How beautifully they still stand
Mark Girouard
THE FALL AND RISE OF THE STATELY HOME by Peter Mandler Yale, £25, pp. 622
Here we are and here we have got to stay, mouldering on in this blasted barrack of a place which eats up every penny of my income . . . To think that we could have gone to live in London in a nice little flat.., handy for my club.., seeing all our friends.
So mourns Sir Murgatroyd Sprockett- Sprockett, in Wodehouse's Young Men in Spats (1922) when officious helpers have put out the fire which seemed all set to gut Smattering Hall and enable him to collect the insurance. Peter Mandler does not quote Wodehouse, but his readable and provoking study amply backs him up. In the 1920s and 1930s owners were selling up and leaving their country houses in droves, and seemed in many cases only too happy to get shot of them. The country-house world was not always a golden one.
Mandler is concerned with the changing and often tricky relations between country houses, their owners, and the public, from the early 19th century to the present day. The story starts, as it finishes, in a glow of mutual admiration. In the 1830s country houses were still the seats of a landed Upper class, which was also the ruling class. No one questioned the rights of their own- ers to alter, enlarge, remodel or demolish them. But they liked to promote an image of feudal benevolence, and by opening their houses to people of all classes turned country-house visiting from an elitist sport into a popular one. In 1871 the great hall and a good deal else of Warwick Castle burnt down. A pub- lic subscription was launched to restore it, as a way of thanking a benevolent and not especially rich earl for making his house available to the public. But radical newspapers suggested another reason: the public paid because Lord Warwick was 'rather the steward than the owner of a place which belongs to English history and therefore to all English people'. He was, in short, the trustee of a piece of national property. The idea was indignantly repudi- ated. Religious owners might see wealth, as did Gladstone, as held in trust from God; others might see themselves, and often legally were, trustees for their descendants; but trustees for the nation — never!
Much of the book is concerned with the ensuing evolution of the idea of trustee- ship, and of the concept of heritage implicit in it, of a building stock of such national value that it overrides or limits property rights. The concepts spread from a tiny and often radical minority until even country- house owners accepted them, or at least paid lip-service to them, in return for state- aid and tax concessions. They needed help. From the 1880s onwards the old country- house world was under assault. Agriculture and rents slumped because of the flood of imported American corn, and owners' sur- viving income and capital were depleted by tax and death duties. They agitated for relief, but at first were prepared to offer lit- tle in return. Many of them gave up or went into retreat. As feudal benevolence was replaced by angry resentment, houses and parks were closed to the public: the 100 or so open in 1850 were halved by 1900, and halved again by the 1930s. Hous- es were shut up, let, sold or demolished in large numbers — on the whole unregret- ted, because demolition was usually of 18th-century classical houses, which were considered hideous or `un-English'.
If the book has a hero it is Christopher Hussey, sitting at his desk at Count?), Life from the 1920s, enlarging the scope of heritage to include houses of all dates, extolling the wealth of their contents and the way of life which they stood for, urging owners to accept opening and regulation in return for aid, and backing the National Trust in its new campaign to acquire country houses, preferably with the owners still in them.
But little had been achieved by the time war came and went, leaving the country- house world doomed, or so it seemed to the public and most of the owners. Then came the amazing transformation. In 1950 the Labour-appointed Gowers Committee endorsed the estimate of a contemporary duke that 'the English country house is the greatest contribution made by England to the visual arts'. It accepted what was virtually the Hussey programme; the most economic way of preserving country houses was to keep the owners in them, and give them grants and tax concessions, in return for opening them to the public.
The Labour government was aghast, its Conservative successor sceptical, but public reactions were so surprisingly favourable that the report was partially adopted. Then an economic and agricultural revival poured money into many land-owning pockets, and combined with increasing government concessions to create a revival. The public took country houses to its heart, with all the hype that continues to flourish today. There are still plenty of problems; contents are slowly leaking away; alterna- tive uses need to be developed and exploit- ed. But the contrast between the despondency of the 1920s and the ebullience of the 1990s remains an extra- ordinary one.
Mandler is always clear and readable, and frequently entertaining, as he moves effortlessly from the eccentricities of dukes to the complexities of finance and legisla- tion. He enjoys exploding myth or preten- sion, and one is not always clear whether he is describing a confidence trick or a success story; perhaps a bit of both. Some- times he oversimplifies. By no means all country houses were in a state of collapse between the wars; a majority were still functioning, sometimes in reduced circum- stances, but sometimes very comfortably, if there was an heiress or a slice of town property to grease the wheels. He exagger- ates the importance of the Bright Young People and the isolation of Hussey and his circle in the 1930s. But one is left with admiration for a complicated story bril- liantly presented.
. .and this is the teachers' common room.'
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