Idling with the rich

In The Long Weekend: Life in the English country house between the wars (2016), Adrian Tinniswood recounts with gossipy glee the lives of the rich and idle in English country houses between the wars. It was followed by Noble Ambitions: The fall and rise of the post-war country house (2021), which takes the story forward to Swinging London’s entanglements with the aristocracy. A prequel, The Power and the Glory: The country house before the Great War, now aims to repeat the formula for a golden era when unparalleled riches met the latest fads such as the motor-car, electric lights and telephones, as well as flushing toilets. Owners were new-fangled too; landed gentry joined by industrialists and various other supposed counter-jumpers, Jews, Yanks and deposed maharajas. They tore down and gussied up, spending extravagantly on mansion must-haves.

Tinniswood covers hundreds of fascinating houses from the famous to the under-sung that we really should know about – testimony both to the depth of the nation’s country house legacy and his reach. There are chapters on gardens, churches and estate chapels, fires and floods, technical wizardry, transport, sports and shooting in particular. At times, places are described in exhaustive detail (“ebonised mahogany Queen Anne chairs made by Gillow, with cane seats and leather backs stamped with a pomegranate motif”).

The tone is wry; the excesses on display sometimes jaw-dropping. At Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, the fifth Duke of Portland found the need for an underground passage, furnished with chandeliers and paintings, to his riding house – one of the largest in the world according to Tinniswood – and a vast sunken, centrally-heated ballroom. Food from the kitchens was conveyed by lifts and on rails in a glorified hostess trolley the 150 yards to the dining room. Another lift allowed carriages to reach the ballroom directly. Yet the Duke was a recluse and guests a rarity.

There is much to amuse, especially when Tinniswood discusses affairs of the heart and the bedchamber amidst ruling class privilege, snobbery and debauchery, divorce and bigamy. As the book progresses, the architectural retreats and this dysfunctional social world comes into focus. When not spending lavishly on homes both here, and increasingly on the French Riviera, it is the sheer indolence that leaps out from the page: balls and banquets, tableux and pageants, cards and casinos, visits to the races, horses to hare courses. Shooting party Armageddon is visited on local wildlife with sometimes thousands of birds dispatched in a session. “Perhaps we went too far today,” reflects King George V to his son on his way back from a shoot at Hall Barn in 1913 when 3,937 pheasants were killed in a single day. Game keepers, beaters and poachers often found themselves on the wrong end of a gun but this is nothing to the slaughter that would bring the merriment to a grinding halt the following year.

There is though some confusion over Tinniswood’s terms, including the period being covered. How long “before the Great War” are we talking? Too many anecdotes and entries are from the 1850s and 1860s, and there are a considerable number from the early 1870s, which is getting on for almost half a century before Germany invaded Belgium. One can put some of this down to necessary scene-setting, but more often it feels like having one’s cake and eating it, dishing gossip from whichever period because it is simply too tasty a morsel to resist. Do we really need asides on Joseph Paxton’s Great Conservatory at Chatsworth (1836) or the lawnmower (patented 1830)?

Tinniswood is more often upstairs than downstairs, amused by all the antics to the point of losing critical distance. Interesting social and political context is offered only when it suits him, such as the system of licenses necessary to keep any male servant or how firearms developments increased the wildlife death count. At other times, the narrative veers off entirely or heads back up driveways familiar from his previous books. There is an intriguing passage on the social control exerted on their neighbourhoods by landed Lady Bountifuls – not simply distributing coal or judging flower shows, but arbitrating morals and removing non-compliant tenants – but just as things get interesting his attention is seized by a titbit and we’re off on a six-page digression about the love life of the Earl of Clancarty’s son. There are four entire pages on the Edward VII Baccarat cheating scandal, for example.

Some readers will delight in this narrative flitting about between topics and decades, sly backhanders and backstory. But as these meanderings become longer and more frequent, minor detours become major diversions and the impression grows that Tinniswood is starting to run on empty. Meanwhile, there is little of the big picture here, or any real acknowledgment that the lavish houses and lives were the product of an empire at its most expansive and extractive of colonial resources. This was a time of power as much as glory. Who got to enjoy this bounty and at who’s expense is treated as a mere byway.

Robert Bevan is a writer on architecture, cities and heritage

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