So sit back and join us as we explore the world of the British Country House with Adrian Tinniswood. Thank you.

It just felt more complete. It's given me a sense of closure, if you like. Now I know where I am with that hundred-year. year period.

Of course.

They change high society, if you like.

So you start to see estates being broken up, even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are also, and this is getting boring and legalistic, so you're going to have to give me a slap, Jonathan, when I drone on about this. But there are also really important legal changes in Britain in the 1870 and 80s. And to cut a very long story short, what it meant was that whereas a house could, an estate could be entailed on the next couple of generations, which means that it didn't belong to them.

They looked after it, but they weren't allowed to sell it. In the 1880s, it became possible to break that entail. And that meant, if you're, you know, if you're going through hard times, you could sell it, sell the house. And a lot of country houses came on the market in the 1880s and 1890. It was a big change.

You know, country life kind of charts the great land sales of the 1890s and early 1900s. Fascinating.

Well, now, you know, the railways enabled that. short visit and the motor car made it even easier. Then you've got things, I mean, obvious things like electricity. You know, in the 1880s, you've got electric, you've got electric, you've got electric light just being kind of experimented with by the early 900's most, not all by a long way, but most big country houses and electric lighting and electric ventilation systems and, and, you know, advances in the kitchen, kitchen technology.

Some didn't. I mean, the more traditional people like the Marquess of Bath at Longleat or the Dukes of Devonshire at one point, the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, they were maybe a bit slow to adopt new technology, but they couldn't ignore it. And I guess that one of the other changes that we traditionally ascribed to the 1920s is that the servant problem starts to bite a little bit. Women, and it's almost exclusively women, are becoming reluctant to go into service and other options are appearing.

for them. Still, in 901, domestic service was the biggest occupational group in England. There were more people in domestic service than in any other job. 1.1 million, I think, is the figure that's usually banded around. And all but about 50,000-oddousand of them were women. Now, one thing we forget, and Downton doesn't really kind of dig deep enough into that. One thing we forget is that domestic service was a transient occupation. Very few women went into it as a career.

What they did, they went into service when they were 14, when they left school. Their average age of marriage is about 25, 26. And that means, and when they marry, certainly before 1900, when they marry, they go out of service. So that means that it's a temporary thing. You know, you go into service. And even within those 12 years or so in service, you might move jobs three, four, five times. Because as the supply of servants goes down and the demand goes up, so servants are able to pick and choose a lot more.

You know, if they don't like a position, they leave. Now, that said, a position in the country house, in a downtown abbey, if you like, is much more desirable. You know, you think you compare, say, being a housemaid at Chatsworth, when you've got, you know, you had at least seven housemaids at Chatsworth, you know, everybody's doing, everybody knows what job they're doing. You know, the lines of demarcation are really clear. Now, you compare that to the life of a 14-year-old skibby in a single servant household, and she's doing all the cooking, she's doing all the cleaning, she's taking the coal up, she's taking the slops down, she's doing every job.

In a country house, servants have their roles defined for them. And they have much more free time. It's much more glamorous. They might get a chance to go abroad or certainly to go to London with the family. So the servant problem starts to bite, but it is slow to hit the country house, I think. Which is not at all the question you asked, and already I've gone off on a tangent. I'm so sorry.

Somebody to do it for them. So in some houses, there are a reluctance. Others, though, are much keener to adopt new technology. Now, the traditional view is that it's the nouveau riche industrialist who adopts new technology because he or she has seen what it will do in their factory, and they think, you know, it's made them rich. And if it does that, in their factory. They're much more enthusiastic to adopt it in their home. In fact, the situation isn't quite that straightforward.

And there are a lot of traditional noble families who were very quick to adopt new technology. I mean, the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield was one example. You know, he had electricity at Hatfield in the early 1880s. He didn't work very well. You know, kind of bulbs were popping right left and center and the occasional workman was electrocuted. But he did, you know, he did, he was quick to install it. I mean, this is a time when the guy is, is lead with the Conservative Party in the House of Lords.

He's a full-time politician. But he seems to find, find time to play with, with electric lighting and gas plants and telephones, all of which are installed at Hatfield very, very early on.

When he then realized that his new daughter-in-law was a musical artist, a burlesque dancer called Belle Bilton, who was on the halls with her sister as Belle and Flo, and Belle Bilton had an illegitimate child, and the father of Belle Bilton's illegitimate child was actually doing six months for fraud in Pentonville jail. Earl Clancarty was not happy. He was really not happy at all. What he did, he packed his son off to Australia, this is 10 days after the wedding, and told him he got to leave his wife behind.

And then he set an army of private detectives on poor old Belle to try and prove to find evidence of her adultery so that his son could sue her. They didn't find the evidence, so they made it up, they fabricated it. Viscount Dunlo is brought back from Australia. There was a huge court case, six days at the law courts and the Strand. It's a massive cause celebrity. And at the end of it, the interesting thing is that Belle was proved innocent.

The judge, the jury and everybody was so disgusted with Earl Clancarty's tactics that they found her innocent. I mean, she may well have been innocent anyway, who's to say. But she was carried on the shoulders of a cheering crowd out of the law courts and down the strand. People stood on top of omnibuses, cheering. Well done, Countess, well done, Viscountess, Dunlo. And the strange thing is, after all this, that Belle and Viscount Dunlo, who had apparently won her in a bet at a race course, that's romantic for you.

He and Belle decided. that they did love each other after all. And Belle became the perfect landed gentlewoman. You know, she went to all the right charity concert. She rode to Hound. She did all the things that respectable British noble women did. There's a fantastic photograph of which I think I put in the book of her at Edward the Seventh's Coronation, 1902, you know, wearing her coronation robes as a countess because her father-in-law, her dreadful father-in-law, her dreadful father-in-law, dead by that time, and her husband and inherited.

So she was now Countess Clancarty. And she becomes what she's expected to be. She actually becomes a landed, gentlewoman, a member of the nobility.

And people didn't kind of badmouth him, but they talked about him being oriental or exotic. And, you know, before the First War, Cosmopolitan was the word that was used. so often, and it was code for Jewish. And there is a sense among some of the more traditional country house owners that big Jewish families like the Rothschild at Waddesdon, for example, you know, that they were ever so slightly vulgar. They were ostentatious. They spread their money around too much.

Now, looking back, we can see what they did. They bought absolutely beautiful things and filled their beautiful houses with those beautiful things. But there's this sense of not being one of us that kicks in. That's less of an issue, I think, with American money. We all know about the bartered brides. And again, we're getting back to Downton again, I think, that, you know, the bartered brides, the, what, 128 or so wealthy American women who married into the British aristocracy in the turn of the 19, 20th century.

What we don't know in quite so much detail is the men who came over. So William Waldorf Astor who was in love with English society and out of love with New York society, moved over. It took British citizenship, I think. And he bought, first he bought Cliveden, you know, the great powerhouse on the Thames outside London. And then he bought Hever Castle, which was the traditional ancestral seat of the Berlin family, and Berlin. And he gloried in its Englishness, in its tradition, in its age.

I mean, he spent, he spent half his time right. the most appalling historical fiction about, well, I mean, I couldn't even recite any of it. It's just, it's so dreadful. But you could tell he just loved the past. And he loved a long lineage past. He loved a past that went back 500, 600, 700 years. And he also did a great deal of good. You know, he restored Hever Castle, which was, you know, half derelict when he bought it in, in, what, 1904, I think?

you've also got, another of my favorites is Isaac Singer. Isaac Singer, I'm talking now about what is currently my favorite country house in the whole world. It changes every day, that one. But at the moment, it's a place called Oldway Mansion. An Oldway Mansion was built by Isaac Singer, who was a New Yorker. He was lucky enough to patent the sewing machine, and that made him very, very rich indeed. he amassed a huge fortune.

He also amassed a huge family. At the last count, we reckon it's about 24 kids. Oh, my God. Various wives and mistresses. And he doesn't seem to quite establish the boundary between wife and mistress, in that he seems, several of the wives overlapped, let's say. He was forced out of New York society because of his goings on and bought this wonderful house and built this wonderful house in Devon in the south-west of England, called Oldway. And, you know, it was, you know, was fated by Devon society.

His son, Paris Singer, and we're actually getting into Brooklyn-Beckham territory. Now, does David Beckham translate, Jonathan? People know who does. Yeah. You know, Brooklyn, Beckham, like Brooklyn, Paris Singer was named after where he was conceived. So he's called Paris Singer because his parents conceived in Paris. Paris singer, lived with his mistress at Oldway, who was the dancer, Isadora Duncan. And she's left some wonderful accounts of life at Oldway, which Paris turned into this vast Versailles.

He bought in French designers, French landscape designers, French architects, and made this fabulous, fabulous house, which is now in a bad way. So it's not in ruins, but it's not good, sadly. But Paris just established a dynasty, if you like, at Oldway. And then he cleared off to Palm Beach and built it, basically. He's responsible. Paris Singer is responsible for turning Palm Beach into the resort it is today. So you've got these amazing character. You've got to stop me, because I'm going to keep going now.

You've got Andrew Carnegie, who's born in Scotland in Dunfermline, but of course goes to America, makes his fortune. what, steel and all sorts of things, comes back to Scotland, buys a run-down place called Skibo Castle in the Highlands, and rebuilds it, basically. Turns it into this massive, massive country house. There's a great story that in 1902, Edward VII paid a visit to Andrew and Louise Carnegie at Skibo. They only got about half an hour's notice of a royal visit.

Total panic. And for some reason, for some reason, Andrew Carnegie received Edward the Seventh in the library at Skibo and proceeded to recite an amazingly anti-British poem by an American poet whose name escapes him for the moment. But it has the line in it, hail to thee, fat Edward. And when Carnegie got to that point, so there's a story goes. He paused and said, that's you, sire. And Edward the Seventh was not impressed. It was left to the Carnegie's five years.

year old daughter, Margaret, to rescue the day. She stomped up to the king with a rose in her hand, shoved it under his nose and said, this is for you. And she was so cute that Edward of the Seven couldn't be angry anymore.

He had pet zebras, which is not a usual thing for the English countryside, I'll tell you. He had a private orchestra. which he conducted himself with a diamond-encrusted baton. He had a troop of performing Japanese dogs. Daisy Warwick, Countess Warwick, remember being at a party there where she said the dogs, that the lead dog performed, but not according to the program is what she said. And she left us to think whatever that means.

And although Elveden, the exterior is quite kind of ordinary, solid, it's Italianate, it's a block, you step inside, and there's a riot of Rajput decoration in there, everything, there's kind of writhing forms and geometrical shapes. It's the most beautiful, beautiful house. And Duleep Singh, it's rather like the Rothschild, in a more obvious way, I suppose, that he's accepted and he's not. You know, everybody wants to go to his parties, but he's not quite one of the world.

of us. That dreadful, dreadful phrase, not quite one of us. Again, at a time when racism is not given a second thought in British society then. You know, he's called the Black Prince. Everyone thinks that's a great joke. Interestingly, his children, several of them anyway, become very English indeed. Prince Victor, his eldest son, marries Lady Anne Coventry. It's the first mixed-race marriage in the British aristocracy, he marries the daughter of the Earl of Coventry at Croome.

Another son becomes an antiquarian, lives in a lovely Tudor country house in Norfolk, devotes his life to antiquarian interest to collecting portraits and memorabilia associated with Charles I. And, you know, he just becomes, ironically, when he died in the 1920s, this is Frederick Duleep Singh. one of his obiturists said he was really an English gentleman. Highest compliment. It's a compliment rather than the description. You're right. Quite right.

Always be careful what you say to the press. But, I mean, his Englishness was indeed, England became a refuge, but it was also an exciting, romantic, glamorous place. And I think that's true for a number of, And, you know, some Americans, they moved over here temporarily, if you like, but they still bought themselves a country house, not the big ones, admittedly, but the ownership of a country house was still tied up irrevocably with society. You know, you could have a townhouse, and most, not only Americans, but most people did have.

Most wealthy people had a home in London. But you needed a country house. You need to be able to entertain there. You needed somewhere to go at the weekend and to invite society and to invite county society to come to you as well. So that ownership of country house confers all sorts of privileges and benefits, not just on American incomers, but on nouveau riche industrialists as well, you know, on everybody.

I mean, Quinn Victoria was anti-Semitic, very clearly anti-Semitic. Edward is very happy to have German friends, Jewish friends, American friends. And if the king does it, it becomes rather difficult for you not to. You know, I mean, for one thing, I'd just, a trivial. example. When Edward the 7th, as Prince, you know, he's Prince of Wales right through to 1901 when Victoria dies, and then he's King till his own death in 1910. But as both Prince and King, he's a great country housegoer.

He's a great house partygoer. He loves to be entertained, usually leaving his wife behind the Queen and taking his mistress with him. And he will tell, he will tell his hosts who he wants, who he wants them to invite. which means, you know, it's no good you're sort of getting on your high horse and saying, oh, we don't want people like that in our house, do we? Because the king has just said you will. And that's enough.

That's all it's needed. So he contributes a great deal towards this de-formalisation. That can't be a real word. But you know what I mean? This relaxation of the old rules. And yes, the old aristocracy will mutter and mumble and will say this isn't quite the thing. And again, but they're not one of us. But they can't do much about it when it comes from the top down.

Who had already married one, had he married one American? He married another one after her. But the idea that American heiresses bought fortunes with them, that they bought into British society, and in return, they brought a fortune to restore the ailing fortunes of British aristocracy. That's not all true, you know. For one thing, a lot of these American heiresses had very astute American fathers with a lot of very astute armies of American lawyers who would tie up their money.

So it wasn't just a case of, you know, that's with Consuelo, you know, a father writing a cheque for two million dollars or whatever and handing it over on the wedding day or, you know, whatever went on. Quite often, American aristocrat, American women, Freudian, if I said American aristocratic women, because, of course, there was an American aristocracy, and, you know, that nobody can go to Newport, Rhode Island, and tell me that there was known an American aristocracy operating.

But wealthy American fathers would tie up the money into trust funds and all kinds of legal things. So the new husband couldn't just blow it on a new roof for his palace. You know, it was more complicated than that.

and he brought in a gifted, an entirely bonkers architect called William Burges to rebuild Cardiff Castle. Now, it's one of the most extravagant and exciting houses I have ever seen. Where else could you walk into a library and see the duck-bill platypus used as a decorative motif? Or there's a staircase at Cardiff Castle. And as you walk out onto the top landing, there's a little, on the banister rail. There's a plaster baby, balanced. This little plaster baby, painted pink, balanced on the rail, about to roll down the banisters.

And on the half-landing, there's a three-foot-long green, smiling crocodile with its jaws open, waiting for that baby to roll down into its mouth. And this is just a piece of whimsy. I mean, it's completely. nuts. And it's one of the most exciting houses I know. It really is. And But Bute was immensely rich. William Burges famously said, I think that money should always be a secondary consideration when it comes to architecture. Now, don't you think every architect in the world has secretly thought that?

But Burges provided for the Marquess of Bute there's fantasy, this sanctuary in which he could just get lost in a in a make-believe world of of Knights of the Round Table, of, you know, Arthurian romance. As if that wasn't enough, Burges also restored another castle outside Cardiff for the Marquess of Bute, Castell Coch, which again is just a complete bit of fan. It's like Disneyland, only good Disneyland. It's wonderful, wonderful. You've then got, of course, arts and crafts houses.

You know, the arts and crafts movement being at its peak in the 1890s, 1900s. Those lovely kind of timber-framed, soft, lyrical houses. Richard Norman Shaw, who built Cragside for the armaments manufacturer William Armstrong up in the north of England. Richard Norman Shaw was great. He was a very, he was a very swift lad that the story always was that whenever he went to a house party or went out to a society dinner, he always used to make sure he had extra long cuffs on his dress shirts.

So if he found himself sitting next to a likely client to one of his country houses. He could skim out those cuffs and start sketching out a design of the country house. And by the time dessert was served, it had made, it had sold a new country house to his neighbour. But he, I mean, he built Cragside, William Armstrong. And Cragside is, you know, it's not a scholarly reconstruction of a medieval house or a 16th or a 17th century house.

But it has elements of all of those things. So there's half-timbering, there's tall Tudor chimney-stacks, there's Georgian bay windows. And what Cragside does, it just conjures up a really soft, rather wonderful image of the past. It's a romantic image. Philip Webb did that as well. Philip Webb did that at houses like Standen, outside London, which was built for a solicitor called Jonathan Beale and his family. And it's a lovely house. It's got weather-boarding and... brick and stone.

It's kind of like an organic. It's as if it's just grown over the centuries. And it actually grew over a period of about six years. But Webb said famously, Webb's the most wonderful architect. He didn't design very much because he insisted on being personally responsible on supervising all his projects. He famously said he was never satisfied until his buildings look commonplace, which is lovely. Never mind the grandeur. Never mind the kind of the ostentation. Just let's have it looking nice.

Lovely.

And of course, that added to the sense of crisis. By the 1950s, those death duties and other estate taxes amount to 80% of the value. So you couldn't, you know, if you died, your house died too. And that, you know, that certainly added. to that, that certainly contributed to that sense of, of impending doom, if you like. But also, I think, by the 90s, a country house wasn't as much of a necessary adjunct as it had been in the 1870s and 1880s.

You know, you start to see aristocrats who don't have country houses. It's not that many, but you start to see some. And they live in towns. Or they rent a country house. They might rent a house for the hunting season in Northamptonshire, in the English Midlands. famous fox hunting territory. They might just rent a house for a month or two, but they won't have an ancestral seat in the country. Things shift. Things are changing. The other thing, when we've touched on it already, I think, is the shortage of servants.

You know, if you've got a country house which is built to be run by 20, 30 indoor servants, and you can only get two women to come in from the village to clean every day, you know, one to cook. It makes it very difficult.

But that's us. You know, at the time, people were just living. through things. They didn't think that, you know, things were changing that much. Aristocrats would happily, you know, some would look down their noses at new money. Others would marry it. You know, we're quite happy with it. Change came, but it came very slowly, I think. When you're in it, it's really difficult to see those changes. It's only afterwards, as we look, you know, from our 100-year-on vantage point, but we can tell how things, you know, how the country house was hovering on the edge of disaster even in 1914.

We look at the changing class structures, the way that new money is introducing, is bringing new blood into the country house world. But we're doing that. They didn't really know that. One or two did, but they didn't really sort of appreciate change. It was just sort of, it was life.

And, you know, sure, Jonathan Beale probably paid for it. However, Margaret Beale was the tastemaker, his wife, you know, no one's going to tell me that Mrs. Beale just sat there, well, Jonathan chose the drapes and the carpets. You know, the role of the women, of a woman, the sort of Chattelaine, in creating a congenial environment in the country house is something that we, quite often, there's very little documentation. It's something we don't explore enough. and certainly the role of the noble woman in traditional areas, like dispensing charity, you know, the Countess of Leicester at Holkham in Norfolk, she did all kinds of fundraising for the local village reading room.

You know, she organised charity concerts and this sort of thing. Their role has been underappreciated, I think. We think because the man paid for it, the man, the man was making those decisions. And quite often, he wasn't. He was just paying for.

You know, I mean, by its nature, country house society was quite conservative at the small sea. You know, it was quite reactionary. And you get these people coming, you know, and yes, we think, oh, they wanted to fit in. Well, quite, you know, sometimes they didn't want to fit in. They were the ones who made, who made people change. They didn't change to conform. They stayed as they were and left the rest of society to kind of meet them halfway.

So that diversity, I think, is really exciting and it's really different. It's not what we think of when we think of the golden age of the country house.

And there's some wonderfully crazy stuff in Regency England, not least, of course, the Prince Regent, who is the most appalling man, but has fantastic taste.

Thank you again, Adrian, and see you next time.