With the news that there’s going to be a Downton Abbey MOVIE in the works, with most of the original cast teaming up all over again to make a big splash on the big screen (and just in time too. I mean, Maggie Smith ain’t gettin’ any younger, here…), I’m sure that a lot of period drama buffs will be dusting off their DVD collections or hard-drives which contain the episodes of ‘Downton Abbey’, and will sitting back to enjoy all that high-class British drama once again, to bone up on everything that’d happened in the series from the pilot episode in April 15th, 1912.
Downton Abbey has singlehandedly been attributed to a rise in interest in things like classic formal attire, household servants, early 20th century history – and that most high-class of all high-class things: owning a grand country estate and a huge manor house which is centuries old! Indeed, the whole thing of ‘grand country house living’ has always been something that people have been fascinated about for decades, probably because it’s where all the major action happens in all those old love-stories, drama series, and of course, who could forget the classic ‘country house mystery’ genre (“It was Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with the candlestick!”).
In this posting, I’ll be looking at the country house way of life. Where it came from, what it was like, how it survived, and finally – what happened to make that way of life disappear almost entirely from the face of the earth in the space of a few short years. So, let’s begin…
Ham House, near London, dates back to the 1610, and is among the earliest examples of what we would call a ‘grand country house’ today.
All around the world, throughout history, one of the biggest status symbols that there has ever been, is the grand country house estate. They existed in Canada, America, all throughout Europe, in Asia, and even as far away as Australia.
But when most people think of grand country house estates, they almost invariably imagine the great estates and grand houses built in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. When people picture the pinnacle of high-fashion, high-class, ultra-rich living, a grand country estate is almost always one of the prerequisites to such a lifestyle and way of life.
That said, most people – even most rich people – don’t live this way anymore. Why not? How and where did this style of living come from, how did it sustain itself, how did it survive, and finally – how did it finally collapse, to become a forgotten, romanticised remnant of history, something to be elegantly recreated in TV dramas and movies such as Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey, The Secret Garden, Gosford Park and the stories of Jane Austen?
Before Grand Houses – Castles and Manors
The first grand houses were not really houses as we know them today. They were castles! Castles as we imagine them today originated in France in the early Middle Ages. Originally made of wood and earthworks, large, elaborate castles, built of stone and with impressive defenses like earthworks, moats, ditches, drawbridges, gatehouses, corbels, jetties, battlements and crenelations started being built in the 1000s, 1100s and 1200s. One such example is the Tower of London.
Castles were not just houses, though. They served multiple purposes. They could be houses, sure. But they were also usually centers of government, storehouses, military barracks, vaults, prisons and much more besides. Nevertheless, they were the original ‘grand country houses’.
By the 1500s and 1600s, with the rise of cannons, muskets and pistols, and the decline of traditional European feudalism, the castles of old started changing, too. They became less imposing and more like military fortresses and strongholds, rather than large, multipurpose structures. Now, castles existed purely for defense, and any thoughts to turning the structure into a home were generally considered secondary (think of Walmer Castle, once home to the Duke of Wellington himself!).
It was at this point that the ‘castle’ started splitting apart into three distinct entities: The palace, the fortress, and the manor house.
The Fortress
All castles are fortresses. Not all fortresses are castles. That’s what a fortress is in a nutshell – a fortified or strengthened structure designed as a military barracks and stronghold – from the Latin word ‘Fortis’ – meaning ‘strength’.
That said, some fortresses were still called ‘castles’, likely out of habit. Castles built in the 1500s by rulers such as Henry VIII were still called ‘castles’ even though they bore very little resemblance in design or appearance to castles of the Middle Ages. 16th century ‘castles’ were lower, more angular and were designed to house musketeers and heavy artillery, not archers, crossbowmen, knights and men-at-arms.
The Palace
As society stabilised, the need to house the country’s ruler in a fortified castle or stronghold lessened. This gave rise to another structure – still grand and imposing, but designed more as a statement of wealth, power and opulence, rather than as one of protection and military might – the palace! Structures like Hampton Court Palace, Whitehall Palace, the Palace of Westminster, the Palace of Versailles, the Winter Palace and Summer Palace, and the Palace of the Forbidden City reflect this. They’re grand and protected, but are built more as showpieces rather than as military strongholds.
The Manor House
Last but not least comes the manor house.
As the need for castles disappeared, the first ‘great houses’ built by the nobility or the military aristocracy started to appear. These were called ‘manor houses’. They were built more as homes rather than as military fortresses or castles, and were designed chiefly – like with palaces – for comfort and good living. Yes, some still had a nod to their militaristic pasts, such as moats, battlements, bridged entryways and gatehouses – but these were now seen more as anachronistic design-features, meant to make the building look more impressive and flashy, rather than actually serving any real defensive functions. The battlements built on the tops of 16th and 17th century manor-houses were small and thin – not designed as shield for defending soldiers, as battlements on castles centuries before, had been.
The Rise of the Manor House
As fears of endemic warfare died away in the 17th and early 18th centuries, the aristocracy started producing grander and grander country houses. With no wars to blow money on, the wealthy started blowing money on flashy homes instead. Homes with features like huge, double-hung sash windows with lots of glass, features like huge doors, high ceilings, a fireplace in every room, elaborate kitchens to produce gargantuan feasts, ballrooms, living rooms, music rooms, lounges, bedroom suites and enfilades.
Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. Built in the 1590s, it represents a new type of grand house that was being built at the time, very different from the castles of the Middle Ages. Meant for comfort and good living, rather than defense and security, it earned the nickname ‘Hardwick Hall, more Glass than Wall’, due to its gigantic windows.
An enfilade, by the way, is a long series of rooms one after the other that stretches from one end of the house to the other. In later times, these would slowly be closed off, and the leftover corridor became known as a Long Gallery, or just a ‘gallery’. With so much wall-space, people would hang their pictures, sketches, portraits and paintings there. This is why we view art in a ‘gallery’ to this day.
The North Enfilade at Blenheim Palace.
Along with the gallery and everything else came the inclusion of a chamber for private parties where people could withdraw and be alone with each other. Today, we call them ‘drawing rooms’.
It was during this time that bedrooms and bedroom suites started becoming a thing. Instead of sharing rooms (or even sharing BEDS, which was very common in those days!), you now had your own bedrooms! And if you were really wealthy, then your room would also have a ‘closet’.
The ‘closet’ was a small chamber next to your bedroom. It served a function similar to a study or sitting-room, and a private space to do personal things like pray, write, read or relax. Since only one’s most intimate and personal activities and deepest emotions and feelings were expressed within a closet, it became associated with secrecy and personal thoughts and feelings. That’s why we call someone who has revealed their sexuality – something extremely personal – to the world – ‘coming out of the closet’.
Inside a Manor House
Along with bedrooms, a gallery, dining room, kitchen and large reception rooms, early manor houses had a few rooms which we don’t have today, or whose functions have changed significantly.
One such room is the pantry. Yes, in times past, a pantry was an actual room, not just a cupboard full of instant noodles, coffee and tea. The pantry was the room where all things associated with baking bread were stored, including mixing-bowls, kneading-boards, dough-troughs, forms, molds and other baking implements, along with baked goods themselves, which were stored there to keep them cool and dry and away from moisture which would cause mold.
On top of that came a room which has disappeared entirely – the still room.
The still room was the chamber where you distilled (hence the name) essentials oils, drinks, alcoholic beverages and medicines. At a time when country houses had to be much more self-sufficient than they are today, a chamber for making your own drinks, medicines and alcoholic beverages was important. As it became more and more possible to buy these things rather than make them, by the start of the Victorian era, still rooms had disappeared, incorporated into kitchens in older houses, and being left out completely in newer ones.
Another room which used to exist in old houses was something called a ‘buttery’.
No, the buttery was not where you stored butter and cream and jam (delicious as they are…) – no. A buttery was where you stored…butts!
Okay, stop giggling.
Butts are kegs…barrels…casks!
Casks of beer, casks of wine, kegs of rum and so on. Basically, it’s where you put drinks. Now obviously drinks have to be kept cool, so the buttery was almost always a basement room, usually under the kitchen. The person who was in charge of looking after the buttery was the…butler, and originally, the man’s job was to maintain and serve the household stocks of beverages. In time, the butler took on more and more responsibilities until by the 1700s and 1800s, he had become the chief of ‘below-stairs’ life, organising and rostering all the other servants.
The Heyday of the Country House (1500s – 1700s)
The country house as we know it, or even as we imagine it, started being a thing as early as the 1500s. From then to now, it went through many changes and morphed in and out of different forms. First they were fortified manors, then graceful mansions, then sprawling estates!
Where, you might ask, did they get the money to build these houses?
Make no mistake, a country house was expensive to build, and even more expensive to maintain (but more about that, later).
Highclere Castle, the setting for the hit period TV series, ‘Downton Abbey’. Highclere has featured in many TV shows over the years, including numerous episodes of the 1990s ‘Jeeves & Wooster’ series, and at least one episode of ‘Miss Marple’.
Many of the people who owned country houses also owned vast, vast, VAST tracts of land, usually passed down father-to-son, father-to-son for countless generations dating all the way back to the Middle Ages. Charging rent on this land for farmers who wished to use it to grow crops, raise livestock, or otherwise make a living there, was the chief form of income for landed aristocracy.
The same applied for anything else – any watermills, flour-mills, brick or tile kilns, any ovens or bakeries, and any villages and taverns or inns built on the extensive lands owned by the local landlord all had to pay rent or taxes to the lord of the manor. So long as he was smart, the lord of the manor could live off this income more than just a little comfortably, without ever having to lift a finger…except to coin his money, perhaps. This is where the whole thing about the ‘idle rich’ and the idea that aristocracy didn’t have to work for their money, came in. This is touched on in “Downton Abbey” where Miss O’Brian says that “gentlemen don’t work, not real gentlemen!“.
This system lasted for years, decades, centuries! Passed down father to son over and over again. In this way, landed families could amass GIGANTIC fortunes, and since most of this money wasn’t taxed – they could do whatever they liked with it – and most of them blew their fortunes on building bigger, grander, more opulent houses, amassing huge collections of silverware, antiques, furniture, paintings and foreign curiosities. If the lord of the manor had a day-job (like being a government minister, army officer, or a naval captain of skill and fame), then they could swell their coffers even MORE by earning a salary, or winning prize-money during battles.
Laws favourable to the aristocracy keep them in power, and in money and for centuries, they held a near monopoly on much of the land, enabling them to milk it for all it was worth.
Keeping it in the Family
One reason why the aristocracy held onto their homes for so long and were able to maintain these lavish lifestyles for generations was because of the peculiarities of English law, which stipulated that (unless stated otherwise), country house estates and their contents always passed from the master of the house to his eldest son and heir (or the second-eldest, if the first had died and left no heirs of his own).
This was all maintained due to one of the key plot-elements that ran through the core of award-winning TV series “Downton Abbey“. As Maggie Smith put it, “The entail must be smashed!“.
OK. Point taken.
What the hell is an entail?
In its simplest terms, an entail was a legal device which regulated the laws of inheritance in Britain. An entail was a form of trust (whereby one party – say a parent – sets something aside – say, the house and estate – in the hands of a second party – say, a lawyer – to give to a third party at a particular time – say, the heir to the estate, when that parent dies).
Basically, the entail stipulated that houses HAD to be passed down, father to son, father to son, generation after generation. Or if not father to son, then at least homeowner to his closest living male descendant (be he a cousin, a nephew, or a brother, and so-on).
Passing land and property down like this through the generations is how you end up with these massive country houses filled with all kinds of expensive treasures – because the properties were never ALLOWED to be sold or gifted to anyone outside the family – it was basically illegal to do so. In Downton Abbey, as Lady Mary isn’t a man, she can’t inherit the house and estate or the money that goes with it, which leads to all sorts of complications, which drives the series along.
The Country House Enters the Modern Era (1700-1900)
The 1700s and early 1800s was the era of the great expansion of country houses. This is when aristocracy built grand houses and expanded on even grander ones. Money was flowing in from trade and commerce and rent and taxes, and they were all living the good life. But something happened in the 1700s that started to force a change.
The Industrial Revolution.
Prior to the 1700s, most people lived in small towns or villages, or out in the country. Most people were farmers or artisans or tradesmen. The pace of life had barely changed in centuries because there was nothing to change it, and nothing around to make it worth bothering to change. But when the first steam-engines, canals, and later, train-lines started being developed, life would never be the same again. Suddenly, it was possible to work faster, produce more, earn more, do more with what you had! And this had a huge impact on the country house way of living.
A great example of a grand country manor built without any regard for expenses is Manderston House in Scotland. Constructed at the start of the 20th century, when architect John Kinross asked the owner (Sir James P. Miller, 2nd Bt. Manderston) what the construction-budget would be, he was simply told that “It doesn’t matter”, and to just get on with building it.
With the rise of factories and warehouses, better wages and a more reliable income than could be had from farming or rearing livestock, peasantry, tenant farmers and villagers in the countryside fled from their jobs that they’d had for centuries, and moved to cities like London, New York, Paris, and Berlin, to work in better jobs with better pay and better conditions and more job-security.
Suddenly, there weren’t so many people working the land anymore.
Fewer people working the land meant fewer people that the local landlord could tax.
This meant that for the first time in centuries, the cornerstone of aristocratic wealth – control of the land, and taxing the people who lived on it – was starting to crumble. At the same time, a new landed gentry started to rise up to challenge the old aristocracy. They had no titles, no fancy lineages going back to the Middle Ages, no flashy family names or noble birth – but the one thing they did have was MONEY.
And LOTS OF IT. These were the industrialists. Factory-owners, mill-owners, railway entrepreneurs, shipping magnates, import-export moguls, bankers, manufacturers and wheeler-dealers. And they wanted a taste of what previously had been the preserve of the aristocracy – a big flashy house out in the country, away from the smog and dust and soot of the big cities. And so, they started building.
And building.
AND BUILDING.
The 1700s and 1800s saw dozens of country houses being raised from the ground upwards in Canada, America, Europe, Britain and Australia. If the way to show you’d arrived at the top echelons of society was to have a flashy house surrounded by fields, then the nouveau riche of the industrial age were going to make damn sure that they would have the biggest and flashiest houses possible, and some even started competing against each other to see who could have the biggest, grandest, most outlandish homesteads, much like how the ultra-rich now compete for yachts, jets and cars – 300 years ago, they competed with gardens, dining halls, gilded entryways and grand ballrooms for those swanky, all-night parties.
The Rise of Industry
As industry started to rise and rise, and the new industrialised landed gentry started buying up land and building grand houses on them, the old aristocracy started to crumble. By the 1830s and 40s, steamships had become a thing. Now, it was possible to buy a ticket, get on a train and head to the docks, get on a ship and sail safely across the Atlantic to the New World – all in a couple of weeks – whereas it would’ve taken MONTHS to do this by horse and cart, and in a sailing ship! Since people could now move, and could now seek newer and better opportunities, they were no longer tied to the land. As travel and trade rose, the grip of the old country house owners started to crumble.
One huge blow was dealt in the 1800s in the massive farming slump that happened across Britain and Europe. America, with its huge tracts of land, railway systems and steamships, could grow, harvest, and import grain, flour, wheat, barley and other foodstuffs to Europe much faster and more efficiently than the Europeans could produce them on their own. As a result, farming in Europe (and especially in Britain) started to crumble – and in England, the bottom basically fell out of the agricultural market. Wheat prices in Britain disintegrated and farmers fled their farms, or else moved to livestock instead of crops.
And what did the aristocracy rely on for their money? Rent from farmers. If there weren’t any farmers, there wasn’t any rent. If there was no rent to collect, there was no money coming in! And this had a massive impact on country house living.
Maintaining a Country House Estate
Country houses are huge structures. Dozens of bedrooms, loads of reception rooms, servants quarters, laundries, kitchens, cellars, basements, guestrooms, stables, carriage-houses…remember that they used to have to be self-sufficient, so they had to have everything they needed to support themselves. This meant that they were HUGE. And in the 1700s when the money was flowing – noblemen and noblewomen built bigger and bigger houses, expanding and expanding, renovating and rebuilding over and over again.
This is fine – great, even – when you have a steady income coming in from the land that you can charge rent on, but what happens when that disappears?
The problem was that these country houses were massive money-pits. It took thousands of pounds to run them every single year. Cleaning, heating, water, food, drinks…and that doesn’t include maintenance – water-pipes, flooring, roofing, sweeping the chimneys, repairing the windows, fixing the gutters, repairing the masonry and upkeeping the gardens.
And we haven’t even begun to look at the wages for the indoor servants, which in some houses could number up in the dozens of people! This was made even MORE complicated by the fact that, from the 1700s to the 1850s, Britain actually had a servant tax.
Yes, that’s right. A SERVANT TAX.
To be specific – a tax on male servants.
See, men are really useful – they can serve as stable-boys, footmen, coachmen, gardeners, butlers, valets, hallboys…but the problem is – they can also serve as soldiers, sailors and military officers. In time of war, (such as during the American Revolution in the 1770s, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Conquests of the 1790s and 1810s, and the European conflicts such as the Crimean War in the 1850s), the country needed soldiers and sailors. And if they were busy serving you, instead of fighting for king and country, then you, as the householder, were expected to recompense the government for their loss in manpower – by paying a tax on every single male servant that you had in your employ!
Add that to the costs of heating, lighting, water, food, drink, wages, maintenance…see how expensive this is?
And that’s provided that you’re not also trying to keep up with the Joneses by trying to live like a billionaire every day of your life! By the second half of the 1800s, British aristocrats were struggling to maintain their lifestyles. Rising costs, falling income and the fact that their houses were gigantic caused a lot of them to just give up!
Many were now cursing their ancestors for blowing millions of pounds on big flashy extensions and expansions, which were now far too expensive to maintain properly. Some aristocrats maintained more than one house – most of them maintained at least two! A country house (the big flashy one) and the townhouse – a smaller, more modest, usually terraced Georgian or Victorian house, often situated in London, which was the family’s base of operations during the London social season in the summer months. As country houses grew more and more expensive to look after, most families abandoned them and just upped sticks and moved into their townhouses fulltime instead.
The Dollar Princesses
The European and British industrialist classes didn’t have to worry about money. They’d built their fortunes from the ground up and had lots of money flowing in from factories and mills, shipping lines, railroad companies and mercantile ventures. As such, they could afford to fuel their luxurious country house lifestyles much more easily than the old aristocracy. Too proud, or unable to work for a living, the aristocracy struggled on, running their houses on dwindling inheritances, and shrinking income from their estates due to the sharp decline in farming. But just as it all seemed lost, salvation was at hand, from, as Churchill would later put it, “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old“.
For the British aristocracy, liberation from their growing financial nightmares came in the form of the ‘dollar princesses’.
The term ‘dollar princess’ comes from the late Victorian era. It referred to young American or Canadian heiresses of marriageable age who came from the social elite and the upper professional classes of North American society. The daughters of families like the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers and the Morgans – the big, old-money robber-baron clans who had amassed gigantic fortunes in the 1830s to the early 1900s.
In most cases, rich American fathers wanted their daughters to marry into respectable, high-society families. Naturally, you don’t get much more high-society than British nobility, and so wealthy American fathers and mothers started looking across the Atlantic for potential marriage-partners for their little baby girls. At the same time in England, impoverished English noble heirs (remember that houses and estates ALWAYS passed down the MALE line of inheritance) were looking for potential wives who would be loaded with cash in order to dig them out of their present financial disasters.
To kill two birds with one stone, the logical thing to do was for American heiresses to marry English heirs. And they did. In their droves! The heir to the Vanderbilt fortune married the Duke of Marlborough and a Brooklynite named Jennie Jerome married a certain Lord Randolph Churchill.
Yes. THAT Churchill.
If not for the dollar princesses, Winston Churchill would have never been born.
Working in a Country House
One of the reasons why English country houses were so expensive to run was simply down to the sheer amount of manpower required merely to keep it operating on a daily basis. Country houses were enormous structures and without modern technology, it took a small army of servants, inside and outside, just to keep them functioning smoothly, never mind what happened during big events like holidays, family birthdays, wedding anniversaries and Christmas!
The servants on Downton Abbey.
A typical household could have up to a dozen or more staff including the butler, housekeeper, chef or cook, at least one kitchen-maid, at least two or three housemaids, at least two or more footmen, scullions or scullery maids and hall-boys who did double- or even triple-duty as boot-boys and pantry-boys (basically hall-boys did all the heavy manual labour below stairs). On top of that you have valets, ladies maids, and if there are young children – governesses or nannies all on top of that.
“You rang, m’lady?” – Many 18th, 19th, and early 20th century grand manor houses (and even many townhouses built in the same era) were equipped with extensive service-bell systems, comprised of wires or cables, pulleys, levers, pivots and springs, which attached a bell at one end in the servants’ hall to a specific room in the house. The wires and pulleys ran up the walls and along the ceilings (usually behind the walls and ceilings) and in and out of rooms, up and down stairs. Usually the bells were all grouped together on a ‘bell-board’ where each bell was tagged to the room it served. It’s the earliest form of ‘intercom’ found in households. In the early 1900s, some of the old cable-and-pulley networks were replaced by new electric bells, but in some houses which couldn’t be bothered (or couldn’t afford) to replace the old systems, the traditional cable-and-pulley system remained in operation still.
And that’s just the inside staff! Tack on a coachman or chauffeur, stable-boys, and gardeners and you’re looking at a staff upwards of 15 or 20 people at least, to serve a family consisting of maybe – six or eight members. By the early 20th century, as an industry, domestic service (or being ‘in service’, as it was called) was THE largest single employer in Britain.
The Country House in the 20th Century
By the early 1900s, the country house was just about ticking over. Money from dollar princesses, wiser investments and careful money management had just about staved off the wrecking ball, but not for everyone.
Remember how I said that in the 1600s and 1700s and early 1800s, country houses were being built bigger and grander and more luxurious every passing week?
By the 1880s and 1900s, such grandeur was considered excessive…and expensive! It was during this time that some grand country houses started being demolished! Families either moved into a smaller villa on the estate, or just gave up country living altogether, and moved to London to their townhouse in Belgravia or Mayfair.
Nevertheless, country house living was still a thing in the early 20th century. With money to burn, some houses were modernised. Plumbed bathrooms with hot water were installed, electrical wiring was set into the walls, gas fittings and oil-lamps were replaced by switches, wall-sconces and pendant lights. In some houses, even telephones were installed. Coachmen, stable-boys and the park drag coach soon got the boot, to be replaced by a chauffeur, mechanic, and the new Rolls Royce open touring-car.
1910s Rolls Royce Silver Ghost Touring Car. One of the most sought-after automobiles of the early 20th century.
The early 1900s was rapidly becoming the end of an era, though. As noted historian Ruth Goodman said, the Edwardian era was “the last great blast of country house living“.
The country house lifestyle was living on borrowed time by the Edwardian era. Rising taxation and then the Great War in 1914, kicked it in the knees and it was now starting to stumble. Servants left to find better and more stable work in shops, offices, factories, on the railroads and other industries. Domestic service was becoming much less appealing as a career by the 1900s.
Part of the problem was the extremely – EXTREMELY long work-hours; 16-18 hour workdays almost every day of the week were normal for most servants, and time off was very, very limited. On top of that, wages just could not compare with what someone might earn working in an office, a shop, running their own business etc, where there was more flexibility in hours and time off. When the war came, thousands of male servants chucked it in, rushed off to enlist, and, whether they survived the war or not, most never came back!
The kitchen at The Breakers, one of the many grand Belle Epoque mansions constructed for, and lived in by, the stupendously wealthy Vanderbilt family. Here, meals for the entire household – upstairs, for the family, and downstairs, for the servants, would’ve been produced, at least three times a day, every day of the year.
The interwar boom known as the Roaring Twenties kept the country house chugging along for another decade or so, but the writing was on the wall. High taxation after the war, and a significant reduction in the manpower required to run a country house estate – even with modern conveniences – meant that they were getting more and more expensive to operate, and as Lady Grantham’s mother said, “These houses were built for another age“. And she wasn’t kidding!
Rear view of ‘The Breakers’, the Vanderbilt family’s mansion at Newport, in Rhode Island, now owned by the Preservation Society of Newport County.
The Crash of 1929 hit a lot of country house owners hard. With heirs lost in the Great War, and now family fortunes on the line (once again) because of the coming of the Great Depression, it was just getting harder, and harder, and harder to enjoy – let alone maintain – the country house lifestyle. It was during this time that many country house owners sold up, packed up, and moved out. Houses were demolished, turned into schools, office-buildings, hospitals and hotels. But worse was yet to come.
The End of the Country House Lifestyle
The final nail in the coffin for the country house lifestyle was the Second World War. Rationing, bombing, evacuations, lack of funds, lack of manpower, and rising taxation after the war meant that the country house way of living was just impossible to maintain, or continue.
By the 1930s and 40s, and certainly by the 1950s, the whole idea of living in a grand country house, waited on by an army of servants – was rapidly being seen as increasingly outdated and old-fashioned. People just didn’t live like that anymore, didn’t work like that anymore! As the years clocked by, country house living was seen as some sort of relic, a grand remembrance from the lavish excesses of the Victorian age, but in no way applicable to people living modern lives in the postwar period.
Demolished almost in its entirety, the palatial Trentham Hall was one of the first grand English country houses to be pulled down, in the early 1900s. This painting dates to 1880, when the house was already in decline.
Finding domestic servants to run the houses was almost impossible now, and unless you were stinking rich – and could remain stinking rich for the rest of your life, come what may, paying servants was getting harder and harder and harder.
The plight of many old English country houses was summed up in the famous Noel Coward song “The Stately Homes of England“. Although meant to be comical, the song graphically outlines just how desperate some country house owners were to do anything to keep their old family estates together, including selling off absolutely anything “with assistance from the Jews, we’ve been able to dispose of rows, and rows, and rows of Gainsboroughs, and Lawrences, some sporting prints of Aunt Florence’s, some of which, were rather rude!” and that “although the Van Dykes have to go, and we’ve pawned the Bechstein grand, we’ll stand by the stately homes of England!”
It was during the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s that a lot of the grandest country houses were consigned to history. Demolished, repurposed, sold off, or simply abandoned, it was up to national historic trusts, social history groups and historical preservation societies to step up to the plate.
In England, the National Trust, in Australia, the National Trust of Australia, and in America, entities such as the Rhode Island Historical Society, and the National Register of Historic Places all rushed to snatch up, preserve and protect grand country houses. In England, Scotland and Wales, surviving country houses are mostly looked after by the National Trust (usually gifted to the Trust by families who no longer wished to live there). In America, the Rhode Island Historical Society protects and preserves the grand villas or ‘cottages’ (as they were euphemistically called, so as not to be seen as being too ostentatious…) which the wealthy of the Gilded Age and the Belle Epoque built on the island’s coastline.
The Country House Lifestyle Today
Although the upstairs-downstairs, masters-and-servants lifestyle of yesteryear is now little more than a distant memory, what is life like inside grand country houses today? Do any of them still exist anymore?
Actually, yes they do! A number of grand country houses (both in the UK and abroad) are still lived in and operated as private homes (some even by their original families), today. However, as was the case a hundred-over years ago, living in an old, grand country house is still a major hassle. It was a hassle 100 years ago when these houses were 100, 200 years old…now it’s even MORE of a hassle when some of them can be 300, 400 years old! The biggest hassle by far, is just the sheer upkeep required. Guttering, roofing, windows, heating, plumbing…trying to get effective rewiring done on a gigantic house is hard enough – imagine how much harder it is when it was built 300 years ago!
As an example – Buckingham Palace recently underwent rewiring, and miles and miles and MILES of antique gutta-percha and cloth electrical cords were stripped out, to be replaced by safer, and more reliable modern cabling and wiring. Imagine how much that costs – and that’s for a building that’s in regular use with regular maintenance…
Living in a Grand Country House Today
Living in a grand country house today comes with many, many challenges. Chief among these is just the sheer upkeep required to keep the house standing. Remember that many of these places are now centuries old and require constant maintenance. Gutters, roofing, heating, plumbing, electronics, gas supplies…another burden is taxation, and at some times, even the limitations placed on what can be done to the house under local historical preservation laws.
But that aside, do people still live in grand country houses?
“Althorp”, the country manor which is the traditional home of the Spencer Family. Princess Diana lived here before her marriage. It remains in the Spencer family to this day.
Amazingly – yes, some do. The Spencer family (famous members include Princess Diana and Winston Churchill) still live at Althorp, their country seat, and Princess Diana grew up and lived there before her famous marriage to Prince Charles. Another famous country house which is still inhabited by the original family is Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. In the 1800s and early 1900s, Chatsworth was a very popular hangout for British aristocracy, and even British royalty – King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria, was a frequent guest there.
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, built in the early 1500s.
Chatsworth House is the country seat of the family which holds the title of the Dukes of Devonshire. Since the mid-1500s, that’s been the Cavendish family…and they’ve lived there ever since, including during a particularly scary year of English history – 1665.
For those not up on their English history, 1665 was the year of the Great Plague of London. During this time, the plague spread (through contaminated cloth) to the village of Eyam (“Eem“), just a few miles from Chatsworth. Within a couple of weeks, the entire village was infested with the plague and to prevent a nationwide pandemic, the village leaders ordered that everybody in the village had to adhere to a strict quarantine. Nobody in, nobody out, until the disease had run its course, and the quarantine could be lifted.
Of course, the villagers could not do this alone. The Earl of Devonshire (as the head of the Cavendish family was, at the time), as the local landowner, felt sympathy for the villagers and agreed to provide whatever assistance he could offer. In exchange for silver coins washed in vinegar, he would send deliveries of food, drink and medicine to the village common at regular intervals (but always at night), in order to give the infected villagers the bare necessities to keep going.
Eyam is now famous as the plague village, because despite the ravages of the Black Death, a disease so infectious that even today, it is only studied under STRICT controls – a surprisingly large number of villagers survived, and it was the Earl of Devonshire, operating from nearby Chatsworth House, which aided in this miracle.
That particular earl (William Cavendish), was later promoted to the Duke of Devonshire (the title they hold today) by King William III (of ‘William & Mary’ fame) in 1694, for his assistance in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw the much-hated Stuart, King James II, kicked off the English throne, to be taken by William of Orange and his wife, Queen Mary.
Anyway…enough of 17th century English history, the black death, and the Glorious Revolution. We digress…
Biltmore Estate (photographed here in 1900) is the largest privately owned home in the entire United States. It still stands today and it’s still owned by the Vanderbilt Family.
In a word – yes, there are still grand country manors (both in England and elsewhere, such as Australia, France, Germany, America and Canada, to name a few) which are still lived in by families and run as private homes. In some cases, they’re even still lived in by the ORIGINAL families which built the house when it was new (although this is very rare). But that said, most grand country houses now survive as a mix of half-house, half-business. In order to fund the maintenance and restoration of the house, most families which still live in them usually also operate them as businesses – either renting out spaces for parties, weddings, anniversaries, receptions, or as filming locations for period dramas and movies (as mentioned previously, Highclere Castle has fulfilled this role many, many times – check Wikipedia for a full list of the castle’s film credits, which are quite extensive).
Will grand country-house living ever return?
Honestly? I doubt it. While it’s very elegant and refined and reeks of upper-class sophistication, the fact of the matter is that it’s a lifestyle that is extremely hard on the wallet. Unless you’re a billionaire who’s making millions every day, and can afford to keep a full-time army of, live-in domestic staff to run the house, then honestly…no.
That’s not to say that some people don’t do it, as seen above, there are some houses which are still used in this way, but they’re very much the minority. Most people – even most people with the money to do it – would generally prefer not to, just because of the expense, but also because most people just don’t live their lives that way anymore, even if they did have the money to not only maintain it, but also enjoy it. The days of upstairs and downstairs, servants bells, footmen and butlers, of servants halls and bringing the car round to the front of the house after an evening’s entertainment.
Today, it’s a lifestyle and a way of life that exists in novels and movies, TV shows and historical romances. As the movie says…
“…Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream to be remembered. A civilization gone with the wind“.
