Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (12 page)

Unfortunately this notion was simply not practical. The work that he, his associates and those influenced by them carried out was so labour-intensive, and the materials they used so costly, that the objects remained exclusive and expensive. The only people who could easily afford such work – at least in quantities sufficient to decorate a house – were the wealthy, and many of the examples of Arts and Crafts architecture or decoration that are admired in situ today are in country houses. While Morris did not therefore succeed in his initial objective, he and his followers created along the way a style that instantly appealed to artists, architects and craftsmen throughout the world, as well as to the general public. Arts and Crafts style has been widely admired and copied ever since, and – both in the lofty notions that inspired it and the objects it produced – is one of the great achievements of the Victorian era. Examples of buildings inspired by it can be found as far away as India and China. It was also extremely influential in Europe, where it had an impact on the design of houses in Scandinavia, Germany and Italy in particular. In an echo of the eighteenth century, when the informality of the English landscape park had been widely copied on the Continent, so the Arts and Crafts interior, with its spacious and uncluttered feel and its simple, basic use of materials and colours, was widely emulated.

The United States quickly developed its own Arts and Crafts Movement, producing specialist architects who built notable country houses, as well as the type of artistic commune (the Roycroft Workshops in New York State) that applied the philosophy to narrower fields such as furniture making, tapestry and bookbinding.

It is a commonplace to describe Victorian country houses as ‘ugly’, yet the Arts and Crafts examples of domestic architecture, equally Victorian, are not generally regarded in this way. The earlier styles of the Queen’s reign, pastiches of Georgian or Gothic or Italianate design (her own summer home, Osborne on the Isle of Wight, was a notable and influential example of the latter), have all suffered from reversals in the popular perception of what is considered tasteful and desirable. The principles of design advocated and practised by the Arts and Crafts Movement meant that, by the time of Victoria’s death, both owners and builders of new houses were a great deal more sensitive to qualities such as harmony, comfort and practicality. Lutyens, their doyen, made a point of using materials such as old bricks and weathered, unstained oak that would blend a house into the landscape around it. The imposing country seat, bristling with towers and battlements, stamping its authority – whether real or aspirational – over the surrounding fields, was now a thing of the past. The style of its successors was one of comfortable domesticity, expressed in chimney stacks, leaded windows, half-timbering and bay windows. The entrances were not designed to intimidate, and the interiors, which commonly lacked a great hall (there was no need for such a thing, since there were no tenants to entertain to dinner), was not laid out geometrically with long corridors but in the traditional manner around open courtyards, and filled with quaint corners and oddities.

There are wonderful surviving examples of such houses, such as Blackwell in the Lake District. It was built between 1898 and 1900 by the Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott for the Manchester brewer Sir Edward Holt. Scott made use of local resources (the roofs are of Westmorland slate) and local craftsmen, who understood both the materials they were using and the building techniques of the region. The chimney stacks, for instance, are rounded, as was customary on farmhouses in the locality. The first thing that strikes a visitor is the utter simplicity of the house’s exterior. There is no ornament, and the windows do not even have sills or hoods. The walls are roughcast and painted white, making the house conspicuous over long distances. Blackwell’s design is as basic inside as out. The colours are light and the lines are simple. The woodwork – panelling, stair-rails, shelving, floors – is of golden, polished oak. The rooms are dominated by large and comfortable inglenook fireplaces. Rooms, especially the drawing room, are angled to make maximum use of sunlight, and some very stylized stained glass allows this to spread beautiful splashes of colour across walls and floors. Despite its deliberate Tudor references, Blackwell is a far cry from the country house of many Englishmen’s daydreams, yet it must surely win more genuine affection than the overwhelming and draughty halls of some of England’s Baroque mansions.

Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire is another house that is a landmark of this style, though it was built a generation later. It was constructed between 1909 and 1929 by the architect and designer Ernest Barnsley in collaboration with the couple who commissioned it, Claud and Margaret Biddulph. This was not an aristocratic seat, and nor was it the home of an industrial magnate. It was instead a development of something that has already been hinted at in this chapter – a country house conceived as an expression of idealism. The builders of this house were aiming to create beauty in a style appropriate to the surroundings, and to live in a comfortable, unpretentious place that made reference to the virtues of rural life in some ideal ‘Tudorbethan’ past. Indeed while Blackwell could not be mistaken for anything other than a modern house of the 1890s, Rodmarton looks like a genuine Elizabethan manor even when seen from close quarters. The major objective of the builders, however, was to celebrate a sense of artistry and community.

The Biddulphs became friends of Ernest Barnsley, an idealistic designer and architect who had founded, at Sapperton near Cirencester, a commune of artisans (mostly from the East End of London) to work in traditional styles. The project was begun in 1893 and would continue well into the following century. The men and women working there produced wooden furniture and fittings, metalwork and ceramics of real ingenuity and originality, and Rodmarton became a showplace for their skills. The notion that it represented a community is emphasized by the circular lawn at the front of the building. This looks like a village green, and was intended to function as one. It served as an outdoor gathering place for all who lived or worked at the house. Another of its features, unusual by the time it was built but a further affirmation of community, is the chapel. Though ecclesiastical decoration is an opportunity for craftsmen to exercise imagination and creativity, the room is as simple in design as the rest of the building. Like other Arts and Crafts houses, Rodmarton is all of a piece and all of one period. Its importance lies not only in its status as a supreme example of a style that was particularly strong and influential in the history of English building, but also in the fact that it was designed for the entire community that would live in it and not simply its owners.

There were exceptions to this ground-breaking new approach, houses deliberately built to express a symmetry and order and grandeur in keeping with the Edwardian imperial heyday. The most striking example is Manderston, built for the merchant Sir James Miller in the Scottish lowlands south of Edinburgh. This house, once again cherished because it represents a single epoch and a single owner’s vision, was completed in 1905. It is so much ‘of its time’ – considered the finest ‘stately home’ in Britain of the opening years of the twentieth century, despite being the antithesis of the Lutyensinspired trend for homely country residences – that it was used in 2002 as the setting for the reality television series
The Edwardian Country House
. Its inspiration is drawn from the eighteenth century, its neo-Georgian exterior crowned with urns and balustrade, and its entrance hall dominated by a staircase that was copied from the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

There were other houses that bucked the trend by aiming at grandeur. Cragside was a modelling, by the great – though in the 1860s still largely unknown – Victorian architect Richard Norman Shaw, of a house already built for William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong. It was scarcely complete before plans were under way to remodel it completely. It is a very homely house, but its majestic setting, as well as its scale and the detail of some of its interiors, makes it grander than many contemporary houses were trying to be.

A great house still required a great number of servants, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, technology was making their lives easier, eliminating some of the dirtiness and drudgery that had consumed so much time and effort.

For instance, with the introduction of radiators and gas fires there was less need for that bane of the housemaid’s life, the endless cleaning of grates. Nor was it necessary to waste time and effort on lugging coal upstairs from the cellar. With hot water available from pipes and taps it no longer had to be carried up to bedrooms and bathrooms. The coach house, formerly a highly important part of the establishment, was now entirely redundant in many households. The coachman himself had probably had to learn to drive an automobile, and his assistants – the grooms and stable boys – had gone entirely or been retrained for other jobs. Since the chauffeur was also a mechanic, the family’s transportation was now the responsibility of only one man instead of four or five. The abandoning of oil and gas lamps meant the loss of another dirty and time-consuming job and, incidentally, saw the demise of the ‘lamp boy’, a junior servant who previously had started a lifetime in service with this lowly task.

The laundry wing was another casualty of changing times. Larger country houses had always had them, yet it became very easy to do without. Commercial laundries could arrange for collection, cleaning and delivery without the need for servants to do more than sort the returned clothing and household items, and put them away. The same became true of many other aspects of running the household, as grocers and bakers also delivered, negating to some extent the need for the cook and housekeeper to work so hard.

Estate Duty was imposed for the first time in 1894, increasing in 1909 under the Liberal government of Lloyd George and again in 1919, when the landed classes had already been badly hit by the wartime loss of family members. Add to this the increase in income tax, and the fact that the wages paid to servants were now much higher than they had been before 1914. Domestic staff, now highly conscious of the value of their work and of the opportunities available to them elsewhere, largely had to be bribed to stay with better conditions than had previously been available. Householders had, in the decades between the mid-Victorian era and the First World War, almost entirely given up the role they had assumed as moral guardians to their servants. Such attitudes were simply out of fashion, especially after the accession of the notoriously pleasure-loving King Edward VII. His behaviour, and that of his raffish friends, heralded an era of libertinism, with widespread bed-hopping among the guests at country-house parties. It was simply too difficult to pretend that the upper class in general held any moral authority over their employees in the face of such behaviour.

The lifestyle that went with country-house living underwent rapid changes in accordance with new social conditions. Though dinner remained a formal affair and guests still dressed for it, the day’s other repasts tended to be more relaxed, especially breakfast, which was normally a sideboard buffet. Dining rooms in newer houses became smaller. Men and women mixed more often and more informally. The morning room, a female bastion, saw much less use than formerly, though its male equivalent, the smoking room, continued to be frequented by men even though both men and women now smoked quite openly around the house. Conservatories, formerly the epitome of Victorian indoor recreation, ceased to be built and would make a comeback only in our own times. They had perhaps come to symbolize for many the stuffiness, both literal and metaphorical, of the era that had passed.

One of the last great country houses to be built in Britain ironically saw a return to the very beginnings of the genre. Castle Drogo was the last castle to be built in Britain. It was constructed between 1911 and 1931, and was completed and occupied at precisely the time when it became uneconomical to maintain a large country house in England. It is worth examining for other reasons too, for the nature of its owner, his choice of architect and site and building materials all tell us something significant about the world of the country house and the role it plays in the social ambitions of the British.

Julius Drew (1856–1931) was a wealthy grocer. As a young man with an acute business sense, he began a Liverpool grocery at the age of twenty-two and soon established a nationwide chain of shops – the Home and Colonial Stores – that became so profitable he could afford to retire at thirty-three. He had not by any means sprung from nowhere – his family had had modest wealth and social position for several generations – but he wished to achieve the status and the lifestyle of the aristocracy, and he had the financial means to do so. He changed the spelling of his surname to ‘Drewe’, and employed a genealogist to investigate his family tree. This turned up a connection with a Norman knight called Drogo de Teigne who had held lands in Devon near the River Teign.

Drewe and his family visited the area, and were enchanted. For those who like wild landscapes Dartmoor is not difficult to love, the neat fields and villages on its edges providing a pleasingly domestic counterpoint to the wildness of the neighbouring moor. The family decided to settle there. Drewe purchased several hundred acres that included the rocky outcrop on which the ‘ancestral’ home was to be built. It would be a castle, and this prominence was precisely the sort of place in which medieval builders would have sited a defensive structure. The ‘ancestral home’ of the Drewes was to be authentic from the beginning. Not only their home but its surroundings would be made to fit the lineage to which Drewe aspired. The nearby village was persuaded to change its name to Drewsteignton, and the landlord of the local pub obligingly renamed his premises The Drewe Arms. Here was, in somewhat exaggerated form, the newly arrived ‘aristocrat’s’ dream of creating a house that would imply long centuries of occupancy.