killed a pheasant and the retriever pursuing it, wounded the dog’s owner in the leg, peppered the chef and damaged a wooden gate.

At Welbeck, in 1913, a gun was accidentally discharged near the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. ‘ “I have often wondered,” reminisced the Duke of Portland, dryly, “whether the Great War might have been averted, or at least postponed, had the Archduke met his death then and not at Sarajevo the following year.” ’

What is plain from Tinniswood’s book is that, for generations, the cream of society sought to emulate the Royal Family.

Hordes of servants were kept busy preparing feasts, sweeping the carpets, laying out medal-bedecked uniforms, carrying hot water.

When Queen Mary paid a private visit to Holker Hall, in lancashire, she brought with her two dressers, a footman, a page, two chauffeurs, a lady-in-waiting and an armed guard. The Prince of Wales’s personnel at Fort Belvedere, Surrey, included ‘ bombardiers whose duties involved firing royal salutes from 31 brass cannon on a new terrace overlooking Virginia Water’.

Other aristocrats, however, were feeling an economic pinch. In the early 20th century, country house life began to suffer from the effects of heavy taxation.

Heirs were also lost in the World Wars. Starting in the Twenties, mansions were suddenly ‘ deserted and dismantled and demolished’ in large numbers, ‘their parks given over to suburban sprawl’.

Family paintings, medieval manuscripts and furniture came under the hammer. The Duke of leeds sold his robes and coronet, which ‘ would be useful for amateur theatricals’, according to the sales brochure. He moved to the South of France ‘ with his widowed mother and Serbian wife Irma’.

unwanted piles became schools, hotels, local authority offices — or else they were bought by Americans who played a vital

role in saving the British aristocracy and their appurtenances.

Between 1870 and 1914, for instance, 128 american women married into the landed and titled gentry, bringing with them their useful loot.

The Duke of Devonshire’s son took Fred astaire’s sister as a bride; while Leeds castle, in kent, was saved by Olive Wilson Filmer, daughter of a Whitney heiress.

AMeRIcaNS were keen to install bathrooms everywhere, though to the english, who always wanted to keep modernity at bay, ‘ bathrooms were an unnecessary luxury when there were housemaids to carry up brass cans of hot water’.

Indeed, at venerable establishments such as Blenheim, Woburn, chatsworth and Longleat, electricity was considered ‘ever so slightly vulgar’. In any event, who wanted to damage rococo plasterwork with newfangled cables?

The solution at Stanford hall, in Leicestershire, was ingenious.

They prised up a floorboard at one end of the room and dropped a dead rabbit into the void.

a ferret was then unleashed with a string attached to its collar. ‘When the ferret had managed to negotiate the joists and reach the rabbit, the string was used to pull a cable through and the problem was solved.’

William Randolph hearst not only installed bathrooms, telephones, central heating and electric light at St Donat’s castle, in South Wales, he set off fireworks and floodlit the place at night, ‘confusing the shipping in the Bristol channel’.

The story concludes with the setting up of the National Trust to catalogue and protect monuments of importance and to put a stop to plunder and desecration.

But architectural preservation is one thing — what can’t be saved for posterity are the magnificent oddballs, such as Sir Philip Sassoon, who had the Union Jack lowered from its flagpole at Port Lympne because ‘he felt its colours clashed with the sunset’.

he also had the flowerbeds replanted overnight to surprise and enchant his guests. carts from covent Garden came up the drive before dawn ‘laden with blooms’.

and how luxurious it would have been to stay with Lord Fairhaven at anglesey abbey, near cambridge.

If you wished to listen to the BBc News, a wireless encased in polished walnut was brought in on a silver salver, and guests had their shoelaces ironed before breakfast.