Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (3 page)

Provided you are at home in this world – if, in other words, you understand the etiquette, know what to change into and when, whom and how much to tip – you will experience a level of service and comfort that will make this one of life’s pleasantest interludes. The year of your visit, no matter which it is, will be a time of anxiety. Politically speaking, these are frantic, dangerous years, and it is ironic that history should remember them as sunlit and leisured. It is naturally understood that you keep away from political discussion in public (this will only take place between the men after the ladies have left them following dinner), but everyone of this class can be assumed to share the same sense of outrage at the Liberals and exasperation with the Conservatives, and the subject is bound to come up for half a dozen reasons, not least for the fact that servants are becoming more expensive. It is wisest just to take your cue from your hosts, and agree with any opinions they express.

You meet the other guests. They too are much as you expected: a few old friends of the family, a young man who is engaged to one of the daughters, a soldier returned from the Colonies, an old aunt who is hard of hearing, and some City men and their wives. No one very interesting, but that does not matter. Though you must make an effort with them during meals, and play the odd hand of bridge to show willing, you can amuse yourself in solitude if you prefer. There are walks to be had around the estate during the day, and there is the library for the evenings. It is well known that an ideal house guest is one who will find things to do and not get under the feet of their hosts, having to be talked to and entertained all the time.

If you wish to stay in your room you can therefore do so without being considered antisocial. If you want to be alone you can say that you must write letters. This is a catch-all excuse to get out of uncongenial circumstances, especially if you are a woman, for they seem to spend hours every day at this task. Though the telephone and the telegram are both widely in use for the sending of urgent messages, all other news is conveyed in notes and letters. Victorians and Edwardians, with their swift and cheap postal service, were in any case inveterate letter-writers. Frequent practice made them eloquent, and many thousands of them could draw well enough to illustrate their narratives. They wrote to each other with the same regularity that people now send e-mails. The author John Buchan, as an ambitious young Oxford man beginning to do the rounds of country houses in the 1890s, wrote to his mother without fail every day, in addition to studying for a degree, corresponding with numerous other people, writing books and producing reviews and articles for magazines.

Love of solitude was even more acceptable in earlier generations, before the railway had quickened the pace of life by making the flying, weekend visit possible. Those who stayed at country houses in previous centuries were often there for weeks, and perhaps even months. With no structured activities or sense of purpose, and the same company day after day, this must have become an ordeal. It was therefore acceptable to seek diversion on one’s own account. One thinks of Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, who shut herself away for long periods in her room because she did not approve of the other guests’ desire to put on an amateur play, and read her way through Lord Macartney’s memoir of his diplomatic visit to China. Where a house boasted a good library and the guests were sufficiently curious and intelligent, there was nothing blameworthy about reading for long hours at a time. Your host might even take it as a compliment.

So if you have no worries about saying or doing the wrong thing, possess enough knowledge of culture to appreciate paintings or to be impressed by the library, know enough about horses and field sports, play bridge well enough and are able to keep your end up in superficial conversation throughout long afternoons and even longer evenings – and especially if you have the good manners to be interested in the garden – you will feel at home no matter how far away you actually live. There is, as we have seen, a code of conduct common to these families and their homes, which varies only in the finer details from place to place. If you understand it, you belong.

What you naturally do not know, as you sip tea on the terrace or tour the stables with your host, is how quickly this way of life will soon vanish. Nobody else realizes this either, which is surprising. The landowning class which inhabits houses like this includes politicians, captains of industry and newspaper proprietors, who are the best-informed and most influential people in the country. They are aware of how fast the world is changing, and they know that a war is likely to come at some time in the next few years, but what they and their peers do not appreciate is that this event will rob them almost entirely of those who maintain their homes and comforts. Their domestic staff will soon be melting away into the armed forces or war work, and for most households it will not be possible to reassemble them again. The war will cause not only terrible loss of life but a major change in social attitudes. Those members of the servant class who survive the conflict will in many cases be unwilling to return to the life they previously led.

But that is in the future. For the present, you may enjoy your surroundings and the comfort that goes with them. At the time of your visit the best conditions prevail. There is as yet no shortage of servants. In fact, there are far too many for you to remember all their faces. They are everywhere, doing everything for you. At the same time the house, like many other spacious and modern country houses, is more agreeable to live in than at any other time, for in less opulent decades the maintenance and the heating of them will become prohibitively expensive. Now there is electricity, the telephone, hot running water, and a host of amusements. Modern technology has added an entire new layer of comfort to that already supplied by numerous willing hands, so that you are much better off than your grandparents would have been when staying at a country house half a century earlier. You are in the twilight of a golden age. And as is always the case, you will not know it was a golden age until it is over.

1

THE BRITISH COUNTRY HOUSE

‘Of all the great things that the English have invented and made part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the only one that they have mastered completely in all its details so that it becomes a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house.’

Henry James,
English Hours
, 1905

Why does the world of the British country house so fascinate us? Most of us have no experience of living in one, though we visit in our millions the ‘stately homes’ that are open to the public. In the collective consciousness both of the British themselves and those who visit, or even visualize, the British Isles, the rural gentleman’s seat – the country house, the stately home – is a repository of all that is finest in life: artistic treasures, good manners, good food (if you’re lucky), good taste in its furnishing and decorations, hospitality, and memory. Like the parish church that so often stands nearby, it is a storehouse of local lore and history; a self-contained world that defies – or at least gives the impression of doing so – the changes taking place beyond its walls. About its restful rooms and lawns there is a sense both of timelessness and of time passing; of ancient secrets. One such house, Snowshill Manor in Gloucestershire, which dates from around 1500, has an inscription that perfectly conveys this:

Old I am, so very old,
Here centuries have been.
Mysteries my walls enfold,
None know deeds I have seen.

Joanna Martin, whose family are the owners of Penrice Castle in Wales, also summed up this sense of the passing ages while writing the preface to a journal she had discovered there and sent for publication:

The house was built in 1770 and has never been sold. This means that nobody has ever thrown away the miscellaneous debris of family life. I would open a drawer in the old nurseries and find a half-finished piece of sewing, which had been put away and forgotten almost 200 years before. In the next drawer I might find a piece of tissue paper, containing locks of hair from the heads of long-dead ancestors.

The notion of a country house as a sort of giant lumber room filled with curiosities is not the least agreeable aspect of these places. An outstanding example of this was Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, home for four centuries to the Harpur-Crewe family. When it came to public notice in 1981 because it was about to be sold, it had been left effectively untouched since the reign of Victoria. Family members who had owned it over generations had been unwilling or unable to install modern heating or lighting, and had inhabited only some of its rooms. The result was a treasure trove – a sort of Tutankhamun’s tomb – of art and furniture, costume, vehicles, domestic clutter, children’s toys, stuffed birds, and the type of eccentric ‘curiosities’ dear to the hearts of nineteenth-century collectors. The new owner – the National Trust, which was able to rescue house and contents for the public – ensured that in some rooms the jumble of piled-up objects would not be tidied away until it had been extensively photographed. People were enchanted by the sense of random historic disorder.

It is important that country houses should not be too tidy, too antiseptic, too recently restored, or indeed too overwhelming. Though visitors can be impressed by the scale and grandeur of Blenheim Palace, whose complex of buildings is the size of a small airport, they are unlikely to be charmed, or to want to live there. It is all too big, and it looks too uncomfortable. The ideal house should fit into the surrounding landscape and – whether it is Tudor, Palladian or neo-Gothic – should have a certain architectural understatement. Inside, it is important that it should look lived in. There should be a certain comfortable raffishness – a patina suggesting that it is well used and well loved, somewhat faded and comfortably down-at-heel. Visitors like to see evidence that family life continues amid the ancestral portraits and the suits of armour. At one Scottish house, Scone Palace in Perthshire, a guide pointed out a stain on the ceiling caused by a washing machine overflowing in the room above. Toys piled in a corner (‘We’ve got one of those!’ someone will often exclaim), some unfinished embroidery or even the television listings left conveniently on a table, will all add to the sense that this historic house is still a home. Where family photographs are displayed, regular visitors will take an interest in the children over the years and will ask what they are up to now. The owners know all this, and like to emphasize that their house is just like ours, though perhaps older and on a larger scale. As the guidebook to one spectacularly lovely dwelling, Deene Park in Northamptonshire, puts it: ‘Although it has never been a house full of famous and priceless treasures it is a very much loved home which has been lived in by the same family [the Brudenells] for over 400 years.’

It is assumed, and not without sympathy, by many of those who wander around that the owners of these properties have to struggle to keep them going. For every visitor who envies the space they enjoy or the things they have inherited, there will be others who give thanks that they do not have to pay for the maintenance. There is, in other words, remarkably little resentment felt today towards those who own and inhabit country houses. Indeed, visitors will often donate more than they are asked for, or spend heavily in the gift shop.

Country houses can, in any case, belong to people other than those who own them. If you visit one regularly, it becomes part of your personal landscape. If you marry in one – and many can now be hired as wedding venues – it becomes part of your family history. And of course not all of them are in private hands anyway. In the 1950s an American author, Ruth McKenny, visited Newstead Abbey, a Tudor house near Nottingham that was once the ancestral home of Lord Byron. It had already been owned for decades by the city and used as a public park. She watched, on a Sunday afternoon, ‘the coal-miners and factory-hands of Nottingham stroll through the perfumed rose-gardens’ and examine ‘with a pleased and expert eye the Japanese dwarf water-gardens’. She went on to observe that Newstead was ‘one place where the people of England have inherited the past they made with their sweat. The great-great-grandchildren of the peasants [whom the Byrons employed to lay out the park] sit, arm-in-arm with their girls, or their beaux, in the Grecian summerhouse, sighing over the romantic vista of water and lawn.’ It is not only the wealthy and aristocratic who can enjoy a glimpse of Arcadia.

An old country house (because not all of them are very old, by British standards) will have been the centre of local life for centuries. It is more common than we might suppose to find families who have lived in the same house, or at least one on the same site, for seven or eight hundred years. Generations of them may be interred beneath marble effigies in the nearby church, in which they will have built their own chapel for this purpose. As well as farming their estate, they will have served as Lords-Lieutenant and High Sheriffs of the county, Members of Parliament, Masters of Fox Hounds, officers in the local Yeomanry, and perhaps even as rectors of the church itself. Thus their lives are extensively entwined with the surrounding area. They will have a lasting local fame – or notoriety – even if their names are unknown to a wider public.

Their servants, too, represent another form of continuity, for local people will have been the most ready source of labour for as long as the house has stood, and the neighbourhood is likely to abound with families whose aunts and uncles and grandparents were gardeners or maids or coachmen in the big house. The descendants of these people may hold the same, or similar, positions today, or they may have jobs on the estate that did not exist in the old days – as staff in the tearoom or the gift shop (or even the safari park!), or as part-time volunteers showing visitors around. They have an emotional stake in the house and, again, a sense that it belongs to them too. If it is well enough known to attract multitudes of tourists through its collections, its associations with famous people or events, or through having appeared on film or television, it can represent a significant element in the local economy.