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Country House Society: The Private Lives of England's Upper Class After the First World War PDF

229 Pages·2013·3.23 MB·English
by  Horn
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Preview Country House Society: The Private Lives of England's Upper Class After the First World War

This electronic edition published 2013 Amberley Publishing The Hill, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 4EP www.amberley-books.com Copyright © The Estate of Pamela Horn 209, 2013 ISBN 9781445603186 (PRINT) ISBN 9781445635385 (e-BOOK) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. CONTENTS Foreword and Acknowledgements 1: The Impact of War: 1914–1918 2: Adjusting to Peace: 1919–1921 3: Community Responsibilities and Sporting Pursuits 4: Social Rituals 5: Domestic Affairs and Breaking the Mould 6: The ‘Bright Young People’ and the End of an Era Picture Section Notes Foreword and Acknowledgements In recent years television period dramas have depicted the ups and downs of life in an imaginary aristocratic household before and after the First World War. Country House Society seeks to examine the realities of the daily round and the joys and sorrows experienced by families who were actually living through the often turbulent years between 1914 and 1930. In collecting material for the book I must thank the staff in the libraries and archives where I have worked for their expert help and ready co-operation. In particular, my thanks are due to staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and especially to those in Special Collections; the British Library; the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College Archives, London; Market Harborough Museum, Leicestershire; the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, whose members of staff have so readily provided material from the Astor collection; the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Shugborough Hall Oral History Transcripts, Staffordshire County Council; St. Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, and especially Sarah Newman; and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham. Pamela Horn, August 2012. 1 The Impact of War: 1914–1918 The First World War brought grievous sacrifices to the whole nation, and it perhaps brought greater losses to the landed families, with their long military traditions, than to any other class. It would be impossible to measure how much the quality and vitality of landed society in the post-war years suffered from the absence of the sons killed in France, or from the natural hedonism of the survivors of the holocaust. F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), p. 327. The Pre-War World In the early weeks of the summer of 1914, when temperatures soared to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, there were few indications that Britain was about to be engulfed in a devastating war, which would lead to the deaths of almost three- quarters of a million Britons.1 The social elite were to be particularly hard hit, with about one in five of the British and Irish peers and their sons who served in the war being killed. Many titled families lost the direct heirs to their titles and estates, though usually there were younger sons or other male relatives to inherit both the title and the land. It seems only three titles out of the 558 which had been linked to estates of at least 3,000 acres at the beginning of the 1880s were extinguished by the First World War.2 In political and social circles, however, in the late spring of 1914 it was the threat of civil war in Ireland over the issue of Home Rule, and labour unrest on the mainland, including the possibility of a general strike, that were the prime causes of concern. Little attention was paid to the assassination by a Serbian nationalist of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian imperial throne, and his wife in Sarajevo on 26 June. Conflicts in the turbulent Balkans appeared to offer little immediate threat to Britain itself. Meanwhile, for members of High Society the London social season was following its traditional course. There were the usual presentations at Court of debutantes, the regular round of dinner parties, balls, visits to the theatre and opera, and attendance at important sporting events, as well as a multitude of Saturday to Monday house parties. For the widowed Lady Airlie, one of Queen Mary’s ladies-in-waiting, the 1914 Season proved particularly strenuous since not only had she to chaperone her youngest daughter, Mabell, to balls almost every night but she had to carry out the duties of Mistress of the Robes to the queen at the Courts, to replace the Duchess of Devonshire, who was ill.3 Chaperonage remained extremely important for young unmarried girls, so while they could play golf, ride or go on the river with young male friends in the country, when they were in London they were supposed never to ‘cross the street alone, go shopping, travel in a taxi or take a journey’ without a responsible older married woman or a maid accompanying them.4 More daring girls, like Lady Diana Manners, the beautiful daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland and the centre of a group of friends calling themselves the ‘Corrupt Coterie’, flouted these restrictions when they could. After a visit to Venice in 1913, Lady Diana recalled the carefree gaiety she had enjoyed: ‘dancing and extravagance and lashings of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses’.5 Dancing was a major preoccupation, with the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and jazz beginning to penetrate British society, although their true conquest of the elite social scene was to come more than half a decade later.6 There was, however, a darker side to these exuberant activities, with drug-taking (particularly chloroform) and gambling part of the wider background. Of Alfred Duff Cooper, who married Lady Diana Manners in 1919, it has been said that on a single evening in 1914 playing chemin de fer, one of his favourite gambling games, he lost £1,645 to a Captain Taylor. That was nearly four times his salary as a Foreign Office diplomat.7 Nancy Cunard, the rebellious eighteen-year-old daughter of Sir Bache and Lady Cunard, was another girl determined to go her own way as far as possible. In part her feelings of alienation arose from her dislike of her mother, whom she referred to mockingly as ‘Her Ladyship’, and from her resentment at Lady Cunard’s life as a prominent society hostess and devoted admirer of the leading conductor, Thomas Beecham. Maud Cunard was estranged from Sir Bache, and on one occasion when Nancy and Lady Diana Manners were discussing maternal attitudes and restrictions, Nancy declared defiantly: ‘My mother’s having an affair with Thomas Beecham; I can do as I like.’8 She was presented at Court in 1914, ‘wearing a pink dress with a train of tulle and rose petals’, and with the obligatory display of ostrich feathers on her head. It was a London Season she little enjoyed and it was to be her first and last, I swore to myself, as one ball succeeded another until there were three or four a week and the faces of the revolving guardsmen seemed as silly as their vapid conversation among the hydrangeas at supper.9 More to her liking were the clandestine excursions undertaken with her friend, Iris Tree, who was a year her junior. As Iris remembered years later, she and Nancy would visit the Eiffel Tower restaurant, kept by Austrian-born Rudolf Stulik. It was a popular venue for artistic and literary figures, as well as for members of the Bohemian avant garde and the fashionable elite. According to Iris, the two girls also patronised other ‘fugitive’ haunts, unbeknown to their parents: We were bandits, escaping environment by tunnelling deceptions to emerge in forbidden artifice, chalk-white face powder, scarlet lip rouge, cigarette smoke, among roisterers of our own choosing … and the ‘coterie’ crowned by Diana Manners, which included the most brilliant and exuberant spirits united at the various Inns and outings; Cavendish Hotel, Cheshire Cheese, pubs in Limehouse, river barges, cab shelters and a secret studio which Nancy and I shared for secret meetings with the favourites … Nancy and I loved dressing up for the Chelsea Arts balls, given at Albert Hall, designing our own costumes … On one occasion we were arrested for swimming in the Serpentine, and emerged in dripping feathers and velvets to receive a summons, returning scared to our solemn doors and stealthy, clockticking stairways. After this, though latch keys were confiscated and curfew imposed, we somehow tricked the watch.10 Even their lavish use of make-up was controversial, at a time when this was thought appropriate only for actresses – and prostitutes. Nancy and Iris rented a room in Fitzroy Place, which they called their studio, and where they could escape to meet their friends unchaperoned, or write and paint, and design their costumes. To Lady Diana Manners, though, the premises seemed to be ‘always in chaos’, and she found it unacceptably ‘squalid’.11 But for most members of High Society the hedonism of these years took a less hectic and more respectable form, involving balls, visits to friends, and attendance at such events as Ascot or the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lords, where those who aspired to belong to the social elite contrived to be seen. In these circumstances, therefore, the society magazine The Bystander, in its ‘holiday issue’ of 8 July 1914, referred to the ‘whole of the English year being now a holiday season’: We make holiday, it is true, in July; but so we do in all the other months. We have summer holidays durating … from June to October inclusive; then we run an autumn holiday season (shooting, hunting etc.) up to round about Christmas. Then our Winter holidays (ski-ing, skating, etc.) until February, or thereabouts, followed by the ‘Spring in the Sunny South’ Season, which gives place in turn to that furiously active spell known as the London Season … July, despite Henley and the call of the river, Sandown, Goodwood, a Court, a few dances, a garden party or two, and the last gasps of the opera, is a holiday month. Three weeks later it noted that the London Season had finally ended: ‘From now till May we shall all behave like sensible “grown-ups” and neither receive nor accept more invitations than we have leisure to enjoy. One well-known lady habitually bids her friends “goodbye” at the beginning of each season, for she says “We shan’t see each other again till the rush is over.” Leisured classes, indeed! Why for months they don’t exist, in London at any rate’, so frantic had the demands of pleasure-seeking and the social round become.12 Leading hostesses nonetheless continued to hold their Saturday to Monday house parties. At Highclere Castle, home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, 18 July marked the start of the last big house party of the 1914 Season, with twenty-six guests, plus their servants, in residence.13 At Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire Lady Desborough, too, organised weekend hospitality, including water parties on the Thames. There was so little concern about the international situation that Margot Asquith, the second wife of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, allowed her only daughter to leave on a visit to friends in Holland on 25 July, although she did recall her a few days later, thereby enabling her to reach England on 1 August. Yet, according to Margot, the apprehensions she had already begun to feel were shared by few others in London society. On 29 July, when she was hosting a luncheon party at Downing Street, attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury among others, she remembered her guests expressing surprise when she told them she had stopped her sister visiting France on a painting holiday, ‘and had telegraphed for Elizabeth to return from Holland’.14

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When the cataclysm of the First World War impacted on British society, it particularly affected the landed classes, with their long military tradition. Country houses, as in a variety of popular TV dramas, were turned into military hospitals and convalescent homes, while many of the menfolk were kil
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