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There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes.

Real life in the country house during the 1920s and 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth and hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world. In a definitive social history which combines anecdote and narrative with scholarship, it brings the stately homes of England to life, giving readers an insight into the guilt and the gingerbread, and showing how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs, and how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrian Tinniswood is the author of fourteen books of social and architectural history. A Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and a Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at Bath Spa University, he has worked for and with the National Trust at local, regional and national level for more than thirty years. In 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to heritage.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England

Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean

The Rainborowes: Pirates, Puritans and a Family’s Quest for the Promised Land

People who formerly lived in very large houses are now getting out of them. As to who goes in is another matter.

‘It’s rather sad,’ she said one day, ‘to belong, as we do, to a lost generation. I’m sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed. We might just as well never have lived at all, I do think it’s a shame.’

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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Adrian Tinniswood 2016
Cover: Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tritton at Godmersham by Rex Whistler, from a private collection

Adrian Tinniswood has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes across the nation.

At least, that is the conventional view of a period which has always been seen as witnessing the end of the country house. One by one, so the story goes, the stately homes of England were deserted and dismantled and demolished, their estates broken up, their oaks felled and their parks given over to suburban sprawl.

There’s certainly truth in that. But it masks an alternative narrative which exists side by side with the familiar tale of woe. A narrative which saw new families buying, borrowing and sometimes building themselves a country house; which introduced new aesthetics, new social structures, new meanings to an old tradition. A narrative, in fact, which saw new life in the country house. That is what I have tried to explore in The Long Weekend.

My title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, who in 1940 published a social history of Britain beginning at the Armistice and ending with Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation at 11.15 on Sunday, 3 September 1939, in which he explained that he had asked Germany to undertake to withdraw her troops from Poland: ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war.’ Graves and Hodge called their book The Long Weekend, a phrase that seemed peculiarly appropriate for a study of the country house between the wars, conjuring up – for me, at least – a transitional moment of leisurely uncertainty, a pause.

I have had so much help in the writing of this book – from friends, from colleagues and from complete strangers who commented with kindness on items in my sporadic Long Weekend blog or offered ideas and enthusiasm at country houses and archives and libraries all over the country. I can’t mention them all by name: indeed, there are many whose names I don’t even know, like the staff at Bath Central Library who retrieved endless quantities of heavy bound volumes of Country Life from deep in the stacks for me, staggering under the weight with unfailing cheerfulness. But they all have a place in my heart. I am grateful to them.

I do want to thank by name Jean Appleton, Gavin Johns, Patricia Lankester, Katherine Ponganis and Nerys Watts. They know why.

Edwina Mountbatten and the Duke of York, 1920.

Sir Henry and Lady Alda Hoare with their son Harry at Stourhead, 1912.

INTRODUCTION

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom …

Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’ (1919)

JUST BEFORE LUNCH on Christmas Eve 1917, a telegram arrived at Stourhead in Wiltshire.

Over the previous five weeks a flurry of messages had flown back and forth between Stourhead, the ancestral seat of the Hoare family, and the Middle East. On 17 November Sir Henry and Lady Alda Hoare’s son Harry was shot through the lungs while fighting the Turks at Mughar Ridge in Palestine; after a night lying out on the battlefield he had been taken to a dressing station and then moved to the small British Army hospital at Ras el-Tin, overlooking the harbour of Alexandria. He was now on the mend, his parents had been told, and coping with his injury ‘with patience, cheerfulness and pluck’. A few days earlier Harry’s doctor had wired to say the boy’s condition was improving, and a West Country neighbour who was stationed in Alexandria followed this up with another telegram: ‘Saw Harry yesterday – progressing satisfactorily’. Alda Hoare recorded their relief in her diary: ‘we knelt and humbly thanked God for His unspeakable mercy’.¹

But Harry Hoare was dead. His wound had haemorrhaged and he had died. This was the news that the Christmas Eve telegram brought for his parents.

They didn’t cry. Instead Alda fell on her knees and prayed, ‘O God, for strength to us, in our shattered lives’. Then together the couple walked through the great old house and stood looking at the full-length portrait of Harry, painted when he was twenty-one. ‘Our only and the best of sons,’ wrote Sir Henry a little later. ‘He never grieved us by thought, word or deed.’²

Harry Hoare’s death was a blow from which his parents never recovered. Sir Henry’s reaction was an urge to get away from the Wiltshire estate where his family had lived for nearly 200 years. It held too many memories. His wife was determined to stay at Stourhead, and for exactly that reason. ‘I cannot bear to leave my son I everywhere see here,’ she confided to her diary.³

So they stayed. For another thirty years the couple managed Stourhead, living the life of country gentry. Sir Henry wrote letters to The Times and entered his hunters in local horse shows; Lady Alda opened the house at a shilling a time in aid of the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing, and ran the household with three housemaids, a cook, a kitchen maid and scullery maid and three or four other staff.

Harry remained in Egypt, in the Hadra War Cemetery at Alexandria. Back at Stourhead, his name topped the list of local men commemorated in a roll of honour at the little medieval church of St Peter, with an epigraph from Ecclesiasticus: ‘A good life hath but a few days: but a good name endureth for ever.’

His parents’ grief endured, too. It defined them, it engulfed them. And since Harry had never married, it left them uncertain for a future without a direct heir. In 1925 Sir Henry went down to Bryanston in Dorset, where the 4th Viscount Portman was selling up to pay the estate duties resulting from the death of his predecessor. Sir Henry was shocked to see family paintings, photographs, even the 3rd Lord Portman’s personal effects, all coming under the hammer. ‘It brought home to me what may happen when we are gone,’ he wrote.⁴ ‘Oh, had he married, and given us a grandson to love,’ said Alda.⁵

Perhaps Siegfried Sassoon was right. Perhaps everyone sang when the war was over. But so many of those songs were shot through with sadness.

IF ALL THE peers in Britain came together to celebrate the Armistice at the end of 1918, the resulting group portrait would fill a large canvas. There would be 746 of them arranged, no doubt, in order of precedence: dukes in front, then marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons (not to mention two archbishops, thirty-nine bishops and two dozen women, peeresses in their own right). Long-lineaged nobles like Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, 20th Earl of Shrewsbury, whose ancestor had fought with Henry V in the Hundred Years War, would rub shoulders with nouveau-riche press barons like Viscount Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook as they raised their glasses to victory. The 5th Baron Headley would have given the champagne a miss: he had converted to Islam in 1913 and, as Lord Headley el-Farooq, was president of the British Muslim Society and a staunch believer in the ability of Islam to arrest the decline of Western civilisation and put a stop to suffragettism and short skirts. The 12th Viscount Taaffe, whose forebears had fought for James II at the Battle of the Boyne, might have found the toasts rather awkward, since he was currently a serving officer in the defeated Austrian Army with a castle in Bohemia. In March 1919 he was one of four ‘traitor peers’ to be deprived of their titles for ‘adhering to the king’s enemies during the war’; the others were the dukes of Cumberland, Albany and Brunswick, three high-ranking German nobles whose British titles came to them through their descent from George III or Victoria and Albert.^fn1

There were some who wouldn’t have been at this imaginary gathering at all if it hadn’t been for the war. When the fighting started, the middle-aged Walter Beresford Annesley had no expectation of succeeding his young cousin as 7th Earl Annesley: then came the day in November 1914 when the 6th earl climbed into a Bristol biplane and set off across the Channel, never to be seen again. George Amias Fitzwarrene Poulett, 8th Earl Poulett, was nine years old when he succeeded to his title; his father, the 7th earl, had survived three years in France before being transferred back to Yorkshire, only to fall victim to the Spanish influenza pandemic in July 1918.

Altogether a dozen British peers died on active service, and one British prince: Queen Victoria’s youngest grandchild, 23-year-old Maurice of Battenberg, who was killed at Ypres at the beginning of the war while serving with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Viscount Hawarden died in France in August 1914, three weeks after war was declared. Marquess Conyngham was killed forty-eight hours before the Armistice.

But the psychology of loss went much deeper. It involved uncertainty about the future, the break-up of estates, perhaps even the prospect of financial ruin. One in ten titled families lost heirs in the war. Tommy Agar-Robartes, whose family owned Lanhydrock in Cornwall and Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, died at Loos after being hit by sniper fire while he was bringing in a wounded private from no-man’s-land. Nineteen-year-old Denis, the only son of Viscount Buxton and a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, disappeared in Flanders in October 1917; all that remains of him is his name on a memorial to the missing on the Ypres Salient. Lord and Lady Desborough’s eldest boy, Julian Grenfell, was hit in the head by a shell splinter at Ypres; the day after he died The Times published his poem ‘Into Battle’, with its prophetic final stanza beginning ‘The thundering line of battle stands, / And in the air Death moans and sings’. When she heard of his death, his ten-year-old sister Imogen wrote, ‘I am glad that he is at peace and did his duty.’⁶ Two months later the next in line, Billy Grenfell, was killed leading a charge within a mile of where Julian had been hit.

And the roll of horror rolls on. At St Michael’s Mount, Lord St Levan lost his brother and heir, drowned in the Mediterranean in 1916. The De Blaquieres of Brockworth Manor in Gloucestershire lost their elder son in France in the spring of 1915, and their younger two years later; with the death of Lord De Blaquiere in 1920 the male line ended and the title, an Irish barony created in 1722, became extinct.

The survivors coped in different ways, selling up or soldiering on or, occasionally, taking control of their lives in a way which would have been unthinkable before the war. In September 1915, for example, Kathleen Cuthbert’s husband James, a captain in the Scots Guards, was reported wounded and missing at Loos. At twenty-nine she was left a widow with three children under the age of five and a fourth on the way.

It wasn’t until 1917 that Kathleen found out for certain that James was dead, so that for nearly two years a cloud of uncertainty hung over her future and the future of the 4,000-acre Cuthbert estate in Northumberland, at the heart of which was Beaufront Castle, a ‘domestic castellated’ mansion of 1836–41, designed by the prolific Co. Durham architect John Dobson.^fn2 Beaufront was held in trust for their eldest boy. Their land agent had gone off to the war at the same time as Kathleen’s husband; and even before Cuthbert’s death was confirmed there were rumblings in the family that someone – some man – should be brought in to run the estate on Kathleen’s behalf.

She wouldn’t have it. She insisted on managing the entire estate by herself, paying the men every week, letting the farms and cottages. If she needed advice, she went to her father, a landowner and mine owner whose estate bordered Beaufront. For a short time she had a bailiff, but he was dismissed after an incident which demonstrated her drive and determination. Late one night she was coming home from a party when she was puzzled to see one of her shepherds, a man named Beatty, driving some sheep out of the park gate.

Beatty’s family had worked for the Cuthberts for generations. Even so, it was past midnight – a funny time to be moving stock. Kathleen ordered her chauffeur to stop the car, got out and demanded to know what the man was doing. ‘Moving sheep,’ he told her. So she asked him to come up to the house the next morning.

When Beatty arrived, she accused him of selling sheep at market on his own account (having first telephoned the mart to check that he was indeed doing just that). Then she dismissed him without a reference and evicted him and his wife from their tied cottage. When her father asked her if she wouldn’t have been better to give him a second chance she answered, ‘As a woman I’ve got to behave like that. If I was a man, I could go and rant at him … But all I can do is to give him notice to get off the place.’⁷ She suspected that her bailiff had known about Beatty’s tricks, although she couldn’t prove it. She dismissed him as well.

IN FEBRUARY 1917 Henry Cubitt’s father died and he inherited the Cubitt family estates, which included Denbies in Surrey, a vast Italianate mansion designed by his grandfather, the famous London master-builder Thomas Cubitt; and Fallapit, a slightly more modest neo-Tudor country house in south Devon. He also inherited a title, becoming the 2nd Baron Ashcombe. His eldest son Henry, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, was already dead, killed on the Somme in September 1916. His second son, Alick, died in the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917; he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Four months later the Ashcombes lost their third son, William, a lieutenant in the Royal Dragoons who died of wounds in northern France. All three boys were in their early twenties. The Ashcombes were well supplied with sons – they had six in all – but that can have been of little comfort to them. In November 1920 their fourth, Roland, married Sonia Keppel, whose mother had been the mistress of Edward VII and whose sister Violet was currently the lover of Vita Sackville-West.^fn3 In a reminder that death was not the only outcome for casualties of war, The Times pointed out that the wedding decorations were all being carried out by a nephew of the Keppels from the Scots Guards, ‘who lost the sight of both eyes during the war in trying to save his sergeant, and who has now a Victory florist shop in the Piccadilly-arcade’.⁸

OF COURSE THEY all had stately homes – the quick and the dead, the brash profiteer and the bereaved earl, the survivors and the scarred. Wasn’t the ownership of a grand mansion a defining characteristic of a British aristocrat? It might be a baroque pile, like the Marlboroughs’ Blenheim Palace and the Devonshires’ Chatsworth, or a rambling romance like Broughton Castle, home to the Fiennes family since the 1440s; a modest Georgian block or an outrageous piece of pathologically earnest Gothic Revivalism brimming over with turrets and battlements. Style wasn’t the point. Taste wasn’t the point. Big or small, elegant or ugly, a country house was a necessary adjunct to membership of that most elite of elites, the nobility of Britain. Wasn’t it?

Up to a point. The 1919 edition of that great directory of the traditional landed classes and their pedigrees, Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage, shows that the vast majority of peers of the realm owned, leased or otherwise lived in at least one country house. A quarter of all peers boasted two, and several had a string of them. The main residence of Hugo Charteris, 11th Earl of Wemyss and March, was Gosford in East Lothian, designed in the 1790s by Robert Adam, and remodelled for the earl’s father a century later. After he succeeded to the title in 1914 he chose to live there with his mistress, the original forces sweetheart Lady Angela Forbes. His wife understandably preferred to live in their Cotswold home, the breathtaking sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Stanway House in Gloucestershire. She supplemented her income by renting Stanway each summer to J. M. Barrie for the considerable sum of 200 guineas. ‘Lady Wemyss [has] a very clear understanding of the things that matter in life,’ wrote Lady Angela in her autobiography – an unnecessarily waspish comment, considering she was sleeping with the woman’s husband.⁹

As well as Gosford and Stanway, the Wemyss family, whose ancestors claimed descent from Charlemagne the Great, also owned Neidpath Castle, a severe tower house in the Scottish Borders; and Hay Lodge on the banks of the River Tweed at Peebles. And Amisfield House, Haddington, designed in the 1750s by Isaac Ware, and one of the most significant Palladian buildings in Scotland. And Elcho Castle, a rather lovely fortified mansion of the sixteenth century. There was also a town house in Cadogan Square, designed in 1887 by Richard Norman Shaw.

Stanway House in Gloucestershire, one of the 11th Earl of Wemyss and March’s six country houses.

Wemyss was unusual in the size of his property portfolio, but not unique. The Duke of Buccleuch also owned six country houses, and like Wemyss’s, five were in Scotland. As well as Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham, claimed as the largest private house in the United Kingdom by the Guinness Book of Records, William Charles De Meuron Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, owned two estates near Doncaster, a Jacobean lodge on the outskirts of the Yorkshire town of Malton, and two houses in Co. Wicklow, Ireland: Coolattin, built for his great-grandfather by John Carr of York at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and nearby Carnew, a ruined castle which was restored and reroofed in about 1817. He was also the patron of no fewer than eighteen livings.

At the other end of the scale, one in nine peers had no country house at all in 1919. A few were living in very modest circumstances. The 3rd Lord Magheramorne, for example, gave his residence as 37 Knyveton Road, Bournemouth; and Lord Strathspey, 31st Chief of the Clan Grant, lived not in a palace but in Putney. But most of the eighty-eight British nobles without a place in the country at the end of the war had prestigious London homes in Mayfair or Park Lane or Regent’s Park. Their decision to do without a rural residence was a matter of choice rather than straitened circumstances, a reflection of the declining importance of the country house, and perhaps of the growing appeal of metropolitan life. By the 1920s many who did own country houses, especially among the recently ennobled and those who aspired to aristocracy, did not have the links with the land which their predecessors in earlier centuries would have taken for granted. For them, a country house, no matter how grand, was a weekend retreat rather than a home.

The Debrett’s list is the roughest of rough indications of trends in country-house ownership after the war, and no more than that. It isn’t always reliable: only one country residence was listed for the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Eaton Hall in Cheshire, even though he owned several more. And more importantly, those 746 peers of the realm were the tip of the iceberg, a fraction of what their Victorian parents used to call the Upper Ten Thousand. What about the baronets, the knights, the country squires? The press barons and the brewers and bankers? The Americans?

Some of these bought and sold mansions with the same ease with which they bought and sold companies or racehorses. For others, though, the country house was a home and more – something woven into the fabric of society, a symbol of continuity which held out the hope of a return to normality after the slaughter.

This feeling was strong among those who came home from the war confused, uncertain about the point of it all. The author John Buchan, although he was never fit enough for active service and spent the war as a correspondent, an intelligence officer and eventually as director of information under Beaverbrook, wrote movingly of his first excursions into the English countryside after being demobbed; of how throughout the war he found it impossible to respond to nature without recalling the scent of hawthorn and lilac vying with the stench of poison-gas, or the sound of birdsong signalling a lull in an artillery barrage. As he tramped along the lanes of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire in the cold, wet April of 1919, he recovered the past, he said, and with it some hope for the future.

Finding in country life a delight ‘in the rhythm of nature, and in small homely things after so many alien immensities’,¹⁰ Buchan and his wife Susan sold their London house and moved with their four young children to Elsfield in Oxfordshire, where they bought an attractively unassuming early eighteenth-century stone manor house with deliciously haphazard additions. Here Buchan threw himself into the life of ‘a minor country gentleman with a taste for letters’, as he wrote with rather deliberate self-deprecation.¹¹ The family employed a small staff from the village, and sat in the front pew at church every Sunday. John always read the lesson; Susan founded a branch of the Women’s Institute and dispensed tea on Sunday afternoons to visiting Oxford undergraduates. She also presided over house parties where visitors might include the poets John Masefield and Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, who lived nearby, or T. E. Lawrence, who used to turn up at Elsfield at odd times on Boanerges, his 1,000 cc Brough Superior motorcycle, and talked for hours about the Arabs, the war, his muddled masochism and his powerful sense of disillusion. On weekdays Buchan commuted to his office in London, but from Friday evening until noon on Monday he was a country squire, riding out each morning, revelling on winter evenings in the smell of woodsmoke and the hooting of owls in the spinneys and copses.

There were alternative and sometimes competing narratives to the kind of rural idyll in which Buchan chose to lose himself. December 1920 saw the posthumous publication of Poems by Wilfred Owen: Owen’s portrayal of the soldier as victim and, in the words of one reviewer, his ‘sternly just and justly stern judgement on the idyllisers’, shifted the emphasis away from Buchan’s conviction that the way of life epitomised by small manor houses like his own was what England had been fighting for.¹² And two years later T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land replaced old certainties with a kaleidoscope of fragmented and bewildering realities, turning gardens into graveyards and teaching that far from offering hope for the future, April was the cruellest month.

But the rural idyll, bred by the Romantics in the nineteenth century, nurtured by the Edwardians’ quest for the heart of England and brought to full maturity by the war, is crucial to the conception of country-house life in the 1920s and 1930s. In the mansions and manor houses of post-war England it was Buchan’s view which triumphed, not Owen’s bitter sacrifice or Eliot’s message of despair and redemption. That isn’t surprising – Buchan’s was a view which placed those mansions and manor houses at the heart of the nation, gave them a leading role in the culture. They were the country in ‘king and country’. A house in the country, rambling, ancient, oozing tradition, with an estate which was small enough not to be an encumbrance but big enough for some riding and rough shooting, was the beau idéal. Those who already possessed such a thing buckled down and buried their sons, or at least memorialised them in a new stained-glass window for the local church, where St Georges slew dragons and knights in gleaming armour gazed proudly, poignantly out at congregations whose losses might be just as great, but who lacked the resources and the social status to commemorate those losses quite so graphically. Those who had no country house to connect them to the land fit for heroes could always follow John Buchan’s example and buy themselves a piece of the past.

^fn1 Taaffe, who was also a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, was doubly unfortunate: four weeks after losing his Irish titles, he learned that the newly established Austrian republic had abolished the nobility altogether, and with it his remaining title. Land reform in the new Czechoslovakia then took away most of his Bohemian estates, and plain Mr Henry Taaffe died in debt in Vienna in 1928.

^fn2 Beaufront was the scene of a gruesome tragedy in 1907. Captain Cuthbert and his first wife Dorothy were out with a shooting party in woodland on the estate when he tripped and accidentally discharged his gun, hitting his wife in the head at point blank range. She died instantly.

^fn3 The genealogically minded will already have noticed that Roland and Sonia were the grandparents of the present Duchess of Cornwall.

CHAPTER ONE

It Is Ours

ON 4 MARCH 1930 the diplomat and journalist Harold Nicolson and his aristocratic wife, the author Victoria Sackville-West, heard that they were to have new neighbours. The couple had lived happily at Long Barn in the Kent village of Sevenoaks Weald, ‘our own nestling home amid the meadows’, for the past fifteen years, and neither could imagine leaving what Harold called ‘our little mud pie, which we both love so childishly and which for both of us is the place where we have been so happy’.¹

Now that was all changed. They discovered that Westwood, the farm next door, was being sold to ‘poultry people’. The idea of a chicken farm on their doorstep appalled them, but neither wanted to leave Long Barn and they immediately contacted the vendor and asked if they could buy Westwood instead. But at £16,000 her asking price was too high for them; Vita suggested offering £13,000, but Harold didn’t think it was worth it and by the end of March Vita was reconciled to the fact that they would have to move.

On the evening of 4 April Harold, who was on the staff of the Evening Standard and stayed up in London during the week, had a phone call from his wife. A local land agent had told her about Sissinghurst, a sixteenth-century castle outside the little town of Cranbrook, twenty miles south-east of Long Barn, which had been on the market for two years. She had gone down to see it that afternoon and fallen in love with it.

Harold took the train down the next day, a Saturday. Vita met him at the station and with their two teenage boys they motored over to Cranbrook, where Harold had his first sight of Sissinghurst – or rather, of the fragments that remained. The once-great courtyard house which had entertained Elizabeth I had all but disappeared during three centuries of neglect: in 1752 Horace Walpole had described seeing ‘a park in ruins, and a house in ten times greater ruins’; and it had gone downhill from there, serving as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Seven Years War, a workhouse and, finally, a sort of adjunct to the neighbouring farm, housing farm labourers, horses and bits of agricultural machinery.² Virtually all that survived intact was a low range of buildings and beyond it, a strikingly beautiful tower, four storeys high and built entirely of soft red brick.

Sissinghurst, ‘as personal and lively as anything in England’.

Harold was non-committal, but the next day he and Vita went back for another look and half-decided to offer £12,000 for the castle, its grounds and the adjoining 400 acres. Still they dithered. Harold reckoned they would need to spend at least another £15,000 to put it in order. By the time they had finished, they wouldn’t have much change out of £30,000 – a large sum, more than £4 million in today’s money. For the same amount, he told his wife, they could have ‘a beautiful place replete with park, garage, h[ot] and c[old], central heating, historical associations, and two lodges’.³ On the other hand, Sissinghurst was in a part of Kent which they both liked. It had links, albeit tenuous ones, to Vita’s family: Cecily Baker, whose father owned the place in Henry VIII’s time, had married her ancestor, Sir Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset. And, most decisively, ‘we like it’.⁴

All through the middle of April they hummed and hawed. Harold’s elderly mother advised them against it, saying it would cost too much to keep up. When they walked over it once more in icy winds and rain, it looked so big and dilapidated that Harold almost lost his nerve. ‘I am terrified of socialist legislation, of not being able to let the fields, of finding that the place is a huge hole into which we pour money, of finding that the whole thing is far more bother than it is worth,’ he confided to his diary, admitting that he and Vita were both depressed and worried about making the wrong decision.⁵

Finally they made an offer, and sat back to wait for an answer. After dinner one night at the beginning of May the telephone rang, and Vita took the call. It was from the land agent who was handling the sale. Harold described what happened next. ‘“Quite” … “Yes, of course” … “Oh naturally!” She puts down the receiver and says, “It is ours.” We embrace warmly. I then go and get the plans and fiddle.’⁶

The Nicolsons at Sissinghurst, 1932.

It would be another five months before the couple could even camp out at Sissinghurst. They moved in permanently in 1932, letting Long Barn to the film producer Sidney Bernstein and then, in 1936, to Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne, who had left America in search of some privacy after the media frenzy that followed the kidnap and murder of their baby son. (‘No, sir, we shall not stare at the poor people,’ the village postmistress promised Harold when he told her the identities of Long Barn’s new tenants.⁷) Sissinghurst’s famous gardens were more or less complete by 1937. Even then, Harold was still looking to a future when the place would be finished. ‘I really believe’, he told Vita, ‘that you will be able to make of that ramshackle farm-tumble something as personal and lovely as anything in England.’⁸ As of course she did.

AS BUYERS IN 1930, Harold and Vita benefited from the fact that supply was outstripping demand as historic country houses poured onto the market in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of the previous October. That summer the Marquess of Lothian let Blickling Hall, the finest Jacobean survival in Norfolk, fully furnished to Major Gilbert Russell, a great-grandson of the 6th Duke of Bedford. One of the great mid-Georgian houses, Claremont in Surrey, built for Clive of India by the impressive triumvirate of Capability Brown, Henry Holland and Sir John Soane, came up for sale a few weeks later, as a business opportunity rather than a home: the agents said that the 210-acre estate, whose pleasure grounds included work by Brown, Vanbrugh and William Kent, was ‘ripe for immediate development for building purposes’.⁹ Broome Park in Kent, an extravaganza of cut and moulded red brick dating from the 1630s which had once been the home of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, also came back on the market, having been sold only four months before. Claremont became a girls’ school, Broome a hotel.

In the week that the sales of Claremont and Broome were announced, stories began to circulate that the Great Chamber of Gilling Castle in Yorkshire was off to America for a five-figure sum. Gilling had been bought the previous year and was being turned into a prep school. The Great Chamber, one of the finest Elizabethan interiors in the country and a riot of strapwork and inlaid flowers with a heraldic frieze containing no fewer than 443 coats of arms, had been bought by a wealthy American – William Randolph Hearst, who also obtained panelling from Gilling’s Georgian long gallery.

That summer the president of the Auctioneers and Estate Agents’ Institute lamented that ‘the large family residences, especially of the older type, are practically unsaleable’. Some few country houses were being turned into schools, institutions and local authority offices, he acknowledged; ‘but the demand for such purposes is very limited, and it is now found that even the moderately large house … is extremely difficult to dispose of’.¹⁰ At the same time concern was voiced that there was a crisis coming in the countryside. Landowners, said the Duke of Montrose, were impoverished, ‘mostly living on capital which, sooner or later, must become exhausted’.¹¹ The time was coming, he argued, when the state should accept land in lieu of death duties, which since the ‘tax on death’ had been introduced back in 1894 had risen until now it stood at 34 per cent for estates valued between £500,000 and £600,000, rising to a whopping 50 per cent on estates over £2 million. ‘The continuance of the current burdensome conditions of private ownership’, said Montrose, ‘is quite impossible.’¹²

The Great Chamber at Gilling Castle in Yorkshire, one of the finest Elizabethan interiors in the country.

Not everyone agreed. Country Life applauded the fact that in the past decade big houses like Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Westonbirt in Gloucestershire had found new uses as schools, seeing their sale as evidence of an adaptable market. The magazine noted that the vast majority of sales were still to private individuals, and maintained that scores of country estates, some quite large, had found buyers over the past year. By the end of the year, though, even Country Life’s relentlessly optimistic estate market correspondent, ‘Arbiter’, was forced to admit that with property transactions £8 million or £9 million down on the previous year, 1930 was probably the worst since the great agricultural depressions of the 1870s.

How had it come to this? In 1918 the future looked bright for the country house and its estate. The volume of sales and prices had improved steadily right through the war, after a predictable and dramatic slump in the autumn of 1914. Farms were in particular demand: the shortage of labour as agricultural workers left for military service was more than offset by the absence of foreign competition and the fact that there was an assured market at fixed prices for every ounce of food that could be produced. True, there was a trend, first noticed before the war, for syndicates or individuals to buy up large estates and then break them up for resale, a practice which disadvantaged the tenant farmer who, if he or she wanted to own their farm, had to pay the speculators’ profit on top of the market value or face the prospect of seeing it sold out from under them. The elderly Marquess of Aberdeen came in for some mildly reproving comments in 1919 when he announced to his tenants that he had sold 37,000 acres of his 50,000-acre estates in Aberdeenshire to a shipbroker, Herbert Boret, who was busy buying up land in England as well as Scotland. The marquess, who kept his ancestral home of Haddo House (and who also owned a ranch in British Columbia), maintained that he was merely moving with the times, which were clearly in favour of substituting ownership for tenancy. The press reckoned he was escaping from his responsibilities as a landowner, and when he claimed that Boret intended to give tenants the opportunity to own their holdings, critics made pointed comments about the profit he would expect as middleman.

Although the spectre of the speculator remained throughout the 1920s, he proved less of a problem than commentators predicted. This was partly because landowners realised that they would get more for their estates by breaking them up themselves and selling them off in separate lots, offering farms to their tenants privately before going to auction; and partly because many believed quite sincerely that they owed a duty of care to their tenants, and were prepared to put their money where their mouths were. The politician Walter Long, for example, sacrificed a cool £20,000 by refusing an offer from a syndicate for his 15,000-acre Wiltshire estates and offering them instead to his tenants.

In 1918 the property market saw sales of £11.38 million, an increase of more than 25 per cent on the previous year. There was a strong demand for country houses, especially those which came without large estates. ‘Today there are on the books of the leading agents scores of applicants for properties, who cannot get what they want at the moment,’ wrote Country Life’s ‘Arbiter’ in his end-of-year round-up of sales. ‘They are in themselves a guarantee of the coming year’s auctions.’¹³

He was right. 1919 was the most remarkable year since estate records began, with more country houses bought and sold than ever before, and prices continuing to rise. Smaller country houses continued to be in demand, especially those within an hour’s drive of London. The firm of Hampton & Sons, one of England’s leading estate agents, reported that furnished country houses were being let for the summer at higher rents than recently, and that ‘for country houses with several hundred acres prices have been distinctly on the upgrade, while for the house of medium size, with a home farm from 100 to 200 acres, the demand has been phenomenal’.¹⁴ Another prominent firm of estate agents, Knight, Frank & Rutley, recorded sales of more than three-quarters of a million acres, and total combined sales for the year reached more than £30 million. Mansions and their estates played a huge part in this boom, particularly those with historical associations. ‘It is striking’, said The Times, ‘how many places sold this year were visited by Queen Elizabeth’; and equally striking that not a few claimed ‘a more or less authentic record running back to before the Norman Conquest’.¹⁵

But there were early signs of a coming storm, as big landowners moved to capitalise on the rising market and liquidise their assets. In the final weeks of 1918, land on the edges of half a dozen estates were sold off, including 1,000 acres of the Holme Hall estate near York, which realised £29,000; nine or ten of the best farms on Lord Pembroke’s Wilton estate; and 8,000 acres on Earl Beauchamp’s Madresfield Court estate. In fact the sale of ‘outlying portions’ – a phrase which referred to land on the margins of an estate or perhaps separated from it – crops up again and again in the property pages, suggesting rationalisation or consolidation, but not financial need. ‘Arbiter’ was at pains to point out that Lord Beauchamp’s sale had nothing to do with Madresfield Court itself. ‘The sale of 8,000 acres on an extensive estate like Lord Beauchamp’s has, necessarily, no more connection with the mansion and its surroundings than it has with a town house.’¹⁶ What ‘Arbiter’ couldn’t know or refused to admit, was that the sale of ‘outlying portions’ would become a frequent precursor to the sale of a mansion and the departure of a family who, whether or not they had been living there since the Norman Conquest, could no longer make ends meet.

Several big Scottish sporting estates came on the market in late 1918 and early 1919. The 11,600-acre Castle Menzies estate in Perthshire was offered at a reduced price of £60,000 in a sale which included five miles of salmon and trout fishing and grouse moors yielding an average of 1,200 brace of birds each year; and nearly 92,000 acres of the Duke of Sutherland’s Highland property, ‘including Dornoch Castle’, said the sale particulars, referring to a reputedly haunted sixteenth-century hunting lodge, ‘but not the town of Dornoch’.¹⁷ This was in addition to 237,000 acres which the Duke of Sutherland had sold earlier in the year.

A further sign that all might not be well in the country house market was voiced in January 1919 by a spokesman for Hampton & Sons, who remarked on ‘the number of properties which have been disposed of together with the interior furnishings, a transaction which was comparatively rare in pre-war days’.¹⁸

IN MARCH 1919 The Times ran a story under the headline ‘Ancestral Seats as Garden Cities’. The report centred on Lord Middleton’s announcement that he intended to sell Wollaton Hall, perched in a remarkable hilltop setting on the outskirts of Nottingham, and that he had given first refusal to the city council. Wollaton was, and indeed still is, one of the most flamboyant Elizabethan country houses. A glittering palace of turrets and towers and mannerist decoration, it was built in the 1580s for Middleton’s ancestor, Sir Francis Willoughby, and designed by the greatest of all Elizabethan architects, Robert Smythson, who was buried in the local church. Its future, declared Country Life, ‘must be a matter of concern for all who have any admiration of the beautiful and any respect for the past’.¹⁹

Middleton was in his seventies and without children. The council was interested in his proposal – very interested indeed. But nothing came of the plan before Lord Middleton’s death in 1922, when his estates and title went to his 75-year-old brother. The 10th Lord Middleton, a former major in the Indian Army, announced his intention to retreat to another family seat, Birdsall House in Yorkshire, remodelled in the 1870s; and to sell off his Nottinghamshire estates, including Wollaton. But he died in 1924 and his son and heir was faced with a second set of death duties in the space of only two years. The 11th Lord Middleton sold land, some family pictures and a library from Wollaton which included important medieval manuscripts, hundreds of rare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets and a First Folio Shakespeare. The four-day sale at Christie’s of ‘one of the few remaining of the old and well-matured libraries, buried in a great country house and practically unknown to bibliographers’,²⁰ raised over £8,300. But it wasn’t enough, and he repeated the offer to give Nottingham first refusal on the Wollaton estate. The council unanimously agreed to buy the hall and 800 acres of parkland for £200,000.

Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire.

And now it emerged that the council didn’t want the mansion at all, no matter that it was one of the finest country houses in England. It wanted the park for development, and plans were swiftly unveiled to sell off the land that fronted the main Nottingham–Derby road ‘as sites for houses of a good class’. This would enable the authorities to recoup most of the purchase price. Some land was set aside for municipal housing, for playing fields and for an eighteen-hole golf course, which was expected ‘to improve the value of the adjoining building land by 2s. a yard’.²¹ As for Wollaton Hall itself, the council didn’t quite know what to do with it. The favoured option was to house the city’s natural history collection there, and this was what eventually happened. ‘The conversion of a park so charming as this into a mass of houses has its painful side,’ commented The Times, ‘but the process is inevitable, and if it is carried out with taste and skill the regret is reduced to very small proportions.’²²

This tale of an unwanted masterpiece illustrates two sides to the country house in the 1920s. First, there was the obvious story of retrenchment and decline, as an established landed family was forced by death and taxes to break centuries-old links with its ancestral seat. This was sad, but hardly new: country-house-owning families had been selling up, going broke and dying out for centuries. More novel was the notion that it was really quite difficult to find a use for a historic mansion in post-war Britain; that while its grounds were worth something as a setting for suburbia, the mansion itself was no longer any use as a home. It was as dead as the stuffed birds and animals that stared out unseeing on Wollaton’s halls and galleries, as much a thing of the past as the fossils in their glass cases.

THE LONG WEEKEND

Life in the English Country House
Between the Wars

Adrian Tinniswood

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Everyone Sang

CHAPTER ONE

It Is Ours

THE LONG WEEKEND

Life in the English Country HouseBetween the Wars

Adrian Tinniswood

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Everyone Sang

CHAPTER ONE

It Is Ours

Life in the English Country House
Between the Wars